Tuesday, December 3, 2019; At Sea, Sri Lanka to Malaysia Day 1

Tuesday, December 3, 2019; At Sea, Colombo to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia Day 1

We’ve settled into a stable schedule for our sea days consisting of eating and playing trivia while also sneaking in enough exercise to try to keep from having to be wheeled off the ship in wheel barrows at the end of the cruise. 

The Indian Ocean is surprisingly busy with commercial shipping. There are tankers and freighters of all sorts around despite the size of the ocean.  This is certainly a much more used marine highway than the courses we took between Los Angeles and Hawaii.  

The weather has settled into temperatures in the 80’s to 90’s with 80% humidity.  If it weren’t for the breeze from the ship’s movement, and abundance of swimming pools and air conditioning on the ship, it could be uncomfortable.  I feel sorry for the people who have to work everyday in this humidity and heat.  We really are spoiled to be able to tour these tropical parts of the world from the comfort and safety of our air conditioned cruise ships and tour buses, only having to deal with the heat and humidity for relatively short periods when we are walking around our excursion destinations.  

We have had some moderate seas with occasional monsoon rains.  The clouds over the ocean appear very active and alive, like you can really see the Earth’s water cycle at work with this tropical heat and humidity.  

We finished our morning trivia 2 points off the lead, but it appears that our Progressive trivia team is still holding onto first place, despite missing the bonus question worth 4 points yesterday.  On today’s Progressive trivia quiz we managed 19/20 but missed the 4pt bonus of what was Elvis’ last #1 hit song during his lifetime.  We know a couple of teams did manage to get that right, so we might have been knocked out of the lead.  

We are managing to get our “Rings Closed” on our Apple watches every day.  Even though we are on the ship, it is over 1000’ long, and we do have to walk everywhere and usually take the stairs as well.  That means clocking over 10-11,000 steps and getting our heart rates up high enough to record 30 minutes of exercise daily.  We know very well that we will not lose any weight on this cruise, but just hope to minimize the weight gain by staying active.  We just enjoy eating too much.  

We came within 1 point of winning the afternoon trivia, and could have won it had we gone with one of our alternative answers that we had narrowed our choices down to.  So close.  

We thought we had sworn off comedians, but we finished dinner early and were able to find seats in the theatre.  The production singers and dancers are putting on a single number before the comedians, apparently to draw more people to the theater.  They did an hot little number inspired by the British Invasion era.  One of the lead male singers seems to have taken ill, and a spare female lead vocal has taken over for one the shorter of the two original female lead singers we started the cruise with in Rome.  Her contract must have concluded in Dubai.  The comedian, Mike Harris, is a Australian, born in Scotland.  His physical presence is a bit like Rodney Dangerfield’s.  His delivery and timing were quite a bit better than the last comedian, and he seemed to connect better with all the Australians and people from the UK, which make up a majority of this passenger manifest.  

We also thought we had sworn off the Liar’s Club because the current format does not award any audience prizes, but it is still entertaining to hear the tall tales spun by the cruise director’s staff in creating definitions for the words Crapulence, Meacock, Willywaws and Oxpecker.  As you can imagine, the definitions can be entertaining fun.  

We also watched some movies in our room including The Light Between Two Oceans, and Rocket Man.