This morning it was possible to photograph the Norwegian Dream without shooting into the sun and it appears that the damage is more severe than it seemed yesterday. Look at this photo of the bow – there is a webbing of discoloration below the notch. It might be rope but more likely it is places where the hull was bent so much that the paint fell off.



Here's a close up:



As you might have guessed at 8 a.m. this morning we were still anchored out in the Rio Platte waiting for the port of Montevideo to reopen. Latest news is that it will occur at 10 a.m. but I’m not holding my breath. Neither am I suffering. If you look off the bow towards Argentina you see nothing but sea. It is as if we are sailing on a very calm sea heading “for God knows where.” That’s ideal for me.

Mary Alice and I will take out own walking tour of old Montevideo should the ship make port today. We’ve got a map. In Febuary of 2006 when we last visited the city we took the grand escorted tour and saw the sights, such as they are. Montevideo is not a large city on the world city scale – perhaps 1,600,000 people – and old buildings are not very interesting to me. What I like is representational art, so I can get a glimpse into what was going on and how they felt about it. Mary Alice likes to go to current supermarkets to see what the local people are getting and using. Supermarkets are the cultural representations of the modern world, I guess.

I did a lot of expensive internet research yesterday, back when I thought we might have dinner in the city, and discovered a strange thing. There is not a comprehensive list of the museums of the city. One has to be careful here, also. There is a tendency for the houses of famous people to become museums dedicated to them –all their stuff is still there. I don’t know if you’ve been to Nashville and seen Jimmy Rodgers’ shoes, but it’s the same effect. I have now seen the radio belonging to Madame Chang Kai Chesk (?)’s sister, who was a notable communist. I don’t feel that I understand her any better.

So the plan is no plan. Get ashore, go for a walk. Don’t get ashore, go to Buenos Aires and take the tango show tour. Maybe I’ll get a photo taken with a couple of tango dancers.

Sorry about the pix but its been almost impossible to upload pix from the ship for the last 24 hours. We are still sitting outside Montevideo harbor and almost certainly will not go to the city today. Tomorrow Buenos Aires, then, incomprehensably, back to Montevideo. Or rather for the 1st time, to Montevideo.

Wed Dec 12, 5:50 pm. Back from walk in Buenos Aires. Got it uploaded at last.

Special to the Blog.

Shortly before the Marco Polo was to dock at Montevideo, Uruguay, the Captain reported that the harbor had been closed due to a collision between a cruise ship and a container ship. Containers had fallen into the harbor channel, which was then closed to all traffic until it could be sounded and/or the containers removed.



A cruise ship, pictured above, pulled up near the Polo and anchored shortly after this announcement. Passengers on the Polo believe we are standing by in case damage to the other ship is more extensive than first believed and rescue of passengers and crew is necessary.



Here is a closeup of the bow of the ship. That notch in the bow is fairly big and is the only visible damage, but it is enough. We saw a tender from this ship circling it, apparently searching for other damage.It is quite difficult to read the insignia and name but it could be the Norwegian Dream. Nothing concerning this incident was located on the internet despite considerable searching (at 40 cents a minute). There is a report that one of the Clipper line's ships has cancelled its Antarctic cruise this month, as of today, due to "mechancial" problems, but Clipper appears much smaller than the ship near the Polo off Montevideo this afternoon.

At 9:52 pm the Polo announced that the Captain and the Harbor authorities had determined that the Polo could dock at 8 a.m. tomorrow morning (Tuesday)

At 11:15 pm confimation was found in the New Zealand Herald on-line that the ship is indeed the Norwegian Dream. So these are the first pictures to be published that I'm aware of. A world wide scoop for my blog.

The NZ Herald reports that several containers of automobiles fell from the container ship,and Navy divers are searching for them now.

A day at sea, and the last day at sea for the next 5. What does a day at sea mean to the cruiser? It means a day with no port, and so no new experiences, no tours, no revealed wonders of the earth to see the which you must arise at early hours. It is a time to reflect, to recharge the batteries that power the imagination, to refuel with awe, so that the next day in port you are in the ideal state; which is to say, you are like a hippie who is high, and everything you are shown is an “Oh, wow!” moment.

On this day between Itajai and Punta de Esta, like Little Charlie, I got up when I woke up, like Bob Brozman, I ate a nutritious breakfast, and I found my shoes. You know by that I’ve either won the lottery or I’ve got the day-at-sea blues. I walked a mile after breakfast, and another mile after lunch. The temperature was down at least 15 degrees, and a wind was blowing. The experienced cruise deck walker knows what this means: hold on to your hat when rounding the bow of the ship because the winds are going to be terrific.

I posted to my blog, discovered how to not only post images but to position them in the text; had some e-mail discussion with the D.A of one of the 6 counties in which I have cases pending, in hopes of avoided an early January trial, checked my eBay bids, read the Eureka news (Roger Rodoni announces he is running for a 4th term, yesterday it was Ukiah upholds absurd medical marijuana cultivation rules), and worked up a slide show presentation of the 100 best Rio de Janeiro photos I took.

At dinner we met someone new. A melancholy Norwegian. He sat at our table out of exasperation because his regular table was given over to a group of young people who wanted to eat together. He has been cruising since 1989, taking at least 5 cruises a year, alone. He seems to prefer trans-Atlantic cruises, which are notable for inexpensive days and no port calls – he got on this cruise in Barcelona and will get off in Buenos Aires, and so far he has not been ashore at all. He had some good information about which cruise lines were best, but wasn’t so informative about the ports.

