Fletcher

Flak jacket and tie required.

I am thinking of taking a Silversea cruise in Asia and wondering about the Chinese visa. To be honest, I’m a bit confused. I read that people aged over 70 can apply online but the official Chinese visa service website makes no mention of this and says everyone must attend a visa centre in person so their fingerprints can be taken. The application form looks as fiddly as India. As China is a fairly common port of call (my cruise would call at Xiamen and Shanghai), I wonder if any UK citizens on here can tell me about their experience obtaining the visa. I know Americans like to be helpful but this is just for UK readers. Thank you.

Quite busy in the Red Sea just now . . . but only one cruise ship! (From Vessel Finder). Today helicopters destroyed three Houthi boats in kidnap attempt on a Mersk container ship. Quite hairy down there.

There are no formal nights on expedition cruises.

You can see Twangster's laptop in recent photos. By the way, the first thing I do when getting on a Silversea ship is to ask the butler to remove the single armchair which is always in the way.

I see the Wind anchored in the bay. Was this because of the sea conditions or maybe the ship is just too big to go alongside which is what we did on Noble Caledonia's Island Sky. I'm enjoying these photos. We're on the Wind next April.

The Moon is in Heraklion, as per itinerary.

Interesting situation . . . the Moon left Antalya yesterday, due in to Heraklion, Crete, tomorrow, but its present course indicates a change of plan. The Moon appears to be the only cruise ship left in the Eastern Med and Silversea has a decision to make about whether to sail through the Suez Canal next week and head up to Aqaba. Or not.

There were quite a few shakes, shudders and rattles on the Spirit and we were on a particularly smooth Med cruise. As I wrote in my blog above, we did ask to change cabins because of it and were pleased that the vibrations all but disappeared on the port side cabin. There was one occasion when we were coming alongside at some port that the vibrations in the Terrazza at breakfast were genuinely startling. Glasses, plates, cups all went for a walk and my eggs scrambled themselves. It was amazingly noisy, too. Everyone thought it was rather funny. We said to our waitress that we hasn't experienced anything like it before, not even on the Regent Navigator, and she said this was her first cruise and so she thought it was normal. I wouldn't worry about it, though. Most of the time you aren't aware of it at all.

I thought some of you might like to see the photos I took on this Spirit cruise to Greece and Turkey. They are here:

Two ports - Jeddah and Yanbu, though we were there for a week and got the full visa.

Try Jeddah Islamic Port. That's what I put when we went to Saudi on the Cloud earlier this year.

Ah the unholy trinity of cauliflower, broccoli and carrot, beloved by every cheap 'Sunday roast' pub in Britain. I asked several times on the Spirit that I didn't want that and it was always there. I guess you don't get it in La Dame??? Maybe half an asparagus spear at that 'fine dining' joint. Silversea needs a total overhaul of its catering.

Antarctica lacks the polar bear element.

I was recently aboard Silver Spirit which called at Antalya and was pleased to see an old friend in the bay . . . now called Blue Sapphire.

New from the FB site - avian flu has reached South Georgia so the Explorer has had to cancel its planned landings on the north coast, so they are switchng to the rarely visited south coast. While that is some sort of bonus, it's worrying news for the isolated island with its vast populations of sea birds. It also casts doubt over all cruises to the island this year and next.

Silversea's ships, Cloud and Wind, are getting rather old these days. I was on the Cloud this year and wouldn't go back on it. Silver Endeavour is the only one in the Silversea fleet worth looking at. Ponant's ships are fairly new but very French-biased if that matters to you. Personally I would choose Seabourn's Pursuit or Venture as they are brand new and look state-of-the-art. I think expediton teams will be equally good across the range. If you have the time, choose an itinerary which includes South Georgia.

Cunard's Queen Elizabeth is in Safaga, Egypt, today while the Spirit sails past.

And to the stock start with soffrito. I usually deglaze with marsala before adding the stock. The classic accompaniment is risotto Milanese, creamy with butter and parmesan and perfumed with saffron. Sometimes a very loose, buttery polenta is just as nice.

I believe the problem is right across the fleet because, like airline food, it mostly comes from a single 'food factory' and sent via containers out to the ships. So an inedible dish on one ship will probably be inedible on another ship. I came to this view after I did a month on the Cloud and thought the food was perhaps the worst I have ever been served on a cruise. I thought it might be a glitch, peculiar to that ship. Then last month on the Spirit I found the food to be roughly identical. I lost four pounds on that trip. One of the major problems is that the staff have no idea about the food they are serving. And there do seem to be a lot of happy customers who wouldn't know a bordelaise from a béarnaise. I am teetering now on cancelling our next cruise - 35 days on the Wind - because I cannot stand the thought of eating badly for that long.

