Richards Bay is a new port, opening in 1976…. to export the minerals. Durban couldn’t handle anymore I gather.

There has been a drought here for the last 3 years so they are looking forward to rain. Not exactly what what we want today though.

They employ people to clear non-native vegetation so that they don’t poach to make money. They can take the wood that they cut and make handicrafts to sell that they can make more money from.

KwaZulu-Natal state (this state)… has a king with no political rights.

3 official language in this area…. that are compulsory ….required in school. Could be more depending on the number of black languages in each area. Up to grade 8 is compulsory.

There are 2 kinds of makaria. The one that attacks the brain….. can reoccur.

Forestry of eucalyptus planted and harvested. Also good for draining wetlands because they consume a lot of water. They also plant pine for harvest. Up to 170,000 hectare tracts … largest forestry belts in world.

Jacarandas are the beautiful blooming trees we see, also African Flamboyance (beautiful orange/red) tree.. national tree of Mozambique. African tulip tree … are brighter … blooms opposite time of the year.

Up to 3000 mm rain per year in this area.

If you install solar….half of the cost of it is born by government. RDP homes for the poor have solar included.

Automated unmanned weigh stations on the highway for all vehicles….. not just commercial trucks.

South Africa runs a point system for drivers like Canada.

Successive speed bumps on highways to slow traffic in area of school.

The St. Lucia Nature Park is 500,000 hectares. As we near the waterway, it’s pointed out that the

fences are put up to keep elephants in. Once they have come up against a fence they will never go near that fence again. Apparently they have excellent memory. Tree damage (also pointed out) caused by elephants trying to dig for food.

We are warned to not put hands in water cuz you may have a surprise…. you may lose your hand. Hippos cause more deaths than any other animals.

Wood artifacts (lots being sold along the road) should be purchased from tourist facility cause they can provide certificate saying that it has been treated.

There are 1000 crocs & 800 hippos in these St Luca Wetlands.

It was predominantly salt water but it’s becoming more fresh water. Quite a number of rivers feed into this St. Lucia Lake

Did you know that hippos can’t float so if you see them, they are walking on the bottom? They can travel up to 40 km/hr. They go on shore at night and into the water during day. They stay in the water because they have no sweat glands so have to to keep cool.

Average weight 1500 kgs. but 2000-3000 kgs have been recorded.

“Yellow Weavers” are the yellow birds with upside down nests.

Our guide on the boat showed us a hippo tooth that weight 1.5-2 kg and is one of ten teeth.

Marsh harrier—- diving bird.

These “white” mangroves don’t look like any mangroves I’ve ever seen…. look just like any deciduous tree except they grow in the water.

The 180 metre high sand dunes off in the distance are on the edge of the ocean.

This excursion was excellent. We saw so many hippos. At one place there were young ones on the shore and a couple of juvenile males play fighting. They were totally unconcerned that we were close by. So cool!

Here you swim at your own risk…… because there’s no nets off the shore to protect you from the Zambezi or Bull Sharks. They are low water sharks, can be in fresh or salt water.

Interesting things learnt from the lecturer

Mozambique uses rats to determine the existence of tuberculosis….and can do it faster than human lab techs.

They also use rats to search and clear land mines

Maputo, Mozambique is the absolute worst “point of entry” experience that probably any of us have gone through. Three immigration officers, “face to face”, pictures, finger prints, over 650 passengers plus the crew. Horrendously long procedure before going out to face the city. The day we were there the temperature was 36C with over 100% humidity….. brutal!

Maputo (inside joke…. Ray says it means “big airport”), was not what we/I was expecting esp. since we all know they had a terrible civil war not that terribly long ago. I expected Mombasa all over again. Not! First there is this 3 km long bridge span in the process of being built. It will be the longest suspension bridge in Africa. We heard that is being financed & built by the Chinese. (Amazing seeing as we can’t get our Johnson Street bridge built…..the steel which is being built by Chinese, that is nothing as elaborate as this one….. completed & in a reasonable time)! This city is huge, with all kinds of high rises, wide avenues, (I heard also with beautiful mansions…. residential areas….. had been way ahead of and more beautiful than Portugal before the civil war. The war began after Portugal gave the country its independence). We did a walking tour but were not impressed! We wanted to go back after the tour but the heat/humidity was just so oppressive…. we just couldn’t!

