Monday to Wednesday – Santana, and leaving the Amazon
Blog posts can be like buses; nothing for ages, and then several come along all at once. It’s worth taking some time to explain that, as there are several very good reasons why I’m not always able to sit down, write an update, then upload it, on a daily basis. First and foremost, there’s the availability of internet access. This is always a bone of contention on board cruise ships (I’m talking ALL cruise ships now, and not singling out any single one); generally speaking, it’s slow and flakey at best, ridiculously expensive, and frequently non-existent. We try to make make use of shoreside wi-fi, when available, but even that throws up curious restrictions. In Ater Do Chao, free wi-fi is available in the village centre, which is very nice, thank you. Unfortunately, for whatever reason, the Brazilians did not want me to connect to my blog server at bravenet.com, throwing up a restricted notice every time I tried… very curious.
There is also a small matter of time; on days when I’m teaching, my time is eaten up at an alarming rate. With the last class being 4pm until 5pm, we’ve still been cleaning up the gear at gone 6pm, which leaves only a short amount of time for showering and changing for dinner in the evening. Blogging, when I can, tends to get done at the earlier, or later, ends of the day.
On Monday, we arrived in Santana; an overnight stop necessary because Brazilian authorities insisted that we be there, our last Amazonian port-of-call, between certain daylight, and tide, times, unfortunately meaning that we had to leg it from AlterDo Chao, and miss out our original planned, interim, stop in Almeirim.
To say Santana is a bit of a festering dive is bigging it up. If the world had piles, they would probably be in Santana; we’ve been here before, and it doesn’t appear to have improved one iota. It has no redeeming features whatsoever (none that we’ve found, anyway). With only the prospect of taking a walk through the mushy brown mess that is Santana, it was with a certain amount of relief to Tracey and myself that we were offered escorting duties on a tour into Macapa. The tour’s first stop was to the Marco Zero Monument, marking the line of the equator. It’s a great photo opportunity, of course, being able to stand with one foot in the Northern hemisphere and the other in the South. From here, the tour stopped off at a Biodiversity Museum, which is normally closed on Mondays, but they’d opened it specially for us. The highlight of this was seeing a massive iguana in a tree, and several turtles swimming in a lake there (personally, I found the rest of the museum a bit boring, and the fact that our guide insisted on taking us into a pharmacy as part of the tour was quite bizarre).
After the museum, we headed into the centre of Macapa, a large, sprawling city, and its fort. The tour concluded with a visit to a craft market. Because there have been a few cases of tummy upset the ship has stepped up the cleaning and sanitising routine. Sanitizers and extra special instructions had been issued to all escorts; passengers must be given a squirt of sanitizer when getting off the coach, and when getting back on, to prevent any possibility of spreading anything unwanted. Anyone found recycling their lunch would not be allowed back on the coach, and would have to find their way back to the ship by taxi. Everyone was happy to receive their squirts, knowing that it was for the good of all – all except one annoying passenger, that is, who refused on two occasions (I insisted, and when he started giving me aggro, I simply told him to take it up with management).
On Tuesday, we finally left Santana, and headed out, away from the Amazon. I’m not going to dwell on the problems we’ve encountered over the last couple of days, other than to say that a few restrictions have had to be imposed in order to protect the health and safety of all passengers. Marcos Bistro has been temporarily closed, with all meals being served in the Waldorf Restaurant, and the Card Room and Library have also been closed to passengers for the time being. Art and Craft sessions have been allowed to continue providing strict cleaning procedures are carried out between each session. This hasn’t posed a problem at all other than to add extra time for sanitization, and cleaning the brushes and boards up at the end of the day has taken longer also.
All-in-all, everybody, crew and passengers have behaved impeccably, accepting restrictions without complaint, and the crew have been seen performing extensive cleaning duties, such as are required in these circumstances. We’re optimistic that normality should be resumed in the next few days.
