Blogs from Japan, Asia

2023_Blog 32_Japan April 21 Port of Call: Aomori, Japan – Weather: Sunny - 55°F/13°C – winds steady at 40 mph. (Force 10) Heavy winds throughout the night created a steady wave action that rocked us to sleep as we sailed in the northern strait connecting the Sea of Japan with the Pacific Ocean. Our stop today was in Aomori where we visited the Seiryu-ji Temple with the Showa Daibutsu (Showa Great Buddha), the Sannai Maruyama Site and the ASPAM – the Aomori Shopping & Product Mansion. While it was quite windy all day it was pleasantly sunny and dry, a rare occurrence on this trip. The Seiryu-ji Temple site was developed by the Shingon sect of Buddhism in 1982 and took over five years to complete. The outstanding features of the site are the Five-Storied Pagoda, ... read more

2023_Blog 34_Japan April 23 Port of Call: At Sea – Weather: 50°F/10°C – scattered clouds – wind: 21 mph. Last day of this cruise heading for our final stop and disembarkation in Yokohama tomorrow. Time to pack, get documentation in order and say goodbye to our faithful stewards and fellow guests. Tomorrow will be a hectic day. During the Captain’s noon address from the bridge, he informed those guest that were continuing with the next cruise that due to a massive storm front heading north, which is the same direction that the Westerdam will be travelling, the next port of call has been cancelled. As a result of that change in plans the ship will stay in Yokohama overnight tomorrow. Today was one of frustration once again for all guests as the internet was spotty all ... read more

2023_Blog 31_Japan April 20 Port of Call: Otaru, Japan – Weather: Overcast with a chance of rain. - 54°F/12°C - Wind: 1.9 mph. After our one-day visit to Busan, South Korea, we are back in Japan and have to have a face-to-face inspection once again by the Japanese Immigration Officers. Early, 6:00 am, yesterday morning we lined up to draw numbered tickets which corresponded to the time slots allocated for the inspection. I have to give high marks to the crew for their organizational skills in channeling 1,900 guest and crew through the process in just over 5 hours. Now if they could only direct that level of efficiency to their shore excursions. Crew safety exercises have been conducted throughout the cruise and today was no exception. Junior officers had to launch one of the rescue ... read more

A Note on Photographs From this blog onwards, I will publish the bulk of my photos on Find Penguins instead of on this blog. Don't be alarmed; I'm not breaking up with Travelblog just yet. I continue to enjoy Travelblog because of the community we have built, and it is easy to tell a coherent story on this platform. However, it can be challenging to relate photos and videos to timelines and locations; when reading your blogs, I constantly have to think about how various photos relate to when and where it happened during your travels. Find Penguins does a superb job of reducing this guesswork, but its Twitter-like format doesn't facilitate telling a contiguous story. The main purpose for my trip to Singapore was to help my parents settle in with their new live-in caregiver. ... read more

2023_Blog 24_Japan April 13 Port of Call: Kochi, Japan – Weather: Partly cloudy - 65°F/18°C – Wind: 7 mph. Today we had a return visit to this city and once again all the shore excursions were sold out and there were no cancellations, so we opted to do some exploring on our own. Unlike our previous visit today was sunny, pleasantly warm, and most importantly DRY, no rain. The shore excursion team arranged for round trip shuttle busses, at $25 each, to take us on a half-hour ride to the local bus depot in the center of town where we could explore as we wished. Our map reading skills were put to the test and after walking from the bus depot nothing matched up to either the paper map we were carrying or Google Maps. Fortunately ... read more