The child, the cyclone and Reunion Island
Saturday 31st January – pm – Port Elizabeth, South Africa
There’s a child on board!! This is advertised as an adult cruise. He’s about 5 or 6 and I can only assume he’s the son of a crew member … if that’s the case he should be confined to crew quarters and not splashing about in the passenger pool!
Chris has just gone to Reception… he’s vexed 🤦♀️
If the outcome hadn’t been so cringing, the schedule of events would have been funny.
Chris – tactfully taking a senior deck steward to one side … “I believed this to be an adults only cruise, why is there a child in the swimming pool?”
Steward – “I’m sure it’s all correct, Sir but I’ll check with Reception.”
Steward, thinking, let’s go for maximum embarrassment, immediately approaches parents of said child, only on the next but one table, and in full view of us, points to our table and questions the parents!
Steward – returning the short distance to our table, and now in full view of the child’s parents – “He is here legally, Sir, his family are visiting.” Of course he’s here legally! I’m sure he’s not just bypassed all the quay security and waltzed on board without an identity card, what a stupid response.
Chris is now a marked man.
Still irked by the fact that we have deliberately chosen – and paid for! – a child-free cruise and yet P&O are not abiding by their own rules, Chris goes to Reception to register his annoyance to a rather uninterested young man who was more bothered about knowing which cabin we were in rather than trying to placate a troubled guest. To add insult to injury as Chris was leaving Reception, having got nowhere, he crossed the offending family on the stairs back up to our deck! … we’re expecting our cabin to be fire bombed any day now 😊
Sea days
It’s not that sea days are boring, it’s just that there’s not much to say about them! They consist of a lot of relaxation, reading, coffee drinking, quizzing and chatting to friends we’ve made.
Sunday – The Captain gave a Christian church service this morning; we didn’t go I just thought it was unusual.
Monday – Today was very exciting though – it’s wash day! The machines are so busy that you have to go and stand in the laundry room in almost a queue fashion. Apparently, (although as Stephen Fry said “any anecdotes that begin with ‘Apparently…” should never be trusted!”), someone has been ‘relieved of his sea passage’ because he caused a bit of a kerfuffle in the laundry, and fisticuffs were on show … I’m happy to say, that even after the child event, it wasn’t Chris 🤣
So, I’m stood in the laundry room in a queue for the iron … I’d just started my bits and pieces when I hear my very own catfight starting! I’ve got a podcast on so can’t hear much, so I turn it off obviously! “Yes, but you weren’t actually in the room were you?!” “ … inaudible… go and speak to Reception then!”
I bury my head in the ironing board while another woman caught in the crossfire almost drops to her hands and knees and scurries out of the room … I wasn’t going to relinquish the iron I’d waited to patiently for so took a deep interest in the collar of the blouse I was ironing 😁
Clocks have gone forward an hour so we’re 3 hours ahead of the UK. The only trouble is that without internet my phone doesn’t update itself so I have to add an hour which confuses my retired brain!
Tuesday
Balcony washing day today, they don’t make us do it obviously 😳. They asked us to keep our curtains shut, I don’t think they want to see the horseflesh that’s on offer in there!
We had an hour in the sunshine this morning, the equatorial sun is sooo much hotter than when we’re at home, I can literally feel it prickling my skin, even through Factor 30. I lube myself up like a slippery fish but can stand less than hour. There’s a lady out there who is in the same chair from 9am until sundown… she must have brought her cruise wardrobe in a Tesco bag because it just consists of a different bikini every day … no clothes, just bikinis and tanning oil!
Clocks have gone forward again so I have to add 2 hours now! I think by the time we get to New Zealand it’s 10 or 11 hours … my brain’s gonna fry.
Just got 36 out of 40 in the music quiz today, best score so far.
Wednesday
It never occurred to me, before boarding, that I would become ‘sea-nauseous’. We’ve always been on much bigger ships and as such have been able to hold our own against the rocking but this is torture. The weather having been predicted by the Captain last, I woke to lots of whitecap waves this morning … it took me until lunchtime, and an anti-sickness pill to feel as though I wouldn’t disgrace myself outside the cabin. Apparently, we’ve caught the tail end of Cyclone-What’serface … well, she can ……..
Disgraceful
Christopher, our cabin steward, who deserves a medal for just dealing with our loo, in conversation today said that the Reunion passenger terminal doesn’t have free WiFi (he’s mistaken though, they do) and that means he can’t FaceTime his two small girls 6 and 4, because they have to buy the onboard WiFi package! How utterly unnecessary and greedy are P&O for charging the staff, who sometimes work on these ships for 8 months at a time, to keep in contact with their family thousands of miles away. I think that’s appalling!
Reunion
We’ve had to fill in a health questionnaire for entry into Reunion and we wonder how many people are going to lie … one of the questions is “do you have a cough?” As I’ve mentioned before, I think we’re slowly building the tender we need to transition between the berth and quayside in Sydney on here because, I’m convinced by the sound of some of them, that they’re coughing up small vehicle parts!
Thursday – Reunion Island
Finally, a bit of terra firma, yesterday was not a good day, barely left the cabin because every time I loved it seemed to unsettle things again! Apparently, we’d caught the tail end of Cyclone-Whatserface.
We got a shuttle bus into Le Port today, there was a large air-conditioned, shopping centre where we spent a couple of hours. We raided the Carrefour for a couple of bottles of wine and some snacks and then in another shop a new pair of shoes and a pair of trousers fell into my basket … don’t feel too bad, Chris got a shirt and a t-shirt too!
It was 30 degrees today so after shopping, we made our way back to the ship to cool our core in the pool for an hour – the sun heats it up and it’s absolutely perfect.
Again, we’ve been pleasantly surprised by Reunion, it’s a really modern place. We realised it was a French colony but expected it to be the poor relation of France, and it so isn’t.
Mauritius tomorrow 🙂