Fletcher

18 - Smuts, soggy bottom with goose I’m sorry. I have been neglecting you. Last Sunday we pulled out of Dakar, having lost many passengers and having gained a few more than we lost. We now have something less than 170 souls aboard. The Wind doesn’t feel crowded at all. It does feel as old as many of us who sail in her. Our favourite perch is the open back deck, behind the Panorama Lounge. Dakar was a dusty place, that’s for sure, but the Wind started to throw out sooty smutty things from its chimneys which covered the blue seating. It was largely invisible and you don’t expect it from a ‘five star luxury line’ but when we got up we noticed our shorts and shirts had these black marks. Our butler got them laundered and we got them dirty all over again. Mrs Fletcher pointed this out to the Hotel Director and now, after some nudging, the upholstery is being properly cleaned. Leaving fewer places to sit. And this isn’t all. They power-jet everything at the moment so if you are not alert when you arrive at the outside terrace for breakfast you sit down in your smutty shorts and get them soaking wet. No one wants a soggy bottom. Mrs Fletcher suggested that they move the chairs before doing the power-jet thing. They looked amazed that anyone could think of that. I would be the first to slag off the food on this ship. The other night the Restaurant equalled their earlier lobster disaster with a turbot disaster. You sort of give up the will to live, or at least the will to eat, and then a minor miracle happens. Yesterday we showed up at La Terrazza for lunch and they offered us a white wine from Austria. The special of the day was roast goose. Roast goose! No one had yet asked for any so I was the first. Now, goose is a tricky thing to cook and also a tricky thing to carve correctly. I had to show them how to do it. So I got a complete leg and a slice of breast. It was utterly superb, crispy skinned, richly goosey in flavour. I said to a waiter that the classic accompaniment was apple sauce and, blow me, he went and fetched some for me. I might have said I wanted red cabbage and dumplings too, but I didn’t push my luck. The Austrian wine washed it down a treat. Oh yes, I nearly forgot, we are in the Cape Verde Islands, now officially known as Cabo Verde. Yesterday was Fogo Island and today we are at Boa Vista. Everyone is off dune bashing, wine tasting and so on. I am in the Panorama Lounge writing this blog. Indoors of course. Cabo Verde seems awfully tame compared to our time in Africa.

We were on that ship, Caledonian Sky. A wonderful visit, with extraordinary butterflies and a sort of Raiders of the Lost Ark stone staircase up to the village. One of our cameras took a dip in the sea.

Many years ago we went to a very fancy restaurant in New York called Lutece. We were staying at a hotel called the Mayfair Regent and the night we went to Lutece the restaurant in our hotel fed Woody Allen and Mia Farrow. Pity we missed them.

17 - Something fishy Senegal’s capital Dakar is a real city, with tall buildings, a huge port, proper roads, traffic police, banks, shops, hotels, a railway station. Senegal is clearly several notches above our previous stops in economic prosperity. Not that Senegal looks like the UAE or Oman. And the further you drive away from Dakar the scruffiness and borderline Saharan poverty kicks in. It becomes one long building site, with houses in various stages of construction but never completed. The shops are just shacks. Goats and cattle are herded through. Rubbish is everywhere. Horses and carts fight for space on the roads. But there are also modern cars and at the hotel where we had lunch, about 40 miles from Dakar, someone arrived wearing a Maserati Levante. You don’t drive Maseratis. You wear them. I wanted to say that the best thing I saw today was that dust-cloaked Maserati. But in fact it was a fishing village called Kayar. This is not a fishing village like Padstow in Cornwall or Staithes in Yorkshire. Or anything we have seen in the Solomon Islands or Sri Lanka. This fishing village was the Taj Mahal or the Empire State Building or the Eiffel Tower of fishing villages. It was absolutely, unarguably gobsmackingly amazing. It might have been the greatest ship’s excursion I have ever been on. Talk about immersive. Our group from the Wind drowned in the cultural and fishy overload. Thousands of boats, thousands of people, horses, and millions of dead fish on a vast sandy beach, stretching for miles. Words rather fail me on this occasion so I’m going to show you a few photos instead.

