Cabo San Lucas and points south, Mexico.

October 24 last year marked our 51st anniversary. After missing out on the scheduled 50th Anniversary cruise in 2020 due to Covid, we rescheduled to sail on one of the first cruises from Norwegian Cruise Lines (NCL) for 2021. Cruise lines were slow to come back online, in fact, as of May 2022, NCL finally put the last of their cruise ships back in service.

We’d reserved a week on the Norwegian Bliss and headed to Los Angeles to sail away. We were traveling with my niece and her husband and we spent one night in an L.A. hotel before we took an airport shuttle to the cruise pier.

The Mexican Riviera is a term given to the ports on the western coast of Mexico. Different cruise lines have different itineraries varying from 3 to 7 days or even longer. Cruisers who opt for a full Panama Canal crossing often get several stops along the Mexican Riviera as a bonus. I prefer a 7-day cruise with a few sea days rather than stopping at a different port every day. On this cruise, there were three sea days to relax and enjoy the amenities on the ship.

The Bliss is one of the largest cruise ships I’ve ever sailed on, and it towers over the landscape at Mazatlan. We enjoyed our first cruise back and scheduled a pair of back-to-back cruises out of Puerto Rico in January. Omicron put the kibosh on that adventure, so we decided to wait until July. By then, the Bliss would be sailing out of Seattle for Alaska. If all goes well, we would be on a land-sea tour of Alaska when this post is published. Fingers crossed. (Note: all didn’t go well, as I write this, it’s July 24, one day before we were to leave, and last Thursday I tested positive for Covid. Looks like my second Alaska cruise will have to wait for another time.)

Cabo is a tender port, the harbor is too shallow to support large ships docking at a pier. Cruisers are shuttled to shore via small tender boats that hold 50-100 people at a time. On the day of our visit, there were two other cruise ships in the harbor. The Celebrity Millenium (on the right in the background), was just beginning a 15-night Panama Canal cruise, and their first stop was at Cabo. The Disney Wonder (on the left in the background), was on a 4-day Mexican excursion on a”Halloween on the High Seas” cruise out of San Diego. Even allowing for the fact that from my vantage point for this photo, the Bliss was closer, it’s easy to see how large it is by comparing the number of decks compared to the other ships.

At Puerto Vallarta, Holland America’s Westerdam was waiting in port to return to service having been stored there during the cruise shutdown. As of this writing, the Westerdam is scheduled for Alaska itineraries during the summer of 2022.

One of our favorite places to hang out on the Bliss is the Observation Lounge, deck 15 forward. The view out of the front windows is from the deck just above the ship’s bridge.

From the upper decks of the Bliss, you can look over the pier area at Puerto Vallarta. Watching the cliff divers is a must-see attraction, but since we’d seen them on our last stop there in 2019, we decided to do a Puerto Vallarta tour that included a stop at the Malacon on the beach and a historic downtown church. The rest of the time on the tour was spent while the guides led us through various shops. Let’s just say that we won’t be taking that excursion again. I will cut the tour operators some slack. Every one of the places we stopped was surely happy to see cruising restart after over 18 months of few to no customers.

From our balcony, we enjoyed the sunset views that are so magical after a day at sea. After missing so many sunsets at sea, we are happy to see cruising restart in earnest. As of this writing, most cruise lines are back to full operating capacity though they are still sailing with generally lower capacity to decrease Covid risk.

There are those who think that cruise ships are not yet safe from the pandemic given the long association times and closer contact quarters. Cruiselines, however, are still asking for pre-cruise testing as of this writing as I prep this post for publication in a couple of days. Most lines insist on a highly vaccinated customer base, 90-100%. NCL is still sailing with 100 percent vaccinated crew and passengers, however some cruise lines have adopted 95 or 90 percent vaccinated.

Even with the precautions, cruise lines are experiencing small covid outbreaks on some sailings. There have been no real issues with the highly vaccinated passengers, the symptoms have been mild to completely asymptomatic in the vast majority of cases. Generally, the worst of it is being confined to an isolated cabin for at least part of the cruise and potentially a quarantine stay in a hotel and rescheduled flight home. It’s important that, unless you wish to self-insure the potential expenses, you carry travel insurance that has a covid inclusion.

Travel insurance is important for other reasons than Covid. If you or someone in your party becomes ill or injured while at sea, and the ship’s medical bay can’t support the level of treatment you need, you can expect a very expensive helicopter ride to the nearest medical facility at home, and maybe a very expensive plane flight back home on top of it. There is currently a horror story of cruisers on a Mexican holiday similar to our cruise. Apparently, they did not purchase travel insurance and had an accident during an excursion that required hospitalization. They ran out of cash in their accounts at about $50,000 USD and still had to hire a private plane to fly them back to the U.S.

