On Saturday morning, we learned that Janie was scheduled to give this presentation at 10 a.m. on Sunday. Talk about pressure to produce quickly. Fortunately, Janie had received information from a friend of hers about what the previous sultan had done for the country, and I had found photographs on the Internet that demonstrated the fabulous wealth and lifestyle of the current sultan. His Royal Majesty had been the richest man in the world until he and his brother had squandered away $8 billion. Don't we all wish that we had that amount of money?
While we were collecting our thoughts about the presentation, we did get to see the ship's emergency drill on Deck 4. We now know just how safe we are on the Pacific Princess and how well prepared the crew is for an emergency.
At 11 a.m., Ken and I decided to debark the ship for several hours to see the one tourist attraction we have wanted to see the most this year--Kelly Tarlton's Underwater World and Antarctic Encounter. We took the complimentary van with the shark's head from downtown to museum, which reminded us of the South Florida Museum in Bradenton but on a grander scale. We saw the king and gentoo penguins through the viewing window, toured the reproductions of rooms in Scott's Hut, watched the Stingray Encounter and marveled at the delicate creatures in the Seahorse Kingdom. We rode the moving sidewalk twice around the Oceanarium and Predator Tank, where we watched the surface feeding of the fish and learned fascinating facts about sharks. The sign at the Predator Tank informed us that the sharks in the water appear only to be 3/4 of their real size and range in length from the school shark at 2 meters to the great white shark at 6 meters (no great whites were present).
However, the most fascinating exhibit for me was the Snowcat Ride that simulated a real trip through Antarctic. According to another display in the museum, scientists that work at Kelly Tarton's who had traveled to Antarctica as part of their job claim that the simulated experience is quite real. On the snowcat, we ventured through whiteout conditions that were a combination of the strong winds and ice that Scott and his team faced during their final days. We learned that penguins, which do not fly, perform all the movements of flying while in the water, lose all of their feathers once a year in a molting process that takes from four to six weeks resulting in a lost of 20 to 30 percent of their body weight and are very social animals. While the colony in the museum has 80 birds, colonies in the wild may host at many as 1 million. I liked this ride so much that I did it twice.
After we returned from the museum, our goal was to spend the remainder of our New Zealand money on wine and beer, with Ken finding a new beer to add to his Beers of the World Tour--Steinlager. Then we returned to the ship at about 5:30 p.m., choosing to dine on our balcony.
The next morning, Janie and I got together early and actually had the semblance of a real presentation by 10 a.m., thanks to Janie convincing members of the audiovisual team to come to her cabin to help us. In my introduction, I explained that Brunei is one of three countries that occupies the island of Borneo, with part of Malaysia and Indonesia being the other two, and showed photographs of the Sultan, his cars and airplanes. Then Janie told her stories of how she became involved with the Sultan and his second wife with whom she often had tea and received a donation of two buses to transport the children in her clinics. While she and her charges often swan in the pool at the palace and attended many parties there, Janie had to get almost everything for the clinics donated.
That afternoon, our room steward delivered a large floral arrangement to our cabin that Janie that worked with the head waiter to obtain. It is no surprise to anyone that Janie was an outstanding fundraiser.
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