Final night

Tomorrow we disembark, a graceless word for a sad process that Holland America will have organized to a faretheewell. They have to. They need to move around 800 of us passengers off by around 10:30 amin order to start moving 1350 new passengers on board at 11:30.for a trip through the Panama Canal. (I could have extended my trip for three weeks and gotten off in Seattle, but it's really time to be going home.) About half the 600 crew members will also leave the Amsterdam tomorrow to be replaced by new folks, who must be both moved on board and integrated into ship procedures in time to set metaphorical sail tomorrow evening.

Only the Dutch could manage to make all that happen and stay essentially human, God bless them.

I said a reluctant goodbye to the ocean, watching the waves after supper until it was too dark to see them, and even then I staying on deck because I could still hear the water sloshing past the ship. We're only 121.7 nautical miles out of Ft. Lauderdale with calm seas and following winds. By dawn tomorrow we'll be docked.

Reality looms

"Remember to send me a grocery list," my daughter Lizz texts me. Grocery list? Oh, right, I will need to feed myself, starting Sunday.

"Do you want me to extend the temporary insurance coverage I have on your car for the day after you get back?" Car insurance. Oh, yeah, that.

For four months, I have been totally taken care of, and in five days, I will be my responsibility again. I am not complaining, I prefer to be the one doing that, but my instincts are rusty. What do I eat when I can't take the elevator to the Lido? What other normal adult responsibilities besides car insurance have I not thought about since early January? I know I'll need to file my taxes -- I filed for an extension, but they do need to be done relatively soon. But if Lizz hadn't reminded me about the car insurance, I wouldn't have remembered.

I think I will just trust the combination of Lizz and cold hard reality. It's six hours earlier in Portland than currently on board the Amsterdam, I'll be waking up way early and can spend the extra time remembering how to be a grownup.

Bad photo juju

As I hefted my big green suitcase onto the bed to pack it, the plug-in charger for my camera batteries fell out.

To appreciate the irony of this, we must return to the Great Wall of China, where after I had taken a few pictures, my camera announced that it needed its battery changed, and turned itself off. "Damn!", I thought, "I know I didn't pack that recharger. Now what?"

But the concierge at the Beijing Sheraton Dongcheng was up to the challenge. He dispatched a minion to a camera store, got an all-purpose camera battery recharger (and a second battery), and got a half charge into one battery -- all there was time for. I repaid the costs and set forth confident that I had my camera woes resolved.

Fast forward to the overnight to the Taj Mahal. At the hotel, I raise my camera to snap the picturesque valet and once again, "Change battery, charge low." The next day, I was to see the Taj Mahal, I had to have a camera. But I'm now a seasoned world traveler, I can just ask the concierge to get me a battery charger or even a new camera -- it is, after all, my once-in-a-lifetime visit to the Taj. But midday in Beijing is not late evening in Agra. The concierge looked at me as if I were only the latest of a long line of crazy tourists with absurd expectations, and said in the slow enunciation one uses with a fussy child, "I am sorry, Madame, but no stores are open at this  time."

Unreasonably, I felt ill-used. "The Chinese solved this problem for me," I thought, confirming the Agra concierge's unspoken evaluation of me, and went off, pouting. Eventually I realized that I had my tablet with me, and that my tablet has both front and rear facing cameras, and schlepping the tablet through the security line got me a great conversation with one of the machine-gun-carrying guides, who was curious about my "iPad", which has apparently become the international generic for tablets, so that one turned out OK too.

When I returned to the ship, one of the first things I did was to try to recharge my camera's batteries with the universal recharger. I couldn't figure out how to make it work. No instruction manual, and all labels were, of course, in Chinese. After several days of failure, I went to the photography shop on board, and they were great, going far above and beyond, but they too were unable to make it work.

Photography was forbidden in the Valley of the Kings anyway, and I am (by the grace of God) not all that photographically oriented anyway, so the Suez Canal passed undetected. But by the time we got to Greece, I had decided I wanted a camera and went out and bought a new one -- cheapest model point-and-shoot, powered by AA batteries, adequate to the task of reminding me where I had been. 49 Euros.

Now we are on the tour of Barcelona. I know I put the new camera in my bag. The guide says, "Around this next corner is one of the most magnificent views in all of Sevilla, perhaps all of Spain." And he is right, we are staring at the gloriously elaborate facade of Sevilla's cathedral in the morning sun, I reach into my bag -- and cannot find the camera. I search frantically without success. I'd like to be able to blame pickpockets, but not even the most degenerate wretch on the street would bother lifting my el cheapo.

The tour winds to its conclusion, we return to the ship, I unpack my bag, and there's the camera with an innocent look on its face.

And now the recharger for my original camera tumbles out of the suitcase. And the original camera and its batteries are already packed away in the other suitcase, which has its snaps fastened and a pink strap wrestled closed around it.

I give up. If any irresistible photo op occurs in the 1412.2 nautical miles from here to Ft. Lauderdale, I will run for my tablet and probably miss it . Taking pictures with a tablet, by the way, is a damned awkward procedure. Maybe I will just beg some passerby to shoot whatever it is and give him my email address.

Sargasso sea

I dream of lush tropical landscapes. We are in the middle of the Sargasso sea, the only sea with no coasts. Only the 1000-mile map on Channel 40, that tracks our progress, shows any land at all. The closer focus maps just show the circled arrowhead symbol that represents the ship on a deep blue-black field that represents the abyss to the west of the mid-Atlantic ridge. In the Captain's noontime navigational and meteorological report, the nearest point of land was 500 miles away in the Azores, and there were three miles of water below our keel.

