Scarborough, Tobago – Devil’s Island, French Guiana – Macapa, Brazil (2024)
Scarborough, Tobago
Located about 23 miles from Trinidad, Tobago is the much smaller second island in the nation of Trinidad And Tobago, sometimes called TT locally. We arrived at Scarborough, the capital and largest city on Tobago, on the morning of January 7. This was our first visit, never having been to Trinidad either.
Tobago was inhabited by Carib people when Columbus became the first European to sight it in 1498 (although he didn’t land there). Over the years the indigenous people adamantly resisted colonization, although the Spanish began raiding it for slaves in the early 16th century. The island was constantly fought over by the British, Dutch and French, changing hands 31 times before it was finally awarded to the British in 1814 (presumably in the settlement of the Napoleonic Wars). A destructive hurricane and the end of slavery in 1834 doomed the island’s productive sugar industry and in 1889 Tobago became a ward of Trinidad. The two-island nation achieved independence from Britain in 1962 and in 1976 became a republic. Today Tobago has a legislature and some internal home rule, but is otherwise dominated by Trinidad. Tourism is its largest industry.
Scarborough is the largest town on Tobago with only about 18,000 people, whose homes are spread out over the beautiful green hills surrounding the town. It was very hot and humid when we were there and it was also Sunday, so not much was happening and most businesses were closed.
After a delicious breakfast (the food on this voyage has been really good so far) we left the ship and walked down the dock into the town. If you have read this blog before you won’t be surprised that our first objective was the library. Unlike in most cities, the library here is one of the largest buildings in town and it is located just a block across from the dock.
We walked around it until we found the main entrance. It was completely dark inside but we walked up the stairs to see if there was a listing of hours. There wasn’t but we tried looking through the glass door to see the inside (too dark to see anything). Then a nice young guard came over and opened the door to inform us that the library was closed on Sundays. We were disappointed but at least we got to see the outside of the building, which seemed to us rather large and imposing for a town of 18,000 people. It probably serves the whole island, which is rather sparsely populated.
We decided to visit the Botanical Gardens, located on the hills behind the library. The gardens cover some 18 acres that the British requisitioned for this purpose in the late 19th century from what was once a couple of sugar plantations. They are quite beautiful but mostly up a steep hill that left us rather worn out by the time we reached the top. Extensive Christmas lights were still in evidence on the buildings and trees but were not lit in the daytime (of course).
Thereafter we looked for the fort the British built here in the 18th century, but we didn’t find it before we were pretty worn out. Mary had a knee replaced in July & neither of us is as young as we once were, and did we mention it was hilly and hot and very humid? So we returned to the ship after what turned out to be a brief look at this town. We tried to spot the fort as we sailed away but never saw it (or perhaps we just failed to recognize it). We backed well away from the pier before turning around to sail into the ocean. As we did so a colorful kite came flying over, apparently from shore, and after a while sank slowly into the water. A boat came speeding up looking for it, but the kite had submerged by the time it arrived. Later, after the boat had gone, the kite bobbed back to the surface, where we last saw it.
Devil’s Island, French Guiana
We were awoken very early on January 9 by the noise of the tender boat hanging just outside our stateroom veranda being lowered into the water. This was our announcement that we were anchored off this three island archipelago (called Iles de Salut) about 9 miles from the shore of French Guiana. Thanks a lot; wasn’t this supposed to be a vacation?
Devil’s Island was, of course, a notorious French prison for about 100 years, ending in 1953. If you have seen the movie Papillion, you should know a lot about it, although the book on which the movie is based has been debunked as fictional rather than the memoir it purported to be. The author had actually been imprisoned on the mainland and had never even visited Devil’s Island, much less escaped from it. Still, the prison was pretty horrible. Its most famous inmate was Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish officer in the French army who in the late 19th century was framed and convicted of treason, spending about 5 years in seclusion on Devil’s Island before his conviction was overturned and he was returned to France. Today you can see a restoration of his stone hut from the nearby island of Ile Royale, although no one can actually visit the true Ile Diablo because the waters are too dangerous.