16 - World Heritage Site with fridge magnets Today we took time off from this cruise and went to an Italian island in the Med. Maybe it was French. Or it could have been Croatian in the Adriatic. Actually it was the Ile de Gorée in Senegal, West Africa, and it was a complete surprise. This place, just off the mainland and Dakar, was one of the two main centres of the slave trade. The other was Elmina in Ghana. Industrial quantities of humans were exported from here to the Americas to provide a work force where otherwise there would be none. To feed us and cloth us with the things we wanted in the 17th and 18th centuries. I went to Elmina back in the 1990s when I was asked to write a piece about UNESCO World Heritages Sites for The Sunday Times. Elmina remains one of the most unforgettable places I have ever seen. Gorée, by comparison, is really tame, yet it is also a remarkably captivating place to visit. One goes expecting a sombre memorial to slavery and discovers a vibrant little island community, full of young kids playing soccer, cats everywhere, pots filled with flowers, cafes serving French food, hawkers selling fabrics and fridge magnets, tourists arriving by the ferry load, even a white sand beach. It is utterly gorgeous. And yes, up a flower bedecked back street, there is the House of the Slaves, where untold thousands were kept prisoner and fattened up before export, but UNESCO has restored it into a bijou mansion in salmon pink. You see the open door at the back and the Atlantic Ocean, the crashing waves and the choice of a watery grave or a life pickin’ cotton in the Carolinas, where nothin’ could be finer, and then you wander back to the real world and this Disneyfied version of history. That’s what UNESCO does. Back on board the Silver Wind, we had an issue with our cabin, namely a disturbing noise caused by a fender on the pier at Dakar. Inside our cabin it sounded like chains being shaken and tuetonic plates being rubbed together. To our intense pleasure they have moved us for the night. It’s a transit day tomorrow. Many are leaving, many more are joining, we are going on a full day’s excursion to see a pink lake which isn’t pink anymore.

15 - The Bellies of Bathurst The Silver Obesity is berthed in Banjul, formerly Bathurst, the capital of The Gambia, the country that looks like a nematode wiggling its way into the fat belly of Senegal. It’s fun to sit on the back of the Panorama Lounge gazing at the vista and the activity - the unloading of container ships, the ferries, the colourful pirogues and the beautiful birds. Hawks, egrets, pelicans and swallows swoop and soar and glide in an endless circus. It’s also fun to look along the glass windows of the lounge and watch how a stomach will emerge through the door, followed some time later by a person. This can take ten seconds, sometimes twenty and there are two extreme cases on board when it takes two minutes, especially after a buffet lunch in La Terrazza. We still have a sort of medical emergency, a few cases of gastrointestinal infections and quarantines which has meant the closure of the pool and jacuzzis and the introduction of strict hygiene measures in the feeding stations, otherwise known as restaurants. Last night most passengers went ashore for a dinner and culture show, something we avoid like the plague. It seems likely that the current stomach bug came from a buffet lunch in a dubious Sierra Leone restaurant and last night’s bash in Banjul might yet turn out to be a super-spreader event. Mrs Fletcher and I have a cast-iron rule of never, ever, eating at risky venues. This dates back to a visit to Dera’a in Syria many decades ago and it’s a rule that has saved our souls and also our bowels. That said, we have to endure the sometimes appalling food on the ship, like last night’s ‘Grilled Maine Lobster’ in the Restaurant. The luckless crustacean wasn’t grilled, merely simmered in some liquid to render it like cotton wool and tasting of the same. It was served with two tiny underdone globes of potato, some raw julienne of carrot, precisely two uncooked green beans and half a thimble of pink sauce. It was by far the worst thing I’ve been served on this ship and, believe me, there is quite a lot of competition. Our Gambian excursion today was a two-hour boat ride up the creek which was pleasant, overly protracted and not nearly as bird rich as we were expecting, though those avians which were around - like spoonbills, egrets and darters - put on a good show. Oysters grow naturally here on the mangrove stems and it was interesting to see how the Gambian women collect them from their canoes. Other than that, it was all a bit reminiscent of an afternoon spent on the Norfolk Broads. Most of us declined the appendage of an hour-long nature walk and headed back to the ship, past the unending chaos and squalor of Banjul where, it seems, all old Mercs come to die. We went straight for a G&T on the back deck where the bellies of old Bathurst belong.

I've snorkelled around the World Discoverer - every expedition ship owes its existence to that ship. It was the first of the breed. A small pedantic note @kej1 - it's Solomon Islands, not Soloman.

14 - Still in the Bijagos Yesterday and today everything I had read about and expected from the Bijagos came true. It has amazing towns, incredible mangroves and world-class beaches. Yesterday we landed on one of the most hands-down-lottery-winner-drop-dead-gorgeous tropical beaches we have ever seen. And we have seen quite a few. This was on Meio Island, uninhabited, just a string of beaches encircling jungle. Birds flew, fish jumped. People would pay thousands of dollars a night to stay in a place like this but probably no one ever will. Guinea-Bissau lacks any sort of infrastructure so we privileged few on the Silver Wind saw it, experienced it, photographed it, swam it, took it away as our secret. Don’t tell anyone. Guests went off on bird walks, nature walks, or just walks. Silversea set up a small bar on the beach and sent out waiters armed with martinis and beers and canapes and whatever you wanted. This was a scene of pure western decadence. Being here you could understand the Mullahs of Iran. Today we were moored off the island of Bubaque. Expedition leader Lea had devised a deviously complex day of action, combining visits to the township and a beach resort on the nearby island of Rubane. Our zodiacs linked the ship, the town, the resort. Lea kept insisting that her plan would work and was easy to understand. Lots of people appeared baffled. We are in zodiac group 3 but for today we were also in Group Two. People who wore shorts were in Group 2a and people in long trousers were in Group 2b which would leave before Groups 5 and 6 but only after 1215 when everyone would meet at the resort for lunch. Vegans were in Group 8. Then everyone would go on zodiac cruises in strict Group rotation and return to the ship. Got it? In sweltering heat, not helped by the Saharan dust which hangs over everything, we wandered around Bubaque’s rubbish strewn streets all the way down to the little fishing harbour. This is the Bijagos’s main community and while there were signs of business ventures, even a few little hotels, it’s basically a wreck with hardly any buildings worthy of the name. Vultures and crows competed for the garbage. There was an old Portuguese mansion which was an astonishing sight. They put on a great dance show and the kids were all over us. Despite all the poverty, this place had a lot of heart. Guinea-Bissau has been a country I’ve long hankered after. It didn’t disappoint me, even though I never met a saltwater hippo. It was also a challenging, tiring, exhilarating definition of expedition cruising. The team pulled out all the stops for us and somehow made it all happen. We are now sailing away from Guinea-Bissau to Banjul, the capital of The Gambia. We are also sailing away with an unwanted stowaway on board, namely the GI virus. Five passengers are under medical supervision, dining procedures have changed, hand sanitising is enforced and the pool and jacuzzis are being drained.

