Jayapura, Papua, Indonesia and a day at sea

01-12 Sunday: Jayapura, Papua, Indonesia. Today was a tender port but it went well. Typically, we have breakfast delivered to our cabin. I don’t eat much, just enough to take my morning medications. It is quite hot, no surprise. We walked into town. The only thing open was the market. We looked around there and bought some Pringles and water. We ran into John and Blanche. There is nothing else to see or do, we walked around a bit and then headed back to the ship. We had a small bite of lunch. We don’t want to eat too much because we have Morimoto at Sea tonight for dinner.

 We greatly anticipated the Morimoto dinner tonight. There is only one night that this is offered on this first cruise (29 days). Before dinner we went to the Pinnacle Bar and sat with Garry and Joan from Canada. We had a nice visit with them. They have gone overland from Sydney to Perth on the train. It sounds like quite the adventure, also very expensive. 

Off to dinner now. Initially, the hostess was not there and we stood waiting to be checked in. It is not near as busy as we thought it would be, yet the service, or at least our waiter, was very slow. People came in after us and were served before we were. Our appetizers were the Tori ramen noodle bowl, pork gyoza dumplings, and Morimoto’s fresh tuna pizza. All three if these were good, but nothing spectacular. For our mains I had Angry Lobster Thai Pad and Stuart had the Ishiyaki Buri Bop, which was yellow tail seared in a stone bowl. My lobster tail was a bit over cooked, tiny (4 bites), and lacked flavor. Stuart’s fish was so thinly sliced it just crumbled when he tried to eat it. We had 3 sides, wok seared bok choy, Wasabi mashed potatoes, and house fried rice. The bok choy and mashed potatoes were delicious. It was all “okay” but our expectations were not met for this special evening. I’m not sure we want to try this venue again. It is $95 and a bit disappointing.

(Photos on Facebook)

We played for a short time in the casino, then on to Rolling Stone Lounge, back to the cabin to play cribbage, then off to bed. We turned the clock forward another hour tonight.

01-13 Monday: A quiet morning, feeling tired from that hour ahead. We opted for lunch in the dining room. Our drink order took 20 minutes to get to us, and they forgot Stuart’s drink. When his burger arrived after 30 minutes, the burger was raw in the middle. Needless to say, he was not happy. I will say the dining experiences on this ship compared to the Zuiderdam is greatly lacking. It’s odd when people arrive after you do and they get served first, even the same dishes were ordered. It is weird. After that we played Mexican Train and that was a lot of fun.

The afternoon was spent relaxing and playing games. We had dinner in the dining room and listened to the music in Billboard Onboard. The show was pretty good with these interpretative dance group with great music and video enhancements. The evening was finished off in the Rolling Stone Lounge.