RTW 2024 Carefree Travel

Quick Post: Another sea that my geographically challenged brain has never heard of! The Andaman (or formerly Burma) Sea lies between the eastern coast of Thailand, the southern coast of Myanmar, and the Nicobar Islands to the east. It's a marginal sea, meaning it's on the edges of a large ocean—in this case, the Indian Ocean. We set sail from Phuket, Thailand, yesterday and are moving almost due west, threading between the Nicobar Islands to arrive in Colombo, Sri Lanka. The Andaman was created about 3-4 million years ago due to tectonic plate activity, and the area is still geologically active. In fact, the 2004 Boxing Day Tsunami impacted a sizeable chunk of it as the sea is relatively shallow. Some of the Nicobar Islands were shifted by as much as 100 feet, and others were split in two. There have been six major earthquakes ( > 8.4 ) in the past 250 years, the last in 2007. Hydrologists love the area as the Nicobar and the Andaman Islands funnel waters between the Indian ...

  Three of Singapore's most iconic sights are the Marina Bay Sands (MBS) resort, Gardens By The Bay (Super Trees and Cloud Dome), and the Flyer. Here's a little bit of history and some pictures of each. 1/ The Marina Bay Sands. This structure is visible from many parts of the city. Opened in 2010, it is the world's most expensive standalone casino. It possesses over 2,500 rooms, a huge 120,000 m2 convention center (I've taught and given a keynote there in the past), and a massive shopping center. The cherry on top, so to speak, is the Sands Skypark. That boat-like thing that sits atop the three towers. It's over 1100 feet long and technically has a capacity of almost 4,000 people. It's centered around a 500-foot infinity pool, offering a majestic view of Singapore - if you can beat your way through the Japanese tourists taking pictures with selfie sticks. Actually that no longer happens, the stick were banned a few years ago - there is now just a mass of humanit...

Singapore.  Crazy Rich Asians, right? You'll see many of the iconic locations in the photos below. But Singapore is way more than that. Ever since I first came here in 2011, it's been one of my absolute favourite cities in the world. I jokingly call the island city-state a benevolent dictatorship, even though it is a multi-party democracy with free and fair elections. The PAP (Peoples Action Party) has governed the country since self-government started in 1959 - and currently holds 59 out of 75 seats in parliament.  The country is a model of efficiency. For example, you can arrive at Changi Airport, deplane, and within 20 minutes, you are through customs and immigration, have your bags, and are in a taxi downtown. The subway system, known as the MRT (see left), is in my opinion, the cleanest, fastest, safest, and most efficient in the world. Crime and drugs are almost non-existent, and littering is a crime punishable by a 400 SGD fine ($300 USD). The highest tax rate is 20% an...

  Before this trip, all I knew about Krakatoa was that it was a huge volcano that blew in 1883 and was featured in the '60s action movie, "Krakatoa - East Of Java." It turns out that the movie was re-released in 1970 as "Volcano" because Krakatoa is to the WEST of Java! So - time for some research. The August 26-27, 1883 explosion made headlines worldwide as the most violent volcanic event in recent history. The eruption was equivalent to 200 megatons of TNT—about 13,000 times the nuclear yield of the Little Boy bomb that devastated Hiroshima, Japan, during World War II and four times the yield of Tsar Bomba, the most powerful nuclear device ever detonated. It ejected 6 cubic miles of rock and was heard as far away as Alice Springs, Australia. According to the official records of the Dutch East Indies Company, 165 villages and towns were destroyed. At least 36,417 people died, and many more thousands were injured, mostly from the tsunamis that followed the explo...

We spent the last two days exploring just a small part of Bali. Although it's the best known of the 17,508 Indonesian Islands - it's not even the largest. We only covered a small portion of the south-east and south-west of the island. Our general impression is that you can't even swing a cat without hitting a temple. They are everywhere! ( Note to our animal-loving readers. The cat expression refers to a swing of a cat o'nine tails - a whip used for punishment aboard British navy ships. It has nothing to do with whirling a feline in a circle! ). Bali has a long history, going back over a million years. Bali and Java, the neighboring large island, only have a small sea channel between them. Over the millennia, the two islands have been connected many times. This part of the world gave rise to Java Man - referring to our ancestors over a million years ago, and not Silicon Valley executives. Local civilization continued strong until the Dutch arrived in the early 1600s and...