I wish I could just sit on deck and enjoy my last few days of ocean, but packing (blech! ptooey!) must be done by Friday afternoon, and there are voyage-end celebrations that focus more on food than drink. Like a brunch this morning at which the Captain will autograph the back of my souvenir delft plate. And I will meet with Vera (see "A steel magnolia" from a few days back) at afternoon tea to learn more about her. And there are only four more days of Bingo, my gambling indulgence, at which I usually win almost enough to pay for the costs of my Bingo cards.

But I will still find time to sit out on the deck and watch the Sargasso sea roll by.

Playing hookey

Right now I am not attending a cocktail party with the Captain, Jonathan Mercer. I mean absolutely no disrespect to Captain Mercer, who, in addition to being tall, handsome, and endowed with a confidence-inspiring British accent, seems to be a highly competent officer and a prince among men. I particularly appreciate his willingness to explain things to us, like the time we suddenly veered off course so dramatically that it woke everyone at 4 am (it was a malfunction of the steering machinery, which the crew handled without further mishap,and which Captain Mercer explained without resorting to "There, there, don't worry your pretty little heads about it" dismissiveness). I even like his wife, whose charm is surpassed only by her lively intelligence.

No, my decision to stay in my cabin and play mindless computer games has to do with my inability to understand why anyone goes to cocktail parties and my growing realization that I Have A Choice.

In the first place, the Captain will not miss me. Half the people on board have been invited, and I am just sparing him the necessity of smiling warmly at one more anonymous face and making meaningless social noises for 20 seconds before turning to the next passenger.

In the second place, half the people on board have been invited -- the other half will attend a later session for people who eat at the late sitting. Several hundred people in one place make a lot of noise, virtually guaranteeing that conversation will be impossible, even should it be possible to find someone with whom to converse, which, in a crowd of several hundred, is, paradoxically, far from easy.

In the third place, although I indulged myself at the Murder Mystery dinner, drinking alcoholic beverages is not my idea of a good time. I imply no judgment, it's personal taste, I'd just rather have a ginger ale than a martini.

But most important is my realization that I don't have to go everywhere I am invited. It's marvelously liberating.

And at that point in the composition of this blog entry, I went to dinner. All the other people at the table had gone to the party, had drunk several glasses of champagne and eaten what were universally acclaimed as excellent hors d'oeuvres, and were feeling very little pain, thank you very much. Maybe I should try not being such a snip. There's a clear difference between a theoretical cocktail party, to which all my objections still stand, and an actual cocktail party, which may have many unanticipated redeeming features, though if I had attended, as they did, and imbibed, as they did, I am not sure I could have found my way unassisted through words like "unanticipated".

Sevilla

Before Madeira, we stopped at Cadiz. A friend gave me her ticket for a tour of Sevilla, a couple hours inland from there. It took until now for me to realize that I had a couple things to say about that tour.

First, I think I got my pocket picked. Lillian, a woman at my table, had been warning us for several days about pickpockets in Sevilla (known to English speakers as Seville because we English speakers seem to feel we have the right to rename foreign cities -- Beijing to Peking, for instance -- for our ease of pronunciation, though I personally have no problem saying "Seh-vee-ya"). Now Lillian is a woman of strong, if sometimes dubious, opinions, and when she insisted that "It's the pickpocket capital of Europe. There's one in every family in Seville , and they're PROUD of them", I didn't worry too much.

And lest you concern yourself overmuch about my loss, it was only 10 or 12 Euros (around $15) in coins that I was sure were there when I left the ship, but weren't when I reached in to pay for a minor purchase. Also in the same pocket was a Swiss Army knife worth twice the value of the coins (why lift the coins and leave the knife?) and several Kleenexes, some used, which I had vaguely considered as pickpocket repellent. Maybe pickpockets practice grabbing pocket change the way pianists practice scales.

The second thing I learned was the staggering amount of wealth Spain extracted from the new worlds Columbus' voyages opened to them. It was the huge carved wall of Cuban mahogany that was part of remodeling the central mosque into a Gothic cathedral once the Moors had been driven out of Spain (coincidentally in the same year Columbus first sailed) . It was the enormous gleaming silver ornamentation on the main altar.

And, oddly, it was seeing the House of Contracts in the Alcazar, the royal Spanish castle virtually across the street from the mosque-turned-cathedral. The House of Contracts was where the 16th and 17th century equivalent of venture capitalists came to get royal permission to organize voyages across the Atlantic to loot the New World, robbing people who didn't understand that, as Spanish colonies, they no longer had any rights to their land or their resources or their cultural artifacts or, for that matter, their lives.

Which was, of course, not the way the guide presented it. He was nostalgic for the time when Spain ruled the seas and was the wealthiest country in Europe. Hard times in Spain these days, so his nostalgia is understandable. The archetype of Spanish galleons laden with gold and silver is not just something Hollywood made up so Errol Flynn could buckle his swashes. Even losing ships to pirates and the dangers of the high seas and the occasional victories of the inhabitants of the New World, even deducting the percentage that doubtless poured into the royal coffers for the privilege of setting sail in the first place, the amount of wealth brought back to Spain was staggering.

And now, thanks to my Sevilla excursion, I think I can begin to imagine what that meant.

Not the Ritz

Turns out the hotel associated with that glorious restaurant in Madeira was not the Ritz after all, it was Reid's. I am publishing this correction so you won't register in the wrong place the next time you vacation in Funchal, which I highly recommend.

