Fletcher

Thanks @jpalbny. Yes, in many ways that is the better itinerary as it covers Madagascar more thoroughly. We fancied the earlier cruise because we would miss Christmas in the UK and we also liked the idea of getting to Rodriguez Island. We're still in the thinking stage.

Just caught up with this excellent thread @jpalbny and very impressed by your Ponant experience. Looking at a Christmas trip Mauritius-Mauritius on a similar ship. Thanks very much for all the info and the foodie pics.

Journal 22: Home sir, goin’ home . . . Let me tell you a little anecdote. First some background. There was (and still is) an Englishman named Peter Jay. He was (and hopefully still is) incredibly brainy. He was the economics editor of The Times, later the presenter of Weekend World which was the best political programme ever on British TV, and later still our Ambassador to the USA. His wife, Margaret, was the daughter of UK Prime Minister James Callaghan and she famously had an affair with Carl Bernstein of the Washington Post who was then married to writer Nora Ephron. This menage gave birth to Ephron’s novel and subsequently Mike Nichols’s movie Heartburn. Now the anecdote: the editor of The Times read an article written by Peter Jay and he told Peter he couldn’t understand a single word of it. Peter said, ‘That article was written for two people and you are not one of them.’ That’s it. Make of it what you will. Our passage through Arabia Deserta aboard the Argo, aka Silver Cloud, is at an end. I did not take home a golden fleece, merely some Iranian saffron and some photos. We arrived at Piraeus and spent the night at the Grande Bretagne Hotel in central Athens. We had dinner at the buzzy, casual, bracingly expensive roof terrace restaurant which allows a grandstand view of the Parthenon from dusk to floodlight. That was as near as we got on this trip because in eons gone by we scrambled all over Athens’s fallen agoras, temples and theatres. And anyway, recent photos of the Parthenon show it to be partially covered in scaffolding and entirely covered in tourists. The whole Acropolis is like a termite mound. We last went to Athens in 1976. That’s so far back in the mists of time that Pericles was still sounding off to anyone who would listen. And that’s just what I have been doing here for the last four weeks or so. Sounding off about places that you probably have not been to and probably don’t want to. Saudi isn’t high on many people’s bucket lists and Djibouti? Djibouti??? Didn’t @RachelG say US marines thought it the worst place on Earth? Marines have peculiar insights and needs, if you ask me. They arrive in chaos and leave in carnage. Looking back, Djibouti was probably the highlight of the trip for me as well as Al Ula and Madinah. We knew roughly what to expect from Saudi, and it fully measured up to those hopes, but we didn’t know much about Djibouti. It was an assault on the senses from which I am still reeling. One thing I have not really described are our impressions of the ship. We started off by liking the Cloud in the way one likes a timeworn but hugely comfy old sofa. Not remotely luxurious, just homely. That was with about 150 passengers. At Jeddah another 50 or so climbed aboard and the Cloud’s weaknesses became blindingly obvious. The main weakness, of course, is the chronic lack of outdoor seating if, like us, you avoid pool decks and like to sit in the shade. Fourteen awkwardly placed seats on the back of Deck 8 is not nearly enough for a ship with over 200 passengers, especially not on sea days. We liked the forward Observation Lounge though it was a faff to get to and we could see how tricky that could be in polar regions. But the lack of a proper open front deck is another major drawback and surely an absolute no-no for any expedition ship. Now, dear readers, brace yourselves, grab a handrail because it’s going to get bumpy. We had massive problems with the food which was, overall, the worst we have experienced for many years. Some passengers got on board in Chile and are carrying on to Greenland. If I were doing that, by the end I would be a poster boy for Oxfam. While breakfasts and lunches were generally OK, every night was hit and miss and mostly miss, especially in La Terrazza where the crew haven’t a clue about Italian food. Not a clue. Dinners there were often appalling which is such a shame as that terrace on a pleasant evening is a bewitching place to be. Dinners in The Restaurant were woefully inconsistent and sometimes just downright inedible and unprofessional. I could example several dishes but let’s take a regular ‘posh’ item on the menu. A classic lobster thermidor is a beautiful thing, chunks of succulent lobster flamed in brandy, added to a rich, mustardy béchamel sauce, returned to the shell and with a cheese topping glazed under the grill. The Cloud version tasted like tinned mushroom soup, with added bits of stringy shellfish, put into some sort of crustacean shell, topped with mozzarella cheese. The most disgusting dish I have been served for years. The fundamental things about European-style cooking do not apply here. La Dame is a joke on a ship like this. We never bothered with it and, anyway, it was closed most of the time. It’s for people who want to pay for more fawning. The Grill was our preferred option because it has a simple menu, though the setting can be a thermo-challenge and we don’t like the messy, smokey ‘hot rocks’ thing so we always got the kitchen to cook for us. The Grill was fairly consistent but you can’t eat steak and chips every night. The bar and restaurant crews have been excellent with few lapses, mostly due to language issues and trainees learning as they go. The standard cabins are fine, the bathrooms showing their age. We are low maintenance and never made use of our butler and, frankly, we find the whole Silversea butler thing a bit creepy, especially on expedition ships where grown men and women in tail coats just look ridiculous. The lecture programme was excellent. The huge expedition team have been . . . well, let’s not beat around the bush. This has not been a proper expedition cruise and on the excursions there were many organisational mistakes. I’m sure our expedition team would be brilliant out at sea, landing zodiacs on small islands and so on, and they are great at birds, but this cruise was essentially a classic one, with coach trips ashore. And on land our expedition team were simply way out of their depth. In many challenging situations in Djibouti and Saudi no one appeared to be in charge. Some of the team seemed wholly ignorant about where we were on any one day. Lessons were learned and sometimes quickly because a group’s mess-up one day was remedied the next. However, I have a hunch Silversea will never repeat this trip. So you might ask, after all that, did I enjoy the trip? I could have said, “Me sir? On the whole, I wished I’d stayed in Tunbridge Wells.” The true answer is, I wouldn’t have missed it for the world. Finally readers, many thanks for all your support and encouragement. Only one snide comment, which might be a record for me, perhaps more will ensue. In due course I will post a link to my photos of the trip. Yassu, God speed to the Gallant Men, Mission accomplished, Farewell my friends, And so the legend ends.

