Oriana continues to creak with age, several people have again spent a relatively sleepless night because of the vibration caused by the engines. Captain Bob has again taken to the airways to assure us all that it is a temporary problem caused by the pitch of the propellers. Dead unlucky how many temporary problems the engines keep on having. Significantly the high presence of officer types around the ship only seems to happen after the event, never when it is ta...

Kuala Lumpur, KL, as it is known by the locals, is Malaysia's capital city, settled about 5000 years ago. After a strong Hindu Buddhist influence 2000 years ago, Islam had become the main religion by the early 14th century. The first Europeans to arrive were Portuguese, overthrown by the Dutch in1641 and then Britain became the dominant power in the early 19th century. There were difficult times during World War 2 with Japanese occupation. In 1957 the Federation ...

Three days at sea gives us a chance to catch up on the blog, write emails, read and plan for the next destinations which will be Kuala Lumpur (KL to the seasoned travellers on board) on Tuesday and Singapore on Wednesday, where quite a lot of passengers are disembarking to fly back to the UK. Seasoned travellers are easily identified by their Tshirt logos naming places they have visited before and by the P & O merchandise they tote!! We have sailed round the ...

Today we experienced Indian bureaucracy at it's most irritating. Officials insisted on repeating the immigration process we did on the way to Mumbai, but this time on the day we arrived in Cochin. Not just those getting off the ship but all 1800 of us had to have our shore passes stamped in our presence by one of 6 immigration officers on board. This resulted in a queue from one end of the ship to the other and back again on the Promenade deck - which could have ...

Our arrival in Mumbai was delayed by 2 hours because of the dodgy engine - now fixed, hopefully. A lot of the crew are of Indian origin and were eagerly awaiting family ashore, many of whom had travelled by train from Goa, and who they had not seen for up to 6 months. A number of passengers asked that the crew be allowed off the ship first so they could spend as much time with their families as possible - the new Captain(since Dubai) all 38 years of him, and a Jo...