From Manaus to Fort Lauderdale on a ship

I haven't blogged about cruising before, but I saw a pink river dolphin yesterday, like, 30 feet away, and I just have to tell someone. OMG. A pink river dolphin. Like, right there.

Having said that, now I feel compelled to blog more. Can't just leave it at that. So, more blogging.

So. I've been giving lectures on science and, um, certain things in science and nature relating to the possible - ok, probable - existence of what we might surreptitiously call something that sounds suspiciously like the G-word in a theologicial context. But one must needs be subtle about it because everyone has an uniformed opinion about science and the G-word, and they're all wrong. No offense.

Anyway. On science and the G-word, lectures. I've been doing them for 30+ years in high schools scattered around the planet - 43 countries and nearly 300 schools with an occasional university (this is where I casually insert the name "Cambridge U" so as to impress. And then I casually say Cambridge Cambridge Cambridge for no apparent reason at all.) With apologies to my friends and board members Simon and Sally who went to Oxford. Which has higher standards than Cambridge, apparently, since I could not get invited to lecture there. OK, I actually did lecture there once, too, at Magdalen College. I forgot. Oxford Oxford Oxford. Casually.

Anyway again (I keep getting sidetracked.) In about 2014, just for a lark, I started doing the lectures on cruise ships, mostly on the Holland American Line, apart from one on Seabourn, an ultra-posh very high end colleague line of HAL. Then Covid happened (while Kam and I were on a HAL ship off NZ and OZ starting March 1 2020)(very bad timing), the school gigs went away and never really came back, but the cruise ship gigs came back in 2022. This is my 15th lecture cruise.

And thus, I am on the MS Zaandam sitting in the Rio Negro, which is really part of the Amazon, where I saw a pink river dolphin yesterday. Did I mention that already? Pink river dolphin pink river dolphin pink river dolphin, which I casually mention for no apparent reason at all.

I flew from Colorado Springs (home base) to Houston to Sao Paolo overnight to Manaus, Brazil, which might be as far up the Amazon that a ship the size of the MS Zaandam can go, but that may be because they built a bridge across the river that might be a squidge too low for the ship to get under. Or maybe the waters get too shallow. I'm making this up since I don't really know. But it's a ship. This is it: 

Impressively, it doesn't look that big sitting the middle of the Amazon River, which is huge. I would have taken a picture, but I was frantically trying to see if there were any more pink river dolphins. The river is 2-3 miles wide here - just upstream on the other side of the bridge (which I can see from my cabin porthole), it's 5 miles wide, and during the rainy season, just a bit further up-stream, it's as much as 30 miles wide. It averages 2-3 miles wide over the whole length of over 1700 miles.

The Mississippi is a mile wide, and we get all big-headed about it. Manaus is 900 miles from the Atlantic Ocean in the middle of the fat part of Brazil, and you can sail big honking ocean-going cruise ships 900 miles all the way to Manaus on the Amazon. Where the river can still be 30 miles wide.

I had no flippin' idea.

And tomorrow I'll give my first talk from somewhere in the middle of the Amazon River somewhere in the middle of the Amazonian rain forest somewhere in the middle of Brazil.

Now, it's time for me to go continue my cruise ship weight gain regime. You would call it, lunch.