The captain had announced prior to our departure from Lanzarote that we’d be putting into port at Gran Canaria at around midnight, apologising that this would mean the planned stop to Madeira was cancelled and for any noise and lights that might wake passengers during the overnight offloading of the unwell passengers. Like we’d be in bed at midnight.
The evening aboard Ventura, subsequently, was filled with a few glum faces because of the news about the removed Portuguese island from the itinerary, and there was some speculation about the state of the passengers who couldn’t be left on Lanzarote and couldn’t be taken by helicopter or ferry or dinghy or fired out of a cannon to Gran Canaria while the rest of us headed off as per the original plan. The consensus was Covid, but we’ll never know for sure.
We picked ourselves up from the bad cruise news with some time in The Tamarind Club as the ship’s stand-out singer, Nikki Jayne, was performing again. Seriously good vocal range, great song selection, and some funny asides to the audience that you seem to get a lot from northern entertainers. You can follow Nikki on Instagram if you’d like to see where she is in the world when you’re reading this.
Dinner was decent once more, although nothing in the main dining room on this Canary Islands cruise was ever spectacular. Cocktails were, of course, consumed as well.
And so for some unexpected photos of Gran Canaria, and certainly not the sort of photos of this island that most people would normally take if cruising in this part of the world. There’s not a lot to say about these pictures because they’re all just lights along the shoreline of the industrial port into which we cruised. We never got to see the passengers being disembarked from Ventura but it was nice to see just how many passengers on the ship were out on their balconies as we made this unscheduled diversion.
In the next part of this cruise travelogue series there will be a couple of quiet, relaxing sea days to suffer through and a meal at the Epicurean to endure.