By Corey Sandler, Destination Consultant Silversea Cruises
A Santarém and Maica Lake Gallery.
Sunset on the Amazon River between Macapa and Santarém
The Meeting of the Waters: the Amazon and the Tapajos
Santarém and Maica Lake
Fishing for Piranha: We caught several, which is better than the other way around
All photos copyright Corey Sandler, all rights reserved. If you would like to purchase a high-resolution image, please contact me.
By Corey Sandler, Destination Consultant Silversea Cruises
First of all, before Amazon was a globe-gobbling online colossus selling billions of products you never knew you needed, it was a river.
Way back, there were the Amazons, who according to Greek and classical mythology were a nation of fierce warriors who might have lived in Sarmatia (now part of Ukraine) or Anatolia (now Turkey) or elsewhere in the Black Sea or the Aegean.
And yes, in ancient and mythology and modern fantasy, they were alluring women.
But that has only passing connection to where Silver Cloud is spending the next ten days: in the Amazon River.
In 1541, Spanish soldier Francisco de Orellana, the first European to explore the river, named the river the Amazon pitched battles with what he described as tribes of female warriors. That was his story, and he stuck to it.
THE GREATEST
The Amazon is the greatest river in the world.
Okay, okay: I am well aware of the Nile, the Yangtze, and the Mississippi.
They are each great rivers, but the Amazon holds the record for superlatives.
It is—by far—the river with the greatest flow of water to the sea: about 20 percent of all of the freshwater discharged into the oceans, roughly the sum total of the next seven large rivers.
That’s great.
It has the largest drainage area in the world: 6,915,000 square kilometers or 2.7 million square miles. That’s 75 percent more than the Congo River, and more than double that of the Nile.
That’s great, too.
And depending upon how you classify its many tributaries—and who is doing the measuring—the Amazon may be 6,992 kilometers or 4,345 miles long.
That’s about 87 miles longer than the Nile. Isn’t that great?
OUR VOYAGE
After leaving Devil’s Island, off the coast of French Guiana, we sailed south down along the coast of South America to enter the huge mouth of the Amazon River
Huge? The mouth is more than 325 kilometers or 202 miles wide.
It takes us four days to sail from the mouth to the navigable end of the river—for ships of our size—at Manaus, about 1,500 kilometers or 930 miles into the interior of Brazil.
Smaller riverboats can go 1,000 miles further to the base of the Andes, and also serve the hundreds of significant tributaries of the Amazon.
Silver Cloud is stopping at some of the isolated towns along the river: Santarém and Boca Valeria going in, and Parintins and Alter do Chao coming out.
Along the way, we will reach O Encontro das Águas, the Meeting of Waters, where the Rio Negro’s dark (almost black) water comes together with the sandy-colored Rio Solimões near Manaus.
For about 6 kilometers or 4 miles, the waters run side by side without mixing.
This also happens near Santarém with the Amazon and Tapajós rivers.
On board ship, I’m telling guests the stories of some of the towns and the tributaries and the explorers. Wish you were here.
All photos copyright by Corey Sandler, all rights reserved. If you would like to purchase a high-resolution copy of an image, please contact me.
By Corey Sandler, Destination Consultant Silversea Cruises
Devil’s Island, L’île du Diable, is one of the most evocative, terrifying, inspiring, and memorable places I know of.
To be precise, Devil’s Island is one of three islands that make up Les Isles du Salut, the Salvation Islands. And those three were in turn part of the vast prison complex established by the French in their colony of Guiana off the southeastern coast odds of South America. As a whole, the complex was known by its most evocative island name, Devil’s Island.
You do not visit Devil’s Island without some of it staying with you the rest of your life.
The good news, of course, is that we are sailed in on one of the most luxurious cruise ships in the world. And the even better news is that we sailed away in the early evening, just in time for drinks at the Bar and a five-star dinner.
It was not at all like that for the 70,000 or so guests who checked in to Devil’s Island between 1852 and 1953. Devil’s Island and the two nearby islands as well as the mainland of French Guiana was used by the French as a penal colony for 101 years.
It was a hot, humid, disease-ridden, outpost of hell.
The vast majority of the prisoners sent to the Devil’s Island prison system never made it back to France. Many died due of disease and harsh conditions. Sanitary systems were limited, and the region was mosquito-infested, with endemic tropical diseases. Only a few convicts ever successfully escaped, and most of them were captured on the mainland.
Devil’s Island is the third-largest of the ironically named Îles du Salut (Islands of Salvation). To be precise, we came ashore at the Ile Royale, which was part of the prison complex. On the far side of Royale is a view across a narrow strait to Devil’s Island.
It is not considered wise to swim in the rough currents between Royale and Devil’s Island. Not so much the currents; the sharks.
It’s a rather foreboding place, with not much to recommend it unless you like to see marauding bands of super-sized rodents, large monkeys, and killer sharks patrolling close to shore.
The reason we visit is to immerse ourselves in the history of the place.
The penal colony was not a secret. In 1895, French army captain Alfred Dreyfus was unjustly convicted of treason and sent to Devil’s Island in 1895. The French author Emile Zola helped bring about a retrial of Dreyfus, and eventually he was exonerated.
