WiFi outage announcement…Covid on the ship…Greatly improved dinner!…

My NY strip steak was cooked perfectly rare and was flavorful.

Two important notices today:

  1. We could not upload a new post for the past few days due to a WiFi outage on the ship. This morning it was working again.
  2. The automatic email messages may not work, and due to the poor WiFi connection, there is no way I can focus on this while cruising. We may not be able to work on this until we return to South Africa after May 25th. In the interim, to see the new daily post, please set a bookmark for: www.worldwidewaftage.com and click on it daily. Once I complete and upload each new day’s post, it will be there.

    My generous portion of shrimp cocktail minus the sauce.

After Tom checked out the various posts on Cruisecritic.com, he noticed that a passenger on this cruise wrote there was one case of a passenger with Covid on the ship. Also, the pastry chef and his sous chefs all have COVID and are in isolation.

At this point, there’s been no mention if it’s Omicron or another variant. Nor have we heard anything about Covid during the Captain’s daily announcements. We can only wait and see what happens and continue to exercise caution to our ability.

Delicious salad with cheese.

I was enthused to post new food photos since the dining room manager, and the chef promised to improve the quality of my meals. They have done so with considerable aplomb. The past three nights since my conversations with them, they have taken it up themselves to ensure I have consistently good hot, fresh, well-seasoned, and well-prepared entrees suitable for my way of eating.

My steak was indeed prepared rare three nights ago, and the last two night’s grilled seafood platters atop a bed of lightly buttered cooked cabbage were delightful, so much so that I ordered the same meal for three consecutive nights.

Last night was a dress-up night, but I didn’t wear any of my new dresses. I’ve decided to “save them” for Queen Mary 2 when every night is dressed up to some degree. Tom did the same, avoiding wearing his new suit and shirts until the upcoming Queen Mary 2 cruise.

My delectable seafood dinner the past two nights.

Have we been having a good time? Absolutely! Not only are we enjoying every moment together, but we have also met so many people it’s hard to keep track of who’s who. I am slightly better at remembering names than Tom but still struggle to recall the names of everyone we meet.

It’s embarrassing to forget the names of the many lovely passengers we’ve met, and we feel bad when we see them later and are at a loss to recall their names. But, one group stands out in our minds: Ceara, Laura, and Jos, adult daughter and husband, and wife. They are lovely people whose company we’ve thoroughly on many occasions.

Tom’s Bananas Foster wasn’t prepared properly because the pastry staff is in quarantine due to Covid.

A few nights ago, we met two more great couples, all from Boston, near where I was born. The “boys” sat in a huddle and chatted while us three “girls” did the same. We didn’t head up to our cabin until 1:00 am.

The past few mornings, we slept in, missing breakfast entirely. Instead, we went to the buffet for lunch, but neither of us enjoyed the items we selected. With a one-hour-forward time change, by the time we got ready for bed the past few nights and finally dozed off, it was going on to 3:00 am, the new time.

We are scheduled to arrive in the Azores and Portugal over the next few days, hoping to get off the ship in each location, depending on weather conditions.

Be well.

Photo from one year ago today, April 13, 2021:

Another kudu with three oxpeckers on her back and neck. They often manage to photobomb our shots. See the warthog checking out the action for the photo. For more photos, please click here.

Day #126 in lockdown Mumbai, India hotel…Our new website…Streaming issues…Our worst nightmare…

A Great White Heron was standing in the water at Sunset Dam in Kruger National Park.

Note: To all of our readers visiting our site via a smartphone, please click the “View web version” tab under the word “Home” at the bottom of the page to access the web version enabling you to access all of our archives on the right side of the page. We’ll be updating our site shortly, making these extra steps unnecessary. Thank you. 

Today’s photos are from July 27, 2018, while in Marloth Park, South Africa. See the link here for more photos.
The process of re-doing our website and moving over almost 3000 historical posts from the archives is taking longer than we’d expected. But, we aren’t concerned when the developer stays in close touch with us, sending the links as it progresses day by day. We’ve been happy with their service, a company, coincidentally here in India.
This was our friend Tusker. He is the sweetest guy who comes to visit several times each day, particularly after 1600 hours (4:00 pm). He was so comfortable he often stayed for a short nap.

As many of us are aware, India, in general, has some of the most skilled tech people in the world, and we were thrilled to use the services of a well-known company with rave reviews. We’ll post more information on this company once we go “live” with our new site sometime in the next 45 days. 

