Day 33 Sailing in Soup

Good Afternoon.

We are sailing in a north westerly direction across the Yellow Sea. Our destination is Tianjin, which is about 2 hours from Beijing and a further 1 hour from the Great Wall of China. A deep soup of sea fog has descended across the water. The ship’s fog horn is announcing our presence with eerie regularity. 

Chris and I are taking it easy today, as tomorrow will be a very long day. We will dock in Tianjin at 4 am, and are due to disembark at 6 am. The 3 hour coach ride will deliver us to The Great Wall by about 9 am .Being May Day, it will be a public holiday in China tomorrow, so we are warned to expect crowds. To add to this confusion, only 700 of us are expected to return to the ship. The majority of cruisers will be finishing their cruise in China and flying home from Beijing. Our return to the ship will clash with the embarkation of a new set of passengers, and their luggage, and their jetlag. Those of us doing both sectors of the journey are told to use the ‘crew entrance’. I feel quite part of the establishment!

Yesterday we made a brief stop in South Korea, but as we are visiting the port again, I will blog about Korea in a later post.

So how are we spending our sea days?

It’s amazing how little we can do to fill our time. A regular quiz trivia spot, watching the daily cruise ‘Wake Show’ and occasional viewing of a live comedian are the only repeated activities. Today, unusually, we did a bit more...went to a talk on Chinese herbal medicine, watched Warhorse on TV and cried, played the final snowball bingo and lost....not a lot really...but quite enough to punctuate our stops at so many seriously exciting places.

So that’s all for today. I need to conserve my energy and internet minutes for the Great Wall of China and subsequent trip to the city of Dallian.

Thanks for stopping by. I’ll be back soon.

Claire