This place looked a lot better than Mombasa right from the get-go. It was a quite a picture as we were having breakfast on the Terrace Cafe, of the mist hanging atop the trees with the dhows in the bay but of course this one time I didn’t have my phone to get a picture.

Our excursion this day was to go to Prison Island.

Amour is our guide. When we drove through Stone Town he asked us why it was famous and why we thought it was called that. “It’s was cause the buildings are made from stone instead of coral”. Really!!!

There is a big Arab influence here because Oman had colonized it up until 1964.

There are 3 reasons the women of Tanzania wear the burka ….. for strict religious reasons, to hide their identity in places where someone may recognize them & for fashion.

Something was mentioned about a hotel or area owned by Aga Khan.

The area where we caught the dhow used to take us snorkelling, has lovely hotels… at least from the outside and beautiful whites sandy beaches… like sugar mixed with butter.

Othman Ramadhan … a nice young man of 20 I met on the dhow. He was one of 3 that came into the water and kept corralling us in the water and making sure we didn’t drown. They were all very good. The coral here was alive (as opposed to in the Seychelles), beautiful colours and shapes but not nearly the number of fish.

At Prison Island, they used to imprison unruly prisoners not slaves although the prison was built original to house the slaves but slavery was abolished before it was completed. Then the prison was used as a quarantine station for people suffering from cholera, yellow fever & smallpox.

Now it has a resort as well as a restaurant for non resort guests. There are also now 500 turtles/tortoises Alhambra turtles here… originally from Seychelles. They are fresh water turtles. The oldest being 192 years. The females have short tails… the males have longer tails.

This stop was really quite lovely. I wouldn’t mind coming back another time. It was clean and quite well taken care of. Different…… mostly Muslim it seems. I don’t know if that had anything to do with it.

As we were leaving Zanzibar, the captain informed us that we have 1469 knotical miles to go to get to Maputo….. a long way. Because we are not stoping in Madagascar (because of the “Plague”), we will be at sea for 4 days….. dodling along.

We were sailing out of Zanzibar for about an hour when there was a loud speaker announcement calling “Code Mike” to the pool deck. Less than another hour later we had turned around and were heading back to Zanzibar because of a medical emergency. I hope whoever it was makes it….. unlike the guy in the Seychelles.

Jeanette and I went into Mombasa on the shuttle , looked around for a Tuk tuk…. (those three wheeled vehicles that you see in all the poorer countries), after walking for less than3 minutes. Reason being it was so, so,sooooo very hot and steamy. OMG the thought of walking around in it was unbearable. Anyway we bartered with a young man to take us around the city for an hour for 20USD for the two of us. He wanted 50 to start. We have found in previous places, that they expect to be paid for each passenger….different than at home. There were lots of “security” on the street (but with no guns that I saw). The place was crawling with people,people eking out a living with fruit and vegetable stall(tin shacks), some clothes stalls too but the streets were piled with garbage wherever you looked. It was disgusting! There was nothing worth seeing that I could see….. no redeeming qualities whatsoever. A couple of times while on the tuk tuk, I had some temporary scary thoughts. Once was when he ran out of gas. I thought maybe this is where he demands more money or he wouldn’t take us back to where he had picked us up. No…… but he had to push it a ways to the gas station to fill up. The other time I had the thought that he was take us to god knows where and then would be demanding more money to take us back. “Same same but only different”. We did do an excursion in the afternoon to Haller Park….. previously a quarry turned into a nature park. On the way there our guide pointed out the area that we drove through, describing it as the area that the “capitalist” live in, having their own shops, grocery stores, schools, yadda, yadda. That, I am sure because their own residences are shamefully disgusting. Oh yes, the streets have speed bumps every 100 feet or so. Incredibly annoying and jarring. First animal we saw after arriving at the park, was a hippo named Leo that the guide called. He came from across the pond but not really close. There where was a huge tortoise about 150 yrs old, we saw couple of elands, several oryx (beautiful colouring), water buffalo, herds of giraffes that I/we fed (they have 18 inch tongues)and at 4 pm, the hippos came out of the water and waddled across the field to be fed. Huge,huge, fat bodies on stubby legs….. you got to wonder how they manage to hold themselves up. The water buffalos, Eland’s, oryx’ and monkeys all ate together with them. Very cool! Well I guess Mombasa does have one plus.