Journal 21: In the footsteps of Pausanias Our last full day arrived and it really couldn’t have been better. We sailed into a place called Gythion, in the Peloponnese, just down from the legendary town of Sparta. This is the ancient Sparta, known for its 300 warriors, and was not the birthplace of Kirk Douglas who was born in Thrace. We zodiacked into the town which was far less touristy and thus much nicer than yesterday’s Chania. Octopuses hung on wires, boats seemed to be for work and not for pleasure, and souvenir shops were a rarity. And this being a Sunday everything was closed. Our coaches were waiting and we sped off north towards the aforementioned Sparta. If someone asked you, ‘What does Greece look like?’ you could do worse than take him or her on this coach ride. It was 40 miles of olive groves, roadside orange and lemon trees, drifts of wild flowers and in the background towering snow-capped mountains. It was Greece in all its scented, surpassing beauty. Sparta’s archaeological site wasn’t deemed good enough for Silversea cruisers so we went instead to a nearby UNESCO site called Mystras, an assortment of churches, a citadel and attendant buildings dating roughly from the Byzantine age. Mystras was a place of importance yet was destined for a slow fade-out, just like DC and London. A few nuns remain in the monastery but it was essentially abandoned in the 19th century after 500 years of influence. Today its ruins are scattered higgledy-piggledy up a steep hillside. Readers, it is utterly magical. While I tend not to be routinely excited by Christian stuff, Mystras poured adrenalin into my weary legs and knees and got me clambering and climbing like a 20 year-old. The buildings, the flowers, the hillside, the mountains and the view down towards ancient Sparta would have had someone like Pausanias in paroxysms of ecstasy. It certainly mesmerised me. We returned from the Mystras excursion to find our suitcases had been placed on luggage racks in the middle of our cabin. Nothing annoys me more than this, these hints that it’s time to pack and basically get lost. We threw out the luggage racks and headed to La Terrazza for our last lunch on board, overlooking the pretty harbour. I devoured an almost entire roast duck and two slices of cake which more than made up for a catastrophic dinner at The Restaurant last night. This is my penultimate Journal. My last, a general up-summing of our 24 days on the Cloud, is on the way. Have your stress pills to hand. Today’s photo is courtesy Mrs Fletcher.

Think about bringing your own food as well.

