Santa Marta, Colombia

7:00 am Sunday and we have just docked in Santa Marta, Colombia. We will have a shuttle to take us into town. There are a couple cathedrals and a market that I am very interested in visiting, but I’m not sure whether Sunday will be a good day for this. Since most of the fresh flowers sold in the US are grown in Colombia I’m thinking the market might be beautiful with flower stalls.

I haven’t mentioned Trivia yet… we are part of a great ‘for fun’ team. Our team name is For Fun. We have 5 regulars and an extra has dropped in a couple times. We actually won the first session… we are now the proud owners of Holland America bag tags! That was the Key West port day. On all the sea days they are running a cumulative score with a grand prize at the end of each segment. So far we haven’t done as well on the sea days, but we have fun and the team never argues about things.
I’ve gone to a couple of the lectures. There was one on how the Asian people crossed the land bridge from Siberia to North America and headed south… It was good. And yesterday we went to a lecture by a professional travel photographer on using your digital camera. One of his questions for the audience was how many are using point & shoot cameras and almost the whole audience raised their hands… then he asked how many use SLRs and 6 of us raised our hands. This is obviously not a serious photo crowd! Then again I’m still remembering our Antarctic trip in November when over half the passengers had wonderful cameras. I asked the photo shop staff if there would be a photo contest and “they didn’t know”. Duh - figure it out. I am in serious need of beating Jim this time since he beat me by placing second overall on the World Cruise.

Well… I was just about to say that things were smoothing out onboard but Jim just went in to take a shower and we have no water.

Now I know one shouldn’t compare cruises, but I’m going to do just a little. So far the food has been very good, the beef is so tender you can cut it with a fork and everything has been perfectly as ordered. And of course, I’m having the traditional Holland America bread pudding every day at lunch, but I need Melania to send me the dessert chef from Royal Princess. I knew that those desserts were really exceptional and so far although the other desserts are all good, they don’t begin to compare with the ones we had on RP. HAL is doing a great job of making this ‘special’ everything is geared to “our special grand voyage passengers”.

I’ll write about the port when we return - and I promise to add some pictures too.