Last port : Funchal, Madeira, Portugal

Wonderful excursion here. This is a stunningly beautiful place, red tiled roofs on pastel houses scattered all over the steep slopes of the volcanic mountains that make up the islands of Madeira, with carefully maintained terraces where they grow bananas and sugar cane and, of course, grapes from which to make Madeira wines. (Looking down one almost vertical set of terraces, our guide shared the local joke about such fields: "You only ever fall once.") The annual flower festival is this weekend, and someone made damned sure the flowers knew about it. Even more variety than in Sicily. Jacaranda trees lining the streets with their elegant blue-violet flowers, and yellow and pink and orange and red and white flowers whose names slipped past too fast for me to catch onto them. Our morning took us up 1000 meters into the Nuns' Valley*, on a twisty little road that had half the bus cowering down in their seats to keep from having to see just how near the edge we were and just how far it was from "up here" to "way down there". (Another local joke: "Our roads may be narrow, but they are elastic -- there's always room." Our driver, Victor, had been driving tour buses along Madeiran mountain roads for 21 years and was nonetheless a calm, elegant, and personable man.)

*The Nuns' Valley got its name when some 15th century nuns hid there from the pirates who raided the island seeking the gold and silver Madeira got from the sale of sugar. The guide told us a story of the aged Mother Superior who accompanied the nuns in their flight. "They say she carried all the monastery's treasure with her. Before she died, she buried it. It has never been found." It is the kind of story where the "They" in "They say" may possibly refer to the current membership of the Union of Licensed Madeiran Tour Guides.

And then we stopped for lunch.

My experience of excursion lunches led me to expect an indifferent buffet including one, count them, one glass of wine OR beer OR soft drink, any additional potable to be paid for by the consumer. Well. We had lunch at Villa Cypriani, a restaurant attached to the Ritz (no, really, the Ritz) Hotel. We ate out on the balcony overlooking Funchal Bay from a height of several hundred feet, allowing us to see other islands of the Madeira Archipelago and to watch a replica of one of Christopher Columbus' ships sail by. The service was impeccable; the food -- a pasta dish, a main course of chicken plus side dishes, a tiramisu dessert plus petit fours and coffee -- was delectable; and both the white wine served with the first course and the red served with the second were excellent. The wait staff seemed to consider it a personal insult if they saw anyone's glass approaching half empty, and they promptly and gracefully corrected the problem as often as it occurred.

I most likely won't be going to dinner tonight. Instead, I think I'll find a place on deck to sit and watch us sail away from Funchal. It is the last land I'll see until we dock in Florida on the 28th, and the last point in the voyage where I can feel this pampered and irresponsible. Tomorrow I will be trying to figure out how to get everything I brought plus everything I bought into luggage that bulged when I arrived -- was it less than four months ago?

Drunk

I am currently more drunk than I have been in living memory, which, given the unreliable state of my memory these days , may not be as long as you think. I went to the murder mystery dinner, which was five courses*, each accompanied by its own wine, which is more wine than I have drunk in living memory, which, given the unreliable -- but we've been down that path already. The murder mystery plot was very silly, which is fine, since the murderer was whoever got the most votes. The food was superb, even by the standards of the Amsterdam, which are quite high: beautifully presented, exquisitely prepared, and luscious. Also at my table were a couple from Michigan and a couple from Alabama, both of whom voted against me as to who killed the victim , but my candidate won out overall, so I feel vindicated. Also very well fed. Also more drunk than I have been in living memory.

We are on our way through the Straits of Gibraltar. I will not see the Rock thereof because we will pass it around 2 am, and even if I were awake, I would not be able to see it. Plus which the idea of going to sleep is sounding better and better.

*Anti pasto platter with Australian Turkey Flat Rosé

Potato and leek soup scented with truffle with California Pine Ridge Chenin Blanc Viognier

Shrimp and lobster salad on a bed of greens with tarragon dressing with Washington Columbia Crest Grand Estate Chardonnay

Petite filet mignon with asparagus, balsamic drizzled cherry tomatoes, and slow fried new potatoes with Washington Columbia Crest Grand Estate Merlot

Chocolate, hazelnut, and coffee cakes with raspberry sauce with Chilean Errazuriz Sauvignon Blanc late harvest

A chivalrous gesture

I really like sitting on deck watching the ocean go by. Sometimes I apparently take this pastime farther than anyone else on board, sitting outside when it's windier or colder than other people find reasonable. Like today, for instance, when it was bright sunny out, but with a chilly wind. Sea and air temperatures were in the low 60s, which would be T-shirt weather at home, but left me shivering as I lay on the deck chair being hypnotized by the sparkles of the sunshine on the waves.

Two men, clad in jackets and windbreakers, strode by, their pace showing they were exercising, not just strolling.

"Would you like us to get you some blankets?" one asked. There are wool blankets available to guests on the outside deck, lovely warm blankets in blue and black plaid.

"No thanks," I replied because I always say "No thanks" when someone offers to help me. It's a character flaw due, I'm sure, to an early trauma or basic lack of courtesy or cerebral short-circuits of some kind. As soon as the words were out of my mouth, I regretted them because I was cold, and those blankets are snuggly-warm, But the two gentlemen were past me, and I had made my statement, and I couldn't think of a face-saving way to change my mind. If I wanted a blanket, I could stand up and get one for myself, grumble, mumble, scrunch down into the deck chair, shiver.

