Norwegian Wind

This is our ship, at anchor off the coast of Belize. Our cabin 9219? (cat CC, 160 sf) is directly above the middle of the three lifeboats towards the front of the ship. The long rectangle of windows behind our cabin is the restaurant where we ate. We had a table for two in the window towards the aft end of the dining room.

The deck pictures were taken on our first "at sea" day. The land in the background is about all we got to see of Cuba.

Georgetown, Grand Cayman, Monday Jan 17th

We anchored in the harbor and took a tender boat ride into town. There, we did some shopping, had a wonderful coconut rum cake, and looked at overpriced jewelry. (Just because it's duty-free, doesn't make it any cheaper!) Then we piled into a taxi for a ride to a resort, where we had tickets for use of their facilities and beach. The beach was packed, and the water cool, so it wasn't the best of our stops. Even so, we did a little swimming, and sunned for a while before heading back to the ship.

Roatan, Honduras, Tuesday Jan 18th

These are pictures of the village of Coxen Hole, where we arrived at Roatan. The village itself is very small and poor. I guess they put the pier there because that's where the water was deep enough for the ship. The road from the parking lot through the village to the main road system was unpaved and full of mudholes. The taxi ride through town, in an old Isuzu compact car with over 250,000 miles on it, was quite an adventure.

The big attraction at Anthony's Key Resort is the Roatan Institute for Marine Sciences, which offers short encounter sessions with some of the dolphins that they train and study there. We were setup in groups of 4 people with a trainer and a dolphin and were given about 20 minutes to play with and learn about the creatures. Our dolphin was Boomer, a 3 year old male (teenager in dolphin terms). The camera seems to have a water spot or fog on the lens for these, unfortunately.

I found our copy of the VHS video they made during our dolphin encounter, and transfered it to DVD-R and then to a computer file. The images below are screen shots from that video. (I tried to pick shots with little motion, so the interlacing wasn't too bad.) A DivX-encoded copy of the video can be downloaded here: dolphinvid.avi (AVI/DivX format, 110MB, 8m20s)

Snorkeling in Belize, Wednesday Jan 19th

Goff's Caye, a very small island on the reef in Belize. They took us out here by speedboat from the ship. We swam out from the beach straight into the reef, which surrounded the island and was only 3-10' deep in most places.

These pictures are from our diving in the reef. We used a throw-away kodak underwater camera, which doesn't have a flash. The water is so blue, so all of our pictures were lit with mostly blue light. I've color-corrected these as best I could.

Cozumel, Mexico, Thursday Jan 20th

In Cozumel, we decided to take a more expensive beach trip than the one in Grand Cayman. They ferried us out to Isla Pasion, a private island with a day resort and a nice beach. There were only 30 or so of us on the beach, the guides were bringing us drinks out into the surf as needed, and they provided a nice lunch. The lady with the camera wanted to take our picture (upper left), so we made her wade out into the surf to do it.

Since this was our fourth stop, we had both gotten a little bit of a sunburn going by now, but not as bad as it appears in these photos.

In this last photo, bottom right, you can see Pepe standing just in front of the little hut. Pepe is a deer. He was found orphaned on the main island of Cozumel, and brought over to Isla Pasion where he was raised by the people working there. He's quite tame around people. Only problem is, he's reached his adulthood, and no one has brought over a female deer for him. Poor thing.

After returning to town, we did some more shopping. The shopkeepers in Cozumel are very aggressive. Every shop had a hawker out front doing everything they could to talk you into coming inside. After we got tired of that, we stopped at a genuine Mexican restaurant for a light dinner before returning to the ship. On the pier, your could see the sunset over the water so we finished up with these last two pictures.