Arrived at Aruba at 7am, as promised.
They made a bit of a mess of our shore excursion - they had originally said that we all needed to meet on board, but then they realised that the shopkeepers would be happier if we met onshore. We're only in Aruba for 5 hours and so the more time we spend on shore, the more money we're likely to spend.
So, last night we got a letter saying we needed to meet onshore, but the time they gave was an hour earlier than we expected. We went there then just to make sure that they hadn't really changed the time for the excursion. They hadn't, so we went off to do some window shopping. However, after about 15 minutes Paul was feeling quite ill again - he's still not over whatever was wrong yesterday. So, he went back onboard and I went on our excursion alone.
Basically this involved about 60 of us going on a smallish boat out to where a submarine was waiting. We then went underwater and had a look at the sights - a reef with lots of different sorts of coral, two sunken ships, lots of fish, two turtles and a moray eel! It went down to about 128 feet at the deepest.
It was interesting enough but my camera wasn't good enough to get any decent photos. This is the best of them - in case you can't tell, it's some fish swimming around a wreck:
We were due to be back on board the Coral Princess at 12 noon, but at that time we were still on the return trip. We finally got to the cruise ship terminal about 10 minutes late, but even then people were stopping at souvenir shops. They don't seem to take the 'all on board' time very seriously in this part of the world.
Turns out Paul slept / rested for most of the day. After I got back, I went to a lecture - information about Cartagena which is our next port (tomorrow). I also did a bit of shopping.
We decided to go to the Horizon Court (the buffet) for dinner, and we ended up sitting next to an American couple. Like most people on the ship they're older than us (their 50th wedding anniversary is behind them) but they've been to Australia a couple of times, and we had a nice talk. I won't have any trouble remembering their names if we run across them again - they're Douglas and Sandy.
After dinner we had a look at the shops, went to the Casino, and then came back to our room.
The ship is behaving strangely tonight - although there's almost no waves, we've got a really slow side-to-side roll happening, and every now and then the engines work really hard and make the whole ship shudder. Hope there's nothing wrong........
No comments:
Post a Comment