In 1938 the penal system was strongly criticized in Rene Belbenoit’s book Dry Guillotine. Shortly after the release of Belbenoit’s book, the French government announced plans to close the bagne de Cayennes. The prisons were kept open during World War II, but from 1946 until 1953, one by one the prisons were closed. The Devil’s Island facility was the last to be closed.
And then in 1970 came the book Papillon, published as a memoir by a former prisoner, Henri Charrière who had a tattoo of a butterfly, a papillon, on his chest. Charriere’s book was an international bestseller, and in 1973 the film Papillon, starring Steve McQueen and Dustin Hoffman made the story part of the global cultural DNA. Charrière said that all events in the book were truthful and accurate, allowing for minor lapses in memory.
A few hours walk around the island leads to this conclusion: close enough, and let’s be on our way.
Monkeys on high, cat-sized agouti down low. Neither were much bothered by our presence.
The church, one of the few places of relative “liberty” for the prisoners. And a section of the housing for the guards, very different from the cells for the inmates.
We are headed now for the Amazon River. My next blog post will come on Sunday, 1 February from Santarem.
All photos copyright by Corey Sandler, all rights reserved. If you would like to purchase a high-resolution copy of an image please contact me.
————————-
Now available, the revised Second Edition of “Henry Hudson Dreams and Obsession” by Corey Sandler, for the Amazon Kindle. You can read the book on a Kindle device, or in a Kindle App on your computer, laptop, tablet, or smartphone.
If you would like to purchase an autographed copy, please see the tab on this page, “HOW TO ORDER A PHOTO OR AUTOGRAPHED BOOK”
Here’s where to order an electronic copy for immediate delivery:
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00IA9QTBM
By Corey Sandler, Destination Consultant Silversea Cruises
First of all, the island we visited is pronounced GREN-ayda.
GRAN-ahda is the city in Spain.
But according to some, both city names have as their root the Spanish word for Pomegranate, which in turn may have come from the Arabic.
The island was sighted by Christopher Columbus on Aug, 15, 1498, and he called it something else: Concepción. At some point after Columbus, Spanish explorers in the Caribbean renamed the island in honor of the great Spanish city of Granada.
And then over time, the pronunciation changed.
And just to make complete the circle of confusion here, although the Spanish did introduce pomegranates in the new world, that happened in the mid-18th century…and not on the island of Grenada.
The British, another great colonial power in the region, introduced a different plant: stealthily imported nutmeg trees from the Banda Islands of Indonesia.
So, no pomegranates in Grenada. But lots and lots of nutmeg.
Grenada is an independent nation consisting of the main island of Grenada and six smaller islands at the southern end of the Grenadines in the southeastern Caribbean Sea.
The island is just 133 square miles or 344 square kilometres, and the estimated population is about 110,000.
Grenada is very lush and green, in a semitropical climate with rich volcanic soil; many types of fruits, vegetables, and spices grow on the island: cinnamon, cloves, ginger, allspice among them.
But the singular spice that is one of Grenada’s signature products is Nutmeg.
Did I say, “singular?” Once again, things are a little unusual here.
Nutmeg is one of two spices derived from the Myristica genus of evergreen trees. The same tree, actually the same fruit, also yields another spice, called mace.
The nutmeg is the egg-shaped seed of the tree, about an inch long and half an inch wide. Mace is the lacy reddish covering or aril of the seed.
All this talk about nutmeg is for good reason: at one point, nutmeg was an especially valuable spice, the source of great conflict between Arab traders who knew the secret source in Indonesia and western buyers who craved it very much.
Today, about 20 percent of the world’s nutmeg comes from Grenada, and 75 percent from Indonesia.
The food and the culture and the way of life in Grenada is appropriately spicy, with more than a bit of Jab Jab, a local version of voodoo centered around a menacing she-devil. I shall end my blog without further comment; don’t want to get on the wrong side of La Diablesse.
Our guide, Dean, with one of the amazing flowers of the rainforest of Grenada.
The Seven Sisters Waterfalls, the end of a muddy, difficult hike. It was very much worth the effort, although my knees will ache tonight.
All photos copyright by Corey Sandler, all rights reserved. If you would like to purchase a high-resolution copy of an image, please contact me.
By Corey Sandler, Destination Consultant Silversea Cruises
Our first port on this cruise is the “island of the clouds”. That’s the meaning of Bequia in the language of the pre-European settlers, the Arawaks.
Bequia is part of the independent nation of Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, about 9 miles or 15 kilometers south of the nation’s capital, Kingstown, on the main island, Saint Vincent.
And then below Saint Vincent is a chain of small islands called the Grenadines, a chain of more than 600 specks of sand and rock in the Windward Islands. The Windward Islands are the southern, generally larger islands of the Lesser Antilles. As a group they start from Dominica and reach southward to the North of Trinidad & Tobago.
Bequia is the second largest island in the Grenadines, second only to Carrioucou, which might make you think it is big, but it is only 7 square miles or 18 square kilometers.