Once back to the pier there were men and women selling handcrafts. Beautiful work, wood… giraffes, elephants. Should have bought but I’m not sure we could carrying them in our luggage. Maybe later we’ll get another chance.

I found a hand written note from a few days ago…. notes taken from a lecture previous to arriving in the Seychelles. 
The Seychelles is a nation of 115 islands with a population of only 90,000 most of which are on the island of Mahe.. … the largest. 

El Nina from a few years ago,has affected the health of the coral reefs in the islands. I can attest to their health. So much of the reefs have died. What a shame!

The Seychelles apparently, are referred to as the Galapagos of the Indian Ocean.  

93% of the islanders are Catholic. So different than the Maldives that are predominantly Muslim. Although you should be modestly clothed everywhere we have been, I didn’t feel that we “watched” like when in the Maldives. According to some “body”, the women of the Seychelles get 6th place ranking in the world. Pretty darn good if you ask me 

If you see “rursettes”(not sure of the spelling) on the menu,it is fruit bars. Yuck! I’ll pass. We did see very large ones of them flying around so I wouldn’t say they are harvesting them to extinction. 

The Coco de Mer palm that Jeanette saw, live between 290-400 years. Maybe that is why they have the worlds largest nuts. The male palm has what looks like a penis and the female counterpart looks like the human female anatomy. Hmmmmm….

In the islands (i was hoping to see them but alas did not) they have rock formations that are called “champions”…. I think. They are flat topped with vegetation. The seas erode the bottoms until they collapse. Would have loved to have seen them. Not enough time. 

The Seychelles are 1000 miles from the coast of Africa, have almost no unemployment, have to import 90% of their food and have the highest GDP of any nation in Africa. 

Last night the decks on level five were “closed for security reasons”. Probably the upper decks were closed too. The lights outside our stateroom were off, others were told to not have the lights on their balconies on & there was no “communication” according to my “Marine Traffic” app so as to not show where we were located. Do you think there was a possibility of pirates in the area??? Thankfully there were no issues. Interesting though!
Tonight we have another Captain’s cocktail party for previous guests of Oceania. Free drinks again! We have a new captain on board so we’ll have an opportunity to meet him. He is much “drier” than the last. 
Nothing much else is happening today besides needlepoint get-together and the guest lecturer (who is quite fabulous), cuz we are still at sea. Oh and don’t forget the eating. I’m sure I will have gained all I had lost. 
I forgot to mention that during our first day in the Seychelles while snorkelling, one of the guests on our excursion, suffered a heart attack and died.  
The last couple of days the air temperature and sea temperature have both been 28C. The air though has been laden with humidity….. a bit uncomfortable. I have been hiding out in the shade enjoying the breeze on the shady side of deck 5 cuz I think I over did it with the heat that last day in Praslin. Maybe by tomorrow I’ll be able to handle the temperature on my excursion while in Kenya. 