From our anchorage we could see two of the three islands: Ile Royale (at left in picture below) and Ile St Joseph (at right). Ile Royale was the main prison installation, housing most of the prisoners and administration of the prison. Ile St Joseph housed problem prisoners, often held in harsher conditions such as solitary confinement, darkness and enforced silence. Ile Diablo (Devil’s Island) was for political prisoners, which included Dreyfus and more than twenty republicans who resisted the coup d’etat of Louis Bonaparte, among others. Devil’s island was on the other side of Ile Royale from where we anchored, so we couldn’t see it from the ship, although you can see it from the other side of Ile Royale.
This was our third visit to this archipelago and Ile Royale is not, for all of its beauty and interest, a metropolis like Paris or Rome where there is always something new to do or see on return visits. So we stayed on board rather than tendering to the small dock on Ile Royale.
But if you want to know what we did and saw on previous visits, as well as see and read much more about these islands and the prison and its ruins, you can look at our previous Devil’s Island blog posts, from 2012 and 2019:
https://baderjournal.com/2012/03/07/devils-island-french-guyana/
https://baderjournal.com/2019/12/12/devils-island-french-guiana-2019/
We were told by some who did go ashore that the restaurant and gift shop were closed as was the church, possibly for additional restoration. So we weren’t too sorry to miss it. If it had been our first visit it would have been a very different story. From the ship we were able to see the top of the modern lighthouse above the trees and another ruins we couldn’t identify visible through an opening in the foliage. In the opposite direction we could see the shore of French Guiana about 9 miles away. You can see why few attempted to escape through this long stretch of shark infested waters.
As an aside, because our veranda was smack up against tender/life boat #11 we had in interesting view of the lowering and raising of the tenders. Below is a picture of the opened tender cranes after the boats are in the water, taken through the rain spotted glass under the rail across our veranda. Below that is a view of the tender boats stored in their raised position along the ship and the same view after they are lowered into the sea, showing the walking deck below. We had never been in quite that position before.
Macapa, Brazil
The morning of January 11 found us anchored in the Amazon near Macapa, Brazil. We had crossed the Amazon Bar (where the river meets the ocean) the day before. There is a dispute whether the Amazon or the Nile is the longest river in the world, but there is no dispute that the Amazon is the biggest in every other way, particularly volume of water. The river is spectacularly wide; in fact there is an island the size of Switzerland situated near its mouth. Sailing this river is quite beautiful and varied, with wonderful cloud formations and many different looking villages and isolated houses along its shores. Mary noted that whoever christened the Mississippi “The Big Muddy” must not have been here, because the Amazon is much bigger and much muddier than the Mississippi.
The water in the Amazon is historically low this year because of drought throughout the Amazon basin. This has killed many wildlife, including more than a hundred of the endangered pink dolphins that live here, whose bodies have washed up on shore. It has also made navigating the river, always a challenge for ocean going ships, much more perilous and a number of them have cancelled Amazon trips. Although it has double the passenger capacity of the Prinsendam, in which we have cruised the Amazon before, we are told that Zuiderdam has a shallow enough draft to make it through the river with an expert pilot on board. We picked up three pilots in Macapa, we understand, and will have replacements come aboard several times, kind of like the old Pony Express I guess. The captain said that the most valuable thing on board the ship right now is the pilots’ paper charts, which show which areas are too shallow and which are still deep enough for Zuiderdam to sail through.
Although Macapa is a large city of more than 500,000 people, this was not actually a port stop. No one was allowed off the ship to explore the city. This stop, only a few hours long, was designated a “service stop” to enable the ship to complete Brazilian paperwork (we know a little about how that can be from our visa fiasco), be inspected by Brazilian officials, and board the pilots. You would never know this was a big city from the ship’s anchorage, however, because all of it but a small dock was obscured by forest. In addition to the dock we saw the pilot boats that brought the Brazilian officials and the pilots, one with scaffolding an a raised platform for a pilot to safely jump from the ship.
