We visited Oberammergau in 2015 as part of our Alps and Dolomites tour. We were able to tour the Passion Play theatre, but of course there wasn’t a play that year. We booked our Blue Danube tour with Oberammergau in 2018 and now – in 2022 – it was finally going to happen. The play has a several hundred year history. In the 1600s, the Thirty Years War was raging in Europe. As the war moved into Germany, the bubonic…
After leaving Grand Cayman, we sailed to Cozumel, Mexico. We had booked a shore excursion, Tulum, Lost Civilization of the Mayans. We took a ferry from Cozumel to Playa del Carmen where we met our guide. Before exploring the ruins, we saw The Danza de los Voladores, or the Dance of the Flyers. It is an ancient ceremony still performed in parts of Mexico and Guatemala. The ritual was recognized as an “Intangible Cultural Heritage” by UNESCO in 2009, a few…
Our next port of call was Taormina, Sicily. Taormina was founded by the Greeks in 358 BC but 300 years later it was under Roman rule. It is on the eastern coast of Sicily on the Ionian Sea and close to Mt. Etna. Part of our trip to Taormina took us through the Strait of Messina, lying between Sicily and mainland Italy. This was the first night where we experienced some “rocking and rolling” aboard the ship – but it…