Aruba

I have some leftover Aruba shots to share. There’s Emilie and I lounging, the beautiful sunset the Alex and I stayed for, a girl on the beach, and some shots that Alex and I took of each other just after the sun set.

I’m actually cruising Alaska at the moment and the climate is totally different. It was weird to go from a Panama cruise, which is really hot to Alaska, which is cold. I had a roll of film with the beaches of Mexico at the beginning and snowcapped mountains in Juneau on the end. So I have a few more Central American pictures to share and then I’ll take you through Alaska.

Katie

Aruba

Windsurfing is so much fun! And Aruba is the perfect place to do it. There are nice steady trade winds all year round in Aruba and I found a place that rented windsurfing equipment and did lessons for beginners. So this time, Emilie, our Assistant Cruise Director joined Alex and I for a fantastic windsurfing adventure.

We had an hour of lessons and going around on the equipment with an instructor and then another hour just to play. We all had a blast. It’s not very hard to windsurf. I think it’s mostly about having good balance. We all got up easily and by the end we were all making turns and having a grand time. Emilie had to go back to the ship afterward, but Alex and I stayed to watch the sunset and just relax on the beach. It was a very fun day.

Katie

Georgetown, Grand Cayman

I had been to Georgetown, Grand Cayman every other week when I was working on the Century, but we always had to tender. There’s no dock and the tender always took a long time and crew had to wait till all the guests had gone. It was always such a hassle, I only ever got off once and I didn’t have time to do much. Well this time I was determined to make the most of it and I did.

Swimming with the stingrays is the thing to do in Grand Cayman. You have to be taken by boat to the middle of this sandbar they call Stingray City. I went with a group of the crew and got a picture of some of the tattooed crew sitting at the front of the boat. It seems like all the crew on ships have tattoos. Don’t worry, mom, I’m not going to get one...yet...tee hee.

Fishermen started feeding the stingrays at Stingray city back in the 80s and now they all congregate there and get fed and petted by tourists. They are still wild, but they’ve become used to human contact and they are very tolerant of people touching and holding and yes even kissing them. They say it’s good luck to kiss a stingray, but I think the locals just say that to have a good laugh at all the tourists who do it. Well, laugh away because I did it.

Our guide brought a bucket of little squid and let us feed the stingrays. You just held a piece in your hand and put it under their mouth and they sucked it out like a vacuum. Well after a while they all smelled the juicy squid and they would swarm around us and brush against our legs. Steve got freaked out and curled into a fetal position in Elisabeth’s arms and I was there to get that picture. I also got a good shot of the underside of a stingray one of the guides was holding. And Steve got a great picture of me petting one underwater. This was a truly amazing and sometimes creepy experience.

Katie

Costa Rica

My first time in Costa Rica I went zip lining, which is the thing to do there. Costa Rica has some awesome rain forests and they have schools for training people on how to zip line and repel and do all that cool stuff when you need to learn how to get really really high in giant trees to do things like study the ecosystem of the canopy of a rainforest. Well these places also do tours for fun so regular people who aren’t scientists can just play and go sliding down the lines from tree to tree.

It was a little daunting at first when I saw how high up we were. It’s defiantly not something you want to do if you’re afraid of heights. I went with a bunch of the crew and they hiked us over to the edge of a mountain and up to this tree stand. The first line, looked really long, but later I realized it was short. We were rigged up with harnesses and they hooked these little pulley looking wheels to the wire cable said lean back and then let you go. It was like flying. You’re just whizzing by with nothing under your feet, but a long drop. Then there was one of the staff on the other end to apply a break with another rope so you wouldn’t slam into the next tree. Then you’d climb across a metal grading to another tree and do the whole thing over again.

It was great fun and definitely a unique experience. At the place I went to, they had the second longest zip line in the world (700 meters long) and I got to go down it. There’s a picture of the line attached. You can see the cable off to the side and then it just disappears into the distance. Yea, I went down that.

That didn’t scare me as much as repelling though. I’ve always thought of repelling as bouncing off the side of a mountain as you go down quickly on a rope, but it can also be sliding strait down a rope, which is what I did. They looped the rope around this figure eight metal thingy for the repelling. One end was attached to the top of a very tall tree and the other went down to the ground and the only thing holding you in the middle was this little metal figure eight thingy and your own hand. Grip tight and you go slow. Grip loosely and you go fast. The woman at the bottom kept saying ‘loosen your grip, you’ll go faster.’ I was just like ‘that’s okay, I like going slow.’ That one made my heart pound, it was awesome.

Katie

Acapulco, Mexico

In the not too distant past Acapulco, Mexico was a place for the rich and famous to get away. Now it’s a huge port town bustling with people and traffic. I didn’t really care for it, but I figured it would be a waste not to get off. I went with Steve to see the cliff divers. There are these divers that get up high on some cliffs next to the ocean and they have to wait for a wave to swell so they can dive into it, otherwise the water is too shallow and they could break their necks. It’s very dangerous and an exciting show to see. It was too hot and my camera was cold from being on the ship so my lens was fogged, but I did get one shot where you can see the little diver at the top of the cliff waiting for just the right moment to jump.

Next Steve and I went to a fancy hotel where Elvis stayed when he visited Acapulco. It was really cool, they had a bar in the pool. So you sat on seats that were in the water and ordered your drinks and food and ate with your body still in the pool. We spent all afternoon there just relaxing. I decided I needed a diva shot next to the pool and just as I was posing, Jason from AV (audio visual department) jumped in behind me and copied me. I had no idea he was doing it until I saw the pictures the next day.

Katie