Cruise Ship….. What Cruise Ship?

Do a simple google search for cruise ship incidents and the pages light up like a Christmas tree. They’re everywhere. From people being lost overboard to last year’s Costa Concordia tragedy and this week’s stranded Carnival cruise in the Gulf of Mexico. They happen all the time. These floating buckets of death are proving all too regularly that you should spend you money elsewhere.

The industry has had a resurgence in the last couple of decades. Gone are the days of old folks spending their sunset years cruising on the high seas. Now they are party boats for the young affluent set. Bachelor parties, girls trips away. 18-25 cruises. It seems that the idea of a cruise is to get on a boat, check your morals at the door and party like you ‘ve never partied before. The stories that come back are mind boggling.

The Pacific Sky

Not wanting to miss out, in 2003 we went on a cruise. Not for pleasure but as a part of a National Radio Network Conference.  The King and his partner were the conference entertainment. 500 guests of the radio network were treated to a cruise for loyalty as advertisers and to entice them to spend more. The King has done many of these conferences, sometimes in Bali and this time on a boat… a motherfucking boat!

As a part of the company I was invited to attend and decided why not. Never having been on a cruise before why not take advantage of the free trip. Oh if I’d only known….

We were cruising from Sydney, Australia to Noumea, New Caledonia and the Isle of Pines in the South Pacific. The cruise length was 8 days. My mum came up to look after a very young Grand Master D and we headed off. At this time I had just discovered I was pregnant and the day before the cruise went for a scan to check everything. I was recovering from a miscarriage a few months before and I was obviously panicked about the viability of this one. At 6 weeks you can see a heartbeat, at 5 weeks, not so much and apparently I was in that grey area. Not a good place to be when you’re worried about the safety of a pregnancy. I was cleared to cruise but told to take it easy.

So armed with the knowledge that I had no idea if this baby was alive, we boarded a plane for our adventure. I’ve never cruised. I get car sick, I was pregnant. Oh what a ride we were about to take.

Throughout our lives together we have come to understand that we shouldn’t be involved in water. Through a series of mishaps ranging from minor incidents to almost killing someone, our relationship with water has been sketchy at best. Every house we’ve lived in leaked and we’ve come to decide we don’t love water.

But at the time of the cruise we hadn’t solidified this idea and were still open to try.

Cruising is a strange experience indeed. Leaving Sydney Harbour was exhilarating and spectacular, cruising through the Heads and out to sea, a celebration. Once out there, as land began to diminish on the horizon so did my comfort and fear began to seep in slowly to my mind. My sea legs didn’t come easily, my equilibrium tainted by the alien residing in my stomach, live status unknown but making sure my body knew it was there.

In my pregnant life, and I’ve had a bit of experience with this, my body is an ass. Foreign bodies must be expelled from any and all available orifices. At times violently. Pair this with being on a motherfucking boat bobbing up and down in the big blue sea like a cork in a bathtub.

I was miserable. Everything I ate, I threw up, when I didn’t eat I wanted to throw up. I couldn’t walk without holding on to something and that makes for slow navigation around a cruise ship. For the first few days we had a lowly cabin down below the water line but it became acutely obvious I would not survive the trip and we were graciously placed in a state room up top. The state room was grand BUT it was at the top of the boat, which evidently makes the roll of the sea more violent! I couldn’t catch a break but at least I could fully close the bathroom door to vomit instead of hanging out into the cabin below decks.

The ships doctor could do nothing for me. Being pregnant I couldn’t take the qwells they offer passengers for seasickness. The smelling thing they gave me made me gag, which in turn made me throw up.

So there I was in a floating hell for 8 days, with no escape not knowing if the thing trying to kill from inside was even alive!

The Isle Of Pines

We stopped for a day at the Isle of Pines. A day on land, spent wandering the small but beautiful island was a relief. It had to end of course, a schedule had to be kept and back to my floating hell we went.

The next day we docked again for an entire day at Noumea, a French ruled pacific Island of poor economic status, whose residents rely on tourism to survive. If you venture deeper into the island beyond the touristy fringes, as of course we did, you will find falling down humpies and locals semi dressed in rags. We spent the day on an adventure. We rented a car and set about seeing the island. Small unsealed windy roads did not help my sickness and the car stopped at regular intervals for my heaving.

We got ourselves lost and were in danger of missing the ship. All passengers were to be back on board at 10pm at the latest. During our day and evening of exploring we got ourselves very deep inland and with half an hour to the ship sailing we were more than half an hour from port. With some swift navigating and mild panic from the girls, we made it, screaming full speed into town, dumping the rental car, muddied and over our allotted miles, we found ourselves literally running for the ship.

Of course we made it. Of course the ship wasn’t really sailing until midnight but I imagine by experience, they knew to lie to the passengers, to scare them into being back on their death boat for fear of being left behind in a third world country. It sure worked on us.

While we were lost, just on dusk we came across a little church in the middle of nowhere. There were cars around and the lights were on. Music was coming from within and being Christians we thought we’d have a look. As we got to the door they opened and people started filing out. What we saw freaked us out! There were painted faces and strange looking things that we’d never seen. It felt very wrong, and they didn’t like us looking in on them at all. As we turned to head for the car, some of them started to follow us. The feeling of foreboding was thick in the air. In fact we were feeling down right freaked out and couldn’t get the car started fast enough. We don’t know what they were doing but there’s a fair chance there was some sort of sacrificing involved. It certainly coloured the conversation on the way back to the boat.

Noumea Aug03

There is nothing scarier than being lost inland on an island and hearing the ship blow it’s warning horn to come home to heighten your senses and cause panic. Especially after narrowly avoiding a sacrificial island ritual. You can’t make this stuff up!

The 3 days sail home was mostly uneventful. It’s all a bit foggy now but the memory of every ship bathroom is etched in my mind. I was never more pleased to sail back through Sydney Heads , sight land and touch Terra Firma. With a flight later that day, we arrived home that evening, very happy to be there, vowing to never cruise again.

The aftermath of the cruise left me with that sea legs feeling for 3 weeks, making me dizzy and unable to stop the world rocking like the ocean. Whether it was due to the pregnancy or not I’ll never know because I will never get on a cruise again to test the theory.

That alien, by the way, made it through and is described in these pages as the lovely Miss Gremlin. 😛

*As a footnote to this story, the next week a friend of ours cruised on the same ship and someone fell overboard. Luckily for us there were no incidents like that on our trip.