Are We There Yet?

A Sick Day at Sea, an On-Time Set of Flights Home, and a Final Thanks to All My Followers

The trip is over. If you perhaps thought the last post about Málaga was a bit delayed, you were right. I thought I had an entire day at sea to pull together a few pictures and notes but, for the first time that I can recall on a trip I was seriously out of commission, starting with an all night session, face down over the toilet (TMI, I know) followed by a day of being as limp and weak as an over-cooked noodle. I’ll blame it on an off-tasting shrimp in the paella we ate but, in sad consolation, I finally went a day without overeating.

I’m better now, thank you, and we are home safely in Georgetown. As our flight from Barcelona to Austin (via Dallas) left too early in the morning to get to the airport from the ship in time, we stayed in a hotel near the Barcelona airport and took the same flight the next day. The hotel gave us a 9:30 a.m. check-in! It’s a beautiful hotel—if pricy.

The flight home was uneventful and on time. What more could you ask? The recent deep chill did some damage to our yard's plants, as we were not here to cover them. It's time to let survival of the fit prevail.

A Thank You to My Followers

So what is the “final thanks” part of this post? As I threatened/promised our last trip, it is time to phase out my blog. I have a faithful group of followers who have been with us from 2015, when Frances and I landed in London to begin our five and a half month adventure traveling throughout Europe. Many others have joined as followers since then and others have moved on. I’ll miss the communications with these readers—and friends.

We’ll not quit traveling, but there are fewer trips per year in our plans and less independent travel. I’ll still take pictures, make occasional Facebook postings, and send emails as we travel.

So…. Thanks for following our adventures. It’s been a pleasure having you travel along with us.

Frances and I have had the pleasure to visit over 115 countries and unique territories (and all 50 states to boot). I leave you with a slug of pictures taken of Frances and me over these years of travel.

The final four photos are all from our 2015 adventure. As we were in Europe so long, family had to come visit us to see us!

Málaga. It’s our last port before heading back to our starting point of Barcelona. Just as Cádiz was advertised as the entry point for tours to Seville, Málaga is advertised by Viking as the start point for excursions to Granada and Ronda. As we spent wonderful days in all these destinations back in 2015, we again defaulted to a local walking tour of the port city. Málaga was new to us.

Phoenicians, Romans, Vandals, Byzantine’s, Visigoths, Moors, etc., the usual heritage of suspects. Málaga was important enough in Punic times to mint coins. During the Reconquista, it took the Catholic Monarchs six months to starve the Moors into surrender, one of the last Andalusian strongholds to fall, in 1487. Málaga was often the scene of rebellion and resistance, especially in the 19th and 20th centuries. With a population of 600,000, it now has a service-based economy, including tourism, technology and finance.

Our excursion was partly by bus and partly on foot, all outside. We were driven to the top of the surrounding hills to start our tour.

This is not our first time in Cádiz. In 2015, on our driving trip around Europe, we made a circuitous route from Seville to Granada via Jerez and Cádiz. Jerez was virtually shut down, as it was a Sunday, and our stop in Cádiz was just long enough to climb the 173 steps of the Torre Tavira. More on that at the end of this post.

Cádiz (yes, the accent is on the first syllable) is the oldest continuously occupied city in Western Europe, founded by the Phoenicians in 1100 B.C. The modern city name is not much changed from the Phoenician Gadir. The city was important to them and to the Romans who displaced them, particularly because of Atlantic Ocean fishing, including tuna. The city was of less significance during the Moorish era, that culture being less oriented to the sea. After the Reconquista, the city regained its importance.

Our excursion into the city was a walking tour of part of the old city. Our guide’s English was clear and excellent, which, of course, made me quite happy. She exclaimed that tourism is very much the dominate industry of the old city.

The City of Palma, on the island of Mallorca, of the Balearic Islands, off the coast of Spain—an unplanned but most enjoyable stop.

We endured a relatively rough ride getting here from Sardinia, but not nearly as bad as our first night at sea nine nights ago.

The seas were calm as we entered the port of Palma de Mallorca as scheduled, or rather as rescheduled. The day was occasionally overcast, but otherwise quite pleasant

Yes, sardines are named after Sardinia. Well, probably. 

Our revised itinerary has taken us to the city of Cagliari on the island of Sardinia. I knew little about this island. It did get bombed by the British in WWII in an attempt to confuse the Italians and Germans as to where the next invasion would occur after the invasion of Sicily.

Viking did an admirable job of setting up a tour of Sardinia’s capital city, finding buses and guides for the passengers. Given the number of buses, perhaps 3/4s of the nearly 1000 of us opted for a hastily arranged excursion. Complicating the effort, I am sure, is that there was another cruise ship in town, a similarly sized one, the Silversea Muse. This is the first cruise ship other than our own we have encountered on this trip.

Our guide, a German-Sardinian (more German than Italian by accent) admitted she reluctantly accepted this assignment as she had just returned from Germany the previous day. She did a good job nevertheless although occasionally giving confusing rendezvous instructions.

