With the critical, 75 days to go almost upon us, just 77 days to go as this is posted, (sounds like a lucky number!) we are now beginning to move forward at a fair pace.
With Paula and I both suffering a wee bit from a medical point of view, two weeks ago, turned into a red letter week – well and truly! We both made significant health progress and also managed to get the builders in to do some window replacement work.
Various contributions to the roll call on the Cruise Critic web forum only seem to increase our excitement, but it is also throwing up a few wobblies. It appears that the cost of an Indian visa for UK passport holders has now shot up from $115 in 2011 where at least we had two stops (Mumbai & Cochin), to an extortionate $305+ fee in 2013. Bearing in mind our one day visit to Mumbai has now been hacked back with an 11am arrival instead of 8am, it makes it even more difficult to stomach. It doesn’t matter whether you are getting off the ship or not (according to Princess anyway) , you still need the visa and by post, that takes at least three weeks. Hard luck if you need to head off abroad urgently.
However, a traveller on the 2012 World Cruise claimed that several people boarded without the visa and rumour has it that the Indian Officials were probably bribed to overlook it. Having witnessed the Indian Officials last time, staggering away with loaded goodie bags from the ship, this wouldn’t surprise us at all!
Just to add to that, last week today we found out that we also need a visa for Sri Lanka! Whether the ship does a blanket processing or it is individual, we won’t know for a couple of days.
As posted earlier, it looks as though son Stewart plus wife Manu and grandson Noah will catch up with us in Venice which is something to look forward to. Our Captain has been named as Ivan Jerman which is good news as we had him as our captain on our last Dawn Princess cruise.
So, not much to report as yet - though a new laptop is taxing my learning capabilities at the moment and it has taken some time to get it to send emails. When travelling, I generally don’t download too many emails as connection speed is very slow on the ship, so in the past, I have changed the account settings for the incoming mail to xxxx.co.uk instead of xxxx.co.nz, which always meant a speedy upload of emails (often less than two minutes to upload a blog with reduced sized pics). However, in office 2013, Outlook checks the Incoming address first, not the outgoing, so it wouldn’t work. A call to my friendly provider came up with a solution for me, by setting up a dummy address – the technicalities are way beyond my simple brain, but it works...
So, as our weather deteriorates and the darkness is now so much earlier, our thoughts are now very much focussed on cruising.
Our group name in 2011 was the very apt Crazy Cruisers, but we are currently voting on a new group name for this year, so by the time May 1st comes along, we should have a name – then I’ll be busy printing out name tags for everyone...
One of the great things about this upcoming cruise is the number of reunions with old friends from other cruises.
