Letter from Espargal: 21 of 2011

We’re home from the sea. The dogs have given us a licking-good welcome. The cats have returned from the hiding places they take up during our absences. Our house sitters have gone. So too has the rain that fell in generous quantities during their stay.

Jones has been catching up with the neighbours as well as cutting back and watering the garden. I’ve been strimming every blade of grass in sight – more thistles and dandelions, actually, than grass. Our suitcases are back up in the roomy bedroom cupboards. We’ve been through the post and caught up with correspondence. The amazing cruise is just a memory.

But since I have very little else to write about, let me finish my account of that cruise with the “Behind the scenes” ship’s tour that we took on our final day at sea. It lasted well over two hours.

First came an introduction by the “hotel director”, a senior officer who was responsible for 800 of the 950 crew on board. As he pointed out, a cruise boat is really just a travelling hotel and it has to provide all the same facilities. Most important of these, arguably, are the extensive kitchens.

The head chef, who hailed from the Caribbean, conducted us around them, explaining how everything worked. With two thousand passengers (and, of course, nearly a thousand crew) to feed each day, they don’t stop. Food is available somewhere on the ship night and day. Jones and I thought that the meals were very good, with a wide choice of dishes, although we confined ourselves to the buffet restaurant.

The downside was the loud pop-music that boomed out relentlessly from numerous ceiling speakers and, on busy days, the difficulty of finding a table. Whenever conditions allowed, we’d eat out on the open rear deck instead. The liner also had two large “sit down” restaurants and half a dozen (entrance fee) speciality restaurants.

I have to say that the kitchens gleamed. They’re stainless steel throughout on tiled floors. The chef said that on the last inspection, the ship had been penalised one point out of 100 – because some of the kitchen tiles were cracked. Even so, 99% isn’t a bad pass.

Then down to the 3rd deck, where most of the crew live and work. A wide corridor known as Route 95 runs the length of the ship. This deck is also the location of the vast storerooms that hold the ship’s supplies. The ship stocks up once every nine days during the passenger “turn around” in Copenhagen.

Still on the 3rd deck is the ship’s laundry which, like much of the ship, works in shifts to cope with the load.

Apart from bedclothes and passengers’ personal belongings, the laundry deals with up to six thousand linen table napkins a day. We watched in fascination as great machines gobbled up wet napkins and spat them out, dry and ironed, a few seconds later.

Back upstairs then, for a backstage walk-through of the ship’s 800-seat theatre. The only fascinating bit of that, for me, was to observe the magician’s doves and rabbit resting peacefully in their cages.

His cat and his (very large green) snake, we learned, lived with him and his wife in their cabin. Their act was easily for us the highlight of the entertainment, most of which tended to be animated song and dance routines. The ship's orchestra and various musicians did their thing in the numerous bars and lounges, where passengers were encouraged to buy drinks at painfully high prices.

The highlight of the tour was undoubted the visit to the bridge. We were most impressed that the captain, a Norwegian, gave up 15 minutes of his time to explain just how things worked. The ship had adopted an aircraft style cockpit, housing two officers and a range of instruments. A third officer was on watch at the windows.

The Baltic, as we learned, is very shallow. Cruise liners follow carefully plotted and marked channels and even these leave big ships with little to spare. Ours drew 8 metres and the channel we were following at the time in what seemed like the middle of the ocean was barely 18 metres deep.

To the side of the bridge, a desk held a variety of computerised equipment that the skipper could use independently of the cockpit. A shipping ID system enabled him to click on any of the dots on a screen representing other ships and immediately to obtain all the details of their name, home port, cargo, destination and itinerary.

The top toy was a handle that controlled the ship’s propellors, rudder and thrusters. When docking or departing, the skipper had only to point this handle in the desired direction and the computer did the rest. Little wonder that he seemed to berth his 80,000 tonner more easily than we moored our houseboat on the Alqueva Dam.

Saturday morning we arrived back in Copenhagen shortly after dawn. We tied up at the edge of a container port, much to Jones’s annoyance, for she was determined not to pay for either a taxi or the coaches that had been laid on. In the event, a commuter bus dropped us at the harbour gates and we had the choice of a train or bus into town.

The rest of the day we wandered around. Copenhagen has much to offer although we were disappointed by the state of some pavements, littered with cigarette butts, papers and broken glass. Those Danes are not as clean living as you might suppose.

Sunday we flew home. Our suitcases were first off the carousel. The Ferretts were waiting for us in the terminal. The rest you know.