Man, ya'll better comment on this entry cuz it was a royal pain in the ass to put together :P
I had to whittle down the last couple months to a dozen pics or so... it was difficult, so I decided I'll make a few posts over the coming week about different aspects of my whole trip. This one will be about the places I've been recently. The next one, though, will be more pics about my actual job, cuz I realized I've never shown you guys pics of the actual ship and what I *actually* do.

So we started in Alaska. There isn't much to take pics of up there unless you want a thousand pics of mountains, but here's a few:

We would sail every week through a fjord called Tracy Arm (which "fjord" actually means "arm" in Norwegian or Swedish or something- like an arm of the sea that comes inland). This gives you an idea of scale, which is often lacking in these shots. That ship is a little bigger than a 50-story sky scraper laying on it's side. Puts it in perspective, ay?
We would take the fjord up to the face of the glacier:

Now, note the ice. We had to VERY carefully navigate this ice field every Wed. morning. So needless to say, if the ship shook on Wed. morning, I was out of bed like *snaps fingers*. Because we aren't talking a little ice, we're talking icebergs:

Yeah, no joke. As we speak, my ship is on blocks in a dry dock in Australia having dents hammered out of the hull.

So, from there came a LOT of days at sea. First San Francisco and Hawaii. Then a long jaunt down to French Polynesia. Crossed the Equator, for which we had a really disgusting, messy ceremony in accordance with ancient nautical tradition. Pics of that later.
During this time, I spent many hours at my control station, running shows:

And occasionally firing pyro bursts:

But again, more about that later in the week.

Then we arrived where I'd been waiting excitedly for months to get to- Bora Bora.

I've asked many old-time sailors from my industry, "what's the most beautiful place in the world?" I would say 4 out of 5 say the same thing- Bora Bora. They aren't alone in that opinion, either: It's been one of the embodiments of exotic romance for centuries.
I mean, hell, look at this beach!

It lives up to it's reputation. My vote for #1 beach get-away in the world.

Then the rest of French Polynesia was kinda ghetto, as I mentioned. A couple noteworthy pics from Fiji though:

That's me next to the guard at the end of the driveway of the house of the President of Fiji. They've had a lot of civil war there in the past decade, and seen much carnage. This guy has probably killed multiple people, maybe even with that very bayonet. But c'mon, doesn't he look so tiny and cute next to my lumbering white ass?
And this next pic is especially just for Becky:

Seems now I'm in more in the Bollywood market than the Hollywood one! This theater was playing like 10 of the big new Bolly films and maybe 2 American ones. I have ten pics of the stand-up displays like this for all the different movies :)

Anyway, on to New Zealand! First Auckland, the biggest city (but not the capital). The most obvious landmark in town is the Sky Tower.

It ALLEGES to be the tallest structure in the southern hemisphere. I have my doubts, but I did look for good measure, and Taipei 101 is north of the Equator, so I dunno. I haven't looked too hard.
But I DID look through the glass floors at the top:

New Zealand cities are clean, calm, and orderly. It's pleasantly odd. Amazing views up there, tons more pics, not enough bandwidth.
On to the park:

I just loved Auckland, I really did. I would live there. What a great city, and I've seen many.
I'm glad we stayed into the night, and I was sad to go.


We went to a couple other cities in NZ, Christchurch and Dunedin. Not many pics, but I really just loved NZ overall, for many reasons.
Saw a kiwi bird in Christchurch at an exhibit. They're the oddest animal I've ever seen, really cool.

We re-routed up inbetween the NZ islands over the Tasman Sea, as it was too rough around the southern tip at the time, so we had to skip Fjordland Park. But hey, 20 meter seas, what ya gonna do?

And on to the moment I'd been looking forward to for months- the sail-in to Sydney harbor.

Cloudy day, but we sailed right by the Opera House. Amazing. Apparently we were the biggest ship to ever sail under the bridge- we cleared it by 6 ft (heh). I have a video of it, it was a bit, um, unnerving.
I only managed to get off for a few hours in Sydney, but we're going back. I managed to have a good walk around. They have the craziest birds all over the place that make pretty comical noises. Seems like a great city, I can't wait to feel it out more.

Well kids, more later. Endoftheearth, reporting from really fucking far away.
I leave you with the money shot:



-Nn