Further along the Coral Sea

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<strong style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Sunday 11^th March 2012:

An interesting start to our day today: we solved one mystery and discovered a new one to add to our To Do List! We went to a lecture given by Dr Stephen Payne. Not a name we expect anyone to know but it turns out he is the naval architect who designed the Queen Mary 2. He’s going to deliver 6 lectures and today’s was about the Mauretania. So here’s the mystery we solved. Richard’s mum had always said that she sailed from her home in Canada to her new, married life in England on the Mauretania. But we learnt recently that the Mauretania was sold for scrap before mum left Canada. So did she mis-remember or did we mis-hear? We learned today that the Mauretania had been such a successful ship, that they built another Mauretania later that was sailing the transatlantic route at exactly the time Mum came over. So that’s the one Mum sailed on. She got the name bang on but the mystery for us is that we know and knew lots about the original Mauretania and know diddly squat about the second one. From pictures we saw today, its design was quite different from the original. So that’s for us to research – once we’re not paying Cunard rates for Google! We’d love to try and find the passenger manifest with mum’s name on. It would be a nice piece of family history to pass on to our new grand-daughter … once she’s a bit older than a bump of course!

We went back to the planetarium today for another show called Cosmic Collisions. The set-up on board the ship is amazing and you get a very weird sensation of flying through space as you watch the film projected on the concave ceiling of the planetarium. Really rather disconcerting!

We’re getting very near the equator now so it’s wonderfully warm outside. We made the most of that this afternoon and went for a lovely swim. There is a great pool on our deck at the back of the ship and just 4 cabins away from ours so it’s hardly a trek to get to it. The view from the pool is stunning – miles and miles of ocean and fascinating weather. There have been all sorts of clouds and rain fall today broken by long periods of lovely sunshine. It certainly makes a great subject for lots of photos so that has kept Richard very happy today.

Papua New Guinea is tomorrow’s adventure. Cunard has given us a written note warning us that the island is not what many Cunarders may expect. It’s very basic. Bad buses with no air conditioning and the guides have a poor grasp of English. Queen Elizabeth is their head of state and English is the official language but with 700 different ethnic groups, English is only spoken by 2%!o(MISSING)f the population. It’s a good job we’ve booked an official tour because a taxi ride is out of the question. There are no taxis on PNG! I reckon it should all make for a fascinating day.

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Comments

[Yutaka Niwa]

Welcome to the Port of Osaka/Tempozan! RMS Queen Mary 2 18th March
Numerous welcoming events are scheduled to entertain the passengers of RMS Queen Mary 2 to the first Japanese the Port of Osaka http://www.osaka-info.jp/en/

[The Tilsons]

Hello
You were kind enough to take the trouble to send us a comment on our travel blog and I wanted to let you know how thrilled we were with our visits to Japan. Osaka and Kyoto proved to be fascinating and the many temples we visited were beautiful. Thank you for helping our visit be so special. Regards Claire and Richard Tilson