I had started packing my stuff and wrote the last emails from the ship’s address. The departure had been delayed again a bit, but it makes no big difference for me because leaving the ship in Dunkirk tomorrow morning should be possible anyway. Dirk from “warmshowers” had cancelled his offer to host me in Wevelgem because of this always changing arrival time, so it will be a night in the tent I guess.
For the French couple and for me, this is the last day on the ship, they had been traveling by ship for 4 months and they are in pension anyway but they still don’t want to go home. I wonder how it would be for me if it would be longer. My days until now had been full of (more or less useful) activity, partly motivated by the thought that later I will have less time to do that. And I get the feeling that this kind of life could continue for a long time, because I would lose gradually lose the ability to cope with more complicated life. Here you have 4-5h between breakfast and lunch and 5-6h between lunch and dinner and some after dinner. You have the options to talk to others, to walk around the ship, read, play something, go to the gym or, at least in my case, do something on the PC. And in my case, I only did one walk on the whole trip instead of 5 rounds every day, I only read 1-2 books (the lonely planet for East Africa is not completed) and the conversation with my fellow travelers is not that fluent, so I didn’t look for it extra. But both options would enlarge the variety and I maybe could have learned to relax, to enjoy just watching the sea, maybe I even missed something when I didn’t go to the bridge as often as the other passenger, I saw less sunsets than they, less other ships and less thrilling manoeuvres of the ship, that means the 3-4 hours procedure of landing. Well, I lived my days, too, and 3 weeks at sea apparently is not enough to change my personality, also a year of travelling did not. My head is full of lively memories and at the same time this trip is unbelievable like a dream. To be more precise about memories, I suppose that I had forgotten 10x more than I remember, but besides the blog and the photos and the videos also my memory stores many moments and scenes and sometimes I am surprised about details that still are present.
When the ship left the berthing place it had to make a 180° turn to leave the port and I saw that from my window. For a short time, I was not sure if I should go up to the bridge and film this, but I am a bit tired of filming those slow procedures, then having 10GB of material to edit. And in the end, who wants to see that? Well, I watched for a while the turning of that big ship that is only possible in one part of the harbour but I took only one photo after that, because I like the view of the calm water with some stripes caused by ships that had been going some time an hour ago and you still could see the traces.
I had my last training in the gym, we had our last lunch together and later our last tea party, again with cake, Jochen was good at organizing that! I showed the ship exploring video we had made before Jochen had had his accident, so there was only a German version, not that exciting for the others.
After our last dinner, I spontaneously had the idea to ask Graham for an idiomatic translation of the text Jochen was telling in our ship video. I had made a translation in that kind of English you must read here and after 15min, it sounded great. Well, not sound in the best sense of the word (regarding a video), so I also asked him for a recording. And then I was very busy incorporating that in the video, putting a third layer of voice on it (the original words of Jochen on our tour, his over dubs in German and now Graham). Suddenly the loud noise of a helicopter sounded, and I rushed out with my camera seeing the pilot on a rope coming down to the ship from the helicopter. This camera has a very lovely feature, making recording videos so thrilling: sometimes pressing the rec-button starts recording and sometimes not. Then you must press a second time. And many times, when I really wanted to have the video, I forgot to check and only the camera pointed on the object and no video existed afterwards. Ok, you know now which version the camera offered this time. I was very sad when I realized it, but then came a second pilot out of the helicopter and I could film it partly.
Another “nice” feature of the camera is that it likes to lose the focus although you only film in the same direction, the same object at the same distance. By that a 10 second video of a pilot coming out of a helicopter and down on the ship can shrink to 5 seconds that are not blurry.
After finishing my editing labour, I went to the bridge during landing. I took a photo of Graham, Jean Marc and Jochen
with the harbour in the background when the captain came to me, with fast steps and a grim face. And traumatized from Suez I started to excuse for taking a photo and talked until he interrupted me because he just wanted to tell me that at 9:00 in the morning a taxi would come to the port for Marie, Jean Marc and me…
without editing 
with France behind me