Journal 20: Saturday in Crete We left Alexandria last Thursday when those who went to Cairo returned to the ship. The weather changed almost immediately, the seas were moderately rough and the temperature plummeted. That’s the Med in May for you. The Cairo group reportedly had a good time, barreling along one of Egypt’s new motorways which tear through slum quarters and 17 new towns. Egypt is set on a course of resettlement to help assuage its population explosion. Social engineering never works. At the pyramids, Silver Cloud guests were privileged to enter the atrium lobby of the brand new Grand Egyptian Museum at Giza which is not yet open to the public and perhaps never will be. It’s taken longer to build than the pyramids themselves. I think this bonus to the excursion was initiated by a Cloud passenger, a woman from Texas travelling alone who seems to be well connected in the cultural and philanthropic worlds. There was also a lunch at the historic old Mena House Hotel which hosted a 1943 conference between Roosevelt, Churchill and Chiang Kai-shek. It was an Oberoi when we stayed there and is now a Marriott. Yesterday we were at sea which was decidedly choppy until the afternoon and decidedly chilly all day. I’m not sure where everyone spent the day as the back of the Panorama Lounge was unfathomably empty a lot of the time. On days like this it is tempting to drink too much alcohol - egged on by the waiters - and we wish we were back in Saudi for that reason alone. Dinner was at The Grill, often the best option because the food is simple. I wore two jumpers and a blanket and an extra layering of Malbec. Today we were in Chania at the western end of Crete. Expedition Leader Schalk got his co-ordinates in a twist at last night’s briefing by saying we would sail around the western tip of Crete rather than the eastern tip which is what we did. He didn’t mention the fact that Odyssey of the Seas with nearly 5000 passengers is also unexpectedly here today, berthed around the corner in Souda Bay, a major NATO naval base. The Odyssey would have been visiting Israel had not a few missiles prevented it from doing so (I understand the Silver Spirit is also taking evasive action). While Cloud people went directly into Chania town by zodiac, the great unwashed Odyssey people came on coaches in their thousands, so the little streets were clogged by midday. Chania is what they call a Venetian port, meaning you get five percent off everything at the shops and cafes which line the waterfront. From a distance it is all very pretty, less so the closer you get. We noticed a sort of large terrace on the old city walls above the harbour which might be a photo-op. We couldn’t spot the way up and asked the young manager of a restaurant immediately below it. She spoke perfect English and, no, she hadn’t noticed the terrace directly above her before. That’s like asking a waiter in Trafalgar Square where Nelson’s Column is. ‘Dunno mate.’ You just despair these days. Of everything. We eventually found the way up and despaired all over again. The vista was magnificent, taking in a former mosque, the harbour, the Cloud in the bay and the distant mountains still with patches of snow, shining in the sunlight. Sadly the whole terrace area was shocking - a once great building fallen into near ruin, stray dogs and cats, graffiti, broken chairs, smashed bottles and the detritus of drug-taking. I’m treating you to a picture of it. Flippin’ heck, another Simon Reeve moment. Plus the nicer angle so two pics today because you deserve it. Tomorrow is our last proper day and we’re at a place called Gythion, in Sparta, which gives access to an inland monastery of some repute. Hope to see you there.