Nope, never did.

13 - In the Bijagos Archipelago Welcome back to the Silver Wind where the weather is warm and clammy and the air is hazy, filled with Saharan dust apparently. Yesterday we pulled in to the Bijagos Archipelago off the coast of Guinea-Bissau. Expedition leader Lea had told us this was an unpredictable place where the immigration officials could take hours to complete all the formalities. She also said we would have to have our passports on us at all times, even in zodiacs and when we went swimming in the sea. In the end the formalities took less than ten minutes and the passport idea was dropped. I think the officials were more interested in lunch. The Bijagos is weird, flat and featureless, culturally quite distinct from the mainland and probably a good deal less turbulent and stressful as a place to live. We went ashore at Bolama which was in fact the capital of the country during the Portuguese colonisation. The lack of fresh water convinced the Portuguese they had made a mistake so in 1941 they upped sticks for Bissau, abandoning Bolama which they had designed on a grid pattern, like a Roman colonia. The town fell into disrepair yet some 4000 humans plus goats, chickens and pigs still live here. I thought the ones we encountered were either unfriendly or just uninterested in us. Someone put their frostiness down to shyness. And that was just the goats. Nevertheless, this was a fabulous place to wander around, filled with buildings in various stages of collapse and decrepitude, most notably a huge Romanesque public building facing a square that could have been a Roman forum. In the late afternoon almost everyone went on a 90-minute zodiac tour of the surrounding mangroves. I love these zodiac trips if only to see who has had their knees replaced and who has not. To be honest the mangroves, which snaked for miles, were not exactly teeming with wildlife. In fact, with 15 or so zodiacs in the water, there were far more noisy people than birds. But it was fun and at the end the Hotel Director appeared in a zodiac laden with Prosecco and fruit skewers. Then, as everyone was exulting in the luxury of sipping a fizzy drink in a mangrove swamp, suddenly you could hear Lea on the walkie-talkies screaming “Leave now!” because the tides around these parts are treacherous, leaving mud flats in an instant. Everyone fled back to the ship except for ophiologist Greg whose was alone in a zodiac and he got stuck. I’m sure we’ll go back for him in a day or two.

@kej1 I'm pleased you have found my current Amazon/Africa blog. I must say I was rather shocked and disappointed to read your comments about third party and other excursions you need to pay extra for. That's totally unacceptable for an expedition cruise. Outside the polar regions, I don't think Seabourn fully understands or embraces the expedition ethic. Silversea and the ship we are on certainly have their faults but the expeditionary side of things is all-inclusive and often immersive.

I'm really enjoying this thread as the South Pacific is my favourite part of the world and the perfect expedition cruise location if the ship is small enough. I'm reading this aboard a Silversea expedition ship, the Wind, currently in the Bijagos Islands, Guinea-Bissau.

