2024 – Queen Mary 2 Grand World– Part 1 –Port Elizabeth  to Cape Town1.6

Friday, January 26th, at sea.  The morning’s email brought the Starrs’ blog Travel with the Starrs – Join us on our travels… (wordpress.com) and it contained the clearest description of the Panama Canal, and its history, I have ever read.  Good on them.  We weren’t supposed to go through it this year, but now that we are afraid to go through the Suez canal, it’s on everyone’s lips.  The only problem is that the Queen Mary 2 is a pretty big ship, and while she can get through the new Panama Canal, she can’t get under the Bridge of the Americas.  Or so says Wikipedia.

I spent the rest of the day on my own TA work and went to my new Happy Hour, now called “Friends of HelenM” at 7:15pm in the Commodore Club.  No one came but the String Trio was playing and it was a lot more interesting than Sir Samuel’s. My dinner companions were Martin and Linda, who barely recognized me because I had my pink wig on the last time we ate together, Vance and Anne, and Gordon and Janet.  We got talking about good restaurants and Gordon highly recommends the “noir” experience, where you eat in pitch black and guess what you ate later.  Apparently, it’s surreal, but a lot of fun and the food is delicious, even if you don’t know what you are eating.  I googled later and there are a good few of these in the world, including O Noir on Prince Arthur in Montreal.  There’s somewhere we’ll have to go.  The entertainment was Linda Evans, a British singer, who does American Country and Western.  Good enough to enjoy. 

The next day, January 27th, we were still at sea and it was pretty uneventful. I had a lot of people at the desk, because  of our upcoming shore excursion and I gave away another bar of soap.  It’s nice to be useful.

Tim came to Friends of HelenM in the Commodore Club and my dinner partners were John, Ian and Jamie, and Sue and Neill.  Three of these good Brits have electric cars and just love them.  Apparently, they are a lot of fun to drive, accelerate in an instant.  The entertainment was a quartet called the 4 Ds, Jersey Boys style.  They were pretty good, considering they were just 3Ds, one of them having popped a knee a couple of days before they were scheduled to leave Liverpool.

Sunday, January 28th was my day for a game drive in Port Elizabeth, South Africa.  I’ll get to compare Safari West in Santa Rosa with the real thing, for just about the same price, including a longer drive to get there.  The bus left at 12:15pm, which is my kind of time.  We drove through Port Elizabeth, 5th largest city in South Africa, with a population of 2 million.  60% are black Xhosa, 25% Afrikaans, and the rest Indians, coloreds, etc. It’s also called the windy city because they have a lot of it.  We drove past miles and miles of wetlands, past decent looking suburbs.  I have to wonder if they flood.  The guide talked about farming, but all we saw was scrub; no crops, no animals, pretty barren.  It got little better as we got farther out, with a few orchards and a couple of small herds of cattle.  Eventually we arrived at the Kwantu Game Reserve, which is 6000 hectares, and houses a lot of wild animals, along with a few being re-wilded, after having been mis-treated pets.  They had the biggest herd of cattle I had seen yet, and I had to wonder if they were being kept as food for the inmates of the game reserve. 

Lunch was pretty good, once we found it.  The appetizers were in a different room from the main lunch and I loaded up, thinking they were the whole thing.  When I found out differently, I had tiny samples of that of which I should have had more.  Oh, well, not to worry.  Cruise passengers never starve. There was some native singing and dancing after lunch, and we were off on our game drive.

We started in the rehabilitation, re-wilding enclosures, where we met three white lions, who were being nursed back to health and three brown lions, who were to accompany them back into the wild.  White lions can’t hunt, you see, because the prey can see them.  They need to belong to a pack.  Luckily, lions are color blind, so the brown lions don’t know they are taking on dependents.  The three white lions were female, as were two of the brown ones.  The third brown lion was male.  That’s him under the table doing what he does best. 

Male lions sleep 20 hours a day, while the females hunt.  He’s built for fighting other lions, with that nice protective mane.  The girls are streamlined for the chase.  The wardens will get them to think the six of them are all family by rubbing fresh brown lion poo on the white lions and fresh white lion poo on the brown lions.  How would you like to have that job?

Then we met a character who has no business being in Africa, but some bad actor imported her parents as pets a few years ago.  Kwantu have had the parents for well over a year and the cubs were born here.  She’s beautiful standing by her water hole.

And comfortable lying in it.  Like all cats, she can fold herself up very small.

