Tasmania to Tokyo – At Sea – Day 32 can be found here.
Today’s Chronicles can be found here.
It’s our third sea day, and I’m starting to get itchy to see land again.
It’s not too bad – we did four sea days at a stretch when we were on the Cloud in October – but I’m finding that the classic ships don’t vary their routine as much as the expedition ships. Bingo is always at 4 pm, and trivia is always at 4:45 pm. It makes perfect sense, but it also takes some of the magic out of the experience.
Nor have there been any boat-building competitions, or mid-Atlantic Ridge crossings, or anything of the like. Even the one novel night – the jam session – came through more as karaoke than a true new experience. (Though I suspect our forthcoming crossing of the equator will merit a party or three.)
Anyway. La Terrazza seems to be settling down. @mchell810 had theorized that this might be due to staff change in Fremantle, and that may well be the case. Some staff are better than others, but generally we’ve been well looked after.
My wife once more attempts to have a chai tea latte made for her and – success! Some of the staff just seem to know how to make one while others don’t, so I’m not sure how that will translate into replicating the success. Yes, we could likely involve Hotel Director Ozgur in the process – but that seems like bringing an atom bomb to a chai fight. We’ll exhaust our other options first.
We head out on the walking track early in a vain attempt to beat the heat. It works well enough, though we end up retiring indoors after 30 minutes so that the kids can start their homework. This ends up being a fortuitous move, as rain soon blasts across the ship. As we’re in the Observation Library, we can only wonder how the sunbathers handle that particular surprise.
Off to Kaiseki with lunch. There are limits to how much tuna our daughter can eat in a given week due to the risk of mercury contamination, so we ask if they can do a spicy salmon roll instead – and they can!
Our daughter also wants to try the ‘surf and turf’ roll next time – with seared wagyu beef and lobster, as on the right.
Next we head to the SALT Lab for our lesson on Indonesian street food, specifically a pasty with vegetables and rice noodles served with a peanut sambal sauce. Today’s ingredients:
We start by cutting the vegetables into cubes.
Don’t judge me based on my absence of carrots
We then cook that up in the wok – along with the glass noodles – adding the garlic and peppers in near the end:
The dough gets rolled out to a 2 mm thickeness, and shapes are cut into it.
These are then stuffed and folded over like pierogies.
These then go into the oven for a while while Chanelle makes the peanut sambal sauce.
Eventually our goodies come out of the oven and we get to enjoy it with the freshly-made sauce. It has 16 chillis in it, but they are Australian chillis so they do not seem to be as powerful as their Singaporean equivalents. It’s spicy but not overwhelmingly so – and so tasty that I’ve eaten all four before I remember to take a picture.
The recipe:
With a few minutes to spare before chess / bingo / trivia, I then do a brief tromp around the ship searching for subjects for my Tiny Trivia.
(Some of you may already have seen this on Facebook – but if not, I would encourage you to weigh in.)
These are pictures of everyday objects from aboard the Silver Moon. I believe all these items can also be found on other Silversea ships, but they might look slightly different there.
Any guesses as to what they are? No need to be super-specific. (Eg. Whisky as opposed to Oban, etc.)
I’ll give some hints as needed, and otherwise will plan to post less-zoomed-in versions of the objects if there are any that no one guesses.
I then manage a couple of quick chess games with my son – winning one, and drawing in the second. Then off to bingo, which is growing increasingly bloodsport-worthy as Caroline starts to run out of her new bingo cards. She has become a victim of her own success! I give one of my cards up, as do a few others at our table. None of us win anything.
We then move on to trivia. We correctly identify the largest human body’s largest organ (the skin), the place of Napoleon’s death (Saint Helena) and the sport in which the mashie-niblick was previously used (golf). We also learn the year that the Flipper TV show was released (1964) and the total number of Rocky movies made (6). Our showing is once more good enough for second place.
My wife and I manage a quick drink on the balcony beneath unsettled skies:
Here’s hoping the weather holds for our beach trip tomorrow!
We’re getting some rollers coming in from the side, so we take a precautionary Bonine to help with the motion. Better safe than sorry.
Off to dinner! We are dining with Hotel Director Ozgur tonight, so no photos of food. He kindly gives each of the kids a miniature model of the Silver Moon that has been signed by the captain. (We will post photos once they’ve been signed by Ozgur too.)
Ozgur has some great stories to tell. He worked his way up in the cruise industry over the course of close to 30 years. He started as a dishwasher and moved on to waiter, then head of the restaurant, head of food and beverage, and then hotel manager. He’s gone all over the world, but loves visiting Alaska.
We’re also fascinated to learn that there are 87 chefs aboard the Silver Moon, and that there are something like 32,000 different items aboard – all of which need to be procured, tracked, maintained, and so on. He also tells a great story in which he meant to order 1 ton of tomatoes but 10 tons showed up instead. Oops!
Ozgur is originally from Turkey, and highly recommends that we visit the underground city of Cappadocia and the ancient library of Celsus. He has a walnut farm in Turkey and hopes to retire there one day.
It’s a fabulous meal, but it’s soon time to head off to bed – we want to make sure we’ll well rested for our first foray into Bali.