A few minutes later, they came by again. This time, they didn't even ask. They just grabbed two blankets, covered me to the chin with one, wrapped up my feet (I was wearing sandals!) with the other, said, "You know, you're the only person sitting out on deck", smiled, and strode off.

Viewed from the perspective of feminist empowerment, I should resent their presumption. I say phooey on feminist empowerment. Their kindness warmed me, body and soul, and I continue to smile whenever I think about it. Like now.

Ajaccio

Have you ever heard of Ajaccio? Neither had I until I saw it on the itinerary, and even then I had to keep checking back because the name would not stay in my head. It's a resort town on the island of Corsica, where Napoleon Bonaparte was born. It's part of France, our only French port of call. For some reason I associate Corsica with pirates, and I suspected that the Corsicans think about France the same way that the Sicilians think about Italy. I also expected to encounter the famed French arrogance.

Well, not so much. I didn't have an excursion, I just walked off the ship for a few blocks (my arthritic knees refused to allow much more) and was charmed. The town looked charming. The vendors in the little crafts market were charming, and that's not just because they wanted to sell me something. OK, it was maybe partly because they wanted to sell me something, but I have been in a lot of situations where people were trying to sell me something over the past few months, and none of them charmed me like the Corsicans. I found a ring I wanted to buy -- little bits of amber set in silver like four-petaled flowers -- but the merchant only took Euros in cash, a limitation which he communicated with diplomacy and, yes, charm. He gave me directions to an ATM, agreeing to hold the ring for me until I got back, and as I walked there, I watched the people around me being charmingly Gallic and no one ever was snooty or unpleasant in any way. It seemed like a place I wished I had more time in.

And now the idea of spending time in France is beginning to appeal to me. How weird! I have nothing in common with France. I can't tell one wine from another once it's in my mouth, I prefer Rachmaninoff and Shostakovitch to Debussy and Ravel, and Corsica isn't even mainland France!

Oh well, we'll see how the rosy glow weathers. But I had a lovely hour in Ajaccio.

End in sight

It's Day 100 of 112. I have a spiffy copper medal honoring my 100 days aboard a Holland America cruise ship. One more day in Barcelona, a sea day, a day in Cadiz, after passing through the Straits of Gibraltar, another sea day, Madeira, then a week at sea to pack up and cross the Atlantic. Actually, a lot of cruises last only a week or two, on one of them, we'd just be starting. I don't think I can actually psych myself out to that extent, but I guess it's worth a shot. Or maybe watching the end approaching is part of the experience. Yeah, I think I'll go with that instead.

A steel magnolia

Got into conversation at breakfast this morning with Vera, a soft-spoken widow from Georgia who told me a story that makes her my hero and role-model.

It happened in Sharm-el-Sheikh. She wanted to get a quick tour of the town and agreed with one of the many taxi drivers on the pier that he would drive her around the town for an hour for $5. She got into the taxi, and he drove for several minutes before stopping at the town's dump and demanding $80 to take her back to the docks.

Tourist nightmare. The ship was due to leave long before she could find her way back on foot. But did she falter? She did not. "I don't carry that much money with me, " she told him. He would take a credit card. "I never carry my cards off the ship," she replied. Maybe she would let him give her a massage.

At this point, she got really mad. "We agreed to $5 for an hour. Now you take me back to the ship right now!" He pretended to be outraged, saying he would take her to the police station. "Fine. That's perfect. Take me to the police station, I want to tell the police about this criminal behavior."

He took her back to the ship. She got out of the taxi before paying him his $5.

When I grow up, I want to be just like Vera.

Insomnia cure: rough seas

Turns out being rocked back and forth in bed by 6-8 foot swells is very calming. I even dreamed I got sent to a newly created world in the second crew because of my debugging skills. Apparently my subconscious considers this world BTDT*.

So, Sicily. We were there at the perfect time, before the summer drought turns everything brown and sere and when Etna was conversational. In the volcanic-ash-enriched soil on Etna's slopes, anything that can grow will grow. We saw lemons and oranges ready to pick, lots of vegetables, lots of prickly pear, pruned back grapevines, flowers, all in carefully maintained terraces -- we're on slopes, remember. Our first stop at the end of the most recent major lava flow took us through villages on streets whose curves were clearly designed with donkey carts rather than 40-passenger tour buses in mind. Our driver deserved an award for not knocking any corners off the beautiful two-story stucco houses we passed within inches of.

And here we are at the end of a lava flow from the mid 90s, hearing how the Sicilians have learned to control the flows to minimize damage, when, out of a clear sky, a growl of thunder. Then a couple more. "Oh, that's just the volcano," the guide says, not visibly running in terror. Turns out Etna, unlike St. Helena, has little mini-eruptions all the time, tossing a few boulders into the air, emitting clouds of smoke, ash, and gas, and spooking the tourists. "If you are here at night, you can see the glow of the lava in the crater," the guide said. One spooked tourist asked, "But we won't be here at night, will we?"

The thunderous basso continuo accompanied us all afternoon. A few of us were spooked, but most of us were delighted. We were delighted to have the volcano commenting as we sampled flavored honey at the little stand by the lava. We were delighted as we walked up from the bus to the winery where we tasted five wines, two reds, two whites, and a sparkling. (The connoisseurs were unimpressed. I liked all five, but especially the red that was presented as "subtle and complex".) We were disappointed to learn that we would not be able to hear Etna back on the ship in Messina, and our guide, Maurizio, a charming man, tried to console us with a passable amateur rendition of "O Sole Mio" and the Sicilian version of the origins of the Mafia.

