21. Cruise Demographics, Geriatrics, & The Grim Reaper

Saturday, 10 NOV 2012 at sea between Fremantle and Albany, Western Australia

Ever wonder about the age distribution aboard a cruise ship? I'm sure that it varies depending on the itinerary and length of the cruise. The one we are on is a total of 55 days from late September to late November. Kids in both Northern and Southern Hemispheres are still in school. So I wasn't surprised that it's mostly old people aboard. Not likely that a middle-aged family with or without kids would sign up for such a cruise. Although the cruise was marketed by Holland America in three roughly comparable segments: Vancouver to Sydney, Sydney to Perth, and Perth to Sydney, so it's not inconceivable that a working couple might have three or four weeks of vacation saved up. But, as it turns out, if you see anyone younger than 50 aboard it's a sure bet that they are part of the ship's crew or staff or the itinerant entertainers that join and depart the cruise at various ports along the way. A large proportion of the guests are very elderly with significant disabilities. Paula and I are 64, so we think we are still fairly young, and when I say "very elderly" I mean that they are (or appear to be) pushing 90 years old. Getting from place to place on the ship can be frustrating because of all the arthritic oldsters shuffling along verrrrryyy slooooooowly. There is one fellow on a scooter or whatever it is called; at least two are in wheelchairs; several get around with canes, and several more ought to be using one. Something like 20% walk with the typical gait of bad hips and bad knees, rocking side to side with each step. On the other hand, there are quite a few power walkers, significantly older than me, who keep passing me when I'm walking for exercise around the outdoors perimeter of Deck 3.

I asked one of the staff how common it is for someone to die during the cruise. She said it was fairly common, more so than most people are aware. They have procedures to deal with it and a cold-storage morgue just for such eventualities. If the Grim Reaper visits, the ship will not divert from its itinerary to make an unscheduled port call. They use the ship's telecommunications to help the surviving companion (if any) contact relatives and make whatever arrangements they need to transfer the deceased at the next port and get the body flown home. According to my informants they will not bury at sea, nor will they keep the body in the icebox until the ship gets back to the US or wherever it might be more conveniently closer to home. If you expire aboard, you're off the ship at the next port that has an airport.

The rumor mill is very active. Our departure from Lombok was delayed a few hours because two people had to be offloaded for "medical emergencies". One had suffered a stroke and was transferred to an Indonesian hospital for evaluation regarding further transfer back home. I haven't heard what the other person's problem was. Earlier in the trip a lady fell and broke her hip, so she was put in a hospital in Hawai'i. There is a rumor that another elderly lady traveling by herself was found by the crew wandering around late at night utterly confused, not knowing where she was or why she was here. Her family was contacted and told to come get her, and she was put ashore at the next port (presumably with some sort of escort or into the care of a waiting family member). I myself heard someone telling how he had to go to three different doctors before he could find one who was willing to certify that he was well enough to go on this cruise. A couple who last year went on a 135-day around-the-world cruise told me that nine people had died during it.

It may sound like I'm callous about all this, but actually I'm sympathetic and somewhat admiring of those folks who have the grit and spirit of adventure to do this in what could well be the last year of their lives. There are lots of worse ways to go!

 

Posted from Tyler's iPad

20. Lombok, Indonesia

Sunday, 4 NOV 2012

Lombok is the next island east of Bali. It is bigger, more populous, and less touristy, but tourism has become increasingly important over the last two decades. Several of the Volendam's Indonesian crew are from Lombok, and we were told that several of their family members came aboard for a tour while we were docked there.

The weather was stifling hot and humid, as it was in Komodo. We participated in an organized excursion that drove to several sights on the island. The lowlands, i.e. the half of the island that is not the volcanic mountain, are intensively occupied and farmed. The city is Mataram, in case you want to look it up in Wikipedia.

Here are a couple of pictures from the Narmada Water Palace.

Posted from Tyler's iPad

19. Komodo Island, Indonesia

Saturday, 3 NOV 2012

After leaving Darwin, Australia, we sailed to the very small island of Komodo, famous as the home of the Komodo dragon, the largest of the monitor lizards and living only on this island and a couple of even smaller neighboring islands. The dragon is carnivorous and brings down deer and feral pigs found on the island. It brings them down with microbes and patience. The dragon's saliva is a fertile brew of many different fast-acting pathogenic bacteria. The dragon gives its prey a good flesh-tearing bite and then waits a day or two until the animal dies of the infection. Yum yum! We observed the deer calmly grazing in close proximity to several large dragons without any apparent caution. Maybe that's because a dragon only eats once every few weeks, and he will pursue smaller prey if it is available.

The kapok tree is common on Komodo Island and is used by the few native villagers who still live there.

They say that the Komodo Dragon routinely grows to 2 meters in length, and can get as big as 3 or 4 meters, but only if it has an opportunity to consume a tourist, such as this preoccupied candidate:

Posted from Tyler's iPad

18. Darwin

Wednesday, 31 OCT 2012

It took three days to cruise from Cairns through the Great Barrier Reef, around Cape York and the Torres Straits, and across the Arafur Sea to reach Darwin. Darwin is quite a modern city of around 100,000 population. It has to be, since it was essentially wiped out twice in the twentieth century. Actually, the repeated bombing by the Japanese during WW2 (more than 70 bombing and strafing attacks) didn't come close to totally destroying the settlement of, then, 2000 people, but it did extensive and repeated damage. Later in the war, as Australia built up military facilities in the area, they became the main targets rather than the town. By late 1943 the defensive capabilities had become effective and the Japanese had lost interest, as well as most of their military position in the nearby parts of Southeast Asia, and the bombing stopped. Thank the Americans for Guadalcanal.