It was too bad we couldn’t go ashore because this is one of a handful of cities in the world that the Equator runs through. There is a tall monument marking the spot, called “Marco Zero,” with a line from the monument to the local soccer stadium where it becomes the center line on the field. When we had a service stop here in 2019 we couldn’t see Marco Zero from the ship but we were anchored much closer to the center of town so that it actually looked like a city. The different anchorage is probably attributable to the much lower water level. You can see our 2019 stop here:
https://baderjournal.com/2019/12/02/three-days-at-sea-2019/
The rest of the day was basically a sea day (or river day) as we continued our journey up the scenic but muddy Amazon.
Third Voyage Around The World, in 2024
On January 3, 2024, we set sail from Ft Lauderdale on an epic 128 day voyage around the world, scheduled to return to Ft Lauderdale on May 11. We are sailing on the Holland America ship Zuiderdam which has a passenger capacity of more than 1900. This is much larger than any ship on which we have taken a long voyage before, but we are told that only a little more than 1200 passengers are actually on board. This will certainly make the ship less crowded but it’s still pretty big for our tastes and we are still trying to remember where everything is located two days later as I write this.
We joined this voyage primarily because its itinerary was so good for us, sailing to a number of interesting places we have never been, including Japan, China, India & Hawaii. So far we have had two itinerary changes before sailing, with three Israeli ports cancelled after war broke out there on October 7, and a reversal of our port stops in China that would enable many of us to visit those cities without obtaining a Chinese visa. As of today, here is our scheduled itinerary, first a map and then a list of port stops (the flaming round map icons denote overnight stops and the moon icons denote late night departures):
Day Date Itinerary Arrival Departure
WED 03JAN24 Sail from Fort Lauderdale, Florida, US 5:00pm
SUN 07JAN24 Scarborough, Trinidad and Tobago 8:00am 5:00pm
TUE 09JAN24 Devils Island, French Guiana 8:00am 5:00pm
THU 11JAN24 Macapa, Brazil 6:00am 11:00am
FRI 12JAN24 Alter Do Chao, Brazil 11:00am 6:00pm
SAT 13JAN24 Boca da Valeria, Brazil 7:00am 2:00pm
SUN 14JAN24 Manaus, Brazil 8:00am 5:00pm
MON 15JAN24 Parintins, Brazil 10:00am 6:00pm
TUE 16JAN24 Santarem, Brazil 8:00am 5:00pm
SAT 20JAN24 Saint Georges, Grenada 8:00am 5:00pm
MON 22JAN24 Willemstad, Curacao 8:00am 6:00pm
WED 24JAN24 Panama Canal 5:00am 5:00pm
FRI 26JAN24 Quepos, Costa Rica 7:00am 4:00pm
MON 29JAN24 Manzanillo, Mexico 12:00n 9:00pm
TUE 30JAN24 Puerto Vallarta, Mexico 8:00am 5:00pm
TUE 06FEB24 Kona, Hawaii, US 10:00am 8:00pm
WED 07FEB24 Hilo, Hawaii, US 8:00am 5:00pm
THU 08FEB24 Honolulu, Hawaii, US 7:00am 11:00pm
SUN 18FEB24 Guam (US Territory), Guam 8:00am 5:00pm
MON 19FEB24 Saipan, Northern Mariana Islands 8:00am 5:00pm
FRI 23FEB24 Ishigaki Island, Japan 7:00am 5:00pm
SAT 24FEB24 Naha, Japan 7:00am
SUN 25FEB24 Naha, Japan 11:00pm
WED 28FEB24 Tokyo, Japan 8:00am
THU 29FEB24 Tokyo, Japan 6:00pm
FRI 01MAR24 Omaezaki, Japan 7:00am 5:00pm
SAT 02MAR24 Kobe, Japan 9:00am
SUN 03MAR24 Kobe, Japan 5:00pm
MON 04MAR24 Scenic Cruising Kanmon Strait
TUE 05MAR24 Fukuoka (Hakata), Japan 7:00am 4:00pm
THU 07MAR24 Shanghai, China 8:00am
FRI 08MAR24 Shanghai, China 5:00pm
