February 8th - Itinerary Change

Our ship was supposed to call at Phuket, Thailand tomorrow, Penang, Malaysia on Monday and then Kuala Lumpur on Tuesday.  All those ports are cancelled now because of the coronavirus. We will be sailing directly to Singapore and be there on the 12^th and 13^th as previously scheduled. Our guess is that Singapore, being as strict as they are, probably didn’t want us to dock there if we were coming from Thailand and Malaysia.  That’s just a guess but probably a good one.  The nav channel shows the hard right we took.

We noticed this afternoon that our speed had been reduced and wondered why.  We’ve been doing 14-15 knots and then went down to 9 knots.  It’s amazing how you can feel the difference in speed after you’ve been on the ship for a while.  We didn’t think for a minute that all three ports would be cancelled.  What a shame.  Now we have to tread water for three days before getting to Singapore.

Although I had no great feeling about tomorrow’s port of Phuket, it would get us into Thailand…another new country for our list.  We’ve had a series of lectures about Penang and they’ve really piqued my interest in that stop so I’m sorry to see that one go.  The final stop of Kuala Lumpur we’ve been to before but we were going to visit some temples built into caves that looked really interesting.  We’re sorry to be missing that one too.

So now we have three MORE sea days to look forward to…some of you might know that I’m not that crazy about sea days. 

After spending those two days in Singapore on the 12^th and 13^th, we are scheduled to visit two ports in Vietnam, or will we?  That will be the question because we are scheduled to return to Singapore on the 18^th and 19^th (as you may remember this was replacing our two days in Hong Kong).  The Captain said we should keep in mind there may be further changes so we’ll see.  We’ve been to the two ports in Vietnam before but were looking forward to seeing different things this time…also there’s the shopping to be had in Vietnam.  Very good prices using US dollars so very convenient. 

I said in yesterday’s entry that only one cruise ship was being held in quarantine and I believe that is technically true but more ships are being affected in various ways.  We hear there is a Holland America ship looking to dock somewhere in Asia and no one is letting them.  I think we’ll all be happy when our time in Asian waters is over.  It’s too bad because we’ve always enjoyed the Asian ports we’ve visited. 

So, stay tuned for further developments!