The first of 5 sea days begins with an all ship announcement from the Captain.  Uh Oh.  Here we go.  As we had anticipated, Coronavirus fears strike again.  Sri Lanka will not allow us to visit the island.  Well, they won’t allow the passengers or crew to disembark, but fortunately (and probably with a good deal of begging, pleading and arguing), they will allow us to dock for a “technical” stop to load on provisions and fuel (which we obviously need).  Totally stinks, but what can we do? Now we have 6 sea days!

Captain says he’ll come back this afternoon at 6p with exact details, but now we will be in Cochin a day earlier, stay overnight, then have an overnight in Mumbai.  In the meantime, we’ve had emails from Lijo, our tour guide in Cochin who knows the whole scoop – he knows we’ll be early in Cochin, but said Azamara was also looking at Goa or maybe Mangalore for a stop.  Gotta love local tour guides with inside info.

In the end, the schedule remains overnight in Cochin, overnight Mumbai.  Lijo rearranges our tours so we’re still going with him the first day, and we add another ship tour in Mumbai to replace the 2 we had cancelled in Sri Lanka.  What a mess this is for the staff and crew though – they had the Azamazing evening scheduled for Sri Lanka, so that has to change and White Night was in Cochin.  Once again, though, they do a stellar job handling all these changes and by 6 pm Captain gives us the confirmed schedule with our new Azamazing evening in Cochin (which he says he likes better than Sri Lanka) and now white night is on the evening of our “technical stop” in Sri Lanka.

We will see what the next few sea days bring in terms of our journey!

In the meantime we have our Chef’s table tonight! It’s Arabic – something new and different, and definitely does not disappoint! We have grilled prawns for starters, Squash and red Lentil soup (that even I like), Chicken tangine and cauliflower Shwarma (you can’t go wrong) and pan-fired tuna that was so superb, I can’t even go into enough accolades! Goat cheese parfait and muscat soaked apricots rounded out an incredibly wonderful meal (not to mention the wines – poured by Igor, the sommelier we met on Pursuit!). Spectacular – and a nice way to end a somewhat challenging (from a schedule perspective) day.