Noon Report:

• Location: S 10° 39.00′, E 135° 54.10′
• Speed: 17 knots
• Course: 270º (That’s due west!)
• Weather: Cloudy, Occasional Rain
• Temperature: 27º C, 81º F
• Wind: W 10 knots, 11.5 mph

Leaving the Torres strait, we’re heading due west to Indonesia and our first stop Rinca Island (a neighbor of Komodo Island) to see Komodo Dragons.

For me it was a normal morning down on Deck 2. Cheryl was feeling well enough to take to the treadmill for a _slow_ walk. Returning to the room I found her back in bed, but in good spirits.

We threw in a couple of loads of laundry and headed for breakfast.

For those unfamiliar with bacon toast – it’s an old family favorite with bacon and honey between slices of (normally) bread.

Followng breakfast we threw the clothes in the drier and Cheryl headed to the warmth of the pool deck while I headed down to the Theatre for a lecture on the history of the Queensland and Northern Territories Air Service – you know them by their acronym QANTAS.

Back up to the pool deck I borrowed her lounge while she found a place in the sun (until a rain squall came thru). I chatted a bit with Kim (via text) and marveled at photos of grandsons and snow. (The Oklahoma crowd spent a weekend skiing at Angel Fire New Mexico and the Beaverton crowd enjoyed the 10 inches of fresh snow they currently have.) My contribution? I’ve given up snow for Lent. It’s the least I could do.

I messed up the timing on the next event – The Cooking Demonstration by the Executive Chef and the Executive Pastry Chef, so ended up watching that on our stateroom TV. It went a bit long so immediately after they signed off we headed down to the Theatre for the rehearsal for tomorrow night’s guest talent show. We’re both in the choir. It’s been fun to exercise our singing voices a bit and meet new friends along the way.

Following lunch we returned to the stateroom for normal afternoon activities: read, fill out customs forms for Indonesia, nap, read some more.

At 4:15 everyone with cabins on our deck reported to deck 2 to turn in our passports (apparently this is the process for entering Indonesia) then headed down to the Theatre for a lecture: “East-West Differences in Values, Worldviews, & Perception

It was a fascinating lecture tracing differences in culture back to Socrates, Aristotle, Plato in the west and Confucius, Lau-tze, Zhuang-tze, Buddha in the east. He investigated differences in World views, Philosophies, Moralities, Behavior, and Perceptions focusing on Individualism vs Collectivism, Differences in Perception, Hierarchy vs Equality, and Communication Styles. It was a great overview!

Cheryl adds:

• The speaker, who have lived in SE Asia for over 50 years, wanted to give us some background before we venture into the Indonesian culture and say to ourselves, “well that’s interesting but we do it better”. He brought forward several basic Eastern cultural ways of looking at the world: 1-everything changes, 2-everything is interconnected (opposites flow into each other), 3-emptiness is fertile (the valuable part of a bottle is that it is empty and therefore can be used to contain something), 4-the relationships around something are as important as the thing itself. As Western science is investigating Quantum Physics, we are finding the Eastern philosophies support this aspect of the universe.

We had an early dinner and returned to our stateroom to read and BLOG until time for…

BBB – 10/23 – ’nuff said.

Cheryl’s factoids:

• Over the past week or so we have been moving steadily northward up through the temperate climate zone, the sub-tropical, and now we are into the tropical zone just below the equator. Temps will be in the mid-80s to high 90s with humidity to match.
• Also as we move north to the equator (equal days and equal nights), we have lost the long sunlit evenings. Sunset at the bottom of New Zealand was at 9:15pm – now it’s 6:48pm (although we have another time change tonight-our 11th time change).

So that’s a day. More of the same tomorrow as we make our way west.

till then, Nite all.