Black Sea Eclipse CruiseBlack Sea Eclipse Cruise
In August of 1999 it was time to see another total eclipse of the sun.
A total eclipse of the sun is the most spectacular natural phenomenon
you can see. Some say it beats all the man-made phenomenon as well.
There's no way to readily describe it, and no way to photograph it, though
people keep getting better and better.
To see this eclipse, which would cross Europe, I decided to take a special
eclipse cruise to watch it on the Black Sea. The weather odds for
that Black Sea were good, and I had not been to that part of the world.
The cruise, on board the Orient Lines
only ship, the Marco Polo, started with a stay in Athens. It then moved
to the Greek islands of Delos and Mycanos, then stopped at Kusadasi in
Turkey to visit the ancient city of Ephesus. From there it cruised to
Istanbul, but did not stop. Instead it sailed through the middle of the
City in the Bosphorus strait, and from there into the Black Sea.
In the Back Sea we first visited the Ukraine (birthplace of some of my
ancestors) stopping first in Yalta on the Crimean peninsula, and then
in Odessa. From there we spent a day at sea to see the eclipse, and
the next day visited Nesebur in Bulgaria. After that it was back to
Istanbul, but this time to leave the ship and spend a few days there.
We departed Istanbul on Sunday morning. The next Monday night they were
rocked by a devastating earthquake. It would have been ironic to leave
California to experience a quake in turkey.
The actual pictures of the eclipse itself are on my
Eclipse Page. These pages here document the rest
of the journey.
Note: These rolls were scanned by Wolf Camera. They did a terrible job and
got a lot of dust on the scans. I'm not going back there.