I’d anticipated this process would be stressful, but our skilled and calm developer has made it as painless as possible for me, quickly responding to changes and inquiries.

We never tired of seeing these wondrous animals, both in Kruger and in Marloth Parks.

We’ll give you, our readers, a heads-up when we know it will go live. The link will be the same, and thus, there will be nothing for you to do but to continue reading and commenting as you have over the past eight-plus years.

On another note, we’ve been grateful for the excellent WiFi connection we’ve had during the past 126 days in this hotel. But, as more and more businesses re-open in India, although cases of COVID-19 continue to rise rapidly, we’ve noticed a slowing of the connection from time to time.

Zebras were crossing the road in Kruger.

Don’t get me wrong. We appreciate being in this beautiful hotel with great food and service, especially with the conscientious efforts to protect all of us from the virus, requiring their staff to live on the premises, unable to leave for months at a time until they are given a two-week break.

(When a staff member returns from their time off, we are only served by those that have been in residence for at least two full weeks, continuing to ensure our safety).

A bloat of hippos at Sunset Dam in Kruger.

Our worst nightmares here would be (beyond exposure to COVID-19 or other health issues) that WiFi service would go down in Mumbai or the hotel. At that point, we’d lose our ability to continue to post, and equally important is our ability to stream shows from the internet to our HDMI cable to the flat-screen TV.

Last night, we had a taste of what that would be like when, for some odd reason, we were unable to stream on Netflix for the first time since we arrived on March 24, 2020.

OK, folks, here’s a new one for you…This is a “bask” of crocodiles!

We were watching season four of the beautiful historical series Reign when the signal dropped repeatedly. I started and re-started my laptop to no avail. For two hours, we continued to attempt to get the show to resume. 

Finally, the later it got, the signal improved. We have to consider the reality that as more time passes, the hotel has more and more guests, mostly business travelers, since this hotel is primarily geared toward business travelers.

As winter continues, there’s less and less green vegetation for the wildlife in Kruger and Marloth Park.

Some domestic flights have resumed in India, although as we’ve mentioned, international travel remains at a standstill. The added domestic travelers have certainly impacted the quality of the WiFi in the evening hours when most will be online. 

Hopefully, we won’t experience this issue in the future.

Stay safe and healthy!

Photo from one year ago today, July 27, 2019:

A six-year-old photo was posted last year when our photo inventory for Ireland was lacking. Busy preparations surrounded the church in Campanario as workers rushed to get the decorations in place for Saturday’s religious festivities. For the post one year ago, please click here.

Mission accomplished…Tip for travelers to Australia…Solutions for us…

This parasitic plant appears to be a face looking up to the sky with leaves in its mouth and throat.

We apologize if today’s topic doesn’t apply to you. However, in today’s world, this subject is important for both business travelers and tourists, technology while on the move.

Three years ago, we found information on technology in other countries other than our familiar USA often confusing and difficult to understand. Each country has its own means of providing Internet service to its residents and the concept of SIM cards is unheard of in some countries.

Although we’ve covered this topic in the past, with our influx of new readers who may not have had the time to go back and read our prior 1104 posts (duh), we share this update today particularly as it applies to a non-resident traveler to Australia which includes Tasmania and a few other Australian islands.

It’s winter here now with fewer flowers blooming than in spring but we love seeing flowers during the off-season.

A bit of review: When we booked the house in Trinity Beach, it listed free wireless Internet access is included in the rent. For the average user, this may have been ideal.

The signal is available in this property via a router in the owner’s house above us, making the distance alone an issue by providing a strong signal in this large property. This is not unlike a router in your own home not providing a strong signal on another level such as a basement or upper level.

Also, we are sharing that router connection with the owners who are often home and online at the same time as us. This creates a very difficult scenario. If we were typical tourists only needing access to email and occasionally searching for restaurants and  “things to do” this wouldn’t be an issue.

But for us, not only posting each day with the inclusion of many data hogging photos and our intensive searching for future travels causes us to run into considerable issues with the slow and inconsistent signal especially if we’re both online on the house’s router at the same time.

Shooting up at our vacation property from our return walk. The owners live in the huge upper level while we live on the ground level smaller though the ideal property.

Within a few hours of our arrival, we realized we had a serious situation that would prevent me from being able to upload our daily posts. As discussed in an earlier post, we had no choice but to head to a local phone store, Telstra, to search for a solution, hopefully using our own global hot spots by inserting one of their SIM cards

Simply put, a SIM card is a small card inserted into phones, routers, and various wifi devices that picks up the local wifi signal for which the user is charged for the data via a prepaid or billed service. Please click the link for a more detailed description.

