PONTA DELGADA, AZORES

Today, we arrived at the final stopping-off point on our grand voyage, Ponta Delgada in the Azores. Arrival time was 8am; we left at 1pm, so we only had five hours to make the most of our relatively short visit. Knowing that our stay would be short, we’d told Shorex that we definitely didn’t want to be doing any tour escorting. Instead, we has a leisurely breakfast and an equally leisurely walk into the town.

The Marco Polo was berthed alongside a very nice-looking luxury yacht, ‘Yalla’. A quick Google search (cos we can) told us that it is worth 80 million US dollars – more than the asking price for the Marco Polo when it was up for sale recently (no-one wanted to buy it). It has a crew of 22 and carries 12 guests, and is currently owned b y the richest family in Egypt… It really was a beautiful vessel… how the other half lives huh?

We walked as far as the ornate gates of the Town Hall, took a few photographs and climbed to the top of the clock tower, from where we had some magnificent views across the rooftops of Ponta Delgada.

Back in the port, we paused to enjoy a drink in one of the marina-side cafes before heading back to the ship to gorge on our fast, freely-available, phone-contract internet access. Bliss!

As we sailed away, the entertainments team were in fine voice, pulling out all the stops to make our final port-of-call as memorable as possible, with a deck-party that had many passengers singing along and dancing.

There seem to be a few rumours circulating with regards to forthcoming sea conditions. For sure, the news is full of weather warnings for the UK as Storm Gareth makes its approach, and there does seem to be a large amount of red on the sea maps posted in the Reception area. So far, we’ve been extremely lucky with the weather throughout the whole of the cruise, and it would be a shame for it to be spoilt by rough seas. Tracey checked some online charts, which don’t look quite so fearsome, and suggest that, providing Storm Gareth keeps moving eastwards and away from us, then we shouldn’t have anything to worry about.

We now have just three more sea-days before we are due to arrive at our final destination, Bristol on Sunday. I have two days of classes to look forward to and an exhibition on Friday afternoon. We have our fingers firmly crossed that things don’t get too rough…