From Brazil into France

On Monday and Tuesday we were at sea and it seemed there were several things we wanted to do. Monday we had a special “Swim across the Equator” which I decided to do since I missed the swim with the penguins. As you can see in the picture, the pool was quite crowded. Thom, the cruise director, is the guy in the tux and hat. There is a slightly larger pool on the aft Deck 9. On Tuesday they had the Mariner’s luncheon… since everyone onboard is a Mariner, it was divided into two lunches just like the dinner seatings. It was a nice lunch and the Captain spoke a bit about our travels and the challenges of the Antarctic and the Amazon.

Wednesday we arrived at Devil’s Island off the coast of French Guiana. This is where France sent some of their prisoners until the 1950’s. There are actually three small islands together named the Iles du Salut; the others are Ile Royale and Ile Ste-Joseph.
We actually were on Ile Royale - not Devil’s Island as it has no facilities to even dock the tenders. The island is an interesting hodgepodge of restored buildings including a small hotel and restaurant and the remains of the prison buildings. There were several paths you could take to explore; it takes about an hour to walk all the way around the island. We were there about 5 hours because there were lots of monkeys big ones and small ones and I had to take lots of pictures. These are wild monkeys, but they are somewhat used to people and if you held out a piece of food, eventually one would get brave enough to come and snatch it quickly and run away. There were also some little rodents called Agouti (I think) - they were kind of cute and everywhere.

Eventually we came back to the ship, hot and tired, but it was a great day… I really liked it much better than some of the large cities we visited - but there were a lot of people that didn’t like this type of stop at all and didn’t get off the ship. I think Holland America did a great job of balancing the types of ports on this cruise - there really has been something for everyone.

Last night was the Green & White Ball in celebration of St. Patrick’s day but as usual, I was asleep prior to its starting time of 10 pm.