Day 7: Sunday April 22 2007, Ponta Delgada
Noon position: 34 degrees 44.186' N latitude, 025 degrees 39.509' W longitude (docked at Ponta Delgada, Azores)
Bob: As the Brilliance approached Ponta Delgada in the Azores, we kept to our morning routine in having a light breakfast followed by a two mile walk, Fun and Fitness exercises beside the pool, but then we broke off to take pictures of the ship entering port and docking. We were not cleared to disembark for a while, possibly because the medically ill passenger was being taken off and transferred into the city. The ship was flying a yellow flag as it entered port, which was taken down by the early afternoon. In any case, that gave us time to participate in another dance class where Ken and Marion reviewed the Cha Cha and Rumba. (I needed all the practice I could get!) |
Monika: How do we know that it is Sunday? Well the folks at R.C. decided to help confused travelers and old fogies by having interchangeable panels in every elevator that proclaim the day of the week. So when you take the elevator to go to breakfast you look down and Bingo you know the day of the week. Isn't it often true that someone's misfortune is another person's luck. We had a medical emergency on board so for the last three days the Captain went "Full Speed Ahead". Thus, instead of arriving in the Azores on Monday morning, they loomed ahead of us in the fog during our 9 a.m. walk-a-mile. After our Fun Fitness we were glued to the railing and snapping pictures as we sailed up to the coast of San Miguel Island and into Ponta Delgada harbor around 11 a.m. on Sunday. This gave us the opportunity of walking in Ponta Delgada and getting to know the town. Since we had booked an excursion for the next day, we would not have had this opportunity if the poor guy had not gotten sick. |
Bob: Even after we were permitted to disembark, we elected to have a relaxing meal in the Windjammer Cafe before essaying to walk to town, partly because I wasn't sure what would be open in town on Sunday, but possibly also because lunch on the Brilliance was gratis. We collected our cameras, GPS, binoculars, tripod, and accoutrements and finally disembarked around 1:00. The Brilliance had moored alongside a pier that was a bit over a mile long, so the walk into town was not trivial. As we reached the end of the pier we saw a small fleet of fishing boats, which looked sturdy enough but dreadfully small to be sailing in the wide-open waters of the Atlantic Ocean. An old fort loomed up over the harbor at the end of the pier. It had been converted into a maritime museum that I would dearly loved to have visited, but it was closed on both Sundays and Mondays so I was fresh out of luck. |
Monika: We got off the ship around 1 p.m. and disdained to spend $4 apiece for a shuttle ride of 1 mile to the end of the pier. After all, we are Volksmarchers, we walk! At the end of the pier, we found a picturesque old fort and across from it a small plaza surrounded by black and white buildings with a small carousel in the plaza. |
Bob: Still, the city of Ponta Delgada was quite interesting. Right off the bat we noticed that all the sidewalks in the old quarter consisted of black and white tiles laid in various patterns. The black tiles may have been basalt stones that would be naturally black, but the white tiles definitely appeared to be glazed. The patterns ranged from large-scale swirls and stripes to small-scale designs such as triangles, circles, shells, or ship's wheels out by the yacht club. The sidewalks certainly had taken a lot of time and effort to construct and tended to unify the visual appearance of the city. The architecture of Ponta Delgada ranged from the 17th and 18th buildings in the old quarter near the waterfront to completely modern buildings wherever the city rose above that area on the surrounding hillsides. The architecture in the old quarter reminded me of the French quarter in New Orleans except that the buildings were generally larger and many of them were being used commercially rather than being private residences as in New Orleans. Still, the graceful iron work on the balconies and the tiled roofs created a charming, old-world atmosphere. |
Monika: Finally my new camera was getting a workout! We walked along the streets of the old town and admired the sidewalks with inlaid white and black designs and the black and white architecture. |
Bob: Having already exercised that morning (possibly a mistake), we became really tired after an hour or two of walking in the city. Hoping for an energy boost, we stopped off at an open grocery store and bought a 6-pack of raisin scones and a 1.5 liter bottle of Sprite (for a total cost of 2.99 Euro). Then we wandered down to the water's edge and sat near the seawall for a snack and a rest so that we had the energy to walk back to the ship. Our perch gave us a nice view of the Brilliance moored across the harbor. To get the shortest possible path back to the ship, we hugged the edge of the harbor on our return, stopping off to purchase a map of the Azores (9 Euro) and a couple of bottles of beer for Monika. As she said, the beer there cost 50 cents per bottle whereas in the ship's dining room it was about $4.00 a bottle, a rather large difference in price! As we curled back past the end of the pier we found a outdoor vendor selling cheap postcards (3 for 1 Euro) and nice embroidered T-shirts that were, wonder of wonders, actually made in Portugal. We picked up 3 postcards and a red T-shirt for Monika and a dark blue one for me and continued down the long pier to the ship. Monika smuggled in the beer successfully while I took some pictures of the painted messages left by ships that had visited the harbor in the past. In one sense they were just graffiti on a seawall, but in another sense it was an interesting chronicle. I found messages from several sailing ships, warships, and merchant marine vessels from a variety of nations, and many of them were rather well done. |
Monika: We found only a few shops open. One was something like old Huey's in Urbana where you could find anything. Another was a grocery store where we bought 6 scones and a 1.5 liter bottle of Sprite, which we consumed sitting on the seawall looking at our ship across the harbor. This gave us enough energy to slowly walk back. At another grocery store I procured a bottle of beer which I intended to smuggle on board. The cruise line does not want you to bring a 50 cent bottle of beer on board; they rather sell you one for $4. When we reached the plaza that had been empty 3 hours earlier, we found a large number of young people in black cloaks with proud parents walking into one of the buildings on the plaza. We found out that it was graduation day at the university. Well we walked on, stopped at a vendor for T-shirts and postcards and finally got back to the ship, where my bottle hidden between T-shirts made it safely through security. |
Bob: Back in the cabin we rested for a good long while before summoning up the energy to have dinner in the Windjammer buffet while Fernando unobtrusively made up our cabin for the night. Dinner revived us sufficiently well that we went to see the evening show in the Pacifica Theater, which turned out to be a 2-act variety show. The first act was a pair of dancer-acrobats who presented the age old "boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets another girl" story with dramatic music set to a choreographed series of ballet sequences. However, the sequences were punctuated by extraordinarily acrobatic lifts, flips, and twists so that the overall effect was very modern rather than classical ballet. The second act was a real contrast, completely humorous rather than dramatic. A young male and female mime enacted a series of skits. Although they never spoke except in one skit where she sang in a squeaky little girl voice, each skit had a distinct sound track. One skit, for example, used the James Bond 007 theme music while another one involving juggling had circus-style music. Each skit spoofed some kind of well-known entertainment in a satirical, cabaret-like manner that we found quite hilarious but which seemed to pass by much of the audience. A skit with airport sound effects, for example, very effectively satirized the safety briefing given by stewardesses at the beginning of each flight. It was a fun way to end the evening, and after we limped back down to our room I brought the journal up to date while Monika read a bit before we finally went to bed. |
Monika: We were glad to take off our shoes and put up our feet and didn't stir until hunger pangs forced us to look for sustenance. Being up already, we decided to watch the evening performance of 2 two-person acts, one an acrobatic performance and another a theatrical farce of a variety show...hard to describe but enormously funny if you had the right sense of humor. |
| Prolog | Map of Cruise | Map of Spain | Epilog |
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