Journal 19: Luke warm in Alex Today in Alexandria was deeply frustrating and rather depressing and I guess you must know by now that I’m never happier than when I am miserable. Let’s get the frustrating bit out of the way first and it’s easy to do that because I am talking about a Silversea coach tour. These tours are master classes in the art of padding and hanging around. They never take two hours when three hours will do. We never saw the gem-like Roman Theatre, or Pompey’s Pillar, or the fantabulous Montazah Palace or have lunch at the Four Seasons Hotel. That would be a proper city tour. This wasn’t. Instead we drove out of the port and seemed to circle much of the city before heading to the historical centre and an imposing 15th century structure called the Citadel. This was built on the site of the Pharos Lighthouse, one of the original Seven Wonders of the World which collapsed in various earthquakes from around 900AD. It was a pleasant little visit which we shared with many local tourists, every one of whom seemed to have caught the selfie bug. It’s not where you are anymore, it’s all about ME ME & ME. Oh, all right then, HER as well. Next stop was the Library. This was famous in the Ancient World for having the complete works of Pericles, Sophocles, Aristotle, Shakespeare, Jeffrey Archer and Stephen King. Cleopatra used to spend hours here browsing and doing her eye makeup. She was famous for never returning the books she had taken out. It was said that if she were a man she might be considered an intellectual. And then, one fateful day, Rex Harrison was looking for a nice carpet and Cleopatra rolled up in one. And then, on another fateful day, Rex needed to burn some ships in the harbour and the fire spread to the great library itself, destroying the Toni Morrison wing. The library thereafter fell into decline, finally closing due to budget cuts and a lack of interest in classical literature. It was demolished later on. The replacement, opened in 2002, is Norwegian in design and lots of students us it, learning on computers rather than papyrus scrolls which is great for the environment. Now let’s get to the depressing bit. Our bus passed mile after mile of squalor in the form of crumbling apartment blocks. I was astonished to see people living in them and hanging their laundry out of the gaps in the walls where there used to be windows. The streets were full of rough sleepers and even fairly ordinary-looking folk were eating meals on the pavements. Scrawny dogs and cats roamed about everywhere. Our guide on the coach talked of the soaring birth rate - a baby is born every 20 seconds, she said, so work out how many babies were born during our coach tour. I reckoned it was nearly a million more mouths to feed. This is why the city was one massive, seething crush. This is what the world looks like just before it ends. I’ve seen this sort of thing before, though seldom as bad as this. This was humanity at the end of its tether. Some of the old buildings were extravagant, beautiful and ornate relics of Alexandria’s past grandeur. The Cecil Hotel, for instance, a major character in those Durrell novels, looked like Alex’s answer to the Sacher in Vienna. But many buildings were just collapsing and it seems the government does have in place a sort of slum clearance programme as there were also miles of brand new apartment blocks on the edges of the city. It all looked a bit Soviet if you ask me, and it’s no coincidence that the taxis here are Ladas. We fancied being dropped off by our coach to do some independent exploring but permission was refused by the port authority. They do not want people wandering around on their own and you can see why - our tour was accompanied by heavily armed police. Egypt seems to be a very nervous, neurotic country on high alert. Just one incident, just one tourist death, and their whole tourist industry would collapse again. We stayed on the ship this afternoon, not risking the shuttle bus, the traffic gridlock and all the hassle. It was all very frustrating and depressing. Tomorrow we are at sea again and alone with the Cloud and its own seething mass of humanity. Not much poverty or squalor, though, just acres of sagging, crinkly flesh roasting by the pool. PS: One of my favourite Hollywood stories involves Rex Harrison who was a famous lothario and an extremely unpleasant man. The story goes that a fan approached him for an autograph and was rudely refused. The fan then struck the star which was subsequently reported in the news media as ‘Fan hits s**t.’

Journal 18: In Transit We have spent the last two days heading up the Suez Canal. Transiting it is called, a very wokeish-sounding phrase these days. The first day was in the Red Sea, quite choppy with a chill northerly wind. Inside the ship it is freezing and everyone is in woolies and fleeces. On the port side, the African side, Egypt seemed to be one continuous wind farm. We anchored for the night at Port Suez surrounded by freighters of all shape and sizes. We had an early dinner in The Grill and got to the back of the Panorama Lounge by 8pm. It was packed, only 20-odd people, no seats available. This cramped old ship can be seriously annoying. Some passengers were wearing suits and ties. God knows why. The terrace cleared quite suddenly and we found ourselves with just one couple who were Australians. Their opening conversational gambit was ‘We have been to 150 countries.’ I asked how they were counting them and if they were collecting them. ‘We are not collecting countries,’ she snapped, ‘we are collecting experiences.’ They said they hated cruise ships, hated the people, hated the excursions but sometimes ships were the only way of adding more experiences to their huge collection. They had experienced Kuwait before joining the Cloud. He gave me his entire medical history and they both said they would never allow themselves to be examined by an Indian doctor as they were not properly qualified. Our Indian waiter served us coffee. This morning I was up at 5.30am to observe the entrance to the Canal. The Cloud got going at 6am. We were the leader of the pack, crawling into the Canal proper, followed at a polite distance by one of the biggest container ships in the business, the Cosco Shipping Star, bound for Felixstowe, UK. Each vessel now has a dedicated tug in case one of us grounded, like the Ever Given which blocked the canal for weeks in 2021 and created a garden fence crisis in the UK. Later in the day I was hoping to replicate two shots in David Lean’s film Lawrence of Arabia. The first is of a ‘ship in the desert,’ which was a second unit shot carried out by Nicolas Roeg. The second shot was of one side of the canal, a sort of raised sandbank. In the film Peter O’Toole and his servant friend Farraj emerge from crossing Sinai, having taken Aqaba, and reach the Canal. On the opposite bank a British soldier on a motorcycle spots them and yells, ‘Who are you? Who are you?’ There is a lingering close-up of O’Toole’s sand-encrusted, exhausted face. At this point he has no answer to the question. He hasn’t a clue who he is. However, just as a I failed in my ambitions for Yenbo, I failed here as well. Suez just ain’t what it used to be. And what is nowadays? The landscape of the Canal changed every few hours or so. It is heavily industrialised for virtually its entire length. There is a spanking new railway bridge that looks like the old one in Edinburgh. It is not open yet. There is a spanking new road bridge that looks like the one across the Humber. It links Africa and Asia and might be unique in that respect. It is not open yet. There is a brand new, two-mile-long city on the Sinai side, New Ismailia, which looks fairly Soviet in concept, complete with a statue of the worker who built it. No one is living there yet. We learned that the average fee for using the Canal is $400,000. It’s calculated by weight of each vessel, so the Cloud will have paid around $150,000. It was all fascinating and yet dull at the same time. The harsh light prevented any good photos. I just longed for the vanished gardens of Cordoba. We emerged into the Mediterranean at 4.30pm and will steam along the coast to Alexandria. Some of us will be going south to Cairo to see the pyramids and others will be going west to see the battlefield of El Alamein. We are taking a city tour as we have not been here before. They say Alexandria has gone downhill since Cleopatra called the shots. Or when Lawrence Durrell haunted the high and lows of the city and created his famous literary tetralogy in the 1950s.

