Callao (Lima), Peru - Tech/Service stop

We stopped at Callao, Peru ... yes Peru. It was considered a "technical stop at sea"" What is that? We were officially "at sea" since no one was allowed off the ship BUT but we actually docked in order to pickup fuel (important) and supplies/food (very important). In particular, we were out of blueberries and Perrier ... really? So it was the non-stop stop. TO make it more vague, when the Captain saw the vendors that were lined up outside the ship (see below) he felt terrible and called the home office to see if they could let passengers out in a very partitioned small area just to shop and support the locals. They were given the ok and some people went out that day and bought all these Peruvian shirts ... as if they visited Peru.

You can see it was quite an industrial port and a little scary, not just because of the unrest in Peru, not just because we were surrounded/protected by armed Coast Guard boats but because these cranes and other equipment were hanging over the ship ..as if we were a container ship.

Vendors hoping we can get off at Peru (photos 1 and 2)
Cranes looming over our ship (photos 3, 4, 5 and 6)
Picking up supplies- note: the Executive Chef trying to get this loading quickly -- he is on the forklift (photo 7)

Time changes!

In the last 2 weeks we had 5 time changes. The good news, we do not have any more changes until we get to Rio on March 3! So what time zone are we on? We are 2 hours later than Eastern Time.

Time zones are roughly the 24 areas, 15 degrees of longitude apart that the Earth are broken into making local time as close as possible (not exact) to solar time. The hour separations and shapes of the time zones are very irregular, usually following state lines or country boundaries to make it easier.

Note: If each time zone were 1 hour apart, there would be 24 in the world. But several time zones have only 30 and 45 minutes offsets, making the total number worldwide much higher.Read more