29^th October. Quiet day today. We had a distress call from Duncan, his computer wouldn’t talk to his camera, so it was a case of trying to think what could be the difficulty. Although I am of course a “Mac” enthusiast, I have used computers for some time and my daughter has “Windows” and Duncan has only had his computer for a very short time. After my suggestions of resetting the defaults and “defragging” the hard disk it was better and then Ose made a suggestion of clicking a button of some sort after I had returned to our cabin it seemed to be OK again. Long to remain that way (or at least until we get to Auckland, I hope). I’m never quite sure how one of these “Windows” machines are going to react, so I need to remind people –  all care, no responsibility if they loose all their data. Then it was print a couple of photos for Ose, then some for Duncan after lunch. So one more busy day gone.

30^th October. Quite day just a few photos to print ready to post off tomorrow with our postcards we purchased from the Suez crew and decide on priorities for tomorrow ashore.

Melbourne

31^st October. Well we arrived of Melbourne this morning before breakfast. It’s quite a way in from the sea and we were only travelling quite slowly as we had to do an anticlockwise trip into the harbor area. Once we were lined up it is a very narrow channel into the wharves themselves so we didn’t actually dock until 10:30am. When we had had lunch Duncan went to see when the Immigration and Customs people would be aboard as we hadn’t heard, 1:30 and we are still waiting, seems a plane with around 300 passengers can be processed quicker than a ship with 5.

Well we finally found out why we were held up. The two cruise ships arrived together and all the customs and immigration staff were down there and nobody was available, they finally turned up at 3:30. We were able to go ashore at 4:00 PM. That was great as when we ordered a taxi for 5 people. At the gate we had to wait until nearly 5:00 PM before it arrived to pick us up and that was after 2 more phone calls. We did get to town but it was about 5:15pm by the time we got there. Luckily being the day before the Melbourne Cup every thing was still open. We were able to do most of the shopping we wanted to get done and met up for dinner at 7:15pm. After dinner we split up with the other three going to an Internet café and Delma and I went to the Casino to make enough money to pay for the trip! After that we decided it was about time to head back to the ship and give a taxi driver a chance to get lost. We ended having to walk the last 300 or 400 hundred meters around the corner because the driver thought he was there but never mind.