7th April JERUSALEM, ISRAEL Well, where on earth do I begin to explain and tell you all about our 2 days in Israel? I’ll start off with Haifa where we docked, which is a place we’ve been to before and didn’t venture too far. Haifa has some lovely places, the best and biggest landmark being the shrine to Bab of the Baha’i Faith ( never heard of it before but still !). They built a stunning layered garden down the side of Mount Carmel which overlooks the...

6th April SUEZ CANAL, EGYPT The last 5 days at sea have been very restful and we’ve had great weather. Yesterday, as we cruised up to the beginning of the Canal the wind really got up and even though it was 28degrees the wind felt quite chilly in the shade. Luckily though we found a lovely sheltered spot to sit in! Last night we dropped anchor at just after 9pm, joining lots of other ships doing the same, to wait for the morning to form a convoy to go through...

31st March MUSCAT Woke up at just gone 5am to a dreadful smell which had me up sniffing everywhere to try to find out where it was coming from! Definitely wasn’t Phil so put the kettle on and watched our sail in to Muscat on the balcony. Turned out to be fumes from the oil stations here which was coming through the air conditioning which the Captain informed us of. Following us in was the Aida ship which we saw in Dubai so will be quite busy later. Today was...

27th & 28th March AT SEA Two days at sea cruising across the Arabian Sea and into the Gulf of Oman towards our next port of call Dubai. Thankfully the extreme heat dropped over the 2 days to a comfortable 25 degrees on the second day and even clouds in the afternoon! Lots of ships near India but they petered out a lot as we went into the gulf. Our Captain has been keeping us up to date with the ships cat and now has it back again after it was held to ranso...

26th March So, a steaming sweltering day greeted us as we arrived in Mumbai when we docked at 4am. A lot of building work was going on in the port area so looks like new arrival buildings are going up. The sun was straining to get through the early morning heat haze which hung over the city but by the time we got off to catch the bus over to the port gates it had broken through. A lot of the Indian staff on board were given the day off so as to spend the day w...