On Board Borealis

 

It was an agonizing night for Albina. The packing saga had not only exhausted but strained her back. She had suferred from back problems all her lifr. She could never stand too long on one spot since childhood, but the efforts of the last 10 hours the previous day had left her in considerable pain. She tossed and turned a lot of the night and I kept waking up and massaging her back, particulrly on the right side. This seemed to giver her temporary relief as the sound of her gentle snore gave witness. 

I got up early on embarkation day to make the final preparations and prepared her tea and her jam and white cheese sandwich as usual, but gamely she too got up by 7.30 and we eventually took our six suitcases and two backpacks. The limousine arrived exactly at 9am like clockwork. Addison Lee had sent us a tracking advice so we kew exactly when the young Bulgarian driver would arrive. We both must have nodded off in the car as it shot down to Southampton Docks and eventually we arrived almost too early. We could just see the top section of the vessel peering over the top of the terminal building. The first customers were only just arriving in their taxis and limousines and there were no staff yet to greet us, except for the porters who scoopled our six suitcases and disappeared in the ferry terminal. We found an almost departure lounge, which was quite chilly, and waited. And waited. And, with a growing impatient throng now around us, we waited until 11.30, more than an hour. 

It was worth looking around the other passengers, all of whom, and I mean all, were aged sixty or over. Some in wheelchairs, some looking frail, but overwhelmingly the majority of couples looked hail and hearty and were quite mobile. There were occasional ladies travelling together, but again overwhelmingly they were white, English speaking, restrained and of the opposite sex to each other. None of the blurred lines of younger people today where you could not tell when one relationship started and another ended. You could see a number of passengers carried pressed suits and dresses on hangers, and you could foresee they would be the Formal Night Brigade. Most too gave the impression of having done this before and some of them had obviously arranged to travel with other couples as they congregated and chatted together. Possibly it was their earlier experience of this sort of holiday, that made them so restrained and patient about the excessive waiting. The occasional passenger was reading today's newspaper, like a last puff of a cigarette before entering a restaurant. Eceptionally I had not seen a newspaper as I had resigned myself to 80 days without a newspaper. I would be reliant only on my phone for an update on what is happening.

After the staff turned up it was like an airport terminal, with all the queueing, document checking, turmoil, hassle you could expect in Terminal 5. We had the required security gate ritual dance as we all slowly filed through taking off  jackets and shoes. As usual I took out my laptop, but perhaps not unsurprisingly, very few other passengers did that. At a normal airport every third person carried a laptop, but obviously the overwhelming majority had decided to leave any office work behind, assuming they were still working. They checked our documents, including out covid test result from the previous day, our printed NHS covid passes, and the lists of our vaccinations. They took away our passports for safekeeping, and also our Esta visa approvals issued by the U.S. Consulate. Apparently, they arrange our passport controls for excursions at each stop on our behalf. I am not quite sure how that will work. I could hear the couple being checked alongside me being asked for the Vietnamese visa confirmations, but we had not been asked for anything like that. Perhaps they were not UK nationals, because we had been given was that Vietnamese visas for UK citizens were not necessary if your visit was less than 15 days. They took down details of Albina's credit card details, so that any expenditure would be credited to her at the end of the voyage. I am sure that at the end of out voyage, whatever appears on that final bill will involve quite a few thousand pounds, will be very painful to digest and will have us rowing over the details. I am sure other couples will go through the same experience. At the end of interrogation, by a very friendly young lady, we were each issued with a yellow coloured plastic card, resembling a credit card, which was in fact the "key to the ship", It had to be produced by us whenever we incurred an expense and was also the key to our cabin, number 6147. 

Armed with this "key" we were able to board the boat following a long covered walk way, but, luckily for Albina, without any steps. We knew our cabin was on the 6th deck and on the starboard side, which even a landlubber like me knew that it was on the right side of the job. We found oursleves in a long narrow corridor that semed to go on to some distant infinity each way we looked, To our right we found doors every five yards or so that vaguely reminded me of prison cells in some nightmare Victorian prison house. We essayed along the corridor checking he numbers as we went along, and soon we had got to 6144, 6146,....and then 6148! Where had ours got to. A couple who followed us and looked like seasoned cruise travellers soon put us right. 6147 was on the other side, he starboard side. Apparently, we were on the port side. But surely, we were.... Of course, we landlubbers had failed to realise whch way was the prow of the ship. We had assumed the ship had been facing the exit from Southampton Water, not the other way round. What we had seen of the top of the ship looming above the cargo terminal on arrival had not made that clear to us.

We crossed off to the real starboard side to enter another long endless narrow corridor. We worked our way past the off door numbers and soon found our cabin 6147, equidistant from each end of the corridor. We applied our plastic key and we were in our cabin, our home for the next 79 days, i.e. 2 months and 16 days. It was a pleasant experience all the same.  It seemed to be about 12 metres long and 4 metres wide, and beyong that we had our private little sun deck with room for two sunloungers. This space included what I considered a generously proportioned double bed, sufficiently wide to be comfortable sleeping to a couple like us used to a super kingsize bed. We had a bathroom with a loo, hand bason and a shower, with three wardrobes, 2 bedside cabinets and 6 and 9 shelves. Apart from that the cabin included a mirror, a small fridge, a TV, a long comfortable sofa and a glass top table surmounted by a bottle of unopened champagne. Other little treasures we found as we examined the fat was a world atlas, a copy of Verne's "Around the World in 80 Days", a pair of binoculars, a couple of towel type dressing gowns and a couple of brollies. We had brought with us a very heavy Times World Atlas, very unweildy to open up somewhere and use, so the provision of this atlas in the room was a pleasant surprise. It made our heavy atlas weighing at least five kilos quite useless. 

