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Trekking Tales: Cosmic comments while cruising

This was one rough trip, especially going from Los Angeles to Hawaii

“Have passports and boarding passes ready!” Clutching the folder that always holds such things, we forged ahead confidently - until the time came to show them. The folder was empty!

“Hang on a bit,” we stuttered, heading for a nearby counter for a deeper search. No worries; they were tucked in elsewhere. Whew!

“Enjoy your afternoon,” said the man at the final station before we boarded the ship.

“You too,” I responded, “and we’ll try to remember that you’ll be doing your vacuuming as we sail away.”

A hundred and more dolphins saw us off....

A nice lady from North Vancouver and I were cycling in the exercise room.

“When my husband died,” she told me, “the doctor said ‘Don’t hide yourself away and give up your friends.’” I said to him, “Why should I do that? They aren’t dead!”

Before “walking the deck for the cure” a moment of silence spoke volumes: “We have all been affected by cancer in some ways,” the attendant had stated.

We enjoyed many informative lectures given by both the ship’s naturalist and the cruise director, but the garrulous cruise director won the toss for best cosmic comment. After promising us a multitude of humpback whales to view he said, “So you don’t need to ask which side of the ship they’ll be on, I’ll tell you. They’ll be on the outside!”

On a crowded elevator, John was holding my bag of stuff in such a way that it covered the door’s signal so it did not close. Told of this problem, he moved saying, “I need more practice carrying a purse!”

This was one rough trip, especially going from Los Angeles to Hawaii. Initially people had fun playing in the “wave pool” that the ship’s motion created. Next the pools were covered with nets. Finally they were drained. “Water was splashing as high as the screen for our Movie Under the Stars,” a crewmember explained to John. The ship had to slow down so much it took an extra day to reach Maui, so we visited three islands not four.

Circling the top deck where that screen was located, I paused because the movie “Hawaii” was showing.  I had missed the beginning but was in time to see the missionaries board one of the sailing ships of the day and set off from Eastern U.S., round Cape Horn, and eventually into the Pacific. What an odd sensation it was to stand on this moving deck, number 15, looking at that comparatively tiny sailing ship being thrown around on much rougher seas with waves breaking all over its one deck. What those passengers of the early 1800s might have thought of our leviathan pales in comparison with how Hawaii’s earliest settlers might have reacted to such a sight. Their outrigger canoes didn’t even have decks, although they brought an amazing amount of plant materials and even some livestock with them, across thousands of miles of open ocean from Polynesia.

Leaving late at night after our stop at Honolulu, Oahu, the time-honoured greeting rang out between starboard-side balcony passengers and dockworkers: “Aloha!” As the lights of the city fell behind us, flying fish glistened as they flew many metres beside one of the port markers.

On Kauai many chickens run wild and no mongoose have been allowed on the island to control them. The guide for our snorkelling expedition called the chicks “Chicken Nuggets” and told us how to cook the adults. “Put them in a pot with a lava rock,” she advised. “When the rock is soft, the chicken will be edible.”

 

And one more: “I haven’t been everywhere yet - but it’s on my list!”