Day 79/138 2022/2023 Viking Neptune World Cruise. A day at sea.
First of all I owe some people who read the blog regularly some answers.
Yes the air conditioning is working perfectly now in our cabin. Thank you for asking. I am really glad Richard persisted with the maintenance crew on Viking, who were able to fix it before we got to these really hot countries! Today it was only 79F outside, and it felt like a nice change, from the hot temperatures we had in Vietnam and Indonesia. The question will be will the heat work if we need it in Europe in the spring? We will just have to wait and see I guess!
Ted, our guide from Vietnam can be reached at +84 90 948 10 18 on What’s App. If anyone wants to reach out to him, he is a tour designer and also has people who work for him so if he is busy, he can still help design your tour and have someone else go with you on the tour. I know some other people from the Neptune also had Ted as their guide either the first or second day we were in Vietnam. If you do your own research first on what you want to see, he can help make it happen for you.
And now back to our regularly scheduled sea day programming…..
A very weird thing happened this morning! I woke up (not weird) and looked at Richard (that’s not weird either!), I looked at my phone and said, we need to get going to breakfast, since it was 8:30am and we hadn’t had our showers. The World Cafe closes at 9:30am for breakfast and we had not ordered room service, so if we wanted food, we had to get moving. We got to the World Cafe and the World Cafe has an electronic signboard outside the restaurant which said the time was 8:08am. What???! I showed Richard my phone and it said 9:08am. He showed me his phone which said 8:08am! He wondered why I was rushing us to breakfast, but he did not say anything to me. Yeesh. We met another friend in the restaurant and he said his phone was also at 9:08pm, so best as we can figure out, my phone still had Los Angeles as the place in the ’Date and Time’ section of the IPhone, so it must have switched to Daylight Savings Time, even though my roaming is off and I have airplane mode on my phone. So now my phone is set to Jakarta and I adjusted the time on my phone and my Ipad. I gained an hour in my day by rushing to breakfast and saw a whole different bunch of early risers in the World Cafe at that time of the morning! Wonders never cease!
After breakfast I decided to head up to the Explorer’s Lounge to work on our upcoming ports of call excursions. We have quite a few days coming up in a row where we are in ports and I was not really ‘digging’ the included and optional excursions that we had chosen through Viking. Since we are more than half way through this World Cruise we have learned to book our own tours where we can see the things we want to, at our own pace and also adjusting what the guide wants to show us at times. I sent Margaret a ‘What’s App’ and asked her what they had planned for the upcoming ports and to let her know I was doing my research. The next thing I knew, she was on the couch next to me in Explorer’s while we were looking at Viator and Trip Advisor options. Unfortunately the Internet was absolutely terrible today, and we ended up booking only 2 tours, with a third tour hung up on my Ipad, until I was finally able to book the tour after lunch. After booking our tours, we returned our Viking tour tickets to Guest Services, to ensure we get the credits for the cancelled tours refunded to our Onboard Account.
We did not do well at Team Trivia again this morning. We had all 6 of us at Trivia too. Will we ever win at Team Trivia before we finish this cruise? I am not sure.
Today was the last art class for this segment of the cruise. The paper cut out project today was to work on contrasts or silhouettes. We were to try and use something Asian for our inspiration, whether it was a temple, pagoda, monkey or an elephant. The teachers handed out an elephant and temples to trace, but I decided I would use something that moved me recently instead as my inspiration and I actually drew on my white paper before putting the cut up paper on top of it. Instead of using the mixed medium glue which the teachers had in the first few classes, we were using glue sticks. I don’t like glue sticks, because every little bit of paper I cut stuck to the ends of my fingers. Ugh!
As the teacher and teacher’s helper walked by and saw the photo on my Iphone that was my inspiration they both said “That’s ambitious!” I really think, they really didn’t think I could pull it off and get the project finished in one hour. All the more reason for me to try!
Photo from my Iphone that was my inspiration for today’s project. The ’Burning Monk Memorial’ to Thich Quang Duc, in Saigon that we had seen two days ago with our guide Ted.
And my finished work…I don’t think I was that ambitious, but when I looked at other’s works of art finished by my classmates, they did not have as much cutting or detail as I did, so maybe I was a bit ambitious! Maybe if my blog writing, golf game, photography hobbies, all go to pot, I can take up paper cut out art as my next hobby? If I was to do the project over again I may have put some blue paper behind the trees to have the sky reflecting through the trees…but now I’m being picky.
We are having an art show which I think will be the day after tomorrow, when we have one day at sea. The teachers have all of our cut up paper masterpieces which they collect and keep at the end of each class. Today in class the teacher held up a piece of art and said “Does this belong to anyone? We pulled the tape off and forget to write the name and cabin number on the back of the artwork.”. Of course it happened to be one of my pieces! So at least I could claim it, put my name on it, so they could put it into the upcoming art show.
After art class I spent quite a bit of time working on what we could do on my birthday on March 20th. We are going to be someplace I’ve never heard of, and I was having difficulty trying to even figure out where we were docking on this island. Richard had to call Guest Services to clarify where we were docking this afternoon, even though he had sat at Guest Services this morning and had written down all of the docking ports and times of our arrival and departure. After finally figuring out what we wanted to do on March 20th, now its up to Richard to try and get it organized. We’ll see if we can pull it off, because if we do, it will be an epic adventure!
We are in for a very, very, very busy stretch of days and we wanted to have lots of energy for the upcoming ports of call, so we both went to the gym this afternoon for an extensive workout. I was on the recumbent bike for 32 minutes, plus floor exercises and stretching for another 28 minutes and Richard did the longest he has done on the elliptical machine, as well as stretching. We will not have much time for the next little while to go to the gym, so it was good to get back there, to help with our stamina!
Here is our itinerary for the next week:
March 13th: Koh Samui (Nathon) Thailand
March 14th: At Sea. Gulf of Thailand
March 15: Singapore, Singapore
March 16: Singapore, Singapore
March 17: Singapore, Singapore
March 18: Kuala Lumpur, (Port Klang), Malaysia
March 19: George Town, Malaysia
March 20: Langkawi, Malaysia
March 21: Phuket Thailand
We are going to be busy! With so many days in a row in ports, it is going to be exhausting as we try to see as much as we can in a short time. We were originally supposed to be in Myanmar around my birthday and then the itinerary was changed before we left on the cruise, so I did not really investigate these ports until today. Now I think we have some good things booked and we’ve got to buckle up and dive in, because we’ll be busy!