I have been away on an amazing cruise holiday but, as always, am pleased to be back in home waters.
The cruise was a week-long adventure in the South China seas, starting and ending in Singapore with visits to Thailand and Malaysia in between.
The format is awesome seeing as the ship travels overnight while you eat(eateateat), make merry and sleep, then docks in the port during the day so you can tour and sight-see.
The whole on-board cruise mode concept seems to revolve around food. There are several restaurants on the ship, both free and for own account. The 3 main eateries included in the cruise price are a big buffet canteen-style one adjacent to the pool (with first sitting at 6am and last at midnight!), a Chinese restaurant (that we never got to) and the Bella Vista which we ate at most often with a continental buffet and full English ticklist breakfast and 3 course set menu lunches and dinners. Several 24-hour terrace options filled the 5-hour chasm of potential foodlessness… As we found out, quite nicely with 3am baskets of chips and chicken wings big enough to have been sourced from small ostriches!
Day trips onto coastal spots are a bit ‘hurry up and wait’ being large groups in coaches with short temple(templetempletemples), local produce (cashew nuts and batiks) and museum visits (and the inevitable mammoth buffet lunch stop) being interspersed with the delays of re-communing and requisite drivetime between points of interest.
Was a great group though – really friendly bunch with none of the usual unwarranted complaints and illogical requests. Had such a good time that have come home with determination to get my ass back over to the Far East for my much-spoken-about ambition to see Vietnam and Cambodia.
Alas, haven’t gotten around to much… have returned to a swamp of To Do things – amazing how much can happen (in some instances and not happen in others, neither favourable) in such a brief absence! So, having covered the reacquainting with lost and reuniting with good over last weekend and having had yet another week slip by, I have realised that it’s become buckle-down time. Have to slip out of cruise mode and get down to DOING.
It’s August. It’s 2011. So much good intention but still so much stuff that’s been waylaid along the way in cruise mode. I seem to have flip-flopped my theory and practical. Have learned loads in practical workday life, but lost the plot with my PhD theory studies as a result; yet am taking a more theoretical approach to my midnight hours, having lost faith in instinct. It’s not all doom and gloom. I have made inroads in the immediate On The Table stuff, but am gravitating toward the need for a plan (end of month, end of year, end of next year, 5 year), then a corresponding action plan and then action.
And then (hopefully) happily ever after. 🙂
PS: They say that loose lips sink ships, but seeing as everything always comes out in the end there’s no point in harbouring the secret…
Boys are like cruise ships: they think from meal to meal, they can take you exciting places but as long as they offer the requisite array of onboard interests then no matter how exciting the coastal options it’s always good to re-embark, you want them to be especially stable when you hit stormy seas, and it’s always good to be a-shored that you’re their first port of call.