This post has a variety of subjects. There were a lot of questions in the comments that I will try to get to first. Such as the service of Cruise Specialists and our leaders. First, the names of our CSI leaders are Tom Mullen from Birmingham, England and Ellen Bethel who lives just North of me in Poulsbo, Washington. They are very nice and Ellen is bubbly and chatty. Tom is more reserved. Second, CSI is doing a good job. The Amsterdam doesn’t have a special room with staff for world cruisers only. CSI fills that void by having representatives on board to answer questions.

My cabin is on the Main deck. This is the third deck up. It is also mid-ship which can be disconcerting. I have had a hard time discerning between Fore and Aft. When you are either aft or fore you become oriented much faster. At least that is my experience on this cruise, I think. It could be dementia. And, for my dear Lord Kay, the bottle is my fitness water not a baby bottle.

I went to my first specialty dinner at the Pinnacle Grill---the South American Dinner. The service and ambience is a little better than the dining room and the food is a bit better. I bought the package of 10 dinners for the price of 8 dinners. My purpose was to buy the package so I could go to the ten specialty dinners, Some of the themes---mystery dinner, French dinner, South African dinner, etc. I will reserve judgment on the relative value and report in a future post.

The photo of the geoglyphs is the part of the Arica post I felt that I couldn’t post under Arica.

Coquimbo is a working man’s town and is the port city for La Serena . Nothing special about the city and I just walked around a little, went to the internet café, and back to the ship to get my camera which I had forgotten. The weather is still quite cool but as the day goes on it does warm up. I changed to a cooler top, grabbed my camera and I was off again. There was only one photo I wanted so I could post here and that was of the zig zag stairs. As I was taking this photo I heard a shout “JUDI”. My cabin neighbors and fellow cruise specialist tour buddies were the ones shouting at me. Jennie was up by the stairs taking a photo when a tall lanky young chap grabbed her camera knocking her glasses to the ground. Locals saw what occurred, called the local police but the lanky chap was long gone. Now I knew why there were so many blue clad police in my photo. They felt I should not be walking around alone so I went back to the ship with them.