According to Maurizio, while Sicily was under the thumb of Spain several centuries back, the Spanish were big on extracting the island's wealth, but not so keen on keeping order and providing justice. So the Sicilians set up their own shadow government. Kind of like what Don Corleone provided to the Sicilian immigrants in New York in "Godfather 1". Once Italy took over in the 19th century, people were used to trusting the local guys and the system continued, in spite of the Italians. Maurizio said he considers himself Sicilian first, Italian second, but he thinks the Mafia is in decline because the younger generation, including himself, is no longer intimidated by them. I was surprised to hear him talk like that. Is omerta passé?

*Been There, Done That.

Insomnia

Apparently when I can't sleep, I can't write. Or maybe it's the other way around. But in either case, I find myself unable either to sleep or to tell you about the wonderful day I had yesterday on the slopes of Mt. Etna in Sicily. All cures for insomnia and/or writer's block gratefully received.

Katakolon

We are docked for the day in Katakolon, Greece, which is the port closest to the site of the ancient Olympic games. I'm sure those who arranged a tour to that site are happily snapping photos and being treated to informative lectures, but I am sitting on deck enjoying looking at Katakolon.

Debate continues as to how to pronounce the town's name, with emphasis on the second syllable (ka-TACK-a-lon) being the current favorite, though the third syllable (kat-a-COAL-un) having its adherents as well. But what has won my heart is its scale: this is easily the tiniest port we have docked at. Nary a container in sight. There are three cruise ships docked here: us, the Cunard Queen Victoria. and the Costa Fortuna (yes, that is the line which had the ship capsize off Italy, one must wonder how many of their cabins are booked).

But the port itself is miniscule. A row of shops and restaurants along the harborfront that lack the grab-the-tourist-dollar frenzy we've seen elsewhere. Houses where actual people live extending up the slopes that ring the harbor, with trees that look to be two-thirds evergreens, though that may be because it's still mid-April. And it's quiet. A truck goes by on the main street, and you can hear it. What a refreshment for the soul!

Now you will have to excuse me while I immerse myself in the luscious human scale of Katakolon. I will attach a photo or two, but they don't do it justice.

Free wifi!!!

We are in Piraeus, which is the port for Athens. And the terminal at which we are docked has free wifi of such potency that I can get it on deck on the side next to the terminal! For the first time, we have mildly unpleasant weather -- rain and temperatures in the 50s -- but I am feeling grateful to Greece for letting me download some new books (including Mark Twain's "Innocents Abroad") to the Kindle on my tablet. The terminal (where it is warmer and drier than on deck) is full of crew members connecting to family and friends halfway around the world. Being young, they fold easily down to sit cross-legged on the floor or on the footrests under the public phones or against idle security scanner tables and type with eager concentration. Their contracts have them on board for ten months at a time, and they seem to be continuously on duty while on board being efficient, courteous, and appropriately friendly to people, some of whom are -- I search for the appropriate term -- royal pains in the ass even to those of us. who don't have to be nice to them.

Now, do I dare read Mark Twain? Having read his version of travel writing, will I ever have the temerity to post my own again? I think I'll start with a Kinsey Millhone murder mystery instead. I have no ambition to do what Sue Grafton does.

The hotel in Luxor

The outing to Luxor consisted of a four-hour bus ride across the Eastern Desert during the afternoon and evening of the first day, an overnight at a hotel in Luxor, then, the second day, tours of the Valley of the Kings and miscellaneous temples, followed in the late afternoon by the return bus trip.

The hotel in Luxor, the Sonesta St. George, deserves its own commentary. Specifically, the bathroom. I mean, sure, marble floors, a life sized etching of Queen Nefertiti in the elevator, luscious Egyptian cotton bed linens, bathrobes, and towels, staff clearly more oriented to serving oil-rich sheiks than plebian tourists, Holland America doesn't do Econolodges.

But that bathroom! Jiminy! Radios inside and outside the shower enclosure, jacuzzi outlets in the tub, six little rotating shower heads at shoulder-to-hip level in addition to the big overhead one and the other one on the flexible hose. One woman on our tour turned on her shower, only to discover that the last user had left the water flow directed to the six small heads, which promptly sent water out the door of the enclosure all over the floor. One needs to acclimate to a sybaritic lifestyle.

The. Toilet. Had. A. Control. Panel. The settings weren't activated until you sat down, at which point there was this low hum as it prepared to do your bidding. Wait a minute, I may have a photo. Yes. I have no idea what most of the advanced functionality does. Bidet I understand, but that one on the far right looks like it will paddle your bottom for you. And the second option may be an enema. There's a  white sign partly visible to the right that is an introductory guide, I think. I know you can set the water temperature.

I was sufficiently intimidated that I just used it in its most rudimentary sense, at which point I noticed another sign indicating that toilet paper should not be discarded in the bowl. I guess maybe the water treatment facilities in Luxor are not as sophisticated as the Sonesta's plumbing.

Valley of the Kings

I already wrote about how being in the Valley of the Kings was a scary existential experience for me, but while I was freaking out confronting my mortality, I was also having a great time wandering around in 3000-year-old graves.

