Smoking or non-smoking?

One of the things I enjoy about cruise holidays is that sometimes you never know what you are going to see outside your window when you wake up in the morning. But I’m not sure this is what passengers on the Dawn Princess were expecting when they arrived at Rabaul, in Papua New Guinea this week. This is the view from the ship’s bridge-cam of the Mount Tavurvur volcano. The island province of East New Britain was shaken by a minor earthquake three weeks ago, and the volcano has apparently been spouting a plume of ash for some weeks. Sights like this may not be of much concern in the south-west Pacific’s Rim of Fire, but if you threw open the curtains on a cruise ship in Naples harbour and saw Vesuvius putting on a similar show, I suspect you’d be getting out of there pretty quickly.