Upcoming holidays:

Upcoming Holidays:
25 January 2025 - Sandy is taking a four day cruise - Sydney to Hobart and return.
April 2025 - Not a cruise! - instead a trip to Brisbane to watch the Panthers vs Dolphins game, and of course to see the family.
August 2025 - And again, not a cruise! - a weekend in Sydney to see Star Wars: A New Hope, with the Sydney Symphony Orchestra performing the music live.
27 September 2025 - Slightly early celebration for Paul's 70th birthday - 7 day Barrier Reef cruise on the Carnival (ex-P&O) Encounter.
August - September 2026 - 12 day "British Isles with France and Belfast" cruise on the Majestic Princess then a stay in the UK afterwards.


Thursday, 21 November 2019

20 November - sea day, but with an unexpected stop


Last night the captain announced that there had been another medical emergency and that we're about to have another diversion for a medical evacuation.  The idea was that it would be similar to the others; the ship would come in close to port - this time Jeddah in Saudi Arabia - and a small launch would be sent out to pick up the sick person and we would be on our way.  This was going to happen in the early hours of the morning, maybe 3 or 4 am.
I woke up around 4am and it looked like this was going to happen - we were sailing slowly quite close to a large city and clearly waiting (as we changed direction a few times).

Large city building complete with advertising:






However, we were then really surprised to see that the ship started sailing in to port and eventually we docked.  The captain said later that the port authorities had insisted on this.  There was an ambulance and a couple of official cars all with flashing lights, and we docked quite quickly - by around 7am.

Photos of the port and of the city:




Two people got off the ship, one in a wheelchair, but we were really surprised to see that she then got up and started walking around. I know that you can be quite sick and still able to walk, but it was a bit surprising, and she kept walking around and was obviously involved in discussions with various people for some time. Some luggage was also brought off the ship.  And then we waited, and waited.  An hour or so later the ambulance was still there and over time a whole bunch of different official looking persons had arrived in official looking cars, and then left. 





By around 9:30 the captain said we'd be leaving in about 5 or 10 minutes "as soon as the last bureaucratic things had been sorted" - it's possible that a third person was taken off the ship and put into the ambulance; we couldn't see and of course they don't share any information about these things.  Anyway, all of this took about 4 hours, but we did finally get underway and the captain said that we will still be able to make it to Abu Dhabi, which is a good thing; in our experience a delay this long would often cause us to miss the next port.

No comments:

Post a Comment