Wednesday, November 28, 2018- Cartagena Columbia Day 1

Wednesday, November 28, 2018- Cartagena, Columbia Day 1 We awoke to a bright blue sky with puffy clouds. The seas are frosted with white caps and 8’ swells.  It was 85 degrees on our balcony at 8am.  We haven’t seen much wildlife aside from a solitary sea bird that has been riding the bow air currents since we left Miami.  Janet saw a whale spout or breech in the distance, but now that there are white caps extending to the horizon, it’s hard to see anything like that at this time.  Breakfast in the Restaurant gave Ben the opportunity to order their New York steak with eggs.  The steak was decent in quality, although a little over cooked (ordered rare, got medium well).  Our breakfast orders have also come back mixed up.  The waiters use iPhones to enter orders, but Janet’s bacon and hash browns arrived with Ben’s eggs instead of Janet’s omelet, and the yogurt Ben ordered never showed up until it was asked for a second time.  The eggs so far have tended to be slightly undercooked, so eggs over easy end up with some of the whites still raw.  The waiters are pleasant and courteous, but not quite as attentive as those we have consistently encountered on Princess cruises.  They still rank far above waiters on Norwegian cruises for service quality. After Thanksgiving, Christmas decorations came out of storage and into the public areas of the ship.  We have encountered Santa on this cruise.  Not Roger, but one of his international brethren.  This Santa was a little more incognito, but fessed up his identity when we asked.  

After Breakfast, we headed to the fitness center and got in our exercise quota.  We watched several other lectures on the TV in our room.  The media system on the Viking Star is pretty state of the art, with on-demand video streaming.  The system seems more robust and responsive than the system on the Regal Princess and Diamond Princess because we never had to reboot the Viking Star system.  However, the internet is not nearly as fast as the Regal Princess Medallion service.  For some reason, all Apple servers have been blocked on the Viking Star’s internet connection.  Ben checked with the ship’s passenger services desk after a week of not being able to access any Apple web servers, including all iCloud services.  We have not been able to post our shared photo streams because of this. They acknowledged that this was a known issue, and that their IT staff has been working on it.   The Lion Kings (our trivia team from yesterday because Dan was wearing a Lion King T-Shirt) reunited for noon trivia today.  We ended up bridesmaids, one point off the lead where two teams tied for first with 11/15. We could take issue with some of the answers that we missed. One question was what was the number 2 traded commodity in the world behind number 1 oil.  Their answer was coffee.  Apparently this had been used in a Starbucks advertising campaign, but it’s clearly not right when natural gas, corn, wheat and soybeans are all traded in quantities that dwarf coffee. Wikipedia clarifies that coffee is the number 2 commodity in developing countries, but not worldwide. This is probably the origin of this fake trivia factoid. We also missed the fact that the UK consumes more canned baked beans than the rest of the world combined.  Trivia was followed by a quick bite in the World Cafe.

We watched the ship’s sail-in to the Harbor in Cartagena.  It is still remarkable to see Cartagena for the third time, which looks like Miami.  Talk about a dramatic contrast to Cuba.  Cartagena is truly a gem of the Caribbean, and a tribute to the success of capitalism and cocaine over communism and tobacco.   We took the shuttle bus from the ship’s pier to the cruise ship passenger terminal, where a lovely small zoo exists.  When we stopped here during the latter part of our South America cruise, there were monkeys working the railings near the snack bar. This time, late in the afternoon, there were no monkeys, and the peacocks were not doing their mating dances, which were so prominent during our last visit.  We enjoyed seeing the macaws, toucans, and other birds in the aviaries.  And the anteaters are just as bizarre as we remembered them to be.  We also saw some huge snails.  

 

 

We did our laundry since so many people were gone off the ship.  We had no trouble getting 2 machines to get all our laundry done. The washers and dryers are free to use, and are plumbed with automatic detergent dispensers, so you don’t even have to buy or bring laundry detergent.  That’s a thoughtful touch. Ben walked to the stern to check out the infinity pool, but it appears that the ship’s pools are roped off at night. He did slip in for a bit just to give it a spin. It is surprisingly deep, so you can’t stand at the end to look out the glass wall without dunking your head completely under.  We did check out the midnight snacks at Mamsen’s which included a split pea soup and cold cut platter.  The cold cut platter had some fresh blueberries and strawberries, but when Janet thought she had popped a large blueberry into her mouth, it turned out to be a black olive instead.  That was a surprise.   Tomorrow is our included Cartagena excursion.  The ship will leave as soon as we reboard it after the excursion, so it was a good thing we visited the zoo tonight.