Tuesday 1st April

Woke up today expecting to be closing in on Chan May, unfortunately we were eighty miles out. We had some sort of problem with our Auto Pilot last night. The ship normally steers itself using computers similar to Auto Pilot on civil aircraft. These were set on our departure from Ha Long but during the night something seems to have gone wrong and we headed off in completely the wrong direction. The system is normally so reliable that no one noticed for some time. It was only when the sun began to rise and an alert lookout noticed that it was rising on the wrong side of the ship, that anyone realised something was wrong, by which time we were miles off course and to say that it caused a bit of a stir is something of an understatement. An embarrassed captain came on the ships tannoy apologising for the error and saying that it had now been corrected but we would be at least two hours late in arriving. He had to consult his map to find out where the error had taken us and not being used to navigating with maps (sorry charts) this took some time. He told us that those who had booked tours could cancel if they wished, but all tours would go ahead at the delayed time. However this in itself caused some problems as some tours were scheduled for eight hours which meant that the last two hours of the tour would be conducted in darkness.

Luckily for us we were not on a tour so we had some time to ourselves before taking the shuttle into ‘town’. We were docked in a little deep-water quay which from the look of it was used for the export of rock from the local quarry. We spoke to a few people who had cancelled but from the number of coaches leaving it seems that the majority had gone ahead. We finally got the shuttle which deposited us at a downtime resort where we were besieged by a large number of locals selling everything from taxi journeys to all the usual trinkets on trays they were the ultimate sticky toffee papers, we just could not get rid of them. We got some relief on the beach but even there we were constantly being approached. It was not easy to enjoy the beach but we discovered that if you walk quickly for long enough they considered it not worth the effort. Once back on board we sat on the balcony with a drink, watching the coaches return. We heard later that two or three of them had been pulled over for speeding trying to catch upon the schedule. Couple of days at sea coming up as we head back towards the equator.