Yes, totally disgusting on the Spirit a week or so ago. Like a gloopy boil-in-the-bag job. Nothing like the classic dish, and served with vile polenta cakes that were rock hard. No idea. We left almost all of it. The wait staff just shrugged.

12: SADLY, AN UNNECESSARY CRUISE I always say I would never chose a cruise if the ship didn’t go anywhere I wanted to go. Cruising for the sake of cruising isn’t me at all. This cruise on the Silver Spirit was majorly effected by the war in Israel and apparently several passengers pulled out, so we have had 500 passengers on board. Apparently the next cruise will have rather less than 500 because stops in Egypt and Jordan have now been cancelled and as I write there is a sense that even the Gulf States might be victims of executive caution. We admired Silversea’s rapid response to the tragic situation and decided to stick with it. We’ll probably look back on this as a mistake because five Greek islands in a row was a bit monotonous. We happily missed out on two identical villages of white buildings, smokey cafes and tourist tat. We have heard rumblings of discontent and one fellow passenger put it like this: ‘With Israel cancelled, Silversea is saving money on fuel and on cheaper excursions so we should at least get some on board credit.’ That might seem callous but it was a feeling generated by disappointment. We only booked this cruise because it was going to Israel. When the cruise itself falters, emphasis shifts to the ship itself and its drawbacks and weaknesses become accentuated. OK, I have probably peeved about the food enough already but we never had a single properly satisfying meal and this might be enough to deter us from getting on another Silversea ship ever again. And that includes our already booked month on the Wind. We realise that food on ships is never more than mass catering. What I find heartening is that it isn’t just me whingeing. People on other ships are feeling the same. And dishes that I have complained about on the Spirit are the same dishes on other ships. We have all surely detected poorly sourced ingredients - cheap lamb, cheap poultry, limited fruit etc. We all know that much of the food arrives prepped and pre-cooked in bags and is merely warmed up and then served up on cold plates. Cold plates! In chilly outdoor venues yet! Things like this are schoolbook errors. Not what you expect from a luxury line. We liked our cabin and were grateful for the upgrade from the GTY Vista. However, Deck 8 amidships cabins do suffer a little from noise from the pool deck above and on one night they had a band and dancing up there which kept us from sleeping. The weakness of the accommodations are the bathrooms which are looking a bit tired these days, especially the enormous basin and very fiddly tap thing. For us, tubs are a waste of space. The ship itself seemed well designed and I always like a ship with a front-facing outer deck: the Spirit has two - Deck 11 and the open Deck 12. There was constant on-going maintenance with much painting of those gleaming white rails and cleaning of windows. This is a very smart-looking vessel. The pool area, when busy, was awful but the open back decks were airy and impressively spacious. We thought the design of the Arts Cafe a bit twee and rather small as well - the servers up here were stars. Never went to Silver Note, never went to Seishin, never went to the spa, or the casino, or the show lounge. La Dame? Of course not. We had a look and thought it was an oppressively dark little space. Atlantide was also a bit heavy on the decor but perfectly OK. Indochine and La Terrazza were lovely rooms to eat badly in. I thought the menu in Indochine was lifted from a 1960s chop suey house in Eastbourne. I have a few pet petty annoyances - the totally irritating, stupid Bulgari bottles in the bathrooms which always fall over. They need to be broad-based, like so many of the passengers. The stainless steel milk jugs are nasty and so is the cutlery right across the ship. They feel rock bottom cheap. The mugs for English Breakfast Tea, like the Bulgari toiletries, seemed designed to topple over. We find the dress code laughable but easy to ignore. It’s obviously doomed. We dislike the whole butler thing and only met ours once. We had little or no interaction with senior staff. Whereas the Captain and Cruise Directors are pretty ubiquitous on Seabourn ships, we never laid eyes on them on the Spirit. All I knew of the Cruise Director were her daily announcements, so relentlessly upbeat and pre-scripted that I began to think she might not be a real person at all but an AI. Obviously the regular cabin , bar and restaurant staff remain unfailingly friendly and eager to please. To conclude, I think Silversea is perhaps struggling to maintain or justify its reputation as a true luxury line. I get the impression they are throwing everything they’ve got at the new ships and letting the old ones carry on the best they can. Old ones like the Wind and the Amazon and way beyond next April. See you on board. Probably. Thanks for some nice comments, by the way. Graham Greene would be flattered.