I think I'll stay Locked out of Flickr as my photos are all RAW and very 'heavy.' Enjoy the canal tomorrow!

I'm on the Cloud right now. The wifi was very iffy when we joined in Muscat. Cruise Critic was so tricky to access I thought they had blocked it. But it cleared up and for two weeks now it has been excellent, perhaps the best we have experienced. My only niggle is that I cannot access the photo site Flickr which is for some reason blocked.

Journal 17: Never get out of the boat As soon as the Cloud left Yanbu yesterday and left Saudi waters, up went the shutters and down came the booze in people’s gullets. We are an unusually restrained couple and left it to our usual time for a pre-dinner drink before we too fell off the dromedary. We feel healthier than ever. Today we were in Sharm el Sheikh, the major Egyptian resort of the Sinai peninsula. Up-market, down-market, mid-market, it’s all here. There are Hard Rock Cafes, tattoo parlours, burger joints, genuine Gucci shops, the full horror of western tourism. You can holiday here for less than it costs to roast a chicken. The port was added to our itinerary after the changes imposed by Saudi Arabia and we still deeply regret being turned away from that last Saudi port - Duba - as the inland scenery looked epic. Sharm is a terrible cop-out, frankly. Our only previous visit to Egypt was in 2004 when we did a Nile cruise on an A&K vessel, Sun Boat III. There were less than a dozen passengers because Egypt was in a security scare, following a massacre of tourists at a Luxor temple we used to call ‘hotchickensoup.’ After that we headed to Sharm for a week at the then new Four Seasons Hotel. The beach was poor, though the hotel was spectacular. I remember a fabulous dinner of duck with red cabbage and dumplings, cooked by the chef from the Four Seasons in Prague. I also remember for the first time being made aware of Russians at a western hotel. The men sat around the pool chomping cigars and the women looked like sacks of potatoes. Their table manners were appalling. Silversea were offering four trips - a back-breaking, spleen-splitting 4X4 adventure, a 3-hour city tour (when one hour would do), a snorkelling boat trip and three hours at a brash-looking beach resort. Naturally, we chose none of them. Dontcha snorkel you may ask? The area is famed for it and I love snorkelling and have snorkelled in some great snorkel spots, from Palau to Vavau. But I do not like snorkelling with 100 other snorkelers. All you see are shoals of buttockfish, cleavagefish, anklefish and flipperfish that slap you in the mask. We hoped the expedition team would get the shuttle buses to make a stop at the big mosque here en route to the beach area. Sadly, they seemed unable or unwilling to do this because they assumed those who did not want to go to the beach resort on a tour would want go to the beach on the shuttle and not be interested in the mosque. And then we remembered the incessant hassle from hawkers and beggars from our last visit so we happily stayed on the ship and had it virtually to ourselves. Our view of the harbour was gorgeous - sparkling turquoise water, lots of boats coming and going, a dramatic mountain backdrop and not a Maersk container in sight. A fabulous day, really.