We docked on the island of Mahe…… the capital city is Victoria. Jeanette thought we should twin with our city of Victoria, Canada.. This is paradise. Right near where we were docked though,there was a tuna fish plant (yellow fin tuna). Oh my did it ever stink but heh…. it’s the “smell of money”. Anyway this country is absolutely worth returning to. They speak English, French and Creole so language is not an issue. We did get out on our scheduled excursion although we had arrived late….. by about 3 hours. It was a trip out on a catamaran where we first went on a glass hulled boat and then went snorkelling. We saw quite a lot of beautifully coloured fish…. several different coloured parrot fish, tiny fluorescent turquoise blue ones(cannot remember the names of any of the others), lots of black and white striped ones, blue bodied ones with bright yellow “beaks” and fin and tails, thin all yellow ones with very pointy noses and only a couple of longish multi-coloured with fluorescent turquoise ones. It was amazing. Both J and i previously had bought full-faced masks with snorkel included. They worked well especially if there was any chop in the water. There were quite a number of others that had brought along masks that were very similar. The weather was hot and sunny but just as we were coming back…… after we were basically all dried off, the skies opened. It was like someone emptied buckets onto us. We could not have been more wet…… kind of reminded me of the deluge we experienced at Boca da Valera on the Amazon . I had thought I would like to go to the Apple Store to find a replacement iPad after returning from our excursion but that pouring rain did not let up at all. Oh well….. i guess I’ll be writing using my iPhone. 
Next day, November 23rd, we were in Praslin, also in the Seychelles. In the morning I just walked toward the town…. away from jetty. This place is lovely but OMG …. talk about sweat! It was dripping off my nose,into my eyes…. unbelievable! On the way back I ran into Faye from TO. We were both on another snorkelling excursion at about 1. Jeanette had taken a walking tour in the morning (it was pouring again when they all left) of the tropical forest park …. to see the worlds largest “nut”. It is a palm that produces a Coco de Mer I think it’s called…. that weights like 26 kgs. No glass bottomed boat for me this time but still another catamaran. We anchored off Coco Island ….. the most beautiful island “nature reserve park”. We did not go on land but just snorkelled again amazing! Saw what the natives said were blue mackerel but I wouldn’t say they were mackerel…. toooo wide in the body but beeeeautiful! Also a strange one that when you looked at them from above, between the tail and the body was what looked like an 4-petalled bright orange appliquéd flower. At first I thought maybe it was a “tracking device” but others saw similar ones. Another strange thing that occurred to me as well as many others on the boat, a intermittent prickly sensation on different parts of our skin. We were told they were tiny jellyfish. They were so small you could not see them…. we all thought it was just our imaginations. 
Last evening we were invited to another “solo travellers” dinner in the Grand Dining Room (with 2 of the entertainers). That always includes unlimited wine. Oh my we are treated very well but Oceania. (Two nights previously we had dinner with Lisa-Jean and Samantha Ivey, the guest singer that was leaving the next day). The lead singer Lisa-Jean last night, was telling us that when they were travelling in the Red Sea between Yemen and Somalia (before we got on board) that they were approached by a boat with fresh fruit for the ship. It also included a number of men that had plenty of arms with them that stayed on board….. to provide protection for the ship from pirates…. until they neared Dubai. Then they left. 

Good news…. the agent in Cochin has found my ipad. Problem is that I will not be able to get it back until after I arrive home. The sister company…. Seven Seas Regent will be picking it up…… transporting it to Singapore where it will be sent to Oceania head office in Miami. I know…. it would have been great if they could have. 

We are somewhere in the Indian Ocean miles/kilometres from anywhere. (the distance from the Maldives to the Seychelles is over 1100 nautical miles). Yesterday we had the “kissing of the fish” and other silliness related to crossing of the equator. We actually didn’t cross it until around dinner time (God forbid that we should have our dinner interrupted). There was a little bump when we went over it….. lol! As the cruise director said…..people check their toilets to see the change of direction when flushing but that in the case of being on a cruise ship” the toilets still just suck”…. another lol!The captain informed us that we were travelling in the area of high seas piracy but that he didn’t expect any trouble seeing as we were 500 plus nautical miles from the coast. In any case if there was trouble that we should stay low to the floor and stay away from the windows and balconies. Last evening we also had the captains party for previous guests of Oceania where there was lots of appies and the drinks were flowing freely. One thing that was mentioned was that there are…….out of 650 passengers,167 from Canada and 280 from the US. The majority of the rest were from Britain, Australia and New Zealand but that there were many other countries represented between the passengers and staff. Our captain lives in Odessa and will be leaving us in the Seychelles. Also the guest lecturer Hanne will be leaving us there too. 