I will assume you know as much as I did going in: that Pharaohs wanted really elaborate tombs filled with treasure because they believed they would need it all in their next life. Maybe Egyptian geography gives everyone existential crises about their mortality. Earlier Pharaohs built pyramids, which turned out to be like big neon signs saying "Grave robbers, here you go!" So later Pharaohs decided to take a different tack and be buried inside mountains. No less treasure, still big rocks pointing skyward, but hopefully, with this new approach, they would be less vulnerable to the not-dead-yet.

So they set their minions to carving out tombs in the limestone and sandstone of the mountains west of the Nile near Luxor. So far over sixty of them have been found, including one (only one!) that the grave robbers never found their way into -- Tutankhamen's. You have to pay extra to see his, even though, what the grave robbers missed, modern museums have scoured out, so there's not a lot left inside to look at.

And, incidentally, looking is all you can do. Photography of all kinds is strictly forbidden in the Valley of the Kings, not only inside the tombs but outside in the parking lot as well. No one is quite sure why this is the case. The current most popular theory blames an exclusive deal between the government and National Geographic. We were ordered to leave all cameras in the bus under threat of having them confiscated by the tourism police. And I'm not making that up, there really are police cars driving around labeled "Tourism Police". I cannot testify one way or the other as to whether they confiscate cameras.

The first grave was a finished one. The Pharaoh buried there had managed to hold onto the throne and not be poisoned by any ambitious brothers or sons for long enough that the plans for his tomb were brought to fruition. I walked down a long, sloping hallway whose walls were decorated with hieroglyphics painted in red and blue and yellow and black telling the Pharaoh's life story, illustrated with paintings, also in color. The colors were vivid and bright and 3000 years old. Part of the credit probably has to go to no sunshine, but even so. It wasn't perfectly preserved, of course -- the "Do Not Touch Anything!" signs were of recent vintage. And it was so tempting -- to my surprise, I found the wall paintings very appealing, lively and even good-humored, and I caught myself thinking, "Oh surely just one quick touch... " I resisted, but it took more will-power than I would have thought.

And no, I was not being seduced by the spirit of the mummy. Those hieroglyphics were just way more likable than I had expected.

At the bottom of the tomb was the Pharaoh's sarcophagus, a Chevy Suburban sized stone coffin with a statue of his body carved on top. To see the statue, I had to stand on a little wooden step stool and use a flashlight offered by a man I thought was an attendant. He turned out to be just another vendor who helped me down off the stool and immediately had his hand out for a tip. I figured, what the heck, how often do I get to see the top of a Pharaoh's coffin, and gave him a dollar.

On the way back out, I happened to look up. The ceiling was painted dark blue with hundreds of white stars drawn like five-pointed asterisks. I wonder why people think of stars as five-pointed. Thousands of years and a huge difference in cultures, and the Pharaoh's artists and I draw stars the same way.

After that, I went to see the tomb of a Pharaoh who wasn't as lucky or well-protected. He died before his tomb was completed. Apparently, the custom in such cases was to give the tomb-building team 70 days -- the length of time it took to mummify the recently deceased -- to finish up as best they could, after which they were to turn their attention to making an even fancier tomb for the successor. It meant walls left only roughly finished, areas without inscriptions or paintings, side tunnels barely begun. No sarcophagus. I don't know whether they just dumped the mummy into the bottom of the excavation, sealed it up, and moved on, or what. I also don't know whether the new guy substituted cheap imitations for the treasure the old guy planned to have. I know that, on exterior carvings, Pharaoh successors were known to scratch out the names of their Pharaoh predecessors, apparently holding grudges way past where it made much sense. Or maybe they just felt there was only room in the universe for one Glorious All-powerful Immortal Invincible Ever-Victorious Divinity.

After we left the Valley of the Kings, we visited three or four temples full of huge stone pillars, bas-relief carvings, and supersized sculptures of whichever Pharaoh was financing the effort. Here too were remnants of bright colors on ceilings -- the temples must have been magnificent before time and weather and vindictive successors wore them down. But the temples didn't appeal to me as much. Probably the same lack of enthusiasm I felt for the Christ the Redeemer statue in Rio, which I wrote about, and the Forbidden City in Beijing, which I didn't. I just don't grok gargantuan, I guess.

Transiting Suez Canal

There's more I want to tell you about the trip to Luxor, but right now, as I'm typing this, we are going through or, as us seasoned world travelers term it, transiting the Suez Canal. It will take us 12 hours, and Holland America is serving us rolls, juice and coffee on several decks with good views. We are leading our convoy -- maybe they let us go in alphabetical order -- and I can see five huge ships following us before the line disappears in the desert dust.

It's another Egyptian line between life and death. The irrigated west side is verdant with date palms and green fields, full of houses and apartment buildings and mosques. Minarets, by the way, are much more elegant during the day; at night they are lit up with white and green neon, making them look like tall, skinny Christmas trees, though probably only to American eyes.

And on the east side of the canal, desert. Sand. Bleakness and nothing whatsoever growing. Almost no buildings. Very occasionally desolate highways from nowhere to nowhere else. (Why don't they use Canal water to irrigate? Because it's sea water.)

Every so often, on the west side are stack of green boxes like shipping containers. During the Egyptian/Israel war in the 70s, Egypt sank a bunch of ships in the Canal so Israel couldn't use it. The Canal was closed for ten years as they got the damned ships back out. The green boxes are there in case they need to block it again -- easier to unblock it afterwards if you use regular-shaped objects with no breakable parts. Oh, and if you can't use the Canal, going around South Africa adds more than 3000 miles to the journey.

