18th January

Sunday 18^th January 2015:

Quelques mots de John qui n'a pas écrit hier. 
Bises.

Une devinette pour Manon : Qui va à la chasse perd sa place. Quand il revient il trouve un...

Notre "chez nous"...Our home for 4 months!

The fourth day of navigation since leaving Mindelo

We have now got into our “habits” onboard. My back problems have come back in earnest so I am up and in the gym by 6h30 each morning. The “armchair cycling” and some very modest arm exercises are now followed by a routine 15 minute sauna & cold shower before going back to the cabin, collecting Mrs Blight and then going for breakfast. We have even got our own table for breakfast with the same waiter – Kumar from near Mumbai – as in the evening! And then 45-60 minutes walk around the top deck (lots of wind) or the third deck (a “walkers” speed track!!) followed by our “cultural lecture” on the discovery of the Americas or early “American populations”. And then I shuffle off rapidly for my Italian lessons – at least I try!!! Then up to the top deck for lunch followed by another brisk walk around the 3^rd deck trying to see who will not move out of the way as we are set for a head-on collision!! Most people walk anti-clockwise but since the first day we are walking clockwise so…

Yesterday morning Costa organized a most pathetic “crossing the Equator” ceremony apparently for people with a mental age of 10 (or less). But last night I was out on the top deck filming at 8pm as we were nominally crossing the Equator and although there were no further celebrations etc, that was quite moving.

Yesterday we saw a school of dolphins which followed by the side of the boat and somebody said they had also seen an albatross! Today the boat is surrounded by diving cormorants and we sailed by a series of volcanic islands 350 km from the Brazilian coast – the archipelago Ferdinand Noronha. The people on these islands are really isolated!! There were some huts on the beach and it looked like a scene out of the US series “Lost” from the early 2000s!

Tomorrow morning we arrive in Recife – we will try to walk around the town centre near the port in the morning and in the afternoon we have reserved a boat ride around the islands which constitute Recife. That should be the real start of our trip!!