As it turned out, Australia is locked up with cell phone contracts. There’s no such thing as the use of a global SIM card in this country. Either purchase a prepaid SIM card or a two-year contract from one of the local providers or eels one is out of luck. 

Essentially, Telstra allowed us to borrow a hot spot without a rental fee for the device while we paid for the data which we’ve reloaded on several occasions online through their website. As it turned out, I exclusively use the hot spot while Tom uses the wifi in the house. The cost of data for my use is a cost of USD $102.26, AUD $140 for 16 gigabytes of data.

Pretty bougainvillea we found on a walk in the neighborhood.

I use all 16 of these gigs every three weeks, renewing for an additional 16 gig once it gets down below 2 gigs.  Then, I go online to Telstra’s website: m.telstra.com to easily renew. Tom could easily log on to the hot spot but his data use is calculated exponentially.

It took me a few times to figure out that the online data reload won’t accept a credit card issued outside of Australia. As a result, its been necessary to pay using PayPal, a secure service we frequently use for online payments. 

Once we activated our first SIM card in Australia, I’ve never experienced an outage, difficulty getting online, or an issue uploading posts or photos. Simply put, it works well.

However, before we leave Trinity Beach we’ll return the loaned hot spot while we’ll continue to travel in and out of Australia over the next 21 months. How will we handle our wifi needs when our own hot spots won’t work here and we’ll be at hotels, on ships, and at ports of call during which we’ll be required to pay even higher fees for data for often a poor signal?

Pink bougainvillea was in abundance in Kenya during the heat of the late fall season.

The only logical solution was to purchase our own Australian hot spot (they don’t carry unlocked universal/global hot spots) and reload the SIM card as required. Ultimately the cost of the device itself was the biggest issue.  We already knew the cost of the data.

Upon visiting the Telstra store in the Smithfield Mall yesterday, spending considerable time with a rep encouraging us to take a two-year contract, we ending up deciding on the most economical decision…no contract, buy a device, load data as needed.

With a few devices available we opted for the following device as shown in this photo which includes 3 gigs of complementary data which should see me through a few days and must be used within 28 days from purchase.  Once that data is used we’ll reload the SIM card. Once reloaded, the new data expires in a year.

Our new Australia only hot spot purchased yesterday at Telstra.

Thus,  we’ll be able to be online when we go to the airport in Cairns, when we stay at the hotel in Sydney before flying to Fiji when we wait at the airport in Sydney before boarding the plane to Fiji. Once we arrive in Fiji, the device will be dormant during our entire stay, fired up again once we’re back in Australia in January for a cruise. 

Once we arrive in New Zealand later in January, again, we’ll figure out a solution that will work for us. With Fiji upcoming, we’ll do the same. There’s no country we’ve visited in the world where the wifi was an easy option considering our use, even when we were in Hawaii where we couldn’t purchase an affordable SIM card to use in our global hot spots. Luckily, the houses in Hawaii provided strong signals.

We wondered what was beyond this barn in the neighborhood.

The cost of the hot spot was AUD $99, USD $72.33.  It pays for us. You may think that as a traveler to Australia for a two-week vacation/holiday that this won’t pay for you. However, as a traveler requiring considerable data use or those choosing to avoid paying high wifi per day fees at a hotel with a poor signal, this may work for you, especially for the business traveler. 

Unfortunately, once we permanently leave Australia, we’ll have no use for the hot spot. We look at it this way…we could go out to dinner and spend the AUD $99 without batting an eyelash.  At least for now, this is the purchase that keeps giving.

Many travelers don’t realize that using wifi on their phones results in “roaming fees” that may result in $1000’s in surprise fees on their cell phone bill when returning home. 

We’d seen these droopy topped agave plants in Hawaii, also found in Australia.

We’ve heard from others about their lack of understanding in this area only resulted in a later discovery that each time they called, sent an email or uploaded photos or, logged into Facebook while on a cruise or traveling, they incurred huge roaming fees when outside their home country.

It’s an ongoing process as we move from country to country. Technology is not universal and may never be so.  In the interim, we do our best to figure out the most logical, user-friendly, and economical solutions to best serve our needs.

                                              Photo from one year ago today, August 12, 2014:

There we were at Le Louvre. It was hard for us to believe we were actually there. For more details and photos, please click here.