Dubai to Aqaba

Before we start on today's post here is something I missed mentioning previously.

One of the ways I like to occupy myself on flights is to listen to music from other countries. So on the recent Air Oman flights, I had listened to some new Japanese music. This is one album/artist which I found interesting - KanoeRana - Kagakuteki Innocence.

Here is the track Gluttonic Love

OK, back to the world cruise. The Arabian peninsula is big. The flat projection maps which compress countries near the equator and make northern Canada take up half the map do not do it justice. Anyway, it is over 5000 kilometres from Dubai to Aqaba by sea.

This was scheduled as 6 sea days, however, the hangover from the previous engine issues (the ship had to slow down a number of times to restart systems as they were repaired/upgraded) and some rougher-than-expected weather put this out of play. There was a bit of speed up and slow down with the Captain making announcements about aiming to get into Jordan as close as possible to the scheduled time before one final reduction in speed which indicated a change of plans was to come. Some nervousness while waiting for the captains' announcement. Time I was assuming they were using to reinforce the barricades at customer service and the excursions desk before making any change to the Aqaba/Petra port of call.

When the announcement came it was not as bad as expected. yes were delayed and could not get into Aqaba as scheduled. Because of the bucket list nature of this stop Princess Cruises had instead rescheduled this stop for a day later. (cue frantic emails to private tour providers) This meant we would also be a day late going through the Suez Canal. So the port of Mykonos was dropped and replaced with a later stop in Messina, Sicily from 3 pm to 9 pm. For us this was a good result, we have previously visited Mykonos and had not visited Sicily and Petra was one of the things we were super keen to see. Also, the tour we were booked on was moved to the next day, so back to lasing around the pool and taking photos of the Cocktail of the day. (plus the meal at the Specialty restaurant while keeping a lookout for Pirates)

There was one break in routine when we had a Christmas In July dinner which was arranged by the Cruise FaceBook Group. Princess certainly went all-in to set this up, setting up a separate area in the buffet and creating an Aussie Christmas menu complete with prawns and baked Ham. There was a visit from Santa and some ice carving which I will have to look at for our next Christmas.

And a change of schedule for us when we took in one of the shows in the evening. Not something we often do as we have difficult moving after dinner but the shows are often good value for a 45-minute show by a featured performer who only has a few days to work with the ships musicians to be ready to do 2 performances on a night and then possibly return later in the week or so they are onboard for another show. The show we saw had a good singer belting out numbers with skill, enthusiasm and a lot of glitter.