Day 43: 20231105 Sunday, November 5, 2023- Scenic Cruising Kimberly Coast
The ship is now on Perth Time, which covers most of the western part of Australia. We won’t have to change our clocks for a while now. We did a Zoom meeting at 7:30am Sunday our time, which was 7:30pm Saturday for our son in Newark NJ, so we were literally on opposite sides of the planet.
The ship’s internet is based on Starlink technology and pretty usable for email and web browsing, but iCloud synchronization takes forever. The Ookla speediest app clocked the connection in at 1MBPS, which is pretty slow by land standards, but certainly better than 1990’s dial up speeds. It was able to carry our Zoom conference without too much trouble.
The sky is hazy with smoke and heavy with humidity due to the climate and prevalence of bush fires in the Kimberly region. This part of Australia is pretty much bush with some aboriginal tribes scattered about, but for the most part, it is pristine wilderness. It took much of the morning and afternoon for the ship to head into the Kimberly coast area to an inlet where the ship would do a spin to allow viewing while the local pilot provided some narration.
We did our morning trivia after Zooming with our kids. We missed winning by 2 points while 3 teams tied with the top score and had two tie breakers that couldn’t break the tie, so two teams won luggage tags.
The gym seems to be the best place to exercise now that it’s uncomfortably hot and humid outside. Just sitting outside for more than 15 minutes is uncomfortable. After lunch in the buffet, we got caught up on some of the destination expert presentations that were recorded on the on demand video system, but we hadn’t figured out where to find them until just today. They happen to be under “Your Excursions” instead of “Live TV” or “Activities”, or any other logical heading. We found them through a process of elimination. We learned that tomorrow in Kuri Kuri bay, it will be very hot and humid, and physically challenging. Our excursion is only scheduled to last 90 minutes including the tender rides so we think we’ll manage. We happened to book the earliest session, so hopefully we’ll avoid the worst heat and sun of the day.
Our Afternoon trivia occurred as the ship was arriving at its viewpoint for the Kimberly Coast Scenic Cruising. We got through it, but it was a very hard trivia with low scores all around. It’s a good thing this one didn’t go towards the progressive trivia scoring because many people didn’t want to miss out on the scenic cruising. While there are some impressive decomposing rock formations and lots of islands, the ship in general was at least a 1/2 mile from the closest shoreline, and to be frank, the San Juan Island back home are more impressive.
The 90+˚F heat and 80% humidity made it hard to be on the Promenade or upper decks to get a good look without discomfort and profuse sweating. The narration was impossible to hear on the Promenade deck or balconies. You could really only hear it in your stateroom with the bow camera TV channel turned up to maximum volume, and it didn't help that the narration was mostly random mumbling and rambling rather than any sort or historical narrative or explanation of the geography.
It helps to have a cold ginger beer to stay cool while on the upper deck checking out the sights, but the best place for viewing ended up being our balcony because we could duck out into the humidity and heat to get pictures, and then retreat back behind the glass balcony doors and continue to enjoy the view as the ship spun in circles.
Scenic cruising in the Alaskan and South American glacier bays, and the Fjords of Norway and New Zealand’s South Island were much more spectacular and enjoyable. But it was more scenic than the so-called scenic cruising past Willis Island. Ben did briefly spot some wildlife in the water as a school of 4 white delta shaped fish swam towards and then dove under the ship. They swooped around for a bit and then disappeared as mysteriously as they had appeared. These waters are supposed to be full of sharks and crocodiles, but these looked like maybe some sort of small rays.
After dinner, a new comedian Wayne Deakin did his first show. He’s an Australian stand up comic who put on an entertaining enough routine that got a few laughs from the audience. Not much gut busting, but funny enough to be worth while. It never hurts to get in a few laughs. He had the audience raise hands to indicate how many cruises people had done, and there was one lady in the back with over a hundred cruises. "Crikey, what was your first cruise? Was it on the Arc? Guess you had them take the unicorns off so your luggage could come on."