We have had strong winds and have been bucking the current for most of time since leaving the Maldives. On account of that we will be approx. 3 hours late arriving in the Seychelles tomorrow.  Apparently we will not be disappointed in the Seychelles unlike the Maldives. 

I think I am all caught up now. 

Port city is Vasco da Gama 
It cost our guide 9 lex rupees (whatever that means…. he was going to calculate it for us later but forgot) for this brand new Toyota car with A/C. We were his first paying passengers. He was very proud. Our driver is a chef that will be soon working for MSC cruises. 

A number of yellow and black tuk-tuks unlike Mumbai that didn’t seem to have any.  

Our driver Sushant (means very silent….. oops that’s a misnomer. He was great!)has lots of goals set for himself before he gets married…. to have his life all settled. And to see the world. 

There was one roundabout that went around a hydro pole. India generally keeps moving because they use lots of “round-abouts”

The whole area was covered in tropical vegetation…. could be quite nice even though it was a little on the dirty side. Sushant says they are working to clean it up. 

Jeanette spent money shopping for clothing. I didn’t! I spent it on jewelry! Aren’t you all surprised???

Below is what I wrote down while going to the Elephnta Caves but unfortunately I have nothing else on Mumbai …. that I can find other than the pictures that I posted to Facebook (with comments below each picture).

The Elephanta Caves were started 1500 years ago and took 2 centuries to complete.  

Made from volcanic ash that had turned to basalt 

First started by the Hindus, then the Buddhists and finally by the Jains ….up until 1180 AD. 

Theres are lots of macaque monkeys… (red long faced with no facial hair). They are also not very big. They are quick to steal any food they see even if you put into your pack. They will steal the pack.

The Hindus carved out these Caves making statues into the walls, of their god Shiva… the destroyer. I wrote down somewhere what the type of cave these were but cannot find it but that they were not naturally made caves but ones that had been chizzled out of the rock. 

We noticed that there were quite a number of men chipping rock by hand…. making paving stones and whatnot…..and women in their saris carrying the rocks to and from the wherever, on their heads. Someone asked why they don’t do it with machinery. We were told that they keep doing it this way because they need to keep all those people employed. 

Here I’m going strictly on memory on Mumbai. It’s air was polluted and the traffic congested but not nearly as bad as Delhi’s. I wouldn’t mind returning to Delhi and other places in India one day but I wouldn’t care to ever return to Mumbai. There really isn’t anything that is particularly “attractive”. Somethings were “interesting” besides the Elephanta Caves though…. the one billion dollar home belonging to the Tata family, the snake that was attached by the workers at the Hanging Gardens (really just unkept gardens over a water reservoir) and Dhobi Ghat where they do the city’s laundry. That was pretty amazing. 

 If you have been following me on Facebook  you know that i lost my ipad. Consequently from here on in will be done using this phone. Grrrr!

Well the Maldives surprisingly enough, were a big disappointment for most people…… not at all what I/we were expecting. The entire island is TOTALLY built up with maybe 10 storey buildings….. streets are so narrow (almost can’t get any sunlight through) with nowhere to walk & its dirty. The streets were crawling with people ……probably 98% men….. all looking at you…… kind of creepy actually!  
Apparently there was an artificial beach that we didn’t find…. of course we didn’t really have the time before it got dark (who would want to be out there in the dark). By the time we were off the tender it was about 4:30 already. Anyway if you use the beach, you have to be fully clothed. Like thats going to happen!!! The places that you can swim and snorkel and such, are privately owned atolls so very costly to visit party because you have to have a private boat take you. One guy was trying to sell us a ride at well over 100US$…. each. We should have booked a snorkelling excursion earlier than when we booked the rest but…. they were already sold out by that time. 
I don’t know what is going on…..can’t send & am losing stuff i wrote. This the second time i gave written this. Am frustrated but will persist. 
We did walk along the shore past the vegetable market where there were quite a number of very colourful live-aboard fish boats tied up. We walked out to the breakwater path….. peered over it into the water. There were quite a large number of manta rays swimming. So very cool! That was the best part of this place. 
On November the19th, we will be crossing the equator so there will be a midday party on board. We’ll see how many will kiss the fish.