Journal 16: Nothing is Written, or Falling Back on Yenbo I have with me a remarkable book called Passages from Arabia Deserta by Charles Montagu Doughty. It is not easy to find and it is not easy to read; in fact, damnably difficult but extremely rewarding if one perseveres. Mercifully my old Penguin paperback edition is an abridgement by Edward Garnett who reduced Doughty’s 600,000 word original by something like four-fifths. Thanks be to Allah that he did so for I travel lightly. Doughty was born in Suffolk in 1843, the son of a clergyman. After university he became one of those Victorian-era explorers who literally risked their lives in pursuit of the unknown and the exotic. Some went to Africa, others to Asia or South America. Doughty went to the Levant and explored what we now know as Israel, Lebanon and Jordan. And then, in 1876 he embarked on his remarkable journey across what we now call Saudi Arabia. In David Lean’s film Lawrence of Arabia, Alec Guinness as Prince Faisal looks at Lawrence through narrowed eyes and says, “I think you are another one of these desert loving English. Doughty, Stanhope, Gordon of Khartoum.” Later on there would be Wilfred Thesiger, Colin Thubron. And me. In that same movie Lawrence is asked what particularly appeals to him about the desert. “It’s clean,” he replies, and later he says, “The desert is an ocean in which no oar is dipped.” I wish I had written that rather than merely quoted it. Doughty’s work was an inspiration to the real Lawrence who admired his evocation and reportage of a culture as much as his highly-stylised, almost medievalist use of the English language. On its original, two-volume publication in 1888 it sold few copies but in 1922 a new edition was published with Lawrence’s encouragement and with a foreword by TEL himself. Slowly the book acquired its reputation as a classic of travel literature. Much of what Doughty has to say about Saudi society still applies to this day, notably the status of women and marriage arrangements. It emphatically remains a dry society, drunk on religion. Doughty uses racial words that would not pass any modern editorial board, specifically in the context of the Africans who work as domestic servants. In another section he describes in graphic detail a circumcision ceremony. I am sorry to report that the Silversea excursion to witness the modern equivalent remained waitlisted. Today we were in Yanbu, which I know as Yenbo because it was a key British port in the Arab Revolt during WW1. Lawrence was sent here from Cairo by the Arab Bureau, a sort of secret service, to ‘assess the situation.’ The Ottoman Turks, allied to Germany, were in control of much of the region, largely due to the Hejaz Railway which ran from Damascus to Madinah. Lawrence would play a critical role in destroying the railway and thus the Turkish stranglehold on Arabia. Lawrence knew Yenbo and I was desperate to photograph the house in which he stayed. I failed. I knew what the house looked like. I knew where it was. Our tour guides showed us another house which I knew was wrong. I quizzed a member our expedition team. She had never heard of Lawrence of Arabia because she had never read that page on Wikipedia. I came to the conclusion that the Saudis had demolished the house to make way for a sort of tourist shopping area and hoped to pass off another house as TEL’s lodgings. The guides also said TEL lived in Yenbo for two years which was total baloney. He stayed for three days, waiting for a ship back across the Red Sea to Cairo. That said, Yenbo was a pleasant place and with a slight stretch of the imagination, and a shift to late twinkling evening, you could imagine this little harbour and its fish restaurants to be on a Greek island. It was quite charming. We put to sea at 2pm and headed north. The sea was - and remains - surprisingly choppy and the temperature has crashed. Compared to what we have become accustomed to, 85 degrees feels bloody freezing. My photo was taken today in Yenbo. It is not Peter O'Toole.