The history of Sardinian is similar to that of Corsica until 1600 or so. The island avoided invasion by the Arabs but was even more subject to slaving raids by the Moors. A key difference with Corsica is that Sardinia was part of the Aragonese, then Spanish Empires for 400 years (with interludes of ownership by Savoy, Austria, the Pope, and others). The native Latin-based Sardinian language is described as a blend of Spanish and Italian. It was not until 1861 that Sardinian officially became part of Italy

With the collapse of the Roman Empire, Sardinians moved inland to the hills to avoid the Moor pirates and slavers. That is where the Castello or old town district of Cagliari is located.

Let’s move on to the photos of our tour.

I had a bout of insomnia the night before last, so my post on Ostia was a wee bit long. OK, way too long. I’ll do better with this post on our port stop in Tunis, Tunisia. I title this post Tunisia rather than its capital city of Tunis as we opted for an excursion that was on the outskirts of the town. I made a last minute change from a highlights tour of Tunis to a visit to the ruins of Carthage and to a Moorish village, Sidi Bou Said. The change also meant a change from a morning tour to an afternoon one. This was a mixed blessing. Well, more a mixed blasting—of cold, wind and rain.

There were to be two parts to our excursion. The first was a visit to several archeological sites from the Carthaginian and Roman eras. (Interesting that our Muslim guide used B.C. and A.D. and “before Christ” and “after Christ”, but not BCE and CE when quoting dates.)

First, a history reminder, at least for myself. While the Berbers were the first peoples of Tunisia (and are still here, if inland), our history lesson starts with the colonization of this area by the Phoenicians in 814 B.C. These became the Carthaginians, a major Western Mediterranean power—until the Punic Wars with the Romans, who destroyed Carthage in 146 B.C. Roman Carthage itself fell to the Vandals nearly six hundred years later but was reconquered by the Byzantine Romans a hundred years after that. The Arabs came and conquered Carthage in 697-698 A.D. The Arabs did their best to destroy anything Roman. The Ottomans took Tunisia in 1574 and the French made it a colony in 1881. Tunisia gained independence in 1956. I’ll leave out the parts about Barbary pirates and the like. Did you follow all this?

All this is to say that, unlike in Europe where Rome’s historical presence is well highlighted, only recently have the North African countries attempted any serious excavation and advertising of their pre-Arab history. And there are only traces of the once important Carthaginian empire. (Having said this, Tunisia is well ahead of civil war ridden Libya and autocratic Algeria in researching and beginning to preserve what’s left of its ancient past.)

We’ve finally made it to Malta, a Mediterranean island republic (actually three inhabited islands) 50 miles south of Sicily and 190 miles from Africa. It’s the 10th smallest country in the world (and one of the most densely populated), but in terms of its history, its central location in the Mediterranean Sea has put it at a bayonet’s point of much military history since the the Punic Wars. Two heroic defenses stand out, but I’ll get to these later.

The night before our arrival at the Port of Valletta, Malta’s capital, we enjoyed our first meal in “The Chef’s Table”, one of the two by-reservation restaurants on board. It has a fixed menu, this time five courses of Asian fusion cuisine. We were quite pleased with it. We have one more reservation here before the end of the cruise. Overall, we’ve been pleased with the food on the Vesta, even a bit more than we enjoyed on the Yi Dun along the China coast. Ask me again in a week. We’ll see if the fruit stays fresh.

Malta is an oddity in its culture and language. The original root of the people is Phoenician-Carthagenian. With the defeat of Carthage in the Punic Wars, Malta was part of the Roman Empire (including the Byzantine Empire) until the islands fell to the Arabs in 870 A.D. Most Christians are aware that St. Paul was shipwrecked on the island on his way to Rome and, thanks to miracles attributed to him, a great number of the islanders became and remained Christians through the present. The island has 365 Catholic Churches or, as both our guides declared, a church for every day of the year. The Arabs controlled Malta for 220 years, before being defeated by the Normans. Yes, the same Normans that conquered Britain. The Norsemen got around. 

Malta became a tradable pawn in European politics until awarded to the Knights of St. John/Knights Hospitaller/Knights of Malta. (There is a much longer formal name). Once an order of medical doctors established to assist pilgrims on their way to Jerusalem, the order was forced to militarize when access to Jerusalem was closed by the Muslims. The order relocated from the Holy Land to Rhodes after Acre fell. In 1527, Suleiman the Magnificant, Sultan of the Ottoman Empire, assaulted the 7,000 knights on Rhodes with a force of over 100,000. It took six months to subdue the knights. Due to their heroic defense, Suleiman allowed them 12 days to abandon Rhodes. Big mistake. The order eventually relocated to Malta, where they fortified that island. In 1565, the Ottomans laid siege to Malta with 120 ships and 40,000 to 50,000 troops. The six or seven hundred knights, augmented by 7,000 or so other defenders including Maltese militia, held out long enough for the siege to be called off. The significance of this is that the Mediterranean did not become a singularly Ottoman-controlled sea, which undoubtedly would have changed the history of much of Europe.

