Contemplations at sea

As I write this, we are in the Indian Ocean right at the southern tip of Sri Lanka - only a few miles offshore, so close that we can see what appears to be a large white Temple of some kind in the hills. To me it looks like the shape of a Buddhist bell. Over the last two days, I have noticed a "relaxation" amongst the passengers - people are rising from their beds later, or at least staying in their cabins longer and not rushing to breakfast. I believe this is because we have nine days at sea with just one stop in Mumbai in between and people are recovering from the rather hectic pace of this cruise over the past 2 weeks. We
have been two days sailing a direct line between the top most point of Sumatra and the bottom most point of Sri Lanka. This is the main shipping route between Europe/Middle East and and what the British call "the Far East" of South East Asia and Japan. (their Far East is our Near East). We have seen a constant stream of cargo ships and oil tankers in both directions along this route. The wide Promenade deck on Oriana with it's comfortable chairs, tables and sunbeds is ideal to watch this passing parade. Exposed to the vastness of this ocean and despite the fact that we have only recently visited six major Asian cities and one Asian tourist island, I cannot help but realise that even a "World Cruise" such as we are on only allows us to catch a fleeting glimpse of a very small part of the World. A person would have to live the life of every other human being on the face of our Planet to experience it all - clearly an impossibility. So we can only do what we can. However, it is always a temptation, when we are living in a comfortable cabbage patch, to not want to venture outside into a world which is clearly much less comfortable than ours. For us, this is a temptation to be avoided - not that we are particularly adventurous. In fact we are not and our travels have mainly been fairly conventional and protected, like this cruise.  But even these are hard work