Pirates
After the Snow Knight cruise ship broke through the waves and left Hong Kong, it made successive stops to resupply and rest at Nha Trang in Annam, Pattaya in Thailand, and Singapore. It then passed through the Strait of Malacca, sailed north along the coast to Phuket Island in Thailand, crossed the Andaman Sea and the Bay of Bengal, and arrived in Colombo, Sri Lanka, several days later.
They spent three days in this Gemstone Country before setting off again.
They passed the Maldives, delivering a batch of supplies to the local capital, Malé, then headed southwest into the Indian Ocean. They skirted the Seychelles Islands near the edge of the calm belt around the equator and sailed all the way to Mogadishu, the capital of Somalia on the east coast of the African Continent. There, they made their final preparations before entering the Gulf of Aden and confirmed the schedule for a naval escort.
After all, pirates were always lurking in the Gulf of Aden. A cruise ship loaded with wealthy passengers was a fat lamb for the slaughter. Kidnap just a few of them and the money would roll in, so an armed escort was essential.
The escorting warships were sometimes from the US Military, sometimes from the Russian Military, and sometimes from China. In general, several countries took turns providing escorts. On one particularly extreme occasion, a quarter of the world's naval combat forces had gathered in the waters of the Gulf of Aden.
With only a day's journey left before Mogadishu, the cruise ship's crew knocked on the doors of passengers preparing to disembark and informed them of the approximate docking time. The new passengers coming aboard would take over their cabins.
The cruise ship was like a bus, stopping at stations along the way