The population of Bequia is about 5,000 people, which is less than the capacity of some of the monster cruise ships that sail nearby.
The good news, though, is that the huge ships pass it by. We are the only cruise ship at the island. I’ll drink to that.
Modes of transit in Port Elizabeth
The path from Port Elizabeth to Princess Margaret Beach, around the corner.
A hot dog in Bequia
All photos copyright Corey Sandler, all rights reserved. If you would like to purchase a high-resolution copy of an image, please contact me.
By Corey Sandler, Destination Consultant Silversea Cruises
Here in Bridgetown, one cruise comes to an end and another begins. We are headed south from Barbados to the fragrant island of Grenada and the infamous Devil’s Island before entering into the South American continent and sailing up the Amazon River to the forest city of Manaus. Here’s our plan:
To guests leaving us here in Bridgetown, safe travels. And to new guests, welcome aboard.
Barbados, along with Jamaica, is one of the most English-like islands in the Caribbean.
That stands to reason…since its first permanent settlers arrived from England in 1627 and to some extent never left…although the population today are mostly descendants of African slaves or indentured servants from India.
Barbados became an independent state in 1966. Queen Elizabeth II is still the constitutional monarch.
And so on Barbados they love their cricket and their rum, often combining the both under the Caribbean sun. Sometimes with a break for tea.
About 90 percent of Bajans are of African or mixed descent, with small groups from India, China, Ireland, and the Jewish diaspora.
Here in Barbados, the big party is not Carnival. Instead it is the Crop Over festival, held for most of the month of July into early August. The origins of Crop Over can be traced back to the 1780’s, a time when Barbados was the world’s largest producer of sugar.
Nearly everyone gets into the parade or the musical performances, colorfully dressed (or barely dressed) for the occasion.
In recent years, a guest at Crop Over is a hometown girl who made good: the pop singer Rihanna. She was born in Saint Michael, Barbados in 1988, which means that most of us have shoes older than she is.
Rihanna grew up in a three-bedroom bungalow in Bridgetown and sold clothes with her father in a stall on the street. Forbes estimated her 2012 earnings at about $53 million, which would be about $106 million Barbadian dollars, in a place where the per capita income is about $16,000.
Good for her, I suppose. To her credit, at least some of those tens of millions of dollars have made their way back home.
All photos copyright by Corey Sandler, all rights reserved. If you would like to purchase a high-resolution copy of an image, please contact me.
————-
Now available, the revised Second Edition of “Henry Hudson Dreams and Obsession” by Corey Sandler, for the Amazon Kindle. You can read the book on a Kindle device, or in a Kindle App on your computer, laptop, tablet, or smartphone.
If you would like to purchase an autographed copy, please see the tab on this page, “HOW TO ORDER A PHOTO OR AUTOGRAPHED BOOK”
Here’s where to order an electronic copy for immediate delivery:
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00IA9QTBM
By Corey Sandler, Destination Consultant Silversea Cruises
Like so much of the Caribbean, it is easy to look at Saint Lucia and see only a pretty, green island fringed by sandy beaches and lorded over by some unusual geological formations.
It is all of that. But it is also a place with a bit of history, an independent nation now part of the British Commonwealth that in its first 150 years of recorded history ping-ponged back and forth between England and France 14 times.
The island bears the name of a Sicilian saint. It has an English heritage now, but holds on to French influence.
It has gone back and forth between admirers so many times that some early historians puckishly called it the “Helen of the West Indies.”
There are only two Pitons on Saint Lucia, but they are almost impossible to miss. They can be seen from almost everywhere on the island. They’re on the flag, one of the more handsome standards I’ve seen.
And they’re on the local beer, which naturally moves the Pitons onto billboards and t-shirts, and carnival floats.
The Pitons are volcanic plugs, part of the Soufriere volcanic complex, remnants of huge collapsed stratovolcanoes. A plug is created when magma hardens within a vent on an active volcano.
This particular vent is believed to be dormant and over time the surrounding hill has been eroded away, leaving only the plug.
And luring the tourists.
Some with beer.
Today, I went with a group of guests to the rainforest.
There we rode up the mountain on an aerial tram and then–wearing a triple-secure harness–we flew from one platform to another, 90 feet above the ground on a zip line.
It was a peak of a different kind.
All photos copyright Corey Sandler, all rights reserved. If you would like to purchase a high-resolution copy of an image, please contact me.
————-
Now available, the revised Second Edition of “Henry Hudson Dreams and Obsession” by Corey Sandler, for the Amazon Kindle. You can read the book on a Kindle device, or in a Kindle App on your computer, laptop, tablet, or smartphone.
If you would like to purchase an autographed copy, please see the tab on this page, “HOW TO ORDER A PHOTO OR AUTOGRAPHED BOOK”
Here’s where to order an electronic copy for immediate delivery:
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00IA9QTBM
By Corey Sandler, Destination Consultant
We are arrived in Dominica, a place whose name often gets confused with the much larger country of the Dominican Republic which occupies about half of the island of Hispaniola near Jamaica and Cuba.
