Day 46

It’s been a day of education today, 3 talks, a bit of sewing, a craft class and an evening of comedy with an Irish comedian.  

Today’s I learned that the oldest tree in the world is a Spruce in Sweden which is 9,200 years old.  Trees can hear, they communicate with each other via sound at 220Hertz and they can also smell.  When they are being eaten by giraffes and other animals the trees produce a nasty tasting substance to deter the animals eating them and at the same time communicate with other trees by releasing a chemical to alert them that the animals are near, enabling other trees to produce the deterring substance.  They also communicate with each other via mycelium which is a fungus root like structure under the ground which connects trees over vast distances. 

Next up was a continuation of the African wildlife talk from yesterday.  We learned how African Conservancies, farms and wildlife parks work and the balance between the animals and growing the right grasses to support all the different animals.

The final spot of education today was a question and answer session with Riaan Manser, the adventurer/explorer who spoke yesterday.  

We had a night off dressing up for dinner and headed to the pub onboard - the Golden Lion where fish and chips were order of the day followed by fruit crumble - yumm!

William Caulfield (an Irish comedian) had the ship in hysterics this evening with his stand up show, which was no mean task given the onboard audience!  The were many laugh out loud moments.

Finally, the evening was finished with a sleight of hand magician/illusionist who was pretty average.  

We headed off to the cabin, ready for bed only to hear this constant muffled ringing of a phone.  It definitely wasn’t any of the phones in our cabin but seemed to be coming through a socket in the wall.  After much investigating, 20 mins later we could still hear the ringing and resorted to calling the purser for help.  A man arrived minutes later and after much head scratching and investigating we discovered it was the cabin next door who were making a phone call and sitting in a phone queue (for a very long time) and had put their phone on loud speaker.  About 20 mins later they either gave up in the phone queue or finally got to the front of it and the ringing stopped, thank goodness.

Last day at sea tomorrow before Durban!

Transporting giraffes in todays talk