SUN 10MAR24 Dalian, China 8:00am 5:00pm
MON 11MAR24 Tianjin (Beijing), China 8:00am
TUE 12MAR24 Tianjin (Beijing), China 6:00pm
SAT 16MAR24 Hong Kong, China 8:00am
SUN 17MAR24 Hong Kong, China 3:30pm
TUE 19MAR24 Da Nang (Hue), Vietnam 8:00am 11:00pm
THU 21MAR24 Phu My, Vietnam 6:00am 6:00pm
SAT 23MAR24 Singapore 8:00am
SUN 24MAR24 Singapore 5:00pm
THU 28MAR24 Colombo, Sri Lanka 8:00am 11:00pm
SUN 31MAR24 Mumbai (Bombay), India 6:00am
MON 01APR24 Mumbai (Bombay), India 5:00pm
THU 04APR24 Fujairah, United Arab Emirates 8:00am 6:00pm
FRI 05APR24 Dubai, United Arab Emirates 7:00am 11:00pm
SAT 06APR24 Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates 8:00am 11:00pm
MON 08APR24 Muscat, Oman 8:00am 6:00pm
WED 10APR24 Salalah, Oman 8:00am 5:00pm
MON 15APR24 Sharm el Sheikh, Egypt 7:00am 8:00pm
TUE 16APR24 Aqaba (for Petra), Jordan 6:00am 8:00pm
THU 18APR24 Suez Canal 6:00am 6:00pm
SAT 20APR24 Rhodes, Greece 8:00am 9:00pm
SUN 21APR24 Bodrum, Turkey 8:00am 6:00pm
MON 22APR24 Kusadasi (Ephesus), Turkey 8:00am 6:00pm
TUE 23APR24 Cruising The Dardanelles
TUE 23APR24 Istanbul, Turkey 4:00pm
WED 24APR24 Istanbul, Turkey 4:00pm
THU 25APR24 Mykonos, Greece 11:00am 11:00pm
FRI 26APR24 Piraeus (Athens), Greece 7:00am 5:00pm
SUN 28APR24 Naples (Pompeii/Amalfi), Italy 8:00am 7:00pm
WED 01MAY24 Malaga, Spain 7:00am 5:00pm
SAT 04MAY24 Ponta Delgada, Sao Miguel, Azores, 8:00am 5:00pm
SAT 11MAY24 Debark Ship Fort Lauderdale 7:00am
The itinerary for this voyage has been uncertain from the beginning and we are still not sure how it will turn out. Notably:
Brazil: When we first visited Brazil in 2012 we purchased a visa that lasted 10 years. We visited again in 2019, when our visa would still have been good but Brazil had eliminated visas for US citizens. Earlier this year they announced they were reinstating a visa requirement for Americans at the beginning of 2014, about a year after our old visa, unused since 2012, ran out. The new visa requirement was to start for people entering Brazil on January 11, 2024 . . . the day we would arrive (coincidence? We wonder).
The date on which they would accept visa applications was delayed from early October until about a week into December, less than a month before we were to depart. This created a lot of pressure on passengers because we were told, repeatedly, that no one would be permitted to board the ship on January 3 without a Brazilian visa, thus putting the entire voyage in doubt for anyone who didn’t obtain a visa by then. And, of course, obtaining a visa turned out to be excruciatingly difficult. After filling out their form each of us had to upload a picture of ourself and of our picture passport page, in specified format with vague sizing requirements. We had to upload a copy of our Airline itinerary to and from Brazil (they later agreed to accept our ship itinerary) and a bank statement showing the names of the bank and the account holder and transactions for the last month demonstrating that we have at least $2,000 (ie. enough to get home again). The reviewing process was very slow (sometimes more than a week or even two) and arbitrary, since different demands for reuploading unaccepted documents were issued. Often no explanation was given about what was wrong with the initial document provided and there was no one you could contact for explanation or assistance. And remember, with the departure date fast approaching, the entire cruise was in jeopardy.