Silver Cloud at the dock in Roseau, Dominica
Dominica got its name from the Latin/Spanish words for Sunday (Dominica) or the Italian equivalent (Domenica).
Here in the Caribbean, it is pronounced DOH-men-EEKA, in a not-often-successful attempt to distinguish the place from the much larger and unrelated Dominican Republic.
At the market in Roseau, a small port town that retains much of the flavor of the Caribbean before many islands were invaded by massive cruise ships and relentless armies of tourists. We are the only ship in port today.
The bestower of the name was Christopher Columbus, who must have been running out of saints on November 3, 1493; he named the island after the day of the week on which he spotted it, Sunday.
Dominica sits midway along the Eastern Caribbean archipelago, just a few miles from the French islands of Martinique to the south and Guadeloupe to the north.
The island was not considered a high priority for the Europeans and they mostly left it alone in the first century of colonization.
The Arawaks and the Kalinago/Carib tribes were already hiding when European settlers got around to paying attention to Dominica. They did not fully escape; there is a waterway on Dominica called the Massacre River. It is said the river ran red with blood for days after incursions by French and British settlers.
Nevertheless, Dominica has one of the few remaining groups of Carib or Kalinago people. About three thousand self-identified Caribs live on Dominica; some have intermarried with other races or cultural groups.
Today the descendants of the Caribs have a six-square mile (15-square-kilometer) territory on the east coast of the island.
The island is perhaps the youngest of the Lesser Antilles; it is still being formed by geothermal-volcanic activity. If you’re truly interested in things like that, on Dominica you can visit the world’s second-largest boiling lake, about 7 miles or 11 kilometers east of Roseau.
What we have is a flooded fumarole, an opening in a planet’s crust usually found near volcanoes, which emits steam and carbon dioxide, sulfur dioxide, hydrochloric acid, hydrogen sulfide and other gases. Superheated water turns to steam as it emerges from the ground and its pressure suddenly drops.
On Domenica, Boiling Lake is about 200 feet or 60 meters across; it is filled with bubbling greyish-blue water that is usually enveloped in a cloud of vapor.
All photos copyright by Corey Sandler, all rights reserved. If you would like to purchase a high-resolution copy of any image please contact me.
By Corey Sandler, Destination Consultant Silversea Cruises
One relatively small island, about 34 square miles or 87 square kilometers.
Two countries: the constituent country of the Kingdom of the Netherlands on the southern side, and the French overseas collectivity on the north.
Three names: Sint-Maarten to the Dutch. Saint-Martin to the French.
Four dominant cultural heritages: African, French, British, and Dutch.
Silver Cloud docked in Philipsburg on the Dutch side, one of the largest cruise ship ports in the world.
And today, five cruise ships in port. One is the largest floating passenger carrying machine in the world with nearly 6,000 guests and 3,000 crew. Three others are merely huge.
For the record, although the French side is larger and in some places more attractive with the better beaches and restaurants, the Dutch side has the significant harbor of Philipsburg.
Depending on your point of view, on a good day (for business) or a bad day (for people who seek a bit of solitude) there can be as many as six large ships in port: there could be twenty thousand guests and another ten thousand crew headed for the narrow alleys of Philipsburg.
The Dutch side also has Princess Juliana International Airport.
This is probably the only place they could have put a flat runway on the oddly shaped island. But there is so little available land on Saint Martin that this is what they came up with: one end is a public beach and the other is Simpson Bay with a range of thousand-foot hills.
I am much happier to be coming in and departing aboard a handsome small cruise ship.
All photos copyright Corey Sandler, all rights reserved. If you would like to purchase a high-resolution image, please contact me.
By Corey Sandler, Destination Consultant Silversea Cruises
Saint Barts is tres, tres French…in a Swedish kind of way.
Its European history began, as much of this region did, with Christopher Columbus. On his second voyage, he sailed past—he did not land—an island he named Saint Bartholomew, one of the twelve Apostles.
In 1648, the French were on the prowl in the Caribbean and they claimed the island. They renamed the place with a Gallic version: Saint Barthélemy.
For much of the next century, the principal industry of Saint Barts was piracy. French privateers (or buccaneers, as they were known) would set sail from the island’s natural harbor to prey on Spanish galleons.
In 1784, as France began to totter toward Revolution, the French crown gave Saint Barts to Sweden in exchange for the right to engage in trade with the developing port of Gothenburg in the Baltic.
The Swedes wanted a foothold in the Americas as a place to sell iron ore and products. They renamed the village at the harbor Gustavia after King Gustav III and they founded the Swedish West India Company. That brought Swedish governors and Swedish merchants and Swedish slave traders to the Caribbean. That’s right: Swedish slavery.
In 1878 Sweden sold Saint Barts back to the French.
And today, the narrow lanes and handsome harbor are patrolled by tourists, oligarchs, and those that make a handsome living indulging them quite well.
All photos copyright Corey Sandler, all rights reserved. If you would like to purchase a high-resolution copy of any image, please contact me.
