On or about Oct. 22, the good ship Quantum of the Seas dropped anchor off the island of Raiatea. Raiatea is the second largest of the "Society Islands" of Polynesia, behind Tahiti, and is thought to be where organized migrations of Polynesians to Hawai'i, New Zealand, and the eastern Polynesian islands began. To put things in some perspective, it's about 4000km to both Hawai'i and New Zealand from Raiatea, and these people made the trip in tribal canoes, using the stars, ocean currents, and migratory birds as their guides. We're in a 170,000 ton ocean liner and we're still being tossed around like a piece of cork. I can't begin to imagine what their trip might have been like. The harbour is not deep enough for the ship to dock, so the ship arranged to take tenders ashore. Apparently, this was the first time Royal Caribbean has visited Raiatea, and there was a small ceremony for the captain and some of the crew to mark the occasion. I guess they normall...
About those bananas. Way, way back on Day 11 we were on the island of Moorea in French Polynesia. We bought a T-shirt, mailed some post cards, hung out at the beach. A stingray the size of an oven door swam lazily past us while we were in the water. I got sunburned, and was subsequently told this by literally everyone we knew. We talked to some people from the ship who rented some scooters, and while there's a perimeter road around the island, there are few, if any, roads into the interior. But there are a number of fruit stands dotting the main road, and we passed these on our way to and from the beach. Each one appeared to have a healthy selection of fruit. I didn't see any fruit in the trees, but this was probably because the low-hanging fruit (heh) was already picked by the locals, leaving only the difficult to reach stuff. (I did find some mangoes smashed on the ground during my run the next day, making me think these might have fallen from higher up in the trees.) On our ...
"How do you market a cruise to people? That seems kinda hard. Do you know what I mean? Like, 'Hey, do you like hotels?' 'Yeah.' 'How about one that could sink?'" -- Demetri Martin So, obviously, we made it onto the ship. And here I am, late at night and all alone, window howling around me, finally providing an update. On the ship there are port days and sea days. As you might guess, the port days are spent in port, and the sea days are spent SEAsoning french fries with many different and exotic salts. No, wait-- the days are spent literally at sea. This is a repositioning cruise, going from Hawai'i to Australia, to take advantage of the southern hemisphere's warm weather (or maybe to avoid the northern hemisphere's cold weather). And as such, there are A LOT of sea days. Of the 19 days we're on the ship, something like 13 of them are just us at sea, surrounded by the Pacific Ocean and not a whole lot else. The point I'm trying to g...
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