The ocean was very choppy again last night. The tell-tale sign of the sea conditions is whether the big flower vases around the ship are on the counter tops or tucked away on the floor! They were all on the floor when we came out of Ray’s show last night.
We are late arriving again this morning. This has been a pattern for the Mariner. She really has a hard time keeping to the schedule if the seas or wind conditions aren’t just right.
Santos is a big industrial port with a long river entry.
It developed in the late 1800's and serves the city of Sao Paulo. The area is surrounded by lush green mountains.
We are in no hurry this morning, so we have a leisurely breakfast, go back to the room and do some emails and post to the blog.
The internet is working very well this morning since almost everyone went on one of the two bus tours. One was an all day affair to Sao Paulo, 80 miles away, that was billed as a coach tour, no walking, and lunch. The other was the four hour drive around Santos with a stop at the coffee museum and a atop at a SMALL (the tour department’s comment) aquarium and a drive by the beach. W were told the buses were not as good as we are used to and not to expect too much from the content either. This was the same as in Rio Grande.
We plan to do the same as in Rio Grande, since that was kind of interesting on our own. So, about 10:30AM we head to the shuttle bus (the buses are very cramped) that will take us to the Cruise Terminal about 20 minutes away. We get on the bus at 10:35AM and wait until 11AM before it leaves. There are maybe six couples on the bus with us. We get to the terminal, which is huge, and walk in about 11:20AM. There are a couple of people who look like they are offering a city tour, but it looks like it is on a bus. We pass and walk around and finally find the tourist information desk. Carolyn gets a map and is told to go to the Coffee Museum (built in 1922) in the Historical District (a $10 taxi ride) or to go to the beach (a $15 taxi ride).
Now, we go outside and look for the taxi stand and run into several other people from the ship who are looking for taxis also.
We finally find the stand and the rest of the couples that were on the shuttle with us. Our plan is just to hire a taxi for maybe 2 hours max to do the circle shown on the map as the whole place looks a little scary! Well they want 200 real for 2 hours or $130! The drivers speak even less English than what we have encountered so far and Portugese is so different. We are having problems figuring out the signs, much less the spoken language! Not wanting to get stuck in town and not being comfortable getting a taxi from the terminal, much less back to the big sprawling port area, we don’t even try to go to the historical area. We go back inside the terminal. There are two ships turning over passengers today and another in port with us and it is busy!
We walk around looking for a pin for Jack.
No pins, just Piranha, but Carolyn sees some straw hats and checks them out for our next ports which have beach activities. They are priced at 300+ real or almost $200 dollars!!! You have got to be kidding...we head back to the yellow door which leads us to the shuttles. On the shuttle, we meet up with almost everyone who was on the shuttle bus coming from the ship. We all did the terminal grand tour!. Welcome to Santos! Ray really needs to look at Santos as the place to spend his last day!
Back on the ship at 12:15PM, we have some lunch and Carolyn goes to the movies. It is an English flick,
You Will Meet a tall Dark Stranger. Dick messes on the computer and goes to Trivia. At 5PM they do the tour talk for Buzios, day after tomorrow. Then we go to the Brazilian Deck Party,
put on by an award winning Carnival band,
omplete with Samba dancers
and with Caipirinha cocktails. This is a sweet drink made with the Brazilian sugar cane rum and is a local speciality.
After dinner in the Compass Rose, Carolyn goes to another movie and Dick goes to bed.
The $64,000 question is why does Regent even waste the time to stop at these last two ports? Of course, the same can be said for one or two of the ports in Peru and Chile!
No comments:
Post a Comment