————–
Now available, the revised Second Edition of “Henry Hudson Dreams and Obsession” by Corey Sandler, for the Amazon Kindle. You can read the book on a Kindle device, or in a Kindle App on your computer, laptop, tablet, or smartphone.
If you would like to purchase an autographed copy, please see the tab on this page, “HOW TO ORDER A PHOTO OR AUTOGRAPHED BOOK”
Here’s where to order an electronic copy for immediate delivery:
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00IA9QTBM
By Corey Sandler, Destination Consultant Silversea Cruises
The flagpoles at the massive El Morro castle in San Juan customarily fly three flags: the United States, the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico, and the Cross of Burgundy.
The last one, Las Aspas de Borgoña, was the standard widely used by Spanish armies around the world from 1506 to 1785.
That makes sense for this handsome part of the United States, a place where English is the second language, and the population are Americans with most of the rights of other citizens except for voting representatives in Congress.
Puerto Rico is one of the gems of the Caribbean, a green and mountainous island with handsome beaches and a tropical rainforest, a now-cosmopolitan capital city with one of the most impressive fortresses of the new world, several other significant cities each with its own allure, and a vibrant culture of music, literature, and food.
Puerto Ricans sometimes call the island Borinquen, a version of Borikén, its indigenous Taíno name, which means “Land of the Valiant Lord”.
The island, of course, was noted by Christopher Columbus, the Forrest Gump of the Caribbean. Columbus named the island San Juan Bautista, in honor of the Catholic Saint John the Baptist,
And the eventual capital city was named Ciudad de Puerto Rico (the City of the Rich Port.)
Over time, the names reversed. The entire island became known as Puerto Rico, while the city took the name San Juan.
Puerto Rico remained Spanish territory despite attempts to capture the island by the French, Dutch, and the British.Like Cuba, Puerto Rico remained a Spanish colony until 1898 when the Americans took over.
And then came the Americans.
Puerto Rico had been on the to-do list of the Americans for some time, although the big prize was seen as the huge island of Cuba.
The dominos fell in the short but decisive Spanish American War of 1898, essentially an American choice to intervene in the Cuban War of Independence.
American attacks on Spain’s possessions spread from the Caribbean to the Pacific, and American involvement in the Philippine Revolution and ultimately the Philippine–American War.
The most dominant structure in San Juan is El Castillo San Felipe del Morro, or Morro Castle. This citadel was begun in 1539 on orders of King Charles V of Spain.
The fort was designed to guard the entrance to the San Juan Bay, and defend the Spanish colonial port city of San Juan from seaborne enemies including the English, Dutch, and Pirates.
Its last, brief and unsuccessful battle, came when the Americans landed in 1898.
And they’re still there: the citizens who live there now and millions of tourists who come by cruise ship and jet to La Isla del Encanto, the enchanted isle.
All photos by Corey Sandler, all rights reserved. If you would like to purchase a high-resolution image, please contact me.
By Corey Sandler, Destination Consultant Silversea Cruises
We sailed out of tony Fort Lauderdale on Friday evening, saluting—and being saluted—by many of the residents of condominiums who have their own version of a waterfront veranda. Almost every day during the winter season, half a dozen or so ships sail by in the channel.
This morning we arrived in Nassau, Bahamas.
There were five major ships in port, along with the elegant (comparatively tiny) Silver Cloud. By my math, about 17,500 guests and crew arriving by 9 am, departing before dinner.
Ships (not ours) double and triple-parked in the harbor at Nassau.
As destination consultant, I always tell guests in this part of the world that it is one of my goals to help they understand that the Caribbean is much more than Diamonds International and t-shirts that change colors in the sun. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but many of the islands have been so heavily plastered over with tourist lures and generic shops that it is easy to forget these are places of considerable history.
To understand Caribbean islands you need to get beyond the tourist district. Visit the remnants of Colonial power, the old churches and cemeteries, and in some places the small vestiges of the indigenous peoples: the Taino, the Arawaks, the Caribs among them.
A remembrance of Queen Victoria in Nassau.
On our visit today we left the ship early and headed for Christ Church Cathedral.
This is the Mother Church of Anglican churches in the Bahamas and the Turks and Caicos Islands.
In 1670, King Charles II granted the colony of The Bahamas to the proprietors of Carolina and directed they build a house of worship.
They did, and it stood until 1684 until it was destroyed by the Spaniards. The present building, which incorporates some of the old fixtures, was built in the late 18th and early 19th century.
It is a simple, attractive wooden structure, home to the Anglican Episcopal community—a remembrance of British times at the corner of King and George streets.
Christ Church Cathedral in Nassau.
Our focus was on the memorial plaques that line its walls; each one tells a story, and together they explain the culture that lies beneath today’s tourist makeover.
Among many evocative memorial plaques was one remembering crew from HMS Peterel who died of Yellow Fever in Nassau in 1862. I’m going to take an educated guess here and say the following is quite possible: the British ship may have been directly or indirectly involved in blockade running, trading with the Confederate States during the U.S. Civil War.
Yellow Fever and Malaria outbreaks were common in tropical and subtropical ports, and both The Bahamas and Bermuda were used as transfer and supply points for the blockade runners.