OK, that's your "here we are!" entry on the Suez Canal. I'm going back out on the bow for another while. If nothing else, I can wave to the soldiers posted to the frequent guardhouses. About 2/3 of them wave back, which I think shows Egyptian graciousness. I only go by once. They see ships going by all day every day.

Abdul the Nubian

When I heard the word "Nubian", it brought to mind gigantic black-skinned grim-faced muscular types equally adept at guarding emperors or playing power forward in the NBA. Not necessarily. "My name is Abdul, and I am a Nubian from Aswan," our Egyptian guide said, introducing himself to our bus. "Nubian means I have dark skin, curly hair, a big nose, and a big mouth. I just got a hair cut, so you'll have to trust me on that, everything else you can see." Slightly below average height, he was anything but grim -- when I asked him to teach me to count to three in Arabic, he had me repeat three words after him several times, praising my pronunciation. Then he grinned and told me I had just said, "I love you."

He took excellent care of us, always arranging his on-scene talks so we could stand in the shade while we listened (which, of course, usually meant he stood in the sun to talk) and herding us diplomaticly so we didn't get lost in the crowds or overwhelmed by the vendors. He walked up and down the bus aisle during the four hour bus trips to and from Luxor to let individuals ask him about anything from history, of which Egypt has more than just about anyone, to politics -- he thinks the upcoming national elections will come down to three candidates, of whom the radical conservative to the right of the Muslim Brotherhood is not one. He referred to him as "the guy with the beard", as ubiquitous election posters show him, and passed along gossip that the man's mother may not be a citizen. He didn't do as well with religion questions. Not that he was argumentative or hostile, but listening to him and his interlocutors talk past one another was a sad lesson in the limits of human communication.

Example:
What the passenger said: Do you think the new government will institute Sharia law in Egypt?"

What the passenger meant: Do you think the new government will turn Egypt into Afghanistan under the Taliban?

What Abdul heard: Do you think the new government will incorporate some Islamic principles into how it runs the country?"

To which Abdul answered: Yes, it seems likely to me that they will. After all, 75% of Egyptians are Muslims.

Passenger: So you expect education for women to be banned?

Abdul: What? Of course not! My parents are illiterate, but all of us, my three brothers AND my three sisters and me , have university educations!

Passenger: But under Sharia law...

Eventually that conversation petered out in mutual frustration.

But through it all, Abdul kept a good-natured cheerfulness and relaxed confidence. He probably would have made a poor harem guard -- too much smiling, not enough musculature -- but as a tour guide, he was top-notch.

Egypt is scary

Not the vendors, though Egyptian souvenir vendors make the Chinese seem shy.

Not even the gun-toting jelabia-clad young men I spotted out of the bus windows as we drove through the Nile valley to Luxor. They weren't pointing their guns at anyone, the orange street lighting would have made the Easter Bunny look sinister, even without the Pavlovian conditioning of the past ten years of TV coverage of terrorism, and it was the end of a four hour bus ride that had left me somewhat loopy. Actual Egyptians I met were gracious and handsome people, except maybe for the hotel personnel who were clearly condescending to have to deal with non-millionaires.

No, it's Egypt itself that scares the bejesus out of me.

I thought I knew what a desert is. I've driven through Nevada and Arizona, I grew up in eastern Montana, which is always described as high desert. But the sere golden cliffs that loom over the Nile Valley to the west and the emptiness that separates it from the Red Sea take the concept of desolation to a whole new level.

Maybe it's the contrast with the Nile Valley in spring, where life is everywhere. Flowering bushes, probably azaleas, line the roads with color, and small fields (Nasser's revolution gave individual farmers plots of only five acres each) are dense with grains, vegetables, herbs, and sugar cane that are sown, tended, and harvested by hand using techniques and tools that would seem familiar to Egyptians of the time of the Pharaohs.

But this vitality occurs only where the millennia of Nile floods have piled up rich silt. Particularly on the west, you can almost draw a pencil line where life stops and the desert starts. And what a desert! No fooling around with cactus and sagebrush. The mountains that house the Valley of the Kings and keep Sahara sand from burying the river seem as sterile as the Moon. Clearly people can survive here -- the steep slopes above the Valley of the Kings are criss-crossed with foot trails probably left by hearty young archaeologists (more likely in baseball caps than pith helmets, alas!) digging for the 64th or 65th New Kingdom burial crypt.

But I am neither hearty nor young (nor, for that matter, an archaeologist), and when I got dizzy in the sun and stumbled walking from one tomb to another, I was grateful for the assistance of one of the vendors, even if, a few minutes later, he came over to sell me a souvenir book ("This is not because I helped you, I did that because we are both human beings, but... "). It made me realize that, if I stayed out in that sun for very long, even under my floppy purple straw hat and protected by the long-sleeved cotton shirt a friend had lent me, I would pass out and, without aid, would die of heat stroke. Right there, mortality, my own personal mortality, inherent in the place, which has been as it is for millennia.

So Egypt freaks me out a bit. Doesn't seem to bother the Egyptians, who turn out new citizens, according to our guide Abdul, at the rate of one every 26 seconds. Does anybody know whether Israel is like this? I know Arabia is. Maybe imminent death concentrates the mind such that religions germinate more readily. I think there's a good analogy with the Nile Valley in there somewhere, I just can't tease it out at the moment.

Red Sea miscellaneous

1. It will cost the Amsterdam $215,000 to transit the Suez Canal on Saturday.
2. I am now as close as I am likely ever to be to Mecca, which is roughly 100 miles to the east.
3. The Red Sea is not red. It is blue, just like all the other waters through which we have sailed. Apparently, at one point, Egypt was once called the land of red sands, and this body of water was associated with that.