Medical facilities on a cruise ship are not included in the price of a cruise. Any charges for use of the facilities are typically added to the onboard expense account that is due and payable on the last day of the cruise. In this case, however, the injuries were too severe to be treated on the ship. A stay in a Mexican hospital was required. Travel insurance, if you have it, will reimburse you for those medical expenses up to the policy limits upon your return home.

We arrived at Cabo in the early morning hours. Once the port authorities cleared passengers for departure, they would board one of these tenders to be shuttled to shore. Our tour included a trip to the end of the Baja Peninsula to view El Arco (The Arch) close up, a visit to a glass-blowing factory, and a bus ride to a viewpoint that looks over the bay.

The Arch is normally shown in images from an angle that shows only blue sky and ocean behind it. We discovered on our boat trip that from the southwestern side of the arch, it lines up with a cave/tunnel that connects the Pacific Ocean on the west side to the Gulf of California on the east side.

El Arco is often shown from the east side looking west. In our previous excursion to Cabo in 2013, we didn’t get nearly this close to the arch.

As we sailed into the port at Puerto Vallarta, the sun rose over the mountains east of the city. The morning sun bathed the highrise condos in the tones of the morning golden hour.

All along the Malacon, street vendors and entertainers plied for those tourist dollars. These musicians were performing in wardrobes that depict warriors from central Mexico rather than from the western coastline of Mexico.

Since we are skipping the Alaska cruise, by the end of 2022, we hope that Covid is held in bay enough for use to complete two cruises, one on Carnival, and one on NCL. On Carnival, we are planning a fall journey from New York to Canada and hope to capture many fall colors at the ports along the way. On the NCL Dawn, we’re trying again for that 50th-anniversary European cruise that didn’t happen in 2020.

For a 2K HD look at any of the images, click the photo to visit my Flickr site, or click here to view the entire album of images that accompany this post. As I conclude this retrospective of our first cruise after the industry’s covid pause, I hope there will be no further editing to note that the Alaska land-sea cruise was also interrupted by covid restrictions. Well, I guess my hopes were dashed for us making the cruise anyway. We were to travel with my niece and her husband, so they will have to take lots of pictures and tell us about the trip. I am glad I have travel insurance and yesterday, I started the process of documenting my illness and applying for the insurance reimbursement of the cancelation charges which, this close to sailing, are extensive.

By the way, I am writing this postscript on Sunday, July 24. My wife tested positive on Saturday so I gave up trying to isolate myself in the spare bedroom. From the beginning, my symptoms were mild, a sore, scratchy throat, and some chills on the first full day. I started a course of Paxlovid, and After one day’s treatment, I feel almost normal. I’m assuming the Paxlovid is working.

Lynn started showing symptoms last night, so we will stop by the County Health Covid Test Center today (Sunday) to confirm what the home test and her symptoms have already shown us. We are hoping she will be able to get a Paxlovid prescription when her doctor’s office opens on Monday morning so she can start her own treatment. It was Monday that we were supposed to drive to Minneapolis to get on an airplane to fly to Fairbanks to start our Alaskan adventure. On the bright side, by the time we are ready for our next cruises, we will have our doctor’s certificates of Covid recovery that in most cases will allow us to skip any required testing.

John Steiner

Cabo San Lucas, Mexico.

The Pacific Ocean crashes against rocky shorelines, provides wonderful beaches, and creates beautiful sunsets for thousands of miles along the western coastlines of the Americas. The photo above features a view of the land’s end at the entrance to the Sea of Cortez, also known as the Gulf of California. Behind that arch lay thousands of miles of the Pacific Ocean.

At the southern tip of the second-longest peninsula in the world is a natural limestone rock formation called simply “The Arch”, or more appropriately in the country of Mexico’s language, “El Arco.” The Baja California peninsula parallels the western coast of Mexico for about 775 miles (1,247 km) and the long, narrow body of water that separates the peninsula from the Mexican coastline is the Sea of Cortez.

In late October, we were on our first cruise since the restart of cruising in 2021. It was our third visit to Cabo San Lucas so we decided our excursion would include a short trip by boat around the southern end of Baja to view El Arco closeup again.

About the photo: Though I took plenty of images with my Nikon D500, I’m always ready to grab my Samsung S20U cellphone to compare the results between the two cameras. Though the D500 has a 16-300mm zoom, the cellphone with a 12000×9000 (108 MP) sensor provides a respectable zoom range by simply cropping in post-production. As it turned out, the boat we were on provided a close enough view of the land’s end that cropping wasn’t necessary. In Adobe Lightroom, I tweaked the composition to level the image on the horizon behind the rock, touched up the contrast, and sent the image to Luminar AI to use the program’s AI module to bring out the detail in the sea and the limestone rock. You can pixel peep at the final image in 2K HD by clicking on the photo to view it on my Flickr site.