11: IN THE CALDERA About forty years ago I was given as a birthday present a massively expensive book called Odyssey. It was published by Thames & Hudson, a decidedly arty company, and consisted of photographs by a guy called Roloff Beny, a Canadian, unusually exotic for someone from Alberta, who took some of the most ravishingly beautiful photos I have ever seen. He didn’t seem very interested in people; he took landscapes, architecture and romantic ruins all over the world. His photos usually had large areas of shade, always creating a sense of discovery and mystery. Odyssey was his tribute to the Mediterranean and of course it had a shot of Santorini, where were today. In fact, Beny’s shot may have sealed Santorini’s fate as the most photographed, the most iconic island vista in the wine dark sea of the Ancients. You know, those blue domes, the white buildings clinging to the clifftop, the deeply scarred rocks. But no swimming pools or fleets of cruise ships when Roloff was there. Today Santorini is one of the world’s most over-touristed places. Just 6000 cruise ship passengers today, though the third ship was late to the party. Tenders were late in leaving our ship because of high winds. I did a lot of research about this place and knew I wouldn’t be leaving the ship. I also knew I would never go there by air because the hotels on the east side of the island are mass market machines on rubbish beaches and the numerous boutique hotels on the caldera side are ludicrously over-priced and require their guests to have the agility of mountain goats. But I also knew that the views from the sea were perhaps the most spectacular of all, as long as the weather played along. And today it did, with an unending carousel of scudding clouds, glancing sunlight and glittering water. Staying on the ship was a good decision. You could enjoy the island without going there. And you could sit out on the back deck having lunch and a few glasses of wine (not Greek of course) and just gawp at it all. It was a pleasant day and I was glad I lugged an old-school heavy camera along for the occasion, just like Roloff. We took our last pre-dinner drinks outside of the Panorama Lounge. Our usual spot on this ship. It was a spectacular sight. My wife downing her . . . no, that’s not I meant at all. There was a full moon, like a light bulb, sitting on an arm of the caldera, with the rest of Santorini lit like a Christmas tree. And there was this American guy, I’ll call him Hank, holding forth as they do, with a great statistic. There were two ships with us today, the Celebrity Apex and Norwegian Gem. Hank said he had taken out his pocket calculator and had calculated that the Apex had 42sqm per passenger, the Gem had 44sqm per passenger and the Spirit had a whopping 102sqm per passenger. That is what we have paid for. I guess that says it all. Spare awareness Hank.

10A: ONE REASON WHY I HATE SILVERSEA We got back from dinner at the Grill tonight to find our suitcases stacked on those luggage rack things in the middle of the cabin. Still more than a whole day to go and they say WE CAN’T WAIT TO GET RID OF YOU. What a dreadful message this sends to their passengers. What a message of total contempt. We have put our cases back in the closet and have thrown the racks into the corridor. We are cancelling our next trip. I'll still describe Santorini as best I can and also a wrap-up about this ship.

10: AG NIK Aghios Nikolaos on the NE coast of Crete became quite famous in the UK because of an early 1970s TV show called The Lotus Eaters about a couple of expats who ran a bar on the harbour. He was played by a fine actor called Ian Hendry (who died tragically young) and she was played by Wanda Ventham, a dolly bird who mothered Benedict Cumberbatch. Because of this show many people wanted to go to Crete and visit this pretty fishing village with its cute little bridge. We went in 1976 and I remember there were fishermen down by the harbour, each one hewn from the pages of Homer, who took their octopuses, bit through their heads, inverted them somehow and gave them a huge slap on the rocks. I suppose if you had eight arms, a beak, three hearts and an ink sac you’d expect harsh treatment. And then they were hung on telegraph wires before being grilled and served with piping hot, crisp chips. Times change. Despite its mountain backdrop, Ag Nik is not nearly as pretty as we remembered it back then and maybe we were just that bit more romantic and impressionable and less well-seasoned. A lot of places are like that. Birmingham for instance. After devouring a couple of perfectly fried eggs we wandered around the town for a bit. There was the usual tourist tat and a lot of cafes with their menus posted outside as long faded photos. All human life was there, in various stages of undress, vaping and smoking away. Eager to capture the classic view on my trusty Leica, we climbed up to the viewpoint overlooking the little lake, the bridge and the harbour. But guess what. In the background was this enormous block of flats which completed destroyed the view. How could the Cretan authorities have been so insensitive? Wait a minute! No, that’s not a block of flats after all. It’s a cruise ship. Our cruise ship. I said to my wife, “I’ll stay here, you go and get the Captain to move the ship out of my shot.” I’m still waiting and I’m losing the light. And the will to live. Tomorrow you will be relieved to hear is our last port of call. It’s called Santorini. We are there with about 6000 other passengers from three ships, including ours. I have read nightmare stories about this place and have little desire to verify them so our plan is to do absolutely nothing. That always works.