Thursday 18th April 2013 BST: The Cruise Revisited

How do you summarise a cruise of 20,741 nautical miles or 22,977 statute miles (1nm = 1.15 statute miles), comprising 80 nights on board, 31 ports of call and 20 countries visited?  I don’t think I could do better than use the words of the Invitation to the All Rounders’ lunch held on 24^th March 2013 (Menu in a previous posting):

Namibia – Africa at its most authentic

Africa – diverse and fascinating

India – a melting pot of colour and spices

Egypt – antiquities, pyramids and knowledge

I’ll close this Bog with three photos that for me sum up what has been one of the most exciting and interesting cruises that I have undertaken – the Antarctic remains at the top of my list. The high points are legion: the lions next to the roadside in Namibia, Robben Island, walking with lions in Port Louis, the Taj Mahal and Red Fort at Agra, hot air ballooning, gold flake adorned cakes at the Emirates Palace Hotel, dune bashing in the Wahabi sands of Oman, the rose coloured hidden city of Petra, the temple of Luxor, belly dancing – twice (!!), Ephesus and the Acropolis, a leg splitting camel ride in in Tunisia and the sumptuous Alcázar Palace in Seville.  So many of these were either Ancient Wonders or New Wonders of the world that I have to pinch myself to realise just how much I have seen since I left Southampton on 10^th January 2013 and how lucky I have been as the Captain put it at his Farewell Cocktail Party “to have missed several ice ages in the UK!”

There is one other group that I would also like to pay tribute to and that is my dinner table companions Joan, Rachel, Sandra and John and our estimable waiters Sanit and Rahn.  I hope they enjoyed my company as much as I enjoyed theirs.

I hope too that you have enjoyed reading this Blog as much as I have writing it.  I know one dear friend for whom it has brought back many memories and his comments to me on some of the postings have almost become a Blog in their own right and I may well add them as comments in due course.  For others it seems to have been a bit of cheer on cold winter’s days.

I have only been back for just over two weeks and already getting itchy feet.  My next adventure will be to the White Sea (Murmansk and Archangel) aboard Braemar embarking in Dover on 22^nd June 2013. I have done the Black Sea so its only fair to do the White Sea.

Au Revoir until the next Blog:  The White Sea Adventure.

Wednesday 27th March 2013 +1.0hrs GMT: Seville, Spain: The Plaza de España

The last visit of the day and just achieved a few minutes before its closure was to the Plaza de España the site of the 1929 Ibero-American Exposition World's Fair.

Aníbal González designed the Plaza de España, as the principal building on the edge Maria Luisa Park's to showcase Spain's industry and technology exhibits. He combined a mix of 1920s Art Deco and 'mock Mudejar', and Neo-Mudéjar styles. The Plaza de España complex is a huge half-circle with buildings running around the edge accessible over the moat by numerous tiled bridges. Inlet into the walls of the Plaza are many tiled alcoves, each representing a different province of Spain – the two photos are the alcoves for the Canaries and Cadiz.

The Plaza de España has been used as a filming location, including scenes for the 1962 film Lawrence of Arabia (Seen) and Star Wars movie series (Not seen!!!).

Sadly we only had 10-minutes here in a day that was badly timed and we still had a long toilet stop on the way back to the ship.  So a bit of a disappointing day but except to climb the Giralda Tower I’m not sure a revisit to Seville will be on my bucket list.

Wednesday 27th March 2013 +1.0hrs GMT: Seville, Spain: The Giralda Tower & Cathedral

After a very brief walk through the Jewish Quarter, an area I would like to have explored in more depth but not in the rain (!) we made for the Cathedral, which is dominated by the magnificent Giralda Tower. A former minaret it was converted to a bell tower for the Cathedral of Seville and is 343 feet (105 m) in height. The tower's first two-thirds was built to resemble the minaret of the Koutoubia Mosque in Marrakech Morocco (Been there and seen that!!) but the upper third is Spanish Renaissance architecture.

The Cathedral of Saint Mary of the See is the largest Gothic cathedral and the third-largest church in the world and was built to demonstrate the city's wealth, when it had become a major trading centre in the years after Seville was taken from the Muslims by the Christians in 1248. In July 1401 it was decided to build a new cathedral since the structure of the current building was so badly damaged by an earthquake in1356. 

We only had a briefest of tours inside – less than 15-minutes - so not really time to do justice to this gigantic building.  Among its most notable artefacts is the tomb of Christopher Columbus (See photo).

The brief visit to the cathedral was followed by one of the finest tapas lunches I have had in my life – some 10 courses.  It lasted for over 2 hours and one wonders if this wasn’t the real purpose of the day rather than visiting the sights – but it was very good!