We began the long process of unpacking but with Albina suffering from her backache this was a long and painful process. We found our way to something called the View Bar two decks above us where had a pleasant buffet lunch and did a little bit of exploring.  

Then at 3.30pm with the ship still in port and many passengers still boarding for the lower decks, we joined a group at the Ocean Bar on the deck below us to have a guided tour around the vessel. The Borealis is 27 years old and it is one of the smaller cruise ships (thank God!) with a length of 237 metres. It has 702 cabins, many smaller than ours, although there were very roomy suites in the deck just above us. I worked out that the number of cabins in our long long corridor was around 60 and you can double that with the same number of cabins on the port side. Altogether the ship has 1360 guests and 662 crew. So around crew member per two passengers. 

There are a total of ten decks open to the public although the lowest three are filled with cabins which could be described as economy. They were without their balcony, but with access to a sea view through a porthole. Deck 4 is the Main Deck with a two storey restaurant at the rear where we would be expecting to have our evening meals and the Neptune Lounge at the front of the vessel which is effectively a theatre, which also stretches up through two storeys. The ship's crew includes an entertainment team  which was supposed to be hosting a Welcome Aboard Show that night hosted by Sammie to whom I had written a couple of weeks to go about Jules Verne, but they also stage shows by guest entertainers, including one next day with a virtuoso violinist. Between the restaurant and the theatre are some key offices such as Guest Services and the excursion organizers at Destination Services, and also the Auditorium, a comfortable cinema and lecture theatre, which has a full demonstration kitchen hidden behind the stage, where various chefs would show how to make meals characteristic for the countries we would be visiting. The guide was not able to confirm whether the films would include one of the versions of "80 Days".   

The deck below our cabin, Deck 5, also wedged between the top floor of the reaturant at the rear and top floor of the Neptune entertainment centre at the front, is the aforementioned Ocean Bar where we started our tour, a scattering of boutiques, a number of specialist eating places, such as the Oriental Tea Room which displayed the most delicious cakes, a library and a card room. Two decks above our cabin are the swimming pool and two hot tubs, with spa and gym facilities further forward beyond that. At the other end of this deck is the buffet restaurant where we had our lunch, with a tea and coffee station where Albina and I helped ourselves to a welcome cup of tea, while the tour moved on. We rejoined it in the floor above (Deck 9) with a wonderful view over the prow of the ship called The Observatory. At the back of that deck were sports facilities and an arts centre. Above all this was a top sun deck but we did not bother to go there. It was a cold winter evening drawing on and we would have plenty of time to visit it in the next months as we plough along the equator.

We went downstairs to carry on with the unpacking. We finished my three suitcases. Once we were in full flow we found our seemingly roomy cabin too cramped. Many of our clothes remained folded and packed in our suitcases, which thankfully we were able to shove under the bed. As the evening wore on Albina was in increasing pain and we stopped short of unpacking the last of her three suitcases.  

Then we found our way for evening dinner at the Borealis Restaurant at the lower level at the back of ship, so two floors down from us. There had been a choice of two different sittings but all along we had opted for the earlier one at 6.15pm. I put on a smarter jacket and we made our way down. We had a lovely little table (no. 93) waiting for us, a permanent place for each evening including Formal Nights. If we chose not to attend those somewhat pompous events we would eat in the buffet reastaurant. The food was excellent and we chose to celebrate this with a glass of Chilean wine. The staff as ever were giving a perfect service, with perfect politeness, perfect efficiency and a perfect smile. I found it a little uncanny as if they were caricatures without any personality. They all appeared to be oriental. Throughout any of the restaurant or cleaning staff I found no Indian, Arab, black of white crew members. All seemed to be Filipino or Thai. They had their task drilled into them and they carried it out with military precision. I sensed however that they were not painted smiles and our Thai waiter made some welcome suggestions when I mentioned as we were leaving that Albina's chicken was a little dry. He told us that next time she orders grilled chicken he will supply some gravy. 

While we continued with our meal in quiet conversation the restaurant suddenly erupted into song as a group of waiters burst out with a round of excessively jolly "Happy Birthday" songs for unsuspectng guests. They obviously had all this information in their computerized records, but I am not sure that all the guests, some of whom were really elderly, wanted to have their birthdays recalled. One lady at a nearby table was a victim of this aural assault though she took it gamely. Her husband told me as he left, that she was 80. I promised Albina I would not reveal details of her birthday, but I cannot get round what the computer records show. As she is a leap year and there is February 29th this year, she might just get away with it. During the meal Albina her back pain was intensifying. I suggested cutting short the desset but she still wanted to have her lemon sorbet. After that we returned in the cabin and stayed there. I foregoed the general knowledge quiz and the opening night at the entertainment centre and settled down for the night.

In the meantime Kasia and Tony contact us to say that they could see us off when the vessel passed Calshot Point at the final headland in Southampton Water. Sure enough the Borealis sailed at 8pm. As we aproached the lighthouse at Calshot I flashed my torch at them and they flashed back with their headlights. Of course we couldn't see each other in the dark, but we both caught sight of the light flashes. A cool way to reord a farewell for our departure.