Sunset while anchored near Sharrod Island:

 

Paula relaxing in a deck chair:

Entrance into Darwin Harbor:

Red carpet welcome to Darwin:

Paula using good cell phone service to talk to our progeny back in Michigan:

This is Fanny Bay at low tide. Tides here are 6-8 meters (20 feet). And it's really hot here - 37 C, the same as normal human body temperature.

 

 

Posted from Tyler's iPad

17. SPOT Lost and Found

Saturday, 27 OCT 2012 in Cairns

SPOT is the brand name of a GPS Personal Locator Beacon and route logger that I have been using both to record some of the positions of our travels and to share with friends and family where we are. When it is turned on it beams our GPS coordinates up to a satellite every 10 minutes, from which they are then automatically downloaded to a web server. You can see the results at



http://share.findmespot.com/shared/faces/viewspots.jsp?glId=06Zs9aknPRupnm05cUUS576ZMvYGKCUVk

See SPOT.

See SPOT on a pole.

 

See Paula on the train.

See Paula by the open window on the train.

Paula held SPOT out the open window.

See SPOT jump off of his leash.

SPOT jumped out the open window of the train.

Now SPOT lies on the ground next to the train track.

SPOT waves bye bye to the train.

Hear Tyler gasp.


See Tyler treat Paula kindly with sympathy when he really would like to throw Paula out the open window of the train.


SPOT misses Paula.

SPOT talks to his satellite up in the sky.

SPOT tells his satellite where he is.

Hours later Tyler uses his iPad to find SPOT.Tyler takes a taxi back to the railroad track and traipses through a kind family's back yard. Enlisting the help of the kind family's young son, they climb down an embankment, and find SPOT lying right next to the rail, right where the iPad map showed SPOT to be. The boy retrieves SPOT and gives him to Tyler. Grateful Tyler gives the boy a modest reward. What a fine adventure this was! Tyler's only regret is that he neglected to take a photo of SPOT lying on the ground next to the railroad track, faithfully beaming his location up to the satellite every ten minutes.

 

Posted from Tyler's iPad

16. Cairns

Friday-Saturday, 26-27 OCT 2012

We had two days in Cairns. Here is Paula relaxing on the veranda of their nice little historical museum. It's worth a visit because it is easily accessible from the port, and it focuses on World War 2 and its impact on this area of Australia.

Next we visited the Botanical Garden, which is excellent. Here is Tyler sitting in the garden cafe with his iPad.

While Paula was admiring the flora I enjoyed the fauna. The following little guys aren't particularly dangerous to humans but they are larger than any of their cousins in the US. I wouldn't want to walk through this web in the jungle and get him on my forehead!

 

 

Paula is photographing a beautiful Heliconia, which we have observed in botanical gardens elsewhere in Australia, New Zealand, and Hawai'i.

Another purty flahr. Paula didn't get the name of it at the time, but she has looked it up and says that it may be Heliconia psittacorum.

The second day we rode the Kuranda Railroad train up to the village of Kuranda in the rain forest on the plateau inland from Cairns. This village and railroad were vitally important in the history of Australia. It provided the only link between the agricultural area on the plateau and the population center on the coast. The alternative was a trek of several days by foot or, I suppose, mule. In the early years there was not even a wagon road.

Barron Falls from an overlook stop on the train ride:

From Kuranda we rode the Skyrail gondola system over the canopy of the tropical rain forest back down to Cairns. Gondola over waterfall:

The Skyrail consists of two separate gondola systems, one from Kuranda up to the high point in the hills, and another from there down to the coast. This is a nature walk from the intermediate station.

The rain forest canopy from the Skytrain gondola:

The view toward the coast:

 

Posted from Tyler's iPad

15. Whitsunday Islands and the Great Barrier Reef

Thursday, 25 OCT 2012

We anchored in the bay just off Hamilton Island, one of the islands of the Whitsunday group. Hamilton Island has a settlement with an airport on it, and is the launching point for expeditions out to the Great Barrier Reef. The GBR is actually more than a thousand component reefs, sand islands, and cays that stretches more than 2000 km long from near Brisbane to well north of Torres Straits and the northern-most point of Australia, Cape York. From our anchorage we rode a catamaran out to the edge of the continental shelf, two and a half hours at 40 knots or more, to Knuckle Reef where a company has set up a floating platform as a base for snorkeling, scuba diving, a glass-bottom boat, and a semi-submerged viewing boat.

The MS Volendam anchored off Hamilton Island:

 

The Volendam with one of the catamarans pulling alongside:

Paula enjoying the ride out to Knuckle Reef:

The floating platform on the reef:

The platform has a submerged viewing area. They lower a container of fish food and the denizens flock to it for the amusement of the tourists:

People in the water swimming and snorkeling:

The semi-submersed glass-hulled viewing boat:

The glass-bottom boat:

Yes, we took lots of photos of the reef, but there's no point in showing them here. They are all a monotonous green color. You can find very good reef pictures by professionals who know how to capture the vivid colors that only show up in careful underwater photos using powerful lighting.

Here's another picture of the reef as it appears in colors of turquoise, green, and blue from the top of the platform:

 

Posted from Tyler's iPad