12 - Slavery etc Taking my lead from people like Greta Garbo, the Pope, Stanley Kubrick and the late HM The Queen, I don’t give many press interviews. But I made an exception today on Bunce Island, 20 miles up the creek from Freetown, capital of Sierra Leone. There was a young man standing in the middle of a photo I wanted to take so we came to an amicable arrangement. He would get out of my shot if I gave him an interview. The young man was a reporter from Freetown’s leading newspaper and they were covering the visit of the Silver Wind. Cruise ships - indeed any form of tourism - is a rare thing in Sierra Leone and this journalist wanted to know why I was here, how I got there, where I was going next, what the food was like on the ship, how many formal nights there were. He also wanted to know what I thought of Sierra Leone and if they are doing the right things to attract tourists. I answered every question and said I was not sure if tourism should be a priority for Sierra Leone’s government right now. They should worry about the Chinese buying up everything, about the catastrophic levels of rubbish, about abject poverty, about housing, about health, about religious indoctrination and radicalisation and about pot-holes before they start worrying about hotels equipped with Toto toilets and Gordon Ramsay restaurants. Silversea had arranged three excursions today - a city tour, a visit to a chimpanzee sanctuary and our trip to Bunce Island on which are the ruins of a British fort used in the slave trade. Apparently some 30,000 slaves were exported from here to the Americas between 1670 and 1807. This was a mere cottage industry compared to the slave castles of Ghana which exported industrial quantities and continued to be used after the slave trade was abolished and are thus in a great state of preservation. This fort on Bunce Island fell into rapid disrepair and today is hardly more than a few arthritic walls. And yet it was a splendid site to see, immensely atmospheric, vaguely reminiscent of Angkor because of the way the forest and the giant trees had smothered the ruins. We also had a wonderful guide. We loved our visit here. The trip to the island wasn’t exactly dull, either. The boat was small, battered and filthy, with two powerful outboard motors that roared and thundered us along. At one point a window flew out and we stopped every ten minutes or so to haul out bits of flotsam and plastic. We sped past Freetown’s world class shanty towns, the world’s biggest floating hospital, the Global Mercy, which seems to be permanently moored here, and also a Turkish-owned floating electric power station which goes on and off depending on Sierra Leone’s bank balance. This was an exciting trip, the best so far, and the waterway here proved to be so much more interesting than the Amazon. Right now, as I write this, we are sailing to our first stop in Guinea-Bissau which is the main reason I am on this cruise. As I eat my steak in The Grill we are sailing directly opposite Conakry, the capital city of Guinea. This is reputedly one of the most hellish, violent, poorest and corrupt countries on the face of the planet. It ranks high on my bucket list. If I had a bucket.

11 - A fishing village Today a strange spaceship called Silver Wind came out of nowhere and landed at an impoverished fishing village called Tokeh in Sierra Leone. Strange people landed on the beach in zodiacs - and I expect there was many a villager who was desperate to get into a zodiac himself in a place called Calais and head for a wet landing in a place called Dover. Our own zodiac crossing was enjoyably hairy with modest swells on either side of the operation. Silversea were based at a hotel called The Place which had laid out sun loungers, seats and proper dining tables on the vast sandy beach. There was an area for local handicrafts, a swimming pool and ten beach chalets available for Silversea guests. There was a cultural show, free-flowing drink and finger-food. As a logistical exercise it put the Moon landings to shame. On landing we were in different groups - nature, birding, cultural, bone idle. We signed up for the nature group but this village of some 4000 people didn’t have a lot of nature to show us. They did have a lot of abject, crushing poverty on a level that caught us by surprise. Our group of maybe 30 people started to wander around, led by the charismatic Greg who was being steered by various local people who were themselves monitored by armed police. We started by walking along the beach, then into the village, past the boat-building yard and on to Main Street. No one seemed to have a proper roof. It was all like a disaster zone. I find it incredible that in 2024 people are living like this. It looked like the catastrophic civil war ended only five years ago, not 25 years ago. There were chickens and cars and bikes and dust and rubbish everywhere. The heat bore down on us like a concrete roof. There were food stalls serving deep fried things and smoked fish. And there were groceries selling bread and tinned produce. One passenger asked, “Are there any more boutiques to see?” Greg said, “Boutiques? I think you’ve been on the ship too long.” Every so often we’d be adopted by a teenage boy or a young man who all had a sorry story to tell. They were orphaned, they needed to pay to go to school, they wanted to be a doctor or a lawyer, they wanted money from you. They all had that story committed to memory. Some of them were in their 20s. It was all rather sad. A few decades ago I used to breeze through these sort of places and regard it as rather exhilarating, one big photo opportunity. I started to change my mind about this sort of thing when I did a Cloud cruise to West Africa when we stopped at town on stilts called Ganvie in Benin. The hostility towards us was quite shocking. The women turned their backs on us and the men often said “GO AWAY.” The kids of course just fooled around with us because they didn’t know any better. Today wasn’t as upsetting as Ganvie but I must admit to feeling rather uncomfortable wandering around Tokeh with a camera that probably cost as much as anyone here would earn in a lifetime. Expedition Leader Lea made a point of explaining how Silversea contributes to this community by funding schools and things. That’s great and I never felt physically threatened - there was a big police presence - but I always felt queasy. Tourism should be a force for good but sometimes, despite everyone’s best intentions, I’m not sure that it is.

10 - We discover Africa It has been five whole days and a bit since we left Fortaleza and the continent of South America. Five whole days. That’s less than ten days which makes it seem a lot better than it could have been. It’s not been dull. It’s been samey. The same heat. The same overcast skies. The same routines. The same disgruntlement over the Amazon itinerary. I think Silversea can look forward to a ton of letters about that. Three days in to the voyage across the Atlantic the Captain came on the blower to tell us there had been a medical emergency involving a crew member and, as a result, the Wind would steam straight to Freetown in Sierra Leone and drop the unfortunate crew member off for medical treatment. This would not impact our itinerary at all. We’d still hit the beach at Tokeh tomorrow morning. I felt rather sorry for the expedition team who were often out on deck, chatting to each other, scanning the sea and the sky for something to engage their attention. They spent hours doing this, the miles rolled past, there was hardly anything to see except the sea. One or two birds maybe. Then yesterday there was a pod of more than 100 spinner dolphins on the port side. I was in my cabin on the starboard side and missed the excitement. Today there was a dead whale and a few freighters and container ships. This evening, at long long last, Africa came up on the horizon. There were hazy mountains, and the rather chaotic geography of Freetown, a former British colony. A woman passenger, dressed as if for a party at Mar Del Lago, looked ashore and said, “Oh my they have electricity.” I detected a note of surprise and also perhaps disappointment in her voice. The Wind sidled in and dropped anchor to await the launch which would transfer our ailing crew member to hospital. We observed all this from the back of La Terrazza. Dining on carpaccio and saltimbocca and gazing at all the twinkling lights in the bay, it was perfectly possible, with only the slightest stretch of the imagination, to think you were in Portofino. Buona notte.

