theladywanderer

We woke up today and observed that Costa Fortuna was already docked up at Swettenham Pier in Penang.  Just like any other day, we freshened up, had breakfast and started walking along with rest of the people outside the Pier.  Our group was waiting for us and once all had gathered we started walking towards our tour bus. We were introduced to our pretty tour guide who was very enthusiastic in showing us around Penang. We were told that today’s tour also will be for approximately around 5 hours since we need to head back to ship by 3 PM. Penang is a beautiful state in Malaysia. Penang is mainly famous for George Town which is a UNESCO World Heritage site famous for the graffiti’s/street arts on the walls. Our guide told us that she will try her best to cover prominent places in this speculated time and we started walking towards to bus. We passed by very famous Penang's clock tower. Wat Chayamangkalaram This is one of the famous Thai Buddhist temple in George Town, Penang.  As y

Day 4 – Phuket, Thailand We woke up early in the morning and as always were super excited to see where our cruise has stopped today. When we peeped out from our cabin balcony, we could see some small passenger boats marching towards our cruise and they were later being connected to exit gates of our cruise. So, we were little curious to know why since previous day our ship docked at Langkawi port where this huge vessel was tied to the pier.  We got to know later that cruise ships like Costa which are too huge would require too deep of a draft to access ports and water is too shallow for ships to get closer to such sea shores. Hence such cruise ships will anchor in the deeper water offshore and use smaller boats to get passengers to and from shore. This is called tendering. Interesting! We quickly freshened up, had breakfast and headed to exit gates with our group. It was very thrilling to step into these boats from our cruise since the wooden planks were different. Once the boat was

Dec 26 th – Our first day of porting was at Langkawi, Malaysia We woke up early and sensed that ship has stopped. Quickly ran to our balcony and the view outside was amazing.  I had never seen something like this before. Jetties passing by tiny mini islands. Then we quickly googled to find out about Langkawi. Basically this is an archipelago made up of 99 islands on the west coast of Malaysia. This really pumped up our excitement for the day.  We then quickly freshened up, got ready and headed to restaurant for breakfast. We had breakfast (Yummy Indian style) which was arranged by Chariot group especially for us. We were asked to assemble at the exit gate of the ship sharp at 9 am so that we all could leave together as a group. Security staff onboard scanned our room keys at the exit and we started walking down the movable ramp to the Langkawi parking lot. We saw lot of tourist buses parked and people were looking for their tour buses. We quickly got off into our Chariot Tourist bus