  Komodo Island has an interesting history. The earliest stories (among Westerners) of a dragon-like animal existing in the region circulated widely and attracted considerable attention. However, no Westerner ever visited the island to check the story until official interest was sparked in the early 1910s by stories from Dutch sailors based on a neighbouring island about a mysterious creature. The creature was allegedly a dragon that inhabited a small island in the Lesser Sunda Islands (the main island of which is Flores).  Hearing the reports, Lieutenant Steyn van Hensbroek, an official of the Dutch Colonial Administration in Flores, planned a trip to Komodo Island to continue the search. He armed himself and landed on the island, accompanied by a team of soldiers. After a few days, Hensbroek managed to kill one of the lizards to investigate.  Realizing the significance of the dragons on Komodo Island as an endangered species, the Dutch government thankfully issued ...

Be honest, have you ever heard of Timor Leste? I certainly hadn't until I saw it on our route map a few days ago. Today, we are sailing south of some of the minor outlying Indonesian Islands on our way to Komodo National Park (famous for...), and we passed to the south of Timor Leste. It's a country—actually, the newest country recognized by the UN to be formed in the 21st century. Timor Leste is also known as East Timor, or officially the Democratic Republic of Timor-Leste. It comprises the eastern half of the island of Timor - of which the western half is administered by Indonesia - the exclave of Oecusse on the island's north-western coast and the minor islands of Atauro and Jaco.   The eastern part of the island has human inhabitants dating back almost 40,000years, although Westerners only found it some 400 years ago. It came under Portuguese influence, initially as a trading base and eventually as a settlement because of conflict with the Dutch. Effective Europe...

  Looking at a map of Australia, you will see a big indentation in the north of the country. It's like someone took a giant chomp out of a cookie. That "bite" is the Gulf Of Carpentaria - another place in the world I knew nothing about until we took this trip. Last night, we sailed past Thursday Island, which is in the extreme northeast of Australia, by Cape York. That brings us to the Torres Strait, the gap between Papua New Guinea and Australia, before we reached the Arafura Sea. We are now sailing through the Arafura at the top of the Gulf of Carpentaria. Above, you see an old Dutch area map from the 1850s. Geologists call the Gulf an Epicontinental Sea, which is a shallow sea that lies on top of a continent. The Gulf doesn't get much deeper than 200 feet and is shallower in many parts closer to the coast. The Gulf was dry land at the peak of the last ice age 18,000 years ago when the global sea level was around 350-400 feet (140m) below its present position. At th...

We spent today cruising through the Coral Sea on our way to Townsville, where we arrive at 11am tomorrow. The technical definition is that it is a marginal South Pacific sea off Australia's northeast coast. The layman's definition is that it's where the Great Barrier Reef hangs out and covers the Gold Coast and the Sunshine Coast. It is a large sea and extends over 1200 miles (2000 km) down the northeastern coast. Most of it and the corresponding coastline are part of the Australian Coral Sea Marine Park, although it does include the two major cities of Cairns and Brisbane. Geologically, the sea was formed around 50 million years ago as part of the Coral Sea Basin, when Zealandia split off from Australia (see New Zealand blog entries), and water poured into the resultant gap. The area still has some light seismic activity, with about 1-2 quakes a year along the Queensland Coast, but nothing dramatic. The sea received its name because of (surprise) the numerous coral formati...

The Tasman Sea is the body of water that separates Australia and New Zealand. We're crossing it now - which takes about 70 hours on a cruise ship. The sea was named after the Dutch explorer Abel Janszoon Tasman, who in 1642 was the first known person to cross it. Tasmania was later named after him, and he also christened Nieue Zeeland when he discovered those islands. British explorer Lieutenant James Cook later extensively navigated the Tasman Sea in the 1770s during his three voyages of exploration Geographically, the Sea is over 1400 miles wide and has an area of almost 900,000 square miles. It's defined as a marginal sea, meaning it's bounded by other seas and oceans. Although not quite as deep as the Pacific, ocean depth gets down to 19,500 feet (5900m), and its seafloor is eloquently stated to be "ooze." That depth is quite impressive when you realize that New Zealand, as part of an ancient continent called Zealandia, broke away from Australia over 80 millio...

Today, we visited Tauranga. It's a city about halfway down the eastern side of the North Island. Demographically, it's the fifth largest city in NZ at 161,000 and is growing fast. Although it's known for trade, business, and a huge harbor - it's famous for two things. First, it is a surfing and beach paradise. Together with its cousin, Maunganui, it features a massive beach used for national volleyball and lifeguard competitions. Second, it is the Kiwi capital of the country. That's kiwi, as in the fruit, not the bird or the people. So, true, we visited on a Saturday, but the beach was jammed with food trucks, commercial tents, and the tents of local surf and swim clubs. There is not a parking spot to be found. Allison described it as a high-class Jersey Shore town. The Bay of Plenty, where the town is located, was the first landing spot of the  Maori back in the late 1200s. You can understand why they settled here with a temperate climate, sheltered harbor, and ple...