En route to Casablanca, Morocco. Arrive on 7-May.

It’s now two weeks until I complete my world cruise (!!!). I’ve been keeping notes, so I will start to document the lessons I’ve learned. I’ll start with technology.

Camera

2006 in Kenya was the last time I used and maintained a fancy camera. My only real job was to keep dust out for my two-week safari. On my cruise there are far more climates – particularly hot and humid around the tropics.

I kept re-learning the lesson that if you keep your camera equipment in an air-conditioned cruise ship cabin all day, the lenses will fog up when you take it out of your bag outside the ship. Lessons:

• Set my camera bag outside (on the veranda) and open for an hour before leaving the ship on a tour to allow the camera and lenses to warm to outside temperature
• Bring zipper storage bags to keep each lens and the camera within while they are warming. This will keep the humidity out while they are warming so they will not fog up and possibly allow moisture to damage the electronics.

The intent of the bags is not to protect the equipment from rain or water, but to allow it to safely migrate from low humidity spaces to high humidity areas.

Memory

I brought far more storage memory than I needed. In 2006 while in Kenya I had to keep several camera memory cards with me while we were on game drives as they filled up in a few hours – so I had to swap them into the camera several times a day. Every evening I transferred the contents into a portable hard drive.

Remembering Kenya, this year I bought four 128GB memory cards for my cruise. In 2019 my experience is totally different – it takes a month to fill a single memory card, and that is when I’m saving raw (~ 30MB each) and large JPG (~3MB each) with every shot. I can easily transfer contents to my laptop every night. I make a duplicate onto an external hard drive. So, my images are triply redundant.

While on this cruise I have confidence I will be sleeping in a room with reliable electricity every night. I simply didn’t need to bring the external hard drive and I could have gotten by with a single memory card.