All photos copyright 2015 Corey Sandler. If you would like to purchase a high-resolution image, please contact me.
Silversea Silver Cloud from Fort Lauderdale, Florida to Bridgetown, Barbados
By Corey Sandler, Destination Consultant Silversea Cruises
After a vacation at home for the holidays, we’re back on the Cloud for a journey to the southern Caribbean and, on later cruises, to South America and up the amazing Amazon River.
We sail from Fort Lauderdale, with our first stop the bustling island of Nassau where we will not be alone.
This cruise includes several of the obvious suspects: well-known places like Nassau, San Juan, St. Barts, and Sint Maarten. Not that there’s anything wrong with them; they are well-known for good reason.
But there are also some less-visited gems including the lush green islands of Dominica, St. Lucia, and Barbados.
I’ll be posting photos and commentary throughout; I hope you’ll join me here.
By Corey Sandler, Destination Consultant Silversea Cruises
We have arrived at the green and lush island of Madeira, about 1,000 kilometers or 625 miles west of the coast of Portugal. It’s a great place to visit, but for many guests it’s time to hitch a ride home.
Here are some photos from recent visits I have made to Madeira.
A MADEIRA ALBUM
All photos by Corey Sandler.
We’ve been onboard the lovely Silver Cloud cruise ship for two months and it’s time for vacation. I’ll be back onboard with Silversea in January, headed from the Caribbean to Devil’s Island and then up the Amazon River to Manaus and back; you can keep track of my schedule at
http://www.silversea.com/life-onboard/enrichment/destination-consultants/?staff=6417
Until we meet again, safe travels.
All photos copyright Corey Sandler. All rights reserved. If you would like to purchase a high-resolution image, please contact me.
By Corey Sandler, Destination Consultant Silversea Cruises
Málaga is the capital of the Costa del Sol, the Sun Coast, its very name brings to mind sweet repose, and sweet wine.
Both are conducive, I suppose, to great art, and it was here that Pablo Picasso was born and it is here that members of his family contributed pieces—some well-known and others quite obscure—to a small but rich museum.
MALAGA AND THE ALCAZABA
Above the bullring in Malaga is the Alcazaba, a Moorish fortification from the 8th to the 11th century. Alcazaba comes from the Arabic al-qasbah, meaning the citadel, and this is the best-preserved example in Spain.
RONDA
About an hour west of Málaga in the inland hills is Ronda. Ronda was first settled by the early Celts, but what you see today is the result of later Roman and Moorish rulers. Catholic Spain took control of the town in 1485, during the Reconquista.
Ronda is in a very mountainous area about 2,500 feet above sea level (750 meters) (2,500 feet). The Guadalevín River bisects the city with the steep El Tajo gorge.
Three bridges cross El Tajo: the Roman, the Old, and the New. All of them are old.The Puente Romano (the Roman Bridge, also known as the Puente San Miguel), dates from Roman times at least one thousand years ago. The Puente Viejo (“Old Bridge”, also known as the Puente Arabe or “Arab Bridge”) is a mere four centuries old, built in 1616.
The Puente Nuevo (New Bridge) was begun in 1751 and took until 1793 to complete. This is the tallest of the bridges, towering 390 feet or 120 meters above the canyon floor. There is a chamber beneath the central arch that was used as a prison. During the Spanish Civil War of 1936 to 1939, both sides were alleged to have used the chamber to torture prisoners, killing some by throwing them to the rocks below.
Another important site in Ronda is the 1784 Plaza de toros de Ronda, the oldest bullfighting ring still in use in Spain. The partially intact baños árabes (“Arab baths”) below the city date from the 13th and 14th centuries.
Ernest Hemingway spent many summers in Ronda’s old town quarter, La Ciudad. Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls describes the murder of Nationalist sympathizers early in the Spanish Civil War.
Another frequent visitor was actor and director Orson Welles. About Ronda, Welles said, “A man is not from where he is born, but where he chooses to die.” Welles’ ashes were scattered in the Ronda bull-ring in 1985.
A MALAGA and GRANADA ALBUM. Photos by Corey Sandler
Downtown Malaga, fronted by the cruise terminal. Photos by Corey Sandler
The Alcazaba of Malaga. Photos by Corey Sandler
Inside the Malaga Cathedral. Photos by Corey Sandler
Some of the glories of Granada. Photos by Corey Sandler
The bullring, the gorge, and a palacio in Ronda. Photos by Corey Sandler
GRANADA
One of Spain’s most spectacular and famous cities is Granada, just under two hours to the northeast of Malaga. Granada sits at the base of Sierra Nevada mountains, at the confluence of three rivers.
The city has been inhabited for thousands of years. The original settlers were perhaps Ibero-Celtics. Then came Phoenicians, Carthagenians, and Greeks. By the 5th century BC, the Greeks had established a colony they called Elybirge.
The heraldic symbol of Granada is the pomegranate: Granada in Spanish. A Jewish community was established outside of the city, called “Gárnata al-yahud” (Granada of the Jews). In 711, the Jewish community worked with Moorish forces to take the city, which became known as Ilbira or Elvira.
