Pleasure boats
Andrew Roberts says cruises are the best way to see the world If ever you want to murder your husband by hitting him over the head with a bottle, always choose champagne. The glass is over twice as thick as normal wine bottles, and so it’s unlikely to smash. It is therefore very unfair to criticise the Duchess of Cornwall for the fact that the Veuve Clicquot failed to smash against the side of the new 90,000-ton Cunard liner, the Queen Victoria, let alone for the norovirus that has struck 78 of the 3,000 passengers — only 2.6 per cent, after all — aboard the maiden voyage.
Cruises are always in the news this time of year, providing the perfect opportunity for the British press simultaneously to exhibit its two favourite traits of envy and condescension. The subtext of much of the coverage is, ‘As metropolitan Britain freezes and trains stop running, how wonderful that those rich swine on cruises in the tropical sunshine are stricken with diarrhoea and vomiting’, while, as well as schadenfreude, there’s also the supercilious sneer that cruising is only for the ‘newly wed, well fed and nearly dead’.
Well, I love going on cruises so much that friends have nicknamed me the Saga Khan, and I will now convert you to the concept. Admittedly, as an itinerant guest-lecturer I don’t actually pay the £9,000 per couple that a really good fortnight on one of the ‘top six’ cruise-lines will cost you, but that often includes free drink, all tips and the Malossol sevruga at lunch.
The first glory of cruising is that you can visit eight or nine fascinating historic cities in a fortnight, yet only unpack and pack once. Once you’ve spread out in your cabin — 287 square feet with 58 square foot balconies on Silversea, for example — the cities are brought to you. You open your curtains on to the Acropolis one morning, a couple of days later it’s the Topkapi palace, then Sebastopol, Yalta and so on, all without having to catch cabs to airports, unlace your shoes for security screenings and check in and out of a series of hotels. The sheer ease of it all is dreamlike.
Then there are the other passengers. Forget all those stereotypes who you assume are to be found on cruises; in fact they are smart, well-dressed, comfortably off Speccie readers of an age mature enough to appreciate calm, good food and drink and a little luxury. You also meet the best kinds of Americans, Dutch, German, French, Spanish and Italians (and the Russians don’t seem to have discovered it yet). Of all the 500 or so lectures I’ve given at schools, colleges, literary festivals, political and business dinners over the past decade, it’s been the quality of questions on cruise ships that has been the most impressive. The small, boutique Hebridean International even concentrates on the intellectual side of cruising, with lectures given by historians and former ambassadors to the countries visited.
Nor is seasickness an issue, with the wonder-drug Meclizine, sold as ‘Sea-Calm’. It knocks you out for 24 hours, but after that the ship can retrace the path of George Clooney’s trawler in A Perfect Storm without any effect on your innards. One problem, even though there are usually good gyms aboard, is keeping weight off, especially as lines like Seabourn, Crystal and especially Silversea concentrate on first-class cuisine. ‘You get on as a passenger,’ it’s said by anti-cruisers, ‘but get off as baggage.’ The trick is to choose those shore excursions where you do lots of walking, up sand dunes in the Namibian desert, or round Boston’s Freedom Trail, or over the Balaklava battlefields, rather than take the ones that send you on a four-hour coach trip to a Bulgarian basket-weaving factory. The top six companies’ excursions are usually well-organised, often in conjunction with operators such as Abercrombie & Kent. Nor is it hard to differentiate beforehand, especially if you hit www.cruisecritic.com, where cruise fanatics swap their experiences.
Ignore the stereotypes that non-cruisers have of cruising people: of snobs fighting over who dines at the Captain’s table, elderly crooners reliving their former days on Pebble Mill at One and HTV Wales, shipboard romances between recently widowed millionairesses and Terry-Thomas lookalikes, and the freeloading guest-speaker (admittedly that last one’s true). In fact it’s a great 21st-century holiday, and there’s absolutely no enforced Hi-de-Hi!-style jollity, and you’re never obliged to eat with people you don’t want to.
With cruising a multi-billion-dollar industry, and some ships such as the floating pleasure-palace Crystal Symphony receiving $28 million refurbishments every few years, the competition between the top six of the luxury end of the market — Silversea, Crystal, Cunard, Radisson Seven Seas, Seabourn and Seadream — is fierce. Huge emphasis is put on the professionalism of its management, so getting a really good cruise director for each trip is vital. The doyen of the trade, Steve Lewis of Silversea, is retiring next year after three decades: who will take his crown?
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