Hong Kong here we come

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<strong style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Saturday 24^th March 2012:

We had another lazy day at sea today as we get excitingly close now to Hong Kong. This morning’s lecture was delivered by an “intelligence and espionage expert” and was titled ‘The Secrets of Air Force One’. And the best secret that was revealed was how to make yourself a comfortable living as a cruise talk person. Pick yourself a subject that you just know is going to hook the curiosity of lots of people, Google it and then bung together 45 minutes worth of slides. Bingo! You have a new career. There wasn’t a single thing about Air Force One that you and I haven’t seen in movies, in the news or on line. The lecture was padded out with clips from a TV news reporter’s own home movie on board the plane and other clips from the Harrison Ford film called Air Force One. So not the very best use of our time today and definitely no sign of any secrets being revealed.

Much better was the thing we expected to be awful that turned out to be great and that was the watercolour art exhibition of paintings created by guests during this voyage. And we have some seriously talented people on board. Even the beginner’s class output would put me to total shame and the advanced class work was outstanding. I could happily live with quite a few of the paintings on show today; they were excellent.

The rest of our day has been very indulgent reading books, eating and watching films on iPads. Tomorrow will be lot less restful as we’re off on the first trip of the day starting at 7.45 am. The ship is in Kowloon tomorrow and lots of people tell us we’ll be docked in a great position for shopping. We’re on the hunt for an authentic Chinese Mah-Jongg set so fingers crossed. At some unearthly hour like 3 am the next night, the ship then moves to Hong Kong Island so we’ll get to see quite a lot of HK although nowhere near all of the 263 islands that make up this very unusual province of China. Although the British handed it back to the Chinese in 1997, it still has its own currency and English is one of the two official languages. Should make for an interesting port of call.

We may not be able to blog or update Facebook for the next few days. Apparently the Chinese are prone to block all satellite communications. That seems quite common in this part of the world as the Japanese did the same thing. If we go quiet for a few days, now you’ll know why.

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