Day 104: Yangon, Myanmar … Our Last Day

Thursday, 20 April 2017
At Sea — Gulf of Mattaban

Stats @ Ship’s Time 9:00p (MMT) … UTC 2:30p (20 April)
Temp: 83.5F (28.6C)
Position:16.13.46N / 96.18.34E

I hate having my life disrupted by routine.
~ Caskie Stinnett ~

For a few minutes this morning I regretted not getting off the ship to do some more sightseeing in Myanmar.  The USD $60 price from One Stop Myanmar — only USD $40 after the driver pays the port fee — was certainly very reasonable.  But the places we would have visited would have been the same places the O tours visited today … thus they would have been crowded.  We were not in the mood to make the long drive into Yangon either.  Besides, just because we’re on an extended trip doesn’t mean that life’s daily routines are suspended entirely.  So, in the end, I was glad we stayed on the ship.  I didn’t get any writing done, but at least I cleaned up all my paperwork and got caught up with all kinds of minutia, including the bookkeeping that has been piling up.

The O tours were all half-day tours.  By around 1:00p, everyone was back on the ship.  The internet, which was slow all day, crawled even worse.  I managed to get the change form for the Cape Town-Singapore cruise we switched to for next winter emailed to my travel agent, but there was not even a semblance of hope to research flights.  I’m afraid that is going to have to wait until we get home … or maybe if we have a slow day in a future port where we are on our own we can find high speed internet like we did at Hạ Long Bay.

So yes, now you know that we won’t be doing the China-Japan cruise as planned for next March.  Our Chinese friends convinced us that late fall is a better time to visit China to do a land tour.  Instead, we will be doing the 35-day segment of next year’s RTW cruise, with time on land before and after.  The beauty of the change is that we will finally make it back to Africa … we’ve been wanting to do so since our photo safari in Botswana in 2004.  This time, though, we will focus on South Africa before embarking Insignia in Cape Town.  Much of the itinerary on this cruise will be to ports we have not been to yet, but a few — such as Myanmar and Singapore will be repeats.  It’s the repeat of Myanmar that actually made it easy for us to decide to stay aboard the ship today.

Oceania’s Bagan and Mandalay overnight tours must have made it back on time as Insignia slipped her mooring lines at 6:00p.  The crew on the barge next to the cargo vessel behind us, as well as some of the locals on shore, waved as the ship slowly made its way towards the open sea.  Such nice people … and truly welcoming to tourists.

We enjoyed our visit to Myanmar, but are looking forward to our three days at sea crossing the Bay of Bengal.  That’s up next.

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