Journal 15: Seeing Jeddah Hello again from the Silver Cloud. Yesterday, Coronation Day, we took a little tour of Jeddah. That is easier said than done as Silversea were not offering such a thing. All they had was a shuttle bus to a shopping mall and a trip to an Islamic museum which didn’t exactly set the pulses racing. Two New Zealanders and I fancied visiting the so-called ‘floating mosque,’ the Corniche, along which they run the F1 race, and the Old Town. First off we asked Silversea if they could organise a private minibus for us. They couldn’t. Could they arrange an Uber for us? They couldn’t. So we took the shuttle to the cruise terminal. Not a taxi in sight. Uber could not be reached on the phone. So we got the Silversea shuttle to the shopping mall and after half an hour a guy at the main entrance found a taxi for us. Jeddah has very few taxis. The locals don’t need them and there aren’t any tourists. The drive took us through many neighbourhoods of the city. There is a dark side to Jeddah that the Saudis would prefer us not to see, such as clear evidence of people sleeping rough and what can only be described as slum housing. There were also clearly visible refugees from Sudan, even including yesterday a Spanish naval frigate, the Reine Sophia, which was berthed next to the Cloud and was disgorging a lot of refugees and possibly Spanish nationals. The floating mosque only floats when the tide is in. It is small, rather jewel-like and a young man opened it up for us and switched on the chandelier. We then drove the entire length of the Corniche which is mostly a building site and mostly full of vacant lots. The only seriously impressive building was the Ritz-Carlton. Saudi Arabia has had vast wealth for decades and is only now spending it on big projects, as if they suddenly realised they have to compete with the likes of Qatar and Dubai. At the moment there is nothing worth seeing, though I understand it’s a different story at night when it comes alive. The Old City is also a building site, a massive project to restore the old houses and shops. It is a lovely place to visit, even now. This was the day we had to officially check out of Saudi Arabia, though we have another Saudi port tomorrow. The afternoon was spent mainly queueing for immigration and having our passports stamped for only the second time. And then, around 7pm, the Cloud slipped its lines and inched away from its berth and left the city. We had been berthed at Jeddah for five nights. We long ago ceased to be an expedition cruise. Now at least we are a cruise again.

Journal 14: The bullet train to Madinah Medina of old, Madinah nowadays. A city of such resonance like Damascus, Jerusalem and Cairo. To get there we took a train and ladies had to cover-up by wearing abayas. They were dispensed on the coach just after the passport desks. Sizes offered were small, medium and large. My wife asked if this was lateral or vertical, an important consideration. As the abayas were handed out the aisle of the coach was transformed into a catwalk. Ladies got very picky about sizes and colours and did it match their hair colour or their handbags. One of our number, Elaine from NZ, was the epitome of elegance. She knew exactly how to tie the head thingie. We blokes just sat in our beige Craghoppers and Tevas getting impatient. I looked out of the window and just across the way was a sorry group of Sudanese refugees, clutching what little they had and looking terrified. Someone had fed them in the night and all their rubbish was strewn around. (Sorry about this which is a bit Simon Reeve.) And then we were off to the station. Back in the Victorian era the British built extravagant temples to the railway. St Pancras in London is a fine example and Victoria Terminus in Bombay is perhaps the grandest of them all. Jeddah’s railway station is the modern equivalent, a staggering building that takes the breath away. It is designed to cope with millions of passengers headed for Madinah and Makkah and is, therefore, somewhat on the large side. As big as a major airport in fact. And inside it’s a fantasy, all domes and circles with escalators like George Lucas’s light sabres. The trains are Talgos built in Spain, which leave dead on time and cruise at 300kmh. It was thrilling to get on the train and watch the TV screen with a map and a speed gauge. We hit 300kmh after 15 minutes or so, the novelty wore off and it became just another boring train ride across a lot of flat nothingness. Madinah was another show-off station and our coaches were waiting. I might add here that all our coaches in Saudi were luxurious and brand new. Rather than cutting to the chase - ie, the mosques - I might describe here what it’s like driving in Saudi cities. They have a weird system that prevents you from turning left until you get to an official U-turning place. This means you pass wherever or whatever you want to stop at, drive on for a few miles, do a U-turn and drive back. So if the station is, say, five miles from a mosque it is, in reality, ten miles because of all the doubling-back. Almost every car is Japanese or Korean, I have yet to spot a female driver, I have yet to spot an electric car. Both Jeddah and Madinah are huge sprawls of urban ugliness. Dreary shopping strips, hundreds of junk food outlets, gas stations, shopping malls, decrepit apartment blocks, acres of waste land and building sites are connected by traffic-choked freeways. Oddly, this doesn’t look like a fabulously wealthy country until you suddenly see some outrageously opulent emporium. They have adopted the worst of Los Angeles as their own. Driving through all this is fairly depressing and also nerve shredding. Madinah in particular was an awful dump. And then you stop the endless circling, as we were doing, and drive straight for the city’s religious heart, the grand mosque, the second most important in the world. It is surrounded by enormous hotels, mostly mid-range stuff like a marble-clad Ramada Inn. The mosque is modern, massive and filled with untold thousands of worshippers. I was worried about going on a Friday but this turned out to be a stroke of luck. It was thrilling to see it like this, thronged, heaving, loud and alive. Heathens like us are never allowed inside mosques in Madinah or Makkah so we walked along the perimeter, peeping through an ornately carved screen that must have been a kilometre long. You could take photos and no one seemed to mind. In front of us lay the courtyards where people met, gathered and socialised before entering the mosque itself. It was an extravagant architectural display, designed by a German, with umbrella-like shades which could fold up like butterfly wings and become water gatherers. There was much boasting from the guides about the cost of it all. It was a great spectacle but it was also a rather zoo-like experience with us looking into a cage or them looking out at us. I wondered who might be the freer species. We visited two further mosques and the obligatory shopping opportunity. There was only one thing to buy and that was dates. The first mosque, Uhud, occupies the site of a historic battle so it’s a sort of pilgrimage to go there and climb one of two hillocks. The place was crammed with the faithful. Women, looking like crows in their black hijabs, fought over prayer mats. Small food trucks offered dates, coffee, trinkets. More dates. Women also wore many different coloured scarves which did not denote religious sects, merely which coach they arrived on. The last mosque was less intoxicating but also drew a large crowd. Mr Archbishop of Canterbury, eat your heart out. You’d be lucky to draw a crowd of 500 on a Sunday. It was getting dark when we got back to the station. As we sat in a waiting area within the massive concourse, the voice of Big Brother boomed out. This is also known as the muezzin. There is no escape for these people. It is a form of brainwashing, I think. It was dark when our train pulled out of Madinah, bound for Makkah with many passengers on the hajj. This time we made a brief stop before Jeddah at a place called KAEC which stands for King Abdullah Economic City. I bet it’s charming. And at around 10pm we all fell up the gangway and back on the Cloud. They kept La Terrazza open for us, blessings be upon them.

