Tuesday 9th February

Sea pretty calm & a pleasant day at sea. The Arcadia is about 80k tons & is incredibly smooth so that one hardly feels any motion. The decor is modern without being obtrusive & the hotel staff is largely Indian while the officers are English as are the majority of passengers. There are quite a few Australians also & we were surprised how many people had joined the ship in Valparaiso.

Lunch & breakfast are buffet style on the 9th deck & the range of dishes is comprehensive & good. Dinner is served in the Meridian Restaurant on the 3rd deck & we dine on tables of 6 or 8 with whoever is there at the time.

We went to a couple of lectures in the Palladium theatre, the first on computer viruses & the other on birds of the area. Both were well presented although the latter was somewhat heavy. We joined a group of South Australians for a pub quiz after lunch & did reasonably well. Later on we went to a musical quiz but our performance here was abysmal. In the evening after dinner we went to a short concert, presented by a guitarist & a flautist, of South American music. It was a strange combination but Jane enjoyed it.


Wednesday 10th February

Another hard day at sea with a few more lectures & another quiz. One was from an English actress well known for her role in 'Only Fools & Horses' which wasn’t well known in Australia. She showed clips from the show & was most entertaining as she was obviously extremely popular with the Poms.

Dinner was formal this evening with the majority in black tie after the captain’s party which we skipped. The entertainer was Peter Piper, an English comedian in his 50s, who turned out to be excellent. His act was quite varied & his ability to mimic accents etc & observe people’s behaviour was quite brilliant. It was great to see how much the audience appreciated the show.

Thursday 11th February

Calm again all day. We are deteriorating at the quizzes which is very disheartening, particularly in the post 1980s films & music.

Went to a couple more lectures on computer hacking & sea birds of the southern hemisphere & then to a Freddie Mercury impersonator who was Ok but lacked something we felt.

There are quite a few Australians on board who joined the cruise at Valparaiso & some have done a lot of cruising with various lines all over the world. In the afternoon we went to the tiny cinema to see ‘American Sniper’, a Clint Eastwood film from the Iraq war.

Friday 12th February

Amazingly calm yet again. Apart from our usual quiz after lunch we attended a couple more lectures, one about the invention of the chronometer in England by Harrison, to allow sailors to accurately calculate their longitudinal position presented by Sue Holderness, the actress.

In the evening we went to see an amazing concert by a lady trumpeter & jazz singer, Georgina Jackson who specialises in swing era music. She proved to be quite brilliant in both areas & it was an excellent concert.

Saturday 13th February

Up earlyish as we sailed past Easter Island, the remotest inhabited island in the world. The weather was fine so the visibility was excellent. We saw first the dark black cliffs of its extinct eastern volcano rising about 30-50m from the sea & then travelled southwest, parallel to the coast about 2km out to sea. It looked fairly windswept but with areas of trees between the grassy slopes & sloped fairly gently down to the sea in some parts. We could see a couple of vehicles running parallel to the ship & Jane spotted some of the statues although they were very distant. After about an hour we rounded a point with 2 small islets & continued along the coast past the small settlement where about 90% of the 3000 people live on the island. Then we left the coast & set off south west towards our next stop in Polynesia. It was a great shame that we didn’t get to visit it but I suppose it would have been too difficult to tender in all the passengers.

In the evening Jane went to the show & then we went to see the film ‘Black Sea’ at 10.30pm, well past our normal bedtime these days.