We are totally at sea, nothing but the beautiful blue ocean in sight in any direction, and as the poet said, “That’s just the top of it.” But tomorrow begins 5 days of port calls. We’ll be in Punta del Este, Uruguay, Montevideo, Buenos Aires, Montevideo, and Buenos Aires. Why the duplication? Because most cruisers, unlike our Norwegian, like port calls, and on this ship one cruise ends at Buenos Aires and another begins – the new cruisers get to sail across the Rio Platte’s bay to Montevideo and back across to Buenos Aires and there are 2 port calls with almost no sailing. (Look at a map).

Perhaps I’ll learn to tango.

Itajai, rhymes with ‘Meet a Guy’, is an obscure port in the south of Brazil, in Santa Catalina state, which is starting to be a stop. They were so happy to see the Marco Polo that they laid a red, carpet down the dock, put up a welcome sign, and gave us free straw hats for the sun, and maps of the city, before we got onto an actual street.



We signed on for the Ecological tour. For this tour we boarded a bus with a very nice guide named Elena, or something close to cal tour that. She is a native and speaks Portuguese, German, and English. Portuguese is the national language of Brazil, German is the language her parents spoke, and English is needed to guide the cruise ship passengers. The south of Brazil is populated by descendants of emigrants from Germany and other European countries. There were no slaves here, and so, there is no large population descended from Africans as there is in Rio.

There is also much less poverty in Santa Catalina because the area is divided into farms of about 240 acres with individual owners, rather than the huge rancheros that mark much of the country. So with no population of freed slaves that needed to be accommodated by the economy, and a tradition of small landowners, the poverty rate is considerably lower than that of Rio, and the crime rate is also. The streets are safe, she said. I noted some fortified houses, however, just as in other South American cities, with high walls topped with broken glass or razor wire.



What did we care? We were on the bus headed for the Atlantic Rainforest Park. We drove through Itajai, and another nearby city but everything looked too normal to get many photos. The larger buildings were unimaginative condos and apartment buildings, the same as we’ve seen on every coastline with decent weather. The ads were in Portuguese, but nothing special. Language aside it was hard to find anything unusual.

Access to the Rainforest Park is via a cable car, so we loaded up 6 to a car, and took off. Over the harbor it was fairly level, but as it started up the mountain we rose steeply and were way up in the air. At the top we started a guided tour. It was like being in a huge florist shop – all of those flowers that seem so exotic were growing wild here. Blue butterflies flitted from flower to flower, and our guide showed us wonders like the trees that grow hollow. Ants nest inside them, and when monkeys come to eat the leaves the ants come out and bite them. The monkey flees. The trees survive. Beauties and oddities mingled in the forest. Birds were largely in the upper canopy and we heard them but didn’t see them. Butterflies are very difficult to photograph, so look for flower pictures.

The first two days with the ship are a blur now in my memory. We got up on the morning after the Folkloric show with about 7 hours sleep to leave on an all day tour. Our principal goals: the emblematic statue of Christ, and the top of the Sugarloaf dome. Nearly missed that tour, but caught them as they were getting off the ship.



The statue of the Welcoming Christ is the very picture of Rio, but it did not loom large in my perceptions that morning. If you come in at sea it is visible nearly every moment, high atop the highest point in the dramatically abrupt mountains that surround Rio – or really, that Rio now surrounds the mountains. On the airport side of the city it is not visible at all.

Like the statue of Liberty, the Welcoming Christ was made by the French, and shipped over in pieces. It is huge, the head weighs 30 tons. It was built in the 1920s, some claim as a statement of power by the Catholic Church. Whatever the origins it is now world famous as the symbol of Rio.

The best way to get there is by cogwheel train, very similar to the train up Victoria Peak in Hong Kong. The mountain it is atop is a botanic reserve and as we went up we would pass signs telling us what plants we were seeing. We also passed small cartoonish statutes of animals and other beings. There are stations en route, and at the last, a small samba band climbs aboard and plays and yells for the last few minutes. Only the passengers display their skills, however, with tourist clothing obscuring those skills they have.



Up top the statue is huge. Hundreds of tourists mill about, taking pictures of friends standing on the stairs with the statue behind them. The views in every direction are dramatic. When you can see them, that is. We could, but the trips for the prior two days could see only fog and cloud cover.

You can’t go up into Christ as you can with the statue of Liberty, but there is a small chapel in the back of the statue. I didn’t go in but Mary Alice saw two women come out weeping, so for the faithful it must be really something. We were in the Samba car on the way down. Loud, but fun.

At the base life intervened in the form of a traffic jam making the bus late so we go to interact with a variety of “hello people” vending various things ranging from a kind of badminton birdie with a solid base that you can knock back and forth with a friend, to license plates inscribed RIO, maps of South America, hats, whistles and such. They are not unpleasantly aggressive about the vending, and one of our number was excitedly trying things, and sometimes buying things.

Lunch was at a meat -on -sword restaurant. They served red with lunch, and I think I’m beginning to get this sniffing your wine and describing it business. Mine smelled like grape cool-aid. The meat was grand. We had beef, chicken, and lamb along with buffet sashimi and sushi.

Sugarloaf is a high dome, much like Half Dome in Yosemite. The first recorded assent was by a British nanny around 1806, and it’s hard to see how she did it. The rock is steep and high and I imagine her in one of those trailing skirts of the period. Now there is a cable car system, which lifts you quite high above the ground – fortunately the cars do not have a glass bottom so you can’t see straight down. It daunts some people but I have faith in Western technology so I ride without fear right up front.

No big statue on top, just a nice place with snack bars, toilets, gift shop, and extraordinary views. Once again we missed fog and cloud and saw the mountains of Rio.

When the ship leaves port the band plays on the rear deck and passengers come to watch the sail-away. As the Zen monk said, I follow the usual customs, so I watched also. Lots of extraordinary photos. If I can get it uploaded I’ll show you the flock of birds around Christ’s statue at sunset.