The four of them are being re-wilded and will be flown back to India, when they are ready.  I just wanted to hug her, but that wasn’t advisable. 

We learned the “follow me” signs on impalas, springboks, wildebeest, and lions, and a lot about horns.  Cape Buffalo piss on their kill to be sure it’s dead.  If it moves, it will be.  I offer this as a possibly useful factoid and more evidence that I have been reading Salman Rushdie, lately: Victoria City and now Midnight’s Children. We had bachelor Impala herds explained, too.  What a bunch of losers.

We saw lions hunting:

And got up close and personal with a termite mound.  Check the construction on the lower left.  The windows are open there.  Depending on how hot it is, the termites will open more windows for ventilation and close them over with mud at night when it’s cooler.

I have pictures of warthogs, rhinoceros, zebras and giraffes, but I won’t bore you with too many.  This one is probably my prize:

The picture is unretouched.  They were less than 20 feet from the vehicle.  We had to be werry, werry quiet. The big one came to within 3 feet of me.  I was werry, werry, werry quiet.  Then she went and stood in front of the bus.  We waited, and waited, and waited. Eventually, we pulled back, very slowly and moved on.  It was time to go. 

I learned that it’s a confusion of wildebeests, a dazzle of zebras, a crash of rhinoceroses, a parade of elephants, a journey of giraffes, and a few more.  I think I have learned and forgotten those before, and likely will again. It was a very good day, though.  I had a baked potato for dinner from the buffet.  It was all I needed. 

Monday, January 29, was another day in Port Elizabeth and I wasn’t going anywhere.  I photoshopped my animal pictures and got caught up with my work.  Around 4pm, I was ready to go out and, since we weren’t sailing until nine, fancied eating out, too.  I called Tim and offered him a free meal in exchange for his company and value as a bodyguard.  That worked a treat.  He had eaten out in the mall last night and knew which restaurant had good food and a good view.  We ended up having a pint and a great honking plate of miscellaneous appetizers, designed for four people, at least.  We had goong sarong, two kinds of dumplings, shrimp and lamb, two kinds of spring rolls, satay and who knows what else.  The whole thing came to under $40, including tip. 

Waiting for the last shuttle, we ran into Ian and Claire, whom I remembered from a dinner together.  They didn’t know me until I opened my mouth, though.  The Helen they had met had pink hair and Lady Gaga glasses.  We got back in time for Laura Evans’ second show and it was a just right ending to a good easy day.

It was January 30,and it was nice to have a day at sea before our DV shore excursion.  I got Newsletter 6 out to be printed before office hour, and delivered just after.  One passenger wanted to know if his parents could leave the tour after Table Mountain.  I assured him they could.  Another one’s husband will be walking to the base of Table Mountain and all the way up it.  She will take our bus and get their tickets from the guide at the base.  Then she’ll join him to hike up the thing and use the tickets for the cable car down.  They won’t be doing anything else with us, but are happy with that.  I’d be happy to be able to do it.

Around five o’clock, Captain Hashmi came on the PA to tell us we would not be going back through the Suez canal and that the new itinerary would be distributed shortly.  That they did very well.  I had it in ten minutes, incorporated it into my spreadsheet schedule, and sent it off to DVhosts, with the following message: 

“There have been rumours on board and now it’s official.  We are not going through the Suez Canal.  It’s too dangerous.  Ya think?  The Captain was on the PA an hour ago and now we have the new schedule.  I incorporated it into MY personal schedule and attached it.  You can ignore the entire month of January, that’s past.  The changes start on March 31, when we turn around in Columbo Sri Lanka, and go back the way we came.  Only 2 ports are different, Las Palmas de Gran Canaria and Lisbon.  Barcelona is gone.  I put the two items we are losing in Red.  The Welcome Reception just needs to be rescheduled on board.  I can deal with that but…

We need to come up with a new shore excursion.  Either we do one in Lisbon, or give me what I have wanted all along, something late February, early March: Melbourne,  Sydney, Cairns, or Darwin would be good.  

No one came to drink with me before dinner, which I took to mean that no one was overly upset.  We all knew.  We would have preferred a more interesting route home, but we get it.  I had a lively dinner with Jean, Sheila, Ann and Keith and Jeff and Janet, the last of the six people I had dinner with the night of the pink wig.  I skipped the entertainment because I was getting up before 6am for our tour in Cape Town.