Travel Withdrawal

 

I’m suffering from travel withdrawal. It has been over a year since Roland and I went on our last international vacation. Since then we’ve had to postpone a trip to Africa and another to Australia and New Zeeland, which have been rescheduled for later this year and next spring, respectively. We’re praying that they don’t get postponed again.

In the meantime, I’m reflecting back on our last trip. I never wrote about it on this blog because COVID-19 swallowed up all other news when we returned. So now it’s time to give you a brief overview. We saw too many sights and I took too many photographs to include them all here, so I’ll try to just give you a flavor of each place.

Roland and I flew to Puerto Rico on February 20, 2020 to board a ship for a Viking ocean cruise through the Caribbean and up the Amazon River in Brazil. It was the Amazon River part of the trip that attracted us, but we’ve cruised with Viking before and always had a good experience. We expected this time to be the same, and it was.

Our first stop was in Bridgetown, Barbados, where we took a bus tour of the island. Our second stop was in French Guiana at Ile Royale, which is the largest of the Iles du Salut (Salvation Islands) and used to be the site of a famous French prison.

The first photo below is an evening shot of the Customs Building in San Juan, which was taken from our cabin balcony on the Viking Sea. The second is St. James Parish Church (Anglican), which is the oldest church on Barbados, and the last show some of the flora and fauna on Ile Royale.

Our first stop in Brazil was at the city of Santarem. Next, we anchored at the small town of Parintins, Brazil and attended a performance of a folk musical called Boi Bumba. From there we went to Manaus, Brazil, which is the largest city on the Amazon and is about 1,000 miles up the river.

The first two photos below show the Cathedral of Our Lady of Conception and one of many hammock stalls in the plaza in front of the cathedral at Santarem. The next two are the skyline of Manaus and the Manaus Opera House.

The ship turned around at Manaus. On the return trip down the Amazon, we docked near the colorful fishing town of Belem, Brazil. These photos show the fishing boats at Belem and some of the fish in the market.

While docked at Manaus, we took a small boat excursion up the Rio Negro, which is where we saw the macaw shown in the photo at the head of this post.

After returning to the Caribbean, we stopped at Tobago and then at Saint Lucia. At Saint Lucia we rode an aerial tram through the rain forest and also took a tour of the island. From there, we sailed to St. John’s, Antigua for a bus tour around the island. Our last stop before returning to Puerto Rico was St. Thomas in the U.S. Virgin Islands. St. Thomas was crowded with cruise ships, and ours was dwarfed by those from other cruise lines. The iguanas sunned themselves on the rocks as they ignored the crowds of tourists.

The next two photos show the aerial tram on Ssint Lucia and a view of Antigua’s English Harbor. The final two are from St. Thomas. See how small our ship is compared to the one next to it.

We returned to Puerto Rico on March 11 and flew home. We had absolutely no issues with COVID-19 on the trip, but when we got to San Juan we discovered that Viking had cancelled all future cruises until further notice. So we felt really fortunate to have gotten our trip in.

And Roland and I are anxiously waiting for the next one.