The city became the capital of a province of the Caliphate of Cordoba. The city was mostly destroyed in war in 1010. When it was rebuilt the Gárnata was incorporated into the city, and from that we have the modern name of Granada.
In January 1492, the last Muslim sultan in Iberia surrendered control of Granada to Ferdinand and Isabella, Los Reyes Católicos (“The Catholic Monarchs”.)
The Alhambra, Arabic for “the red one”, or the red fortress, was built in the mid-14th century. It originally was the residence of the Muslim rulers of Granada and their court. With the reconquest by the Spaniards, it became a Christian palace.
Within the Alhambra, a new palace was erected in 1527 by Charles V, the Holy Roman Emperor. After falling into disrepair, the Alhambra was “rediscovered” in the 19th century. It is now one of Spain’s major tourist attractions.
It exhibits the country’s most famous Islamic architecture, together with Christian 16th-century and later improvements. Like a house that has been built, rebuilt, and expanded dozens of times over centuries, the Alhambra is a bit of an architectural mess.
That’s actually one of its charms
All photos by Corey Sandler. All rights reserved. If you would like to purchase a high-resolution image, please contact me.
————————————————————————-
Now available, the revised Second Edition of “Henry Hudson Dreams and Obsession” by Corey Sandler, for the Amazon Kindle. You can read the book on a Kindle device, or in a Kindle App on your computer, laptop, tablet, or smartphone.
Here’s where to order a copy for immediate delivery:
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00IA9QTBM
By Corey Sandler, Destination Consultant Silversea Cruises
Cartagena is on the Costa Cálida, the Warm Coast of Spain’s Murcia region.
This is one of Spain’s more historically significant places because of its superb and easily defended naval port. As far back as the 16th century Cartagena was one of Spain’s most important naval ports; it still is one of the homes of the Spanish navy, including a contingent of minesweepers and submarines.
The original settlement was called Mastia. About 227 BC, Hasdrubal the Fair established a town at the great harbor. He called the place Qart Hadasht, “New City”: The same name as where he had come from: Carthage, across the water in what is now Tunisia.
Hasdrubal used the port as launching point for the conquest of Spain.
Roman general Scipio Africanus conquered it in 209 BC and renamed it as Carthago Nova, which—a bit confusingly—means “New, New City.” At least that helped distinguish it from Carthage.
The Romans, from Julius Caesar to Octavian and beyond used Carthago in their conquest of the Iberian Peninsula. In 298 Diocletian constituted a new Roman province in Hispania called Carthaginensis and placed the capital in this city, a role it would hold for more than seven centuries until it was destroyed by the Vandals in 435.
When the first wave of Islamic tribes came to Hispania—the Umayyad invasion—the port was one of the landing places they used, along with Gibraltar.
Today Cartagena is a handsome coastal city, holding within a section of ancient Punic or Phoenician wall, a Roman amphitheater (only rediscovered on 2000), Moorish fortifications, 16th century Christian sites including churches and crypts, and a beautiful downtown lined with Modernist or art nouveau buildings.
Here are some photos from my visit today.
A CARTAGENA ALBUM
MURCIA and FUENSANTE
About 50 kilometers or 35 miles north of Cartagena in the interior is the town of Murcia, the provincial capital and university town, a much larger city of 440,000.
Murcia has a similar back-story to Cartagena, a mix of Roman, Moorish, and Spanish cultures.
Just outside of Murcia is the Monastery of the Virgin of Fuensanta, the patroness of Murcia.
In Murcia itself is the exquisite 19th century Murcia Casino, with an exterior inspired by the Alhambra in Granada; inside it is more like a British gentleman’s club, a place to socialize and play billiards.
A MURCIA ALBUM. Photos by Corey Sandler
The Murcia Cathedral. Photos by Corey Sandler
Monastery of the Virgin of Fuensanta. Photos by Corey Sandler
Within the exquisite Murcia Casino. Photos by Corey Sandler
All photos by Corey Sandler. All rights reserved. If you would like to purchase a high-resolution image, please contact me.
By Corey Sandler, Destination Consultant Silversea Cruises
Tunisia needs a better public relations agency.
It’s not a country that has been high up on many people’s list of must-see, historically and culturally important places on the planet.
For most of its existence—and we’re talking here about the past two or three thousand years—it has been a backwater, a relatively small and powerless piece of real estate.
Except when it hasn’t.
Except when it was the birthplace of Hannibal and the great Carthaginian Empire.
Except when it was one of the principal crossing points for the Islamic invasion of Europe, with wave upon wave of Moors coming from the Middle East.
Except when it played an important role in some pivotal action in World War II.
And except for 2011, when it was the first domino to fall in the Arab Spring, a seemingly unlikely place to overthrow a repressive dictator and set off a rolling earthquake in the Middle East and parts of Africa.
And even today, it is in some ways teetering on a razor’s edge as it attempts to build a stable democracy at home at the same time as it nervously worries about the possibility of radical Islamists coming back home to Tunisia from Syria or Iraq.
