Feb 11

It is hard to settle on a regular schedule on this world cruise. This is our first time sailing long distance on the ocean. Today, we crossed the international dateline and skipped a day, Feb 10. For the most part, the international dateline is the line at the longitude of 0 degree. But the line was redrawn in Polynesia islands where we are headed towards. Tonga is at the longitude of 175 W but it is the west side of the date line. During the journey, we adjusted the ship time periodically. Sometimes, we rolled the clock back one hour; other times, we just adjusted by 30 mins. Adjusting the time on our iPhones to match with the ship time created another confusion to us. On iPhones, there are Chicago time, Mountain time, etc but no Tonga time zone. The only way to adjust the time on an iPhone is to adjust the time at Chicago time manually. Since we also track the time at Shanghai and the West coast, changing the time at Chicago time zone manually messed up the other time zones on our phones.

Feb 12

Today, we were scheduled to dock at Tonga in the morning. We have had 15 sea days out of 20 cruise days. Everyone was eager to set foot on the land today. Then, the captain’s morning announcement came. Tonga authority had refused cruise ships entry to the country this morning. There were four cruise ships turned away today. We were not happy about it but we also understand it would be hard for Tonga . We can imagine the financial impact on the people depending on tourist industry. We are ahead to towards Fiji. We were told that we would have extra day on Fiji. Again, we have our fingers crossed. We saw another cruise, CMV Columbus, sailing from a distance.