I encourage fellow bloggers to create their own Cellpic Sunday posts. I never have a specific topic for this feature, and the only rules are that the photo must be captured with a cell phone, iPad, or another mobile device… If you have an image from a drone, that’s acceptable as well. The second rule is to link your challenge-response to this post or leave a comment here with a link to your post in the comment.

John Steiner

He started with a glowing orange glob of molten glass. He then dipped it in white and yellow glass beads. Our last stop on our excursion to San José del Cabo found us almost all the way back to Cabo San Lucas and the marina bay. We visited The Glass Factory, a business that creates many hand-blown glass products. The large store adjacent to the work area offered many fine examples of the artisans’ workmanship, and in the “factory” itself, there are two areas set up where the artists work in front of small bleacher arrangements. Guests from the tour buses are ushered into the area to have a seat on the bleachers to watch the handiwork in progress. Of course, at the end, the artisan shows off his work, tip jar handy at his side. Today’s Travel Tuesday post is short on words and other than this paragraph contains only a photo gallery featuring the creation of a water pitcher. If your browser gives you the option, I recommend that you click on an image in the gallery to enlarge it, see the details, and scroll through the photos therein.

John Steiner

Cabo San Lucas, Mexico

In July, 2013, I posted an article about our visit to Cabo. You can read that post for details about the trip here. At that time, a Nikon D5100 took up much of my attention because I just acquired it, and I had much to learn. In getting back into photography after many years, I’d read about High Dynamic Range (HDR). I didn’t know much about it then, but example HDR photographs attracted my attention and I knew at some point I would like to experiment with the techniques. At two sites I visited, Cabo and Yelapa, Mexico, I put my new camera into bracket exposure mode. Virtually all photos taken at those two locations were triple exposed. The exposure bracket range I chose was -1.3, 0 and +1.3. When I got home, I loaded the images, most of which were taken without benefit of tripod on a boat of some sort. It was then I discovered that the version of Photoshop Elements, (11, if I recall,) couldn’t handle matching the three images if the camera moved even slightly.

I used the best exposure version of the three shots for my posts submitted to this blog at that time and called it good. However, I kept the extra exposures in my catalog for a future improved HDR application. Other than experimenting with Snapseed’s HDR mode on my iPad, I haven’t done much with HDR. I did a couple of tripod-supported sunset shots processed through Elements’ HDR function, but that’s about it. Even though I keep a tripod in the car, I seldom take it where I plan to shoot. Yes, I know…

The other day, I discovered that Lightroom 6 now has integrated both panorama and HDR functions. I do use panorama mode in Elements on occasion, but the cumbersome switch to tiff files from Lightroom for editing in Elements is extra work that I don’t bother with unless I really need to do something special that Lightroom cannot manage. When I read that both HDR and panorama modes in Lightroom create separately editable RAW images, I immediately purchased the upgrade. I considered Lightroom CC where for $10 a month, I could also get the full version of Photoshop. I decided against it, partly as a hobbyist, I have trouble justifying the monthly fee, and the three features, including face recognition, that I would use in Photoshop are now included in Lightroom 6. By the way, the photo of the marina above is my favorite of all the conversions.

I quickly discovered that Lightroom’s HDR mode has several advantages over the Elements version that I originally tried. Whether Elements 12 or 13 have improved the HDR functionality, I don’t know. I now have 12, but I never tried again to merge the photos that were taken from the moving boat. Lightroom’s HDR tool handles the slight changes in each image beautifully. It also has three levels of deghosting to ensure things like changes in wave action or other slight movements within the frame don’t get duplicated if they are in slightly different positions. I noticed that the length of time to process appears to increase in proportion to the degree of deghosting applied. That’s not surprising. Most of the time I left deghosting off, but found one photograph among this batch that ended up with a weird mottled appearance in the water. I reprocessed the image with full deghosting, and the resulting image came out just fine. I believe that image was the photo above this paragraph, but I didn’t save it, so I’m not sure anymore.

I am looking forward to taking my camera to more places where I can experiment with exposure bracketing. I now have a D7000, and I need to become more familiar with setting up bracketing. A friend of mine works with HDR and his choice of exposure range is -2, 0, and +2. I will have to experiment with those settings as well. Looks like I need to find a nice place to shoot a sunset and this time bring my camera. Who knows… maybe I’ll try a panoramic HDR image. For now, I submit a gallery of images in HDR that appeared in the earlier post, along with four bonus images that are being published for the first time. I welcome any comments and criticism on any part of the image, but especially if you have advice for someone just starting out in HDR. Click on an image to enlarge it and to scroll through the gallery.

