Happy Birthday to me.  A lovely morning with a message from the crew and staff on the TV to wish me happy birthday.  As we are leaving for breakfast, our cabin steward wishes me a happy birthday, then after breakfast we come back to the room find it decorated with Happy Birthday streamers and glittery balls.  So sweet!  

We spend the day in normal fashion going from one lecture to another (I still don’t like the historian, Ed suffers through), doing trivia, etc.  For the past couple of days we’ve been trying to get in touch with Anju, our tour guide from Madagascar, who hasn’t been answering emails or WhatsApp messages.  We’re a little concerned, when finally he pops up and apologizes for the delay, but says he has to check about the coronavirus before confirming our tour.  What? We ask him to explain and he tells us another ship has been turned away from Madagascar and he needs to confirm if our tour is even possible.  Uh oh.

The day goes on in typical fashion with us trying to determine if Anju is just trying to get our of the tour or serious.  We’ve been following the coronavirus on the news, but hadn’t really seen any effect on board (I mean, we have been in code red since day 3 because someone brought noro onto the ship – but its noro – and the staff is doing an absolutely heroic job cleaning everything constantly, from the railings to the door handles, making us sanitize our hands and even serving in the buffet.  The other day the drummer from the orchestra was back there serving us.  The activities staff wipes down everything, including the books in the travel library.  It’s all hands on deck and they are absolutely fantastic about it.  But it’s noro, not corona!).  We will just have to wait and see what happens, but as the days wear on, we are thinking Anju just might be right.

At any rate, we celebrate my birthday dinner in Prime C, the steakhouse with an excellent dinner and a sweet birthday cake at the end.  Then show, drinks, bed.

The days progress the same way – I won’t bore you – except to say that we are indeed not going to Madagascar.  They have refused us entry and we are heading straight to Reunion Island, arriving one day early, then having an overnight visit to Mauritius, which is great because now we can explore both the north and the south of the island.  We’re a little disappointed with missing Madagascar, but since we’ve seen all the lemurs at the Duke Lemur center, we’re not that disappointed, really!  And as a funny end to this story, Anju finally emails back and tells us all is well, he can do the tour, but it will cost 80 Euros instead of 50.  We just laugh and email back that we appreciate it, but he won’t be seeing us this time around.