Tuesday – 3 December 2013 – At Sea
Samana, Dominican Republic
Yesterday we took our first ship's excursion of the cruise during our day's stop anchored off Samana in the northeast corner of the Dominican Republic. The "Cave and Mangrove Exploration" half day tour crosses the huge Samana Bay in a high speed excursion boat to the recently established Los Haitises National Park. Samana is a recent favorite of smaller cruise ships that can anchor off the small town. The bay is known for whale watching, but if there were any of them there, I doubt that they saw us. There were lots of birds in the park, mostly pelicans and some frigate birds. We toured a couple of undeveloped caves where we observed some indigenous people's cave drawings. Apparently, the Taino Indians might have been excellent hunters and gatherers, but their artistic skills were not their forte. Nevertheless, we did enjoy the tour and had the chance to mingle with the other passengers.
We returned to the Silver Spirit for a late lunch of sushi and sashimi on board. Seishin is a small restaurant that is unique to this ship. They serve a wide assortment of high quality fish throughout each cruise by means of extensive and no doubt quite expensive preservation techniques. I asked the room's dedicated chef how fresh sushi can be prepared despite only once or twice per cruise provisioning. He was glad to explain in great detail the technique. Wish I understood Japanese. The head waiter did inform me later that my question about refrigeration resulted oddly enough in granting of my special order for miso soup. I said thank you. Wonder what we would have gotten if I had actually asked for miso soup.
Later in the evening we discovered and took each other's' pictures by the ship's "black box" located on the topmost forward deck roof. Notice the handy hook on the top of this device. Hope they don't need to use it, at least until we disembark. Although we like Silver Spirit more than we thought we would, the larger size makes finding one is on an actual ship a bit harder. This top deck, available to passengers by a quite obscure stairway, looks most nautical. It even has the required by international law compass binnacle. I enjoyed playing with the big balls. Boy, were they hard to move around. I put them back more or less where I found them. (Later I heard that the navigation officer was reviewing the ship's security videos, for some reason.)
This evening is Silver Spirit's "Pool Barbeque", actually an outdoor feeding frenzy for the famished Silversea passengers who choose to participate. (Most of the other dining venues are open as well). This event is held usually once per cruise segment. Heinz and Ellen either arrived early to get a favored smaller table, or perhaps they were the only participants. If so, they seemed to have very good service judging from the number of crew members marshaling.
Rather than participate in the outdoor hectic event, Barbara and I opted to have dinner served course by course in our suite by our trusty butler. Abraham is from Manila and was able to arrange for a special dinner of Filipino pork and chicken adobo, in this case the less available "dry" version preferred by the crew members and not usually available for the passengers. When adobo appears on the "guest menu" at all, it is a coconut milk concoction which is neither sweet nor sour and is served boneless. Getting the real thing required some considerable effort by Abraham. Also as the ship gets bigger, customer service can become less personal. But we know the ropes (as well as the Hotel Director).
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