The whole world is in love with Sydney and it’s easy to see why. Sydneysiders have it made with the city’s style, sophistication, friendly people, bustling art and entertainment, restaurants, museums. You could almost eat off the streets of this gleaming pristine city and the food wouldn’t be bad either, with great seafood a special…
Continue reading →Located on the banks of the Brisbane River, the capital city of Queensland is relaxed, friendly, cool, casual, and so beautiful with pristine clean streets, active downtown bicycle stations, rolling hills and, of course, the requisite football arena. Australians love their football, though Americans know it more commonly as rugby. And, hand in hand with…
Continue reading →The Whitsunday Islands, off the central coast of Queensland, Australia in the Great Barrier Reef, were discovered by Captain James Cook on the Sunday of the feast of Whitsun, observed seven weeks after Easter. However, as the International Date Line had not been established, it was actually Whit-Monday. We anchored off the resort destination of…
Continue reading →The relaxed ambiance is readily apparent in this north Queensland city, pronounced “Cans” by the Aussies. Cairns, Australia, is surrounded by tropical forests, coffee, tea, and sugar cane plantations and, of course, the living masterpiece of the Great Barrier Reef stretching along its coast. The area has two seasons, wet and dry, and can have…
Continue reading →The notoriously difficult waters of the Torres Strait are located between Australia and New Guinea and contain more than 274 small islands in the Queensland territory. The strait connects to the Great Barrier Reef, the world’s largest coral reef system that stretches for 1,500 miles along the northeast coast of the continent. These waters require…
Continue reading →As culturally, historically, and even visually interesting Asia is, there was a collective readiness onboard to reach the shores of Australia and relax a bit in its western familiarity. However, Darwin, named after the famous evolutionist, Charles Darwin, is still a diverse mix of Asian culture and Australian heritage and, while my geographically-challenged mind thought…
Continue reading →The famous Komodo Dragon, an endangered species of which there are only 3-5 thousand left in the wild, exists only within Komodo National Park, which covers nearly 1,000 square miles of Komodo Island and the two smaller islands of Rinca and Padar in Indonesia. The park was established in 1980 in order to protect its…
Continue reading →We stood before King Neptune once again to seek permission to cross the equator as we sailed northward this time. At 1100 hours on June 10, 2015, having missed the first Crossing Ceremony, Dean, still a Polliwog, performed his dutiful initiation, kissed the fish, and was anointed with the green slime….thus elevating his status from…
Continue reading →I always imagined landing on the shores of Bali, that I would step off the ship to be greeted by a brown-skinned, flower-adorned native handing me a Mai Tai with a tiny umbrella, as I sink my toes into the warm, fine, white sandy beach. Not. While as we cruised into port I did see…
Continue reading →If you’ve been checking our itinerary you know that I am woefully behind on my blog, since in real time we are now in French Polynesia and my recent posts show us still in Southeast Asia. I am about to recount a momentous event, however, that occurred over a month ago, and will actually happen…
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