Was anybody nervous? You bet! Shortly before Christmas Holland America announced that no one would be denied boarding for lack of a visa after all and if Brazil wouldn’t accommodate us they would change the itinerary to skip Brazil. Then about a week later, as we were preparing to leave, HAL announced that Brazil had agreed that the ship could sail up the Amazon so long as passengers without a visa did not leave the ship. So at least no one was going to miss the entire cruise. Rick’s evisa finally arrived in his inbox the day before we sailed and Mary’s came today, three days into the voyage. We understand that about half the passengers hadn’t received visas by the time we sailed. Then yesterday Brazil announced that they were postponing the visa requirement for three months (what they should have done in the first place). So now everyone is free to visit the Brazilian ports (assuming we will be able to sail up the Amazon, which is suffering from a historic drought that kept some ships from visiting it a month or so ago). All we are out, therefore, is the $160 we paid for a Brazilian visa we probably will never need (no refunds, at least so far). That is not counting any health effects of a month of unnecessary tension for a bunch of people who are no longer as young as they once were.
The Red Sea: As I mentioned above, we originally had three stops in Israel that were changed in October. But we have no idea what may happen when we arrive at the southern entry to the Red Sea in April. The war in Israel continues, ships are avoiding the Red Sea and Suez Canal because some are being attacked with missiles and drones from Yemen, the US is threatening the Houthis in Yemen with military force if they don’t stop doing that, and Iran has reportedly sent war ships to the Red Sea and the Mediterranean. By April this may all be over, or it may have spread into a wider conflict shutting down the Red Sea. If the Red Sea is not open for cruise ships it seems we will have to be redirected around Africa, missing the Mediterranean portion of this itinerary. That would be pretty drastic and disappointing to us, first because it would mean more and wider suffering for the people in the region, but also because we visited most of the ports in Africa last year and were looking forward to some of the stops in the Mediterranean. Still, such a drastic alteration of a world cruise is not unprecedented: in 2020 HAL’s world cruise was aborted in Australia at the beginning of the COVID pandemic and passengers had to leave the ship in Perth and find a flight home from there. It was more than half a year before they saw their luggage again. So detouring around Africa wouldn’t be the worst that can happen (while being hit by a missile in the Red Sea would be). Obviously, we are hoping it doesn’t come to that.
Anyway, however it goes we intend to enjoy this voyage. We have a lot of great experiences planned and life aboard the ship is also enjoyable (unless you really enjoy washing dishes, making beds and doing laundry, which is all done for us here). Some people post to their blogs every day, it seems, but we don’t know how they do it. Blog writing can only be done on sea days and each episode seems to take us a long time to compose. Our main goal in this blog is to create a record of what we have done and seen on our travels that will serve as a diary/photo album, allowing us to look back on them and remember what we have experienced. So the permanent product is more important to us than keeping up with daily events. The result is that our postings will fall further and further behind the ship’s actual progress and we will not finish blogging this journey until months after we return.
If you are interested in following where we and the Zuiderdam are at any particular time you can see it on this page:
https://www.seascanner.com/ships-position-zuiderdamr
If you would like to receive an email when a new episode is posted to this blog there is a link where you can subscribe at the very bottom of this page. Because episodes will, at best, be posted intermittently on fairly random dates (on Grand Africa nothing was posted before we returned), and this blog is old-fashioned and not well indexed, subscribing is probably the easiest way to follow it. If you have subscribed in the past I don’t think you have to do it again (unless your email has changed).
If you click the “About” button at the top of this page you will learn more about this blog than you probably want to, including past voyages that are included here.
So that’s it for now. If you see this you will know that we were able to upload to our blog site (this didn’t work at all on our Grand Africa voyage last year). If you don’t, then nothing I say here will matter. We will leave you with two pictures. The first is us (on the left) with our friends Bill, Robert, Judy and Bob at dinner on the first night of the cruise. We all met during our first world cruise in 2016 when HAL threw us together to share a dining table, along with our friend Lee. All seven of us travelled together again on a world cruise in 2018. Only six of us are together this time, but only because Lee died during the 2018 voyage; otherwise we are sure he would have been here. The second picture is our first glorious Caribbean sunset. See you next time.
BADER JOURNAL 
