Sea Day 3
Sea Day 3
The dawn breaks slowly on a very dark day. One of those days when it's not just gray from horizon to horizon; instead, the great dark clouds combine to cover most – not all – of the sky, and they move, perceptibly, to the northeast. Ahead of us, opposite the dawn, is a narrow band of pink and purple, a break in the cloudy sky. Ragged edges of opaque clouds twist and grow, boil and shrink, and just like that, the whole skyful of black is blown over us, behind us, leaving a lightening sky and some benign clouds toward the horizon. The dawn here is just like the dawn at the Cape – reddish, purplish orange at the horizon, transitioning smoothly through yellow and beige, to light blue, a blue that will become the blue sky of full day.
The sea, this morning, is much calmer; the ship's motion has been reduced to an almost-unnoticeable vibration, with tiny bumps now and then. The wind, though, is still there.
We're beginning to see more ships. The Mediterranean narrows quite a bit before the Strait, and we're in that narrow part. We're still almost 200 miles from the Strait, but a great deal of shipping is occupying a much narrower passage. The Strait is, apparently, the second busiest marine traffic passage in the world, after the English Channel and ahead of the Straits of Hormuz and the Suez Canal. So it'll get a lot busier before we get through. And at 200 miles away, we should be there in daylight. Hurrah! And it's warm enough to sit outside for long periods, as long as we avoid the wind, which isn't hard.
A bright white ship - the Viking Sky - pulled up to our right and sailed with us all afternoon, providing ideal photo ops against the snow-capped mountains of Spain.
Well, that was disappointing.
All morning - “Wait! Did we miss it? We need to go check!” Nothing but Spain on one side and water on the other. After lunch, we read and wrote and periodically checked the ship tracker, laboriously converted knots to nautical mph and then to normal mph, and did the math. We were slowing down considerably, as we moved closer to the Strait. So slow, apparently, that we wouldn't get there until after dark.
Which is what happened. We watched as the sun went down over the mountains on the African side (top). The mountains in Spain seemed to taper down to the water. We could make out the Strait, mostly because we knew it was there. By then, it was colder, and we were on the top deck at the bow of the ship, behind the plexiglass barriers, so the wind was, of course, a factor. There were about a dozen of us up there, hoping to get a glimpse of the Strait and the Rock.
We were there for over an hour, as the ship chugged slowly ahead. It was kind of a nice sunset, especially with the silhouette of the Moroccan mountains for perspective. The lights of Algeciras came into view, along with the lights of Ceuta and the other smaller cities on the African side. To the right of Algeciras was a blob of dark that was darker than the rest of the dark which was, apparently, the Rock of Gibraltar. I had forgotten that the Rock is not at the narrow point of the Strait; in fact, it's nowhere near the narrow point. So we saw it... sort of...
But we did see it, at a distance, and then we sailed through it, in the dark. I was thinking about how this strait was like Cape Canaveral for the early civilizations of the Mediterranean. What would we be thinking and feeling if we were in the same spot, approaching the strait before 1,000 BC? What did I believe was out there? What was out there? Who would take that journey straight out and into the unknown? Who would take the first step onto the Moon?
But for real drama, go read about the Zanclean Flood.
There are four lecturers on the ship, and two or three (or more) lectures per day. Each is recorded and available on the stateroom TV. We've been watching them at night; tonight was The Ottoman Empire. We actually watched two today; this afternoon, waiting for The Big Event, we watched The Making of the Movie 'Casablanca.' We're stopping in Casablanca tomorrow, and they're showing the movie Casablanca tonight in the theater (which is designed so that wherever you sit, there's someone's head in the way). We learned a whole lot of stuff that was really interesting about what is my favorite movie. Just one example: the movie was made in 1941 and released around Pearl Harbor Day. Only three of the actors in the whole movie were Americans; a large proportion of the rest were refugees from Europe, each with their own story of escape from the Nazis, many of whom lost family members to the Holocaust. The actor Conrad Veidt, who played the bad guy, Major Strasser, was a well-known German actor before the war (he starred in the groundbreaking slilent horror classic “The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari.”). When he came to America, he got a lot of Nazi parts, but only took the part if the character was portrayed as the villain.
During the dueling anthems scene, one of the greatest scenes in film history, someone who was there said, among this set full of refugees, there wasn't a dry eye in the house. I believe it. I've led a perfectly safe life (until, perhaps, the present), and I am moved to tears every time I see it.
'Casablanca' is also available as one of the movies you can watch any time in the room. We'll watch it soon. As part of our upgrade, we had a bottle of champagne in the room when we arrived. We haven't figured out what to do with it yet, but maybe we'll open it to celebrate a night at Rick's American Cafe.
[Abbey: One of the interesting things we learned about the movie, was that it was completely made on the set in Hollywood- there was a war going on! So here, in the city of Casablanca, some enterprising fellow has created a “Rick's Cafe”, fabricated to look like the set. Yes, it was one of the $$$ optional Viking tours.]... but since it wasn't the original, we weren't interested.
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