Pirate sighting!

Or, probably not. In any case, as we approached the entrance to the south end of the Red Sea, there was a small motor boat passing to the north of us with five people squeezed into it and no signs of fishing equipment. They went their way, we went ours without mishap. No Jolly Roger flying (no mast of any kind to fly it from), no hearty cries of "Heave to there, matey, or ye'll be on yer way to Davy Jones' locker, argh!". We were at least twenty miles from land, so they weren't just out for a jaunt -- though what do I know about jaunting range off the horn of Africa? Maybe they were pirates who decided five to 1500 was not very good odds. Maybe they weren't.

Losing time

If you travel all the way around the world to the west, one way and another, you're going to have at least 24 time zone changes that work like daylight savings time in the fall -- you get an extra hour to sleep. I say "at least" because our course squiggles around some, occasionally requiring a "spring forward" instead of a "fall back". The ship's clocks are always moved back at 2am and forward at 2pm, so we always gain an hour of sleep and lose an hour of afternoon. And India is half an hour off from everyone else, so there we gained half an hour we'll have to give back one of these days.

BUT ANYWAY. Tonight is one of the gain-an-hour-of-sleep nights. Maybe it's some obscure anti-pirate measure, we're in the Gulf of Aden until tomorrow at around 11am. But when 24 out of 112 nights is an extra hour long, it raises some conundra.

The ship's clock currently says 9:30pm, a not unreasonable time to start heading to bed. But the impending time change means that, in some sense, it's only 8:30pm, way too early for anyone over the age of four to be ending her day. But I'm sleepy. Yawning even.

I know, I could go to bed now and plan to get up a nominal hour earlier and do something worthwhile, like exercise or meditate or read something to improve my mind. But getting up is a challenge even when the clock says it's time.

What I usually do is believe the ship's clock. Right now the ship's clock says it's bedtime, so I will go to bed. Tomorrow the ship's clock will tell me I have another hour to doze, so I will doze.

Now if I could just figure out how we'll get back to where we are on the same calendar page as the US after crossing the International Date Line. I suspect it may involve having to give back all those extra dozing hours.

A multitude of voyages

It occurs to me that there are a multitude of voyages happening on the Amsterdam.

There is my voyage, whose purpose is to sail around the world. My voyage likes sea days because we are progressing toward my goal -- Ft. Lauderdale the long way around. And my voyage involves a lot of looking at water going by, to the exclusion of, say, ballroom dancing classes or evening shows or shopping for diamonds or tai chi or acupuncture.

And then there is one of my tablemates who seems grimly determined to wring every last drop of possibility out of the trip. He has scheduled excursions for every day in port, some of them 12 or 14 hours long. He seems to spend sea days mostly in the sports bar or the casino, two places where he can smoke, though he does go to some of the lectures and is merciless toward lecturers who don't hold his interest.

The woman who was my roommate on the China trip seemed most interested in what she could buy and how cheaply. She described destinations in terms of what could be bought there. Her targets ranged from black pearls in Tahiti to jade and silk in China and Thailand and India. She has dozens of people she's buying small presents for, and she seemed to find it difficult to pass a street vendor without trying to haggle herself a bargain. I hope she brought a couple extra suitcases. And that's off the ship. I don't think she buys the gemstones offered in shops onboard, but someone must. Maybe the people paying $100,000 apiece for deluxe veranda suites on Deck 7 need diversions on sea days and pick up spare diamonds to cure the tedium.

Then there are those for whom a cruise provides support that any other form of vacation does not: a widowed tablemate* nearing her 90th birthday, frail and nearly deaf, or the Australian woman who sits near me at bingo whose husband is in a wheelchair. She suffers seasickness the whole voyage no matter how calm the waters, but it's preferable to trying to rassle all their equipment onto and off of airplanes and into and out of hotels. (There are several couples in her situation, all with him in the wheelchair and her on her feet. I would like to see just one with roles reversed. But "judge not... ". And now that I think of it, there was a couple on the China trip, him physically healthy, her in a walker, so forget I said anything.)

I think most passengers, at least the ones with more than one world cruise to their credit, are just garden-variety hedonists. (Again, "judge not... ") They like endless good food served with reliable smiles from people who take the trouble to learn your name and preferences, no housekeeping chores, lots of diversions, and a chocolate coin on your pillow each night.

*One evening at dinner, I asked my six tablemates why they were on this voyage. Answers were kind of what you'd expect until we came to Sue, the frail 90-year-old. It took a couple tries to get her to understand what I was asking, but then she smiled and answered, "Because this will be my last one."

Entering the Gulf of Aden

So here I sit on deck, assuming that the warm, moist air will be good for my cold, which is a weird turn of phrase, since I mean good for my health and bad for the cold. Temperature is in the upper 70s, sky is clear, ocean is calm -- friendly little sparkly ripples glitter in the sun, but no swells and only a light breeze.

And we've just entered the Gulf of Aden, right between Somalia (pirates) and Yemen (Islamic radicals). It's a major shipping route, so container ships have begun parading across the horizon between me and Somalia. From where I sit (or, more accurately, from where I recline) I can see three Amsterdam security officers studying the horizon. The sun gleams off curls of razor wire visible from the deck. I have completed the easy sudoku and gotten stuck on the hard one. Why does having a stuffed up head physically make my brain sluggish? I need a nap.