En route to India

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<strong style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Good Friday 6^th April 2012:

Today has been the perfect holiday day: sunny, hot, calm, lots of swimming, sunbathing, reading, sleeping … and hot cross buns for breakfast! It’s been the perfect lazy day and really lovely to have <em style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">sunshine again. Although we’ve been terribly hot for a while now, it’s been largely hazy but not today. I definitely over-cooked myself on a sun lounger and really should have spent longer with Richard in the shade. Hay ho.

We had our anti-pirate safety drill this morning and it really doesn’t amount to anything arduous. We just have to return to our cabin and sit in the corridor outside it and make sure we’re not opposite the cabin door. But 25 cabins put their <em style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Do Not Disturb sign on the door and simply assumed they didn’t need to bother with the drill. According to the Captain’s tannoy speech, they will “all be spoken to individually”. Neither of our neighbours bothered to join in: the Japanese on one side of us stayed on their balcony which will be a pretty dumb place to be if pirates decide to start shooting at the ship. The other side refused to leave the poolside so we had a lot of corridor all to ourselves and there will be quite a lot of ‘chatting with the security guys’ in at least 2 cabins on our deck.

This afternoon’s excitement was our little team of armed guards coming on board. We sailed only 6 miles off Sri Lanka today so they rendezvoused with the ship just off the coast. These 3 people had an awful lot of luggage, and some of their cases seem remarkably strong! I think we can safely say the Queen Mary 2 is now armed and dangerous!

We’re in India tomorrow and we start our day with a lot of shananagins (I have no idea how to spell that!) with the Indian immigration authorities. They are insisting on coming on board and doing a full face-to-face passport check with every passenger and crew member. When that happened in San Francisco, it cost us a lot of time ashore and it looks like it’s going to do the same here as they aren’t even coming on board until 10.30 am. That’s a bit of a challenge as our tour was originally due to leave the dockside at 9.45. I bet some tempers fray tomorrow!

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