9 - Never get out of the boat In Fortaleza we got ourselves a new expedition leader. Her name is Lea and she seems like a typically competent, forthright, down-to-earth Aussie. At a stretch she could morph into Lee Ermey, the drill instructor in Full Metal Jacket. Yesterday Lea gave a briefing about what we might expect from our two stops in Sierra Leone. Quite a few passengers on the Wind seem a little on the old side of elderly, a little uncertain on their pins. I’m sure some of them at the briefing wondered if we could simply turn left and head for Barbados instead of this terrifying place called Africa. Lea started off by saying the last time Silversea came to Tokeh Beach they couldn’t land. The surf was just too high. She had photos to prove it. In one picture the zodiac platform was about six feet above the water and in the next picture it was entirely submerged. The beach itself seems like a death trap. She has apparently hired some local lads to help out when the waves hit the arriving zodiacs and flip them over. She said we had to sit this way, swivel that way, and try not to drown when you are thrown into the foaming tumult. Oh, she said as an afterthought, you need to prevent your camera from getting wet. She recommended wearing swimmies. And that was only the beginning. If you survived the beach landing you were into Saving Private Ryan territory. Lea said we had to leave all valuables on the ship because the natives were lining up to rob and murder us. Someone asked if they took credit cards. There was a charming ambiguity to that question. If you were alive after all this you would enter a beach resort behind a security cordon. I had an urge to tell people there are apparently crocodiles at the far end of this beach. Lea didn’t have the nerve to mention that. Today, Wednesday, Lea gathered us for a briefing about Guinea-Bissau and the Bijagos Archipelago which is the main reason I am on this cruise. I have long wanted to go there. From Lea’s briefing, these rarely visited islands look like a total bliss-out. They do have one distinctive wildlife attraction - saltwater hippos which Lea failed to mention. They were, you might say, the elephants in the room. The skies have been disappointing in the mid-Atlantic. No sunsets. This is the best I could muster today.

8 - All At Sea There are some baffling behaviours on this cruise, mainly to do with eating patterns. I don’t mean some people are eating beef wellington and pinot noir for breakfast and Corn Flakes and tea for dinner. I mean which restaurants are busy and which restaurants are not. On all our previous Silversea cruises one of the most popular, fully-booked dining venues has been The Grill. On the Cloud last year it was often hard to get a table. We like to eat there every other day because I think the food is the best - or least worst - on the ship. We never use the hot rocks because I don’t like the smoke, the spitting fat or the wearing of bibs. We find that the chef can cook a fillet or a rib-eye to our liking and the prawns are also rather tasty. And messy - where are the finger bowls? We’ve now been on the ship for nine days and The Grill has never been remotely busy. The weather has always been tropical balmy without life-threatening insects or much rain. Last night there were only three tables taken, one of them by a woman on her own who finished her meal by 7.30pm. It was eerily empty, like a Blackpool cafe on a bleak February day. The maitre’d, from Belarus, looked a little depressed. Maybe if you are from Belarus that’s your natural look. Our favourite venue for dinner, ambience-wise, is the back deck of La Terrazza, though the food is chronically inconsistent. In various Terrazzas I have been served a mud bath called osso bucco or lasagne. La Terrazza, like The Grill, has been very busy on every Silversea ship we have been on. But not on this cruise. The other night we dined with a couple we have befriended and we were the only people there. It was like having our own private yacht. We told them we have emptied grand salons in our time. We enjoyed the privacy and the chef even managed a decent pasta dish. On stone cold plates of course. Downstairs in the Restaurant is where almost all the 150-odd passengers choose to have their dinner. No one is dressed up to the nines, merely sixes and sevens. It’s a pleasant enough room where the other night I had correctly cooked foie gras served with stewed tinned strawberries, followed by juicily pink lamb chops served with barely raw bits of broccoli, carrot and cauliflower, the unholy trinity of veg beloved of every chain pub in Britain. Have they never heard of pommes dauphinoise? And today we discovered this is perhaps the best place for lunch. Everything was unusually lovely. We bumped into the Equator at 3pm, going north. Some weird pagan ritual was held at the pool deck when ophiologist Greg smeared himself in chocolate sauce and invited passengers to lick it off. Sadly, a planned dip in 13,000 feet of water was abandoned because a giant squid was spotted roaming around, pursued by a sperm whale called Dick. Or maybe it was just too much of a swell. So the Captain turned the fire hoses on anyone who had signed up for the dip. As you can tell, on these sea days the team try desperately hard to keep us amused. So there is volleyball and ping-pong and a lot of dandy games. What ain’t we got?

