By Bob Van Leer

(GOA, INDIA, Saturday, April 1, 2000) - Our cruise ship, Legend of the Seas, docked in Goa, India this morning and Betty and I hired a cab to take us on a tour around the area. Goa was a Portuguese colony for 450 years, after being captured in 1510. 

   Its southwest coast of India has much Christian background. Portuguese explorer Vasco de Gama was the discoverer of the sea route to India from Europe and died there in 1524.

   But much earlier, the Apostle Thomas ("doubting Thomas") arrived in 52 A.D. The remains of St. Francis Xavier are on display in a church in Old Goa.

   Goa is 165 miles south of Bombay, India's largest city (15 million), and is a getaway beach resort for that city. Old Goa contains St. Francis' church, the cathedral, now a museum, and other relics of old Portugal. A series of rooms in the museum has almost life-size oil paintings of all the Portuguese governors for 450 years. Portuguese rule came to an end in 1962 when Goa was incorporated into India.

   The new city of Panaji is a jumble of shops, stalls, people and traffic, almost wall-to-wall. Traffic is a nightmare with trucks, buses, rickshas, automobiles motor scooters and pedestrians all mixed together. Drivers use their horns a lot. Any vehicle in front of you is a challenge to every driver and it is a game of leapfrog played on crowded two-lane streets where there really isn't enough distance to pass. Anything that doesn't take off paint is considered a normal pass. There is a macho thing involved. Our cab driver, Sandil, was being paid by the hour and he would make more money by slowing down. But this didn't matter. He drove as if he were doing the Indy 500.

   There were motor scooters than cars and it is a common sight to see a driver on one with his wife behind and two kids crammed in somewhere in between. This doesn't sound like much, but if your only method of getting around previously had been walking or riding overcrowded buses, a motor scooter that can carry your whole family is a quantum leap up in your life style.

   There is a fair amount of construction, but most of it is by hand, not by machines as we are used to seeing. The temperature was in the 80s with humidity at the top and the sun beating down on men breaking up concrete with steel bars rather than a jackhammer.

   A big export here is iron ore. It seems to be ground up to a powder then loaded in freighters by bucket lift or pipeline. It is a red-pink ore and the dust settles on everything.
Yesterday we were at sea. In the evening Capt. Thomas Wildung held a perty for those who have sailed on Royal Caribbean Lines before. He said there were 600 repeaters aboard of a total of 1488 passengers.

   Capt. Wildung said Royal Caribbean is building a new "Voyager Class" of cruise ships that are double the size of the ship we are on. The new ships, of which five are on order, will carry 3700 passengers and have 5000 aboard including crew. The cost of each is $550-600 million dollars. When we asked, there seems to be some resistance among the passengers of traveling on a ship that size.

   Capt. Wildung said another class of cruise ships for the line is under construction, the "Advantage Class". These will be "Panamax" size, the largest size that can fit through the Panama Canal. We went through the Panama Canal on the Legends of the Seas. The new class may be longer, but it can't be any wider. This ship will barely fit in width.

   The Panamax class will have gas turbine engines which the captain said cost more and cost more to run. But he said there will be less maintenance and they are cleaner.

   In spite of all the ships under construction, Capt. Wildung said he doesn't think they are enough to handle the demand. But he said they are running out of attractive ports. He said the Caribbean is the best cruise area in the world, but it is becoming too crowded with cruise ships. He said the competition will keep prices down.

   We get underway at 4:00 p.m. today for Dubai in the Persian Gulf, two days at sea and 1301 nautical miles away.