At sea

Until recently the weather has been good and the seas largely calm. Last night we discovered that our cabin at the back of the boat with its bizarre arrangement of  three wash basins is prone to pitching up and down when the seas are less temperate. This may be why we were allocated it. Throughout the voyage our fellow passengers have been entertaining and generally good natured. Political discussion has been notable by its almost omertà like absence. The accompanying lecturers have provided depth and insight to our shore  visits. One after dinner speaker gave a very Stanford insight into Chinese Taoist dissident literature. This is not something you’d get on many ships.  Being a California cruise the day starts with Pilates on the fore deck. In some of the smaller islands the primary school kids and their grand parents run down to the dockside to greet us. This is rather like the innocence of Scotland 50 years ago. We have seen lots of azaleas, some olive trees and a few hardy orange groves.

The ships WiFi became temperamental shortly after we boarded and has retained an impractical quirkiness ever since. Downloading photos is impossible.  These will need to wait until we make it back to Tokyo. The ex servicemen among the passengers have discovered that if you stand behind the bridge and hold your phone up over your head there’s an outside chance the satellite will do what it’s supposed to do and you’ll catch a few minutes of connection time. From a distance they look like a gaggle of swaying ravers .

The woman at the table next to us in the dining room likes to have  a Bloody Mary with her breakfast . She has gluten allergies so the vodka must be Smirnoff . The Filipino bartender deals with this very first world problem with good natured third world charm. At our next port of call he heads off in a taxi to pick up half a dozen bottles from the nearest liquor store. For the last black tie ‘Gala’ dinner Bloody Mary woman and her husband appeared in shiny matching gold outfits. The look is remarkable and ‘The Font’ quietly wonders if they might be in show business. The food on board is becoming slightly repetitive and slightly drab in a brown rice with crayfish sort of way. The logistics of feeding forty passengers for three months between the Malacca Straits and Sakhalin must be a nightmare of planning and delivery. Dinners  ashore are a welcome change.

Earlier in the week we briefly went to Hiroshima. We thought the site of the atomic bombing would be a place of quiet reflection. Not a bit of it. Princess Cruises, Hapag Lloyd and Seabourn had huge ships in port and all of their passengers had made a bee line to the museum to be first in line for when it opened. On top of that every school in Japan seems to have chosen the day we were in town to come on a field trip. There must have been a queue ten thousand long when we arrived. Unable to see the displays we manoeuvred our way through the crowds and headed for the exit. More moving was a small almost invisible marker in a side street by the children’s hospital that marks the exact spot  where the bomb detonated. An intense young German man with his equally intense girl friend looked at the marker stone and  quietly cuddled. Apart from us and them there wasn’t a tourist to be seen.

We head back to Tokyo next week before flying onto Edinburgh. How quickly our three week break will have passed.