Into the Taiwan Strait

 Borealis Monday 27^th March 2023 Monday

I got up this morning still unable to process my photos or to enter my Hong Kong blog on the internet.  The weather is cold and there isa considerable swell so you can feel the ship roll as you move across it to breakfast. Albina said it had been even more choppy during the night while she stood on the balcony. I was not aware as I was fast asleep.

I had a more filling breakfast than usual and then attended a lecture. The subject was the China-Hong Kong Nexus. I am sure it was very informative. I particularly remember the chart the speaker showed depicting the enormous Chinese diaspora around the world in the late XIXth century, but not much else. It was the sound of clapping as he ended his talk that woke me up. I felt like I had been drugged. I went downstairs to Group Services to complain about the poor internet access and then changed £70 into yen. Unfortunately, they did not have any smaller denominations than 1000 yen.

As there was a film in the Auditorium at 12.45, I suggested to Albina that she can get up and have lunch at 12. Then I went for a leisurely walk around the ship on Deck 3 in the hope that the cold and the strong wind would come as a friend and wake me up. Hardly. I treated the wind as an alien force that needed to be avoided and returned to the comfort of the internal temperature after just two laps. The seas were heaving mw and the waves were 3 metres high. Each time we took on board made us swerve and wobble like drunks.

We had lunch together at last and then watched the film, Downton Abbey, a real tsunami of sentimentality and nostalgia, with intermittent scenes of a film being recorded in the Abbey and a trip to a villa in Southern France, inherited by the grandmother after an “innocent” fling with a French aristocrat. There were tears to be shed and, by God, we shed them. Luckily, I had brought a small packet of Kleenex.

After the film we made our way to the photographic shop and picked up some snaps of ourselves made by the official photographer of the cruise in Singapore, Vietnam and Hong Kong.

We enjoyed a high tea, which is normally Albina’s favourite meal in the day. Then backed to our cabin for me to finish preparing the 31 photos are needed for the lecture. I thought of a title too. Borealis in the Footsteps of Phileas Fogg. We watched a murder mystery on the telly and this time we both ended up without a dinner, as time had run out and were not so hungry.

Out quiz team was there in full, and we stormed through to 13 out of 15. A respectable losers’ score, we thought. We did not know that cynophobia was a fear of dogs and that a collective name for frogs was army. To our amazement the usual know-alls in the other teams got even less than us. We had won! We were presented with our second bottle of champagne, and we posed for a group photograph. I think one rule that we set for ourselves is paying off. If you are making a reasoned guess, stick with it and don’t second guess. Avoid any crossing out on your sheet. It is working for us.

This evening we sailed into the Straits of Taiwan. Somewhere in the dark Borealis will be fumbling its way past the watchful spy cameras of the Chinese military and the American Seventh Fleet. Let us hope no one mistakenly takes a pot-shot at us with one of their laser beams, let alone one of their missiles. Am obviously getting jumpy.