John Steiner

Cabo San Lucas, Mexico

Our last stop on our journey through the Panama Canal landed us in Cabo San Lucas. The only port on our cruise that required the use of tenders, Cabo was once the playground of the rich and famous. Originally only accessible by air or sea-going vessel, some of the Hollywood royalty made Cabo their getaway destination.

In the mid-70s, Los Cabos; the area so-nicknamed because of the proximity of two areas, Cabo San Lucas and San Jose del Cabo; finally became accessible by automobile. A highway was built that traversed the peninsula from Southern California, United States to the southern tip of lower California, Mexico.

Our selected excursion included a boat ride along the coast to the tip of the peninsula in the Gulf of California, then north along the Pacific Ocean side for a couple of miles. We would return the way we came back to the marina at Cabo. There, we boarded a bus for a trip through town where we would stop at a scenic point overlooking the bay, have a cerveza, and head back to town for shopping or to reboard the ship for our last day at sea.

Los Cabos is crazy with construction. The development of vacation properties is visible everywhere. Golf courses, resorts, time shares and other tourist venues abound. The tourist economy appears alive and healthy.

Our tour boat, a large double-hulled catamaran, was nearly full with somewhere around fifty passengers. We found a place to sit on the port side and waited to get underway. We were served coffee and juice as we headed out of the marina.

We bounced along on rough seas, happy we were on a larger craft. We might have selected a tour company on Cabo that sailed much smaller tour boats. We would have gotten much closer to the land. The cruise line’s excursions, however did not include any smaller craft options. Had we chosen that option, we would have been in for a much rougher ride. Those prone to motion sickness should stick with the larger vessel on a day like today.

As we neared the tip of the peninsula, it was hard to find a place to take photos of the iconic arch. Again, we picked the wrong side of the boat to sit, though as it turned out, we were just fine for the return trip. We got some nice photos of the arch without looking through the sea of people on the boat. However, it was now later in the day, and the haze and low clouds from an impending weather front many miles to the west, gave us a lackluster sky.

Rounding the tip of the cape, an outcropping of rock gave us our first and only view of wildlife other than seagulls. A lone seal lay in the hazy sun.

Rounding the tip of land, we sailed into the Pacific Ocean, past the other side of Lover’s Beach. There is no shortage of development on this side of Cabo. A long stretch of sandy beach invites tourists to stay in one of the many resorts built along the shore.

If the beach isn’t your “thing”, then you can vacation in one of the hillside resorts, or hit the links on one of the many golf courses. There is no shortage of things to do in Cabo. It is not the getaway from the hustle and bustle of the city that you would find in Huatulco or Yelapa. If you’re looking for a secluded beach, you probably won’t find it here.

After returning to the Marina, we walked a short distance to a waiting bus where we boarded for our city tour and scenic vista. On the way to our scenic vista, we passed such uniquely Mexican businesses, you know… Home Depot, Wal-Mart, Sam’s Club, Costco. Seriously, we could have easily mistaken this place for somewhere in Southern California.

Our destination turned out to be a beautiful restaurant and supper club. An exclusive place in a resort community, it was not open to the public in the mornings. However, they served beer and soft drinks, one only, please, while we overlooked the view of the bay from their outdoor terrace. We did not see the inside of the restaurant… remember, it was closed.

All in all, I can recommend NCL’s excursion on the boat around the cape, especially if you want a smoother ride than you’d get on the smaller vessels hawked by the tour vendors on shore. Though the view from the restaurant was beautiful, truth is, I didn’t think the view was worth the trip through town on the bus and the extra cost of the excursion. You can choose to purchase the excursion with or without the scenic tour. Next time, we’ll skip the scenic tour.

On our way back to the marina and our tender, we were given the option of being dropped off downtown for shopping. A nice walk or short cab ride would be necessary if we departed the tour bus here. Since we saw many vendors selling souvenirs in the marina area, we opted to stay on the bus.

I will admit at Cabo, we found the best deals in souvenirs. I purchased some pretty high quality t-shirts with embroidered lettering for only $5 each. That was less than a third of what we paid for screen-printed Panama Canal shirts on the ship. We loaded up with a few other souvenirs and boarded a tender for our short trip back to the Norwegian Pearl. There would be one more day at sea before our arrival in Los Angeles for our morning disembarkation.

My next, and final post on our Panama Canal Cruise will focus specifically on the ship, the Norwegian Pearl. Stay tuned. Hasta La Vista!

John Steiner

Cabo San Lucas on Dwellable