I love the way a magnificent sunset can unite perfect strangers. Up on the walking deck, mid-stride, I can’t stand it anymore. I must go and get my camera. The lemony yellows and buttery highlights of this seascape are too unusual to pass up.

Walk abandoned, I stand on the deck contentedly, alternately gazing and snapping frames. The sky is wondrous to behold; lines of blue and white and a faint peach intersect everything, but it is the yellow!!! … the soft, lemony yellow that I can’t tear my eyes from.

A young, European couple approaches to ask if I can take their photo. They look like newlyweds and the love that infuses their words and actions is palpable and makes me smile. I take several photos of them and their exhilarated smiles.

A few minutes later it is an Indonesian cook, asking in his shy, unsure English, if I might take one of him. “Of course,” I tell him. In a crew of almost 900, on a ship this size, I’m not sure I have ever seen him before, but in this moment, staring with him into the last light of this sunset, I feel he is my friend.

On a whim, I ask him to take one of me too, even though I am dressed in gym clothes and have a bad cold. The result is not picture-perfect, but it is a memory for me.

I wish I had a copy of his photo, of him standing five feet tall in his white cook uniform - the two of us separated by continents, language and culture, but somehow united in our beaming smiles of delight at this breathtaking sunset.