This book is a photographic diary of a voyage on the Queen Victoria across the Pacific Ocean from San Francisco to Bali. I sailed to Sydney last year, featured in my book “Rock and Rolling to Sydney”. This time the voyage across the Pacific to Sydney continued beyond Sydney, sailing up the coast of Australia to Darwin and then to Bali, before heading through the China Sea to Vietnam and Hong Kong which is the subject of another book published alongside this called “A Vietnamese Experience”. The voyage from Sydney was hot; it was always over 30 degrees, sometimes 38 degrees. This was quite normal for this part of the world but very hot for those of us used to a Northern European climate. Many of the ship’s passengers took an interest in my activity as they observed me patiently scanning the ocean and the sky as they passed by on their regular laps of the promenade deck. Some were surprised to hear and learn what could and had been seen and others keen for instant identification of anything we saw. The crossing to Hawaii was windy and after seeing Albatross at a distance during the first couple of days there was little other wildlife to be seen. We then headed south to the Polynesian Islands and again this year experienced a very barren ocean. I feel from my experience there is more wildlife to be seen in the Atlantic Ocean. It wasn’t just the life at sea though that was to be of interest; the excursions and the places we visited during the voyage provided more photographic opportunities and interesting experiences. Therefore I have not limited this book to just the sea life, and have included material from our ports of call which I think will be of interest to you. We covered a distance of about 13,000 nautical miles over the 34 days it took to reach Bail visiting 10 ports on the way.

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