7 - Fortaleza woes Fortaleza was our first time on dry land since we left Manaus last Monday. We didn’t want to go to Fortaleza which is just a huge Brazilian city with big beaches, high rise buildings, a lot of squalor and a reputation for street crime. But it was always on our itinerary as the ship needs to fill up with stuff and clear immigration formalities before we head across the Atlantic. We wanted to make the most of what little it has to offer. But before I tell you about our visit to Fortaleza here’s a little amuse bouche. We have another cruise booked, on the Dawn, later this year. Because we have been messed around quite a bit on this current cruise - not only the itinerary but our cabin as well - we thought we’d see how Silversea behaves and consider our options. At the moment I think we are about 70 percent on the side of bailing out. Anyway, we were chatting to this guy on the Future Cruise Booking desk. He wears a suit and tie and seems very keen to help. We said we already had this Dawn booking. He said he’d look it up, apply the discount, and see what else he could do. He could get us an upgrade, on board credit, all sorts of lovely stuff. And the next day we were presented with an offer which came in at about £3000 more than our existing booking. I said we’ll stick with that. He said, yes, that’s a good idea. He looked a bit crestfallen. Back to Fortaleza. That’s something I hope never to say again because we will not go back to Fortaleza. The tour today was the absolute pits. It was billed as a nature walk. So we drove for half an hour through some scruffy areas and came to a stop near a sand dune which rose up beside a four-lane highway. Some people climbed it. I asked our resident ophiologist, the charismatic Greg, why people were doing that. He said they were channelling their inner Sean Connerys. I loved that. We drove around a bit more, past many high-rise blocks which filled our local motormouth guide with pride, and came to the nature walk, a mangrove swamp right in the middle of the city. This was muddy and vaguely on the underside of whelming. We saw perhaps three birds. After half an hour we got back on the coaches and did another tour of the high-rise buildings. I should mention here that there is only one building in Fortaleza worthy of serious scrutiny and that is the theatre, as impressive in its way as the opera house in Manaus. Sadly, the theatre was not on the itinerary. Nor was a pretty beach area. Instead we were taken to a shopping mall and told to shop for 30 minutes. We declined the offer and waited until the others maxed out their credit cards on knick-nacks from China. We returned to the ship. What a waste of time this was. We knew Fortaleza would be rubbish. And it lived up to all the hype. We wouldn’t have minded so much had São Luis and Barra Grande remained on the itinerary. But Silversea nixed them. And having monitored a recent cruise with the Silver Nova, I believe that the people on that ship had a far better, far richer experience of this part of Brazil and the Amazon than we have had on this so-called expedition ship. We now have five sea days to get to Africa where I learn there is barely a 50-50 chance of making our first landfall at Tokeh Beach in Sierra Leone. Are we downhearted?

On the Wind right now. If you wear Jeans, T-shirts, flip-flops you will be overdressed.

Thanks @mklions Insects have not been an issue on board. A few mozzies and moths but nothing like the invasion you describe or the blizzards of insects we experienced on the Irrawaddy. The issue here on the Wind is the rain - torrential last night and pretty grim this morning. Hey ho.

6 - Right river, wrong ship Today was a case of nothing to see and pleased to have seen it. I’m referring to almost endless rain and to the gigantic and largely featureless Amazon delta which went on for miles and miles and hours and hours. We finally spilled out of the river and into the Atlantic by the northern passage which took us past the city of Macapa where our two river pilots jumped ship. It wasn’t meant to be like this. Today should have been a great day of sightseeing from the decks of the Wind. On the original itinerary, which we booked and paid for, we were to have sailed through the Breves Narrows which, according to some, is the highlight of any Amazon cruise. The river meanders tightly, the jungle scenery is reputedly sublime and scores of little communities line the riverbanks. Instead we got the channel used by container ships and bigger cruise ships. And most of it at night. The reason for this administrative horlicks is that the Wind now exceeds the length of 160 metres allowed by the Brazilian authorities. The Cloud would still be allowed to negotiate the Narrows as it is just under that length and so too would the Wind until they extended the rear end for the zodiac platform. The irony is not lost on me: a classic cruise ship like the original Wind is OK but an expedition ship like the converted Wind is not. How bonkers is that? I was informed by our expedition leader Iggy that the cruise was planned before the Wind was extended and it was all a bit of a surprise and of course a major disappointment to us, the paying passengers. And a humiliation for Silversea. There is another cruise ship in the area, the Hapag Lloyd vessel Hanseatic Inspiration, and that is going through the Breves Narrows as I write this blog. It also sailed past Manaus as far as Iquitos in Peru which is also something beyond the wildest dreams of the Wind. Frankly, our ship just isn’t Amazon primed. There were other losses to our Amazon and Brasilian itinerary - a lagoon filled with giant lily pads; the UNESCO World Heritage Site of Sao Luis, a ravishingly beautiful Portuguese settlement; and one of the world’s weirdest landscapes near Barra Grande. All these were dropped and to make up the time we stayed an extra day in Manaus and we have an extra day in Banjul, the capital of The Gambia. Not a good trade if you ask me. None of this makes any sense at all. We are currently sailing non-stop to the huge city of Fortaleza which isn’t expedition cruise territory but I guess we need to buy some petrol and victuals before we head out across the Atlantic. This has meant we have had virtually six ‘at sea & river’ days before Fortaleza and another five sea days lie ahead of us. What we booked was therefore not an itinerary at all. It was just a wish list. I think we all got a measly $250 per person in compensation to be spent on board. On African visas. Despite a few enjoyable hours spent wandering around Manaus and four hours in zodiacs along the river, this so-called Amazon cruise has been underwhelming and will soon be entirely forgotten. You pay a big premium for an expedition cruise. On this occasion Silversea has not gone the extra mile for us but I am hopeful they will pull out all the stops for our landings in West Africa. If you are thinking about an Amazon cruise I hope this might help you to make your choice. As far as Silversea is concerned, it’s a case of the right river, the wrong ship. I’ll be back in a few days to tell you all about our visit to Fortaleza.