Tunisia is at the center of the Arab Maghreb—the Arabic word for the “place where the sun sets”—the western extension of the Moorish wave that swept out of the Middle East into Africa.
From Morocco, hordes crossed the narrow Mediterranean into Europe to occupy Spain, Portugal, and parts of France.
Tunisia is in many ways a straddle, a keystone at the top of Africa.
With about 98 percent of its population Muslim, it has strong links to the Arab League and Arab nations. It also participates in the African Union.
And then there are relations with the European Union and in particular France, and—in recent decades—a mostly strong relationship with the United States.
On this visit, I went with a group to the Cap Bon peninsula, a part of Tunisia not often visited by tourists. It includes the northernmost finger of land in all of Africa as well as the ancient Phoenician ruins of Kerkouane. Here are some photos I took:
CAP BON, TUNISIA
And here are some more photos from previous visits.
A TUNISIA ALBUM. Photos by Corey Sandler
Les Roses des Sables. Sand roses from the desert
Ancient Carthage
Museé Nationale de Carthage
Sidi bou Said
The Bardo Museum, Tunis
The Great Mosque of Kairouan
All photos by Corey Sandler. All rights reserved. If you’d like to purchase a high-resolution image, please contact me
———————-
Now available, the revised Second Edition of “Henry Hudson Dreams and Obsession” by Corey Sandler, for the Amazon Kindle. You can read the book on a Kindle device, or in a Kindle App on your computer, laptop, tablet, or smartphone.
Here’s where to order a copy for immediate delivery:
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00IA9QTBM
By Corey Sandler, Destination Consultant Silversea Cruises
At the considerable risk of jinxing a remarkable run of good weather, we returned to the wondrous island nation of Malta today for a reprise of summer.
Here are some photos I took today in the late November sun.
Sailing into Valletta, Malta in the early morning.
Our ship, Silver Cloud, at the dock. And a street scene in Valletta.
The spectacular Co-Cathedral of Saint John in Valletta, with a detail from the amazing frescoes by Italian artist Mattia Preti. Figures seem to lean out from the corners toward we mere mortals below.
For more about Malta, see my earlier Blog post of October 7, 2014 by clicking below.
http://blog.sandlerbooks.com/2014/10/08/7-october-2014-valletta-malta/
All photos by Corey Sandler, all rights reserved. If you would like to purchase a high-resolution image please contact me.
By Corey Sandler, Destination Consultant Silversea Cruises
We returned to Trapani on the island of Sicily, and our reception could not have been warmer.
In mid-November, with winter around the corner, we enjoyed a superb summer-like day along the sea and up in the mountains.
On this visit, I went with a group of guests up the mountain to Erice, starting at the sea salt pans in the harbor and then climbing the switchback road up the hill.
Some photos follow. For more about Trapani, see my blog entry from October 6, 2014.
A TRAPANI AND ERICE ALBUM
Erice above Trapani
The salt pans of Trapani
Looking down from Erice at Trapani
The Cathedral at Erice
All photos copyright Corey Sandler, all rights reserved. If you would like to purchase a high-resolution image please contact me.
By Corey Sandler, Destination Consultant Silversea Cruises
We are back in Naples, our last visit of the season to Campania. Silver Cloud is heading now for Sicily, Malta, Tunisia, the south coas of Spain and on to Madeira before crossing the pond to the Caribbean and South America for the winter.
Many guests headed off to Pompeii or the on enchanting isle of Capri.
Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but we’ve done that and more many many times.
See some recent blog posts: 11 November 2014 and 4-5 October 2014 for photos and stories.
Instead, on today’s visit we choose to go underground: to two of the ancient catacombs below Naples.
Up on the hill of Capodimonte above Naples are the Catacombs of San Gennaro and nearby in the working class district of Sanita are the Catacomb of San Gaudioso.
Photos by Corey Sandler
Unlike the Catacombs of Rome, these underground cities were not built as refuges for really Christians hiding from persecution. Instead, here in Naples, the catacombs are remnants of ancient burial cults.
Some date back several hundred years before the Christian era. The two we visited include some ancient chambers as well as Roman and Christian tombs.
The catacombs on Capodimonte have only been reopened to the public since 2009; they were cleaned and lit by a cooperative established by local students and parishioners. This year they expect to receive about 50,000 visitors. Today, there were eight of us–and the former tombs of perhaps three thousand former residents.
At San Gaudioso, the 3rd century Christiana had elaborate routes that including doing of bodies, separation of the head from the test of the body and the veneration and display of the skulls on a special chamber.
I almost joined the display myself: I clanged my head on a low hanging beam. I left the catacombs with an indelible memory and a temporary lump on my forehead.
All photos copyright Corey Sandler. All rights reserved. If you would like to purchase a high-resolution photo image, please contact me.
———————-
Now available, the revised Second Edition of “Henry Hudson Dreams and Obsession” by Corey Sandler, for the Amazon Kindle. You can read the book on a Kindle device, or in a Kindle App on your computer, laptop, tablet, or smartphone.
Here’s where to order a copy for immediate delivery:
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00IA9QTBM