Thursday, October 23

At sea. Wonder of wonders, my absentee ballot, which was mailed to me in care of the port agent in Hong Kong, showed up at Singapore! So now I must deal with sending it back from Bali. From an excruciatingly slow, long and expensive session on the Internet, I found that we shall be nowhere near any access to FedEx or DHL, but I think that the Indonesian Postal Service does offer something called “international express mail.” I am assured by the Front Office that an Indonesian Postal Official will be on board while we are at Padang Bai. Heaven only knows how much it will cost and whether it will actually get back to Albemarle County in time, but at least I’ve got a shot at voting in this election.

We have a new lecturer on board who is an expert on Australian aboriginal cultures. I went to her first session today...very interesting. I hope to catch her other lectures between here and Perth. I am really looking forward to the overland tour in Australia. I’ve just learned that there are only 15 of us going on it...we have an orientation meeting tomorrow.

For those who haven’t heard, I also learned today that the shipment of books that a number of us collected for the ladies who like to read in Grenada have arrived there in good order.

Friday, October 24

At sea again/still. We celebrated Josie’s birthday by most of us table mates having lunch in the fancy Pinnacle Grill this afternoon. All but one of the women at our table have birthdays that fall during the cruise, and Stan’s is two days afterward. So I’m going to “donate” my second birthday to Jill and Yvette (whose actual dates are in August), and we’ll celebrate Stan’s a couple of days early at the end of the trip. Yvette from Hawaii is our new table mate since Singapore.

Then at dinner, we celebrated Josie’s birthday again with a special dessert which, instead of a little cake, turned out to be a decorated and deliciously light lemon mousse on the thinnest of cake bases. Yum. Definitely well fed today!

And kudos to Holland America Line. They have arranged to have absentee ballots for the US election sent via courier from Jakarta to their home office in Seattle where they will be mailed out. A very thoughtful service to offer!

Saturday, October 25

Padang Bai, Bali, Indonesia. Up at 0-dark-30 this morning to be ready for an early tender ride to shore for my Bali Arts and Crafts Shopping tour. The monetary unit of Bali is the rupiah with an exchange rate of 10,000 to the US dollar. That’s actually better than the dong in Viet Nam which was 16,000 to the dollar. Fortunately, for each port the ship gives us a little card with a currency conversion chart. Even so, this trip is a bit of a mathematical challenge!

Well, the tender ride was easy on, easy off in both directions! I did see many terraced rice fields, but not the spectacular mountainside ones as we stayed pretty much in the lowlands. The countryside is incredibly lush and green. Almost every square meter is under cultivation of one kind or another. They used to grow three crops of rice per year, but now grow two crops of rice per year and then grow something else like cucumbers, garlic, melons, etc. for crop rotation.

First we went to see a performance of the Barong dance at an outdoor theater. It was accompanied by a gamelan orchestra... not my very favorite music, but certainly appropriate in this case. It was quite spectacular. Next we went to a wood carvers’ village to visit a workshop to see how they do it and, they hoped, buy some of their wares. I didn’t. The last stop was at a painters’ village, ditto.

The traffic is at least as crazy as Singapore. Buses, vans, motor bikes, bicycles, cars. Certainly not as many of each, but then the roads are tiny! At one point we wound up behind a broken down bus, and there just wasn’t room for our bus to get past. Meanwhile cars and motor bikes were scooting past in all directions and on all sides...wherever they could squeeze by. It took almost ten minutes to get enough break in the traffic so that our driver could back up to a place where he could turn around and go another route! He got a good round of applause for that bit of dexterity!

Sunday, October 26

At sea and bouncy. We’ve been sailing straight into the swells, so the ship has been pitching a good bit (i.e. front to back as opposed to rolling which is side to side). Fortunately, I don’t really get seasick, but this much motion does tend to make me sleepy, so that’s what I did for much of the day. “Rocked in the cradle of the deep...”

At dinner this evening I discovered that our new table mate, Yvette, was on the Discovery last year with Virginia and Gil...small world strikes again! It seems like the world of long cruisers is smaller than most. Our other table mate, Phyllis, boarded the Prinsendam last year as Jill and I were getting off in Ft. Lauderdale, and as I mentioned before, there are a bunch of other passengers from our cruise on the Prinsendam on this one.