2023 Alaska, Asia, Australia, Arabian Peninsula Trip
Day 36/105 - Sailing the East China Sea between Taiwan and Hong Kong
Ahh, breakfast. What a great way to start a day. The chef whipped up one of our favorites this morning, biscuits and sausage gravy. It is great that Viking is willing to handle special requests like this as their breakfast selection, while wide, doesn't change, ever. Being able to get a special breakfast like this from time to time breaks up the breakfast monotony.
The water is a little rough this morning, but nothing terrible. According to Windy.com, we're in 9 to 11-foot waves and will be all the way to Hong Kong.
Today's Baggo pitted the men against the women with officers joining their respective gender's team. The last toss was from the very top of the atrium stairs, all four bags simultaneously in a single toss to the two boards that were placed side-by-side. A bag on your team's board was worth nothing. A bag in your team's hole was worth 5,000 points. A bag on your opponent's board or in their hole was worth 5,000 points for them. It was close with the men in the lead the entire game, but in the end, the women triumphed in large part because several of the men scored points on the women's board, netting them 15,000 points and the win. There was a lot of laughter and smiles.
Trivia today had a nautical theme. All the questions were related to sailing, cruising, or songs and movies about boats. We missed one question about distance because we needed to calculate it correctly - I had the wrong nautical mile-to-statute mile conversion factor. Several teams were perfect but one team was first to answer the tiebreaker about Leonardo Dicaprio's famous line from Titanic: "I'm the king of the world!"
After lunch, our planned Villages get-together went perfectly. Everyone on the ship from The Villages met in the upper deck of the Explorers' Bar and spent a wonderful hour together, getting to know each other.
 |
| Villagers love to travel and socialize! |
The area between Taipei and Hong Kong is a very busy shipping lane. We were constantly passing other ships in multiple directions.
The amount of containers on the move all over the world at any given moment is staggering. When you consider that once these reach their end port, they all have to get loaded onto trains or trucks, the logistics behind it all is mind-boggling.
We had the usual pre-dinner drinks and then dinner in the World Café. Tonight was surf and turf night. Show me another buffet where you can grab and go with lobster and filet mignon, and both are great. We both were still dragging a little and tomorrow will be a busy day in Hong Kong with a five-hour excursion. Based on that, we opted for an early retirement to the room.
One nice thing is that as cruisers who are continuing on the ship after Hong Kong, we are not required to go through immigration like passengers who will be disembarking, or visiting areas like Macau. I'll take my wins where I can get them.
Hong Kong tomorrow for three days.
Hong Kong is our favorite city. I first went there in the late 60’s on R&R. The Star Ferry is fun even though there is a subway train now. We were there on a ship about 15 years ago but we docked at the old terminal which was next to the ferry. Have fun.
ReplyDelete