You know you are no longer in winter when the temperature is already in the 20s as soon as you roll out of bed and head upstairs to deck 14 for breakfast, rather than put on your own kettle and collect the daily paper. Lombok is a tender port so the noise as the ship’s lifeboats are extended on their booms and the electric winches drop them alongside, usually acts as an alarm clock, but for us, with no tour booked, there was no rush at all to get moving.
BUFFET – THE HORIZON COURT
As this was always going to be a short day in terms of activity, I thought I may as well start on a culinary tour of the Horizon Court buffet, as I found that the on-line info was very short on detail and the buffet often comes in for a deal of unfair criticism. Food is an integral part of cruising (and my life generally!) so this may be of some value to potential cruisers.
On entering the buffet area, you generally have two major choices – entering on the starboard side or the port side. Each side is a mirror image of the other, so the first buffet photograph shows the inner station on the port side. This is the first of the two major, hot areas.
The Princess system is a mix of daily staples and rotating specials.
From the far end of this picture, there are the following:
Link sausage – staple
Speciality sausage – in this case Luganega sausage (whatever they are – but they were tasty!)
Baked beans – speciality – it rotates with corned beef hash for example
Cooked tomatoes – speciality – rotates with Italian tinned tomatoes
Rice – speciality. No idea what that rotates with.
Chips – I hadn’t even noticed them before at breakfast!!! Usually it is hash browns…
Bacon & egg pie – supposedly a kiwi speciality.
So that is station number one covered. Look out for the next thrilling instalment, coming your way soon.
LOMBOK - PIER
As a tender port, those on ships’ tours are ferried off first, which is fair enough, so we strolled through to jammer’s Nightclub to pick up our numbered tender tickets, handed out by Circle Host Heather (from Sutton in Ashfield, Nottinghamshire).
We still had to wait until the third tender call, even though we were on the preferred list thanks to our loyalty status. A pleasant 15-20 minute tender ride to the pier across calm water, spying several local ferry boats on the way, where we entered the somewhat optimistically named “Lombok Paradise”. Not sure about you, but my definition of paradise would not be a dusty car park with about 10 market stalls and a load of taxi touts trying their level best to entice you into the taxis parked outside the gates, where there was a pretty good chance that the driver’s knowledge of English was somewhat limited.
Those we spoke to who had ventured outside the compound had these sage words of advice. “Don’t bother.” So we didn’t. Many others of course had day tours to various aspects of the island and were impressed with the weaving, though not the working conditions. Apparently each person manages to produce about 15cm an 8 hour day. Very labour intensive and for a small island, the township traffic is horrendous.
Paula did boost the local economy by knocking a trader’s $25USD starting price down to $15 for two ‘real pearl’ bangles and like many others, was simply happy to have helped out the locals a wee bit. I’m afraid that remote island life is not my idea of paradise, regardless of what it says on the flags. A tender ride back home (the Dawn Princess is considered our home when we are traveling) and a very light lunch, eaten out by the pool, but in the shade. It is getting rather warm now and neither of us are sun bunnies.
M & M joined us for the afternoon trivia as the rest of our team were still out on a taxi tour. We didn’t win.
We headed to our “private deck” on level 11 for our sail-away, clutching a small class of port each. Somehow or other (I blame Garry) three dishes of hot chips with tomato sauce appeared to soak up the liquid.
We headed off to the 6:15pm show in the theatre. It is a bit tough for any entertainer doing an early show on a sail-away, but banjo player Jim Coston is one of the regular entertainers and I enjoyed his shows last year. We weren’t disappointed. The numbers are quite short and so is the chat between them, so a most enjoyable show, even though the theatre was only about half full. Considering Jim had just endured a 14 hour travel link (from Bangkok I think); just 45 minutes practice with the Dawn Princess orchestra for a 45 minute show, he did remarkably well. I’ll give him a 9/10 as I like the banjo anyway.
We succumbed to the watches and accessories sale on deck six, so I managed a set of cufflinks - but Stewart may just get an early birthday present as it was part of a set and I didn’t need the other bits…
Tonight’s dinner was an Oriental theme. Cue for extra prawns for table 7. They went very well with my stir fried sweet and sour pork and rice.
Out on deck tonight was a pirate rock and roll party, initially the back line of the orchestra and fronted by Trevor Knight – yes again! (He has done very well on this cruise and has several different shows, which is more than can be said for some entertainers, who only seem to have two 45 minute acts in their entire repertoire and tell the same jokes each time between their musical numbers, year after year.)
Once the live music had finished, DJ James took over but most of the passengers drifted off after their busy day. We did a bit of rock and roll dancing before relaxing and chatting to cruise director Mark and assistant cruise director Marcus.
With another two sea days ahead, to acclimatise to the 30 degree heat, no rush to get to bed by a specific time as the alarm clock is redundant.
Tomorrow? Your culinary tour part 2. I bet you are really excited.
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