5 - The river continues We continue our voyage down the Amazon to the Atlantic. Today was just like yesterday except for subtle differences - the scenery has changed, with a few distant hills, and the river is much wider, maybe five miles across. The weather veers from dry and wet and back again yet it’s always hot and humid. At about midday we spotted another cruise ship, the Hanseatic Inspiration, about which more tomorrow, and at 2pm we dropped anchor and ran zodiac trips. Two hours on a zodiac are probably enough for anyone, especially as whatever there is to see is always on the other side of the zodiac, meaning your spine and flanks get a work-out. There were tons of birds to see so if you were not into birding you should have stayed on the ship. Yesterday we had Malcolm who knew every feathered friend we saw. Today, it was someone else and she had an app called Merlin so she took a quick snap, somehow sent it to Merlin and got an instant answer back - that was a black-breasted vulture even though it was in fact a yellow-breasted woodwit. She was on safer territory when we invaded a family’s watery backyard and made smalltalk. We were happy, they seemed happy, everyone was happy, we went back to the ship. For those of you interested in food, we had dinner tonight at La Terrazza and it was delicious. That was a first for us!

4 - Amazon Immersive I thought you might like to know that we have 148 passengers on board the aging river scull Silver Wind. This makes the ship seem quite empty, a bit like a private yacht when you can sit for an hour outside the panorama lounge and not see a soul. But it always makes you wonder - why did we choose this cruise when the majority didn’t? What do they know that which what we don’t? Are we stupid or a member of an elite? Today was all about the river. That’s the Amazon for the benefit of those just joining this blog. We have previously cruised the Nile, the Mekong, the Irrawaddy, the Danube. We know a river when we see one. And the Amazon looks like a river. It drifted past beautifully this morning, sometimes quite wide, sometimes narrower, always the same landscape, flat yet utterly vast, limitless, the colour of mud, a few little communities, all of them grazing cattle, sometimes a ferry to link them, sometimes a container barge the length of a train. At 10am it was blue sky and clarity. At 1030am it was tumultuous rain and mist. At 11am it reverted. We dropped anchor mid-stream near a little village. Some of us went ashore to walk around and say hello to the locals. We decided to stay on board as it didn’t look that promising. And we were told it was muddy underfoot which wouldn’t do my Ferragamo loafers any good. We did however venture out on a zodiac cruise in the late afternoon. The first thing to strike you is the speed of the current in the river. It hurtles along, carrying fallen logs and matted weeds the size of tennis courts. But getting on to the zodiac was a breeze and within minutes we were in this narrow channel which cuts the village in half. There were a dozen of us in the zodiac and there might have been a dozen zodiacs in the channel at the same time. I’ve seen the M25 less busy than this. This would not be a quiet, rewarding nature cruise. We all made a lot of noise. The surprising thing was this did not seem to deter the resident bird population because they made a lot of noise right back. We were fortunate to have on board our zodiac Silversea’s ornithologist extraordinaire, Malcolm Turner. His knowledge and enthusiasm is infectious. People shout at him - “What’s that little red thing over there?” And he will say, “That’s a red-crested swallowtailed godpipit.” And then a second later someone will point out another blameless bird and Malcolm will christen it, “Ah, this is a blue-throated tree-pecker.” He’d get all excited by the purple-nosed, ringtailed vulture, not to to mention the incredibly rare Amazon rusted breasted thrush. I counted six species he discovered or invented in the space of an hour. I must confess to finding this zodiac tour more than a little frustrating and a major test of my neck muscles. It was fun and also painful. After two hours of a zodiac log-jam in this narrow channel I was ready to return to the ship. But our zodiac driver spent 15 minutes showing us a piranha fish caught locally and we also tracked a couple of pink dolphins as the sun went down. The golden light on the river was surpassingly beautiful. Tomorrow looks like a repeat performance.