What is curious to me is that while the Arabs controlled Malta for but 220 years, the language of Malta changed completely to an Arabic-based Semitic one (one of only three: Arabic, Hebrew and Maltese). Yet the island remained predominantly Catholic. This is just the opposite of, for instance, Albania, where the language remained Slavic while the religion became Muslim. Enough random thoughts. Back to our tours. 

Our stay in Malta was two days. I do wish more of the stops on cruises were multiple days. Two days is hardly an in-depth visit but it’s an improvement on the one-tour-and-done scenario typical of most land and sea tours. We signed up for one tour each day. There were a dozen tours offered by Viking. There was even a tour that featured a visit to 7,000 year old Neolithic/Megalithic excavations, including temples older than Stonehenge. I wish we could have participated in several more than we did, but we were happy with those we selected.

Day one was a tour featuring “Malta at War”.  It’s time to let my photos tell the story.

As I mentioned in the finish to my last post, we opted for a tour of Ostia Antica, the first and for many centuries primary port for the city of ancient Rome and located on the Tiber River at its mouth. (Ostia means river mouth, for the trivia driven.) In fact, Ostia may have been Rome’s first “colona”, that is, their colony city built (as opposed to conquered) outside Rome. Ostia was prosperous for much of the time after its establishment, but, thanks to silting and flooding, always problematic as a port. Claudius and Trajan established a second port at Portus and Trajan later built what is now Rome’s primary port, Civitavecchia, soon after. Still, the city remained well populated until the end of the Western Roman Empire. The sea is over three miles away now and, thanks to a flood in 1557 that changed the course of the Tiber, Ostia is no longer on the river. The flooding had one benefit, at least to modern archeologists (and tourists), in that much of the city was buried and hence preserved .

Oh Where Has All the Marble Gone? The ruins of Ostia Antica are almost all of brick. Being a once prosperous Roman city, many of its structures, from temples to homes, had marble facades, columns, and the like. The marble was fine Carrara marble. During the late Middle Ages and Renaissance, Ostia became a de facto quarry for obtaining marble. One recipient: the leaning Tower of Pisa.

Our tour group was small, only fourteen people, which was quite nice. The consensus was that the tour guide was excellent but she was a very’a Italian’a accented’a guid’a who I struggled to understand. Nevertheless, it was an excellent tour overall. The day was sunny and warm, a beautiful day for a guided stroll through a fascinating site.

What did I know about Corsica, beyond its heritage as the birthplace of Napoleon Bonaparte? In truth, very little. I know a bit more now. Its history is a history of southern Europe. First colonized by the Greeks (glossing over the prehistoric peoples that undoubtedly proceeded them), over the last 2500 years Corsica has been occupied by, invaded by, raided by, and ruled by the Greeks, Etruscans, Carthaginians, the Greeks again (this time from Sicily), the Romans, the Vandals, the Goths, the Byzantines, the Lombards, the Moors, the Pisans, the Luccans, the Aragonites, the Genoese, and finally the French, ignoring the incursion of the Fascist Italians and then the Germans during WW2. Corsica even had a short-lived republic from 1755 to 1769, a year notable both as the year France took possession of the island and the year Napoleon was born. One result is that the Corsicans retain a certain antipathy to foreign domination. The sometimes violent independence movement is quiet now but not gone.

Corsica is now a major tourist destination and retirement destination. About 5,000 additional pensioners each year retire to Corsica from France, increasing its population to 355,000 from little more than half that only a few decades ago.

Still, it is its heritage as the birthplace of Napoleon Bonaparte that makes Corsica famous and which the island embraces. The “Little Corsican” was the focus of much of our tour. (Actually, he was of average height for his time.) Our tour guide was a German-born Corsican who once despised Napoleon for his excesses but now has a more nuanced view.

Goodbye to Barcelona and hello to Marseilles. Oops, not so fast. The ship is not going to make it to Marseilles, but more on that later in this post.

I left you all half way to our hotel late Sunday afternoon. Yes, it did rain, but with our umbrella and rain jackets, we did fine. Still, we were tired enough and satisfied enough that we did not seek out a restaurant for our last evening in town. A couple of tapa dishes and glasses of Spanish wine in the hotel bar were quite adequate for our needs. 

We got to the Viking Vesta via a taxi. This was partly to get a comparison of taxi vs uber rates in Barcelona, but mostly because it was raining fairly hard and a taxi was waiting to be hailed by the doorman just outside the hotel entrance. Good decision. As it turns out, the ride was about four euros more than the estimate provided by the uber app, but the drop-off location was not quite where expected (“B” vs “C” at the cruise terminal), a minor complication, perhaps, had we been in an uber. Bottom line? Go with uber in Barcelona unless 1) it’s raining and a taxi is right in front of you, or 2) you’re not sure where you’re going!

Viking Vesta

This is our second voyage on a Viking ocean-going ship, the first being our China coast cruise on the Yi Dun. The Vesta is slightly larger than the Yi Dun (998 vs 930 passengers) but the deck plan is quite similar. It’s also new, just six months since launch. We are in a smaller suite than we had on the Yi Dun and, while quite adequate, we miss the extra room, closet space (but with plenty of drawers), a second sink, and the like. I know, it’s a tough life we live. 😉