3 - The stuff we learn The latest Royal Caribbean innovation is to restrict passengers to just one glass of wine at lunch and at dinner. I think that’s a positive step towards healthiness and well-being. The good ship Silver Wind has been alongside in Manaus for four days. We are getting to know this town like we know every wart, mole and varicose vein that erupts on our body. This morning we did a city tour and it’s amazing how much knowledge can be crammed into our heads on a four-hour tour. For instance, can you name another city in the whole wide world apart from Manaus with more than two million inhabitants that cannot be reached by road? It does seem a little isolated. We went to the opera house which is closed on Mondays but was opened for us. On stage were many young people wearing medical whites and it seemed like some sort of ceremony was in progress. We learned why the building had a dome; why many women in the audience during la belle epoque sent their evening gowns to Paris for laundering; how the design of the roof is what you see if you stand underneath the Eiffel Tower; and why the road outside was paved with rubber. We stopped at the city museum and learned about the rubber trade and about Brazil nuts as well as tapioca. We went into the mansion of a German rubber baron and learned how he and his wife lived there alone while their 50 staff lived next door. We went to the main market, designed by Gustav Eiffel but built in Glasgow and shipped to Manaus. We saw more bananas than we have ever seen before, in many varieties, and we saw huge fillets of fish, whole piranhas, and mysterious cuts of meat and offal that would send a vegetarian into an ICU. All this was pretty intense and exhausting I can tell you. And after lunch on the ship I even went back into town to take a few more snaps, including one of a festering, once majestic building down by the harbour. At 4pm the Wind finally slipped its anchor and headed east for Africa. We passed the so-called Meeting of the Waters, where the Amazon is born, shrugged it off, and got ready for dinner. Oh yes, I nearly forgot to say, that thing about wine was all made up.

2 - America Sul Last night Manaus came alive. The opera house was performing Carmina Burana, a work which is known for one section and the rest everyone skips. Many passengers already aboard the Wind attended the performance and a couple staying at our hotel also attended. They reported that the orchestra was sometimes a little Orff. The square outside, named for St Sebastian, was heaving with people with perhaps half a dozen cafes and bars all offering different music, none of which was of the Orff variety and I didn’t hear the devine Astrud G either. Noise levels were nevertheless high. It was really exciting to be there. And also at 6.30am the next morning when I did a photo safari, concentrating on the many century-old mansions which have fallen into disrepair. They were spectacularly grungy and put me in mind of Havana and also Knightsbridge - you know, all those mansions owned and abandoned by Russian oligarchs. Yesterday was our seventh landfall in South America. We have invaded it from all four points of the compass. We have seen a fair bit of it but not, as yet, the thing I most want to see which are the reduciones of Paraguay, not because I am religious but because I adore ruinas and because Paraguay is one of those wacky, off-grid countries no one ever seems to visit. Including me. I find South America a rather perplexing place, insular, other worldly, almost a separate planet unconnected to my own. South America has only the slenderest connection to the rest of the world, a deeply forested, impenetrable place called the Darien Peninsula. There is more: as an Englishman, I feel no real connection to this massive continent. England lacks the enduring historic, cultural, emotional and economic ties to South America which we have with North America, Africa, Asia and Australasia. We only managed to colonise a small portion of land - Guyana - since the Spanish and the Portuguese got there first and got all the gold and silver, damn their blood. We hardly ever get news from South America yet life goes on, lurching from crisis to crisis, just like us. When I land here and see these seething cities and these vast wildernesses I might be as well be on Mars. I am a total stranger in these parts. I find it interesting that so few people in the hospitality and tourism sector bother to speak even basic English. On the other hand, why would we bother learning Portuguese? Apparently about ten countries have it as their national language, including Guinea-Bissau, where we are going, and Sao Tome & Principe, where I have already been. But Brasil is by far the most important. This cruise on the Silver Wind promises to show us the Amazon. It is called an expedition cruise. I hope it does what it says on the tin yet I think a trip we did to a jungle lodge in Ecuadorian Amazonas will be far more memorable, authentic and immersive. It’s true that wildlife was rather lacking, apart from a few birds, a comatose caiman and an anaconda which was a sort of house pet. But the scenery was glorious, a symphony of green which we traversed every day in dug-out canoes along channels no wider than a Venetian canal. That was Amazon Prime you might say. I’m not sure this Wind trip will equal that. I think the river from Manaus will be too wide, I think there will many container ships and maybe one or two touristy villages. We’ll see. I’ve written these notes today because I don’t have much to report. We had a breakfast at the hotel, we basically lazed around, walked around the block, and then made our way to the ship and checked ourselves in. Turmoil might be the way to describe it. Tomorrow morning we have a city tour booked as we don’t fancy the pink dolphin thing which looks a bit like a circus. And the dolphins look a bit pruney which is what happens when you soak in the tub for too long.