On the Cloud now, berthed in Jeddah so toasting with water or a mocktail. The ship's TV was useless but managed to watch the middle of the service in HD on my laptop. Go figure. Missed the beginning because we were out, missed the end because Saudi immigration needed us all. I think the Coronation and Silversea excursions have a lot in common - they go on too long with too much padding and hanging around.

Journal 13: Under the stars in Inselberg Al Ula. Alula. AlUla. There are I think three ways to write it. But have you ever heard of it? No? Well, let me fill you in. AlUla is Saudi Arabia’s answer to Petra in Jordan. Alula is also Saudi Arabia’s answer to Monument Valley in Utah. Al Ula is fast becoming Saudi Arabia’s tourist hotspot and not just because it is chargrillingly hot. There are already several hotels, an international airport, a Jason Atherton restaurant, a mirror-walled concert hall, a Burger King serving camel meat and a Dunkin’ Donuts. Amanresorts are building there. It’s going to be big. Better get there pdq. So we did. The day before yesterday in fact. Our private jet took off from Jeddah’s private aviation terminal at 8am. You must be thinking, oh how glamorous, that’s the Silversea life! But no, it was just another cramped aircraft and rammed luggage bins. The stuff people seemed to need for a one-nighter. The luxury element I suppose was the fact that we took off when we got there. The flight lasted an hour and then we were in the coaches. In AlUla we were walking in the footprints of history, of great civilisations, of great men. Nabateans, Romans, Arabs, Ottomans all tread here, as did explorers and warriors like Doughty, Lawrence, Thesiger and Elley. All have entered the annals of Arabia and now we group of 70 have done so as well, legends in our own buffet lunchtimes. We came first to Elephant Rock, a big hunk of pachydermic sandstone. It was fun and cute and the Saudis have made something of it, a sort of Picnic at Elephant Rock. Next stop was Hegra, the Nabatean’s second city after Petra and a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The architecture is Nabatean vernacular - ornamental tombs cut into rock. In Petra the cliff faces are solid and continuous; here they are weird, wind-blasted outcrops called inselbergs. They are huge and humbling. We stood in the blazing heat while our story-teller (aka guide) lectured us about them for 30 minutes. Some gave up. That is us you saw walking back to the air-con of the bus. We saw only a fraction of Hegra’s wonders and feel tempted to return and book one of their private tours in a classic Land Rover. Next was an inedible buffet lunch at our hotel. There was not a scrum for the sheep’s eyeballs or a suspicious looking plate of sausages. It had all baked in the merciless heat for hours before we showed up. Then it was off again to Al Ula town itself which was like a wannabe Taos, NM. Saudi men and women were having coffees separately, eating dunkin’ donuts, selling artsy stuff. Then we had a night of star-gazing, music and a buffet dinner, served in completely the wrong order. The star of the show was a lamb, spit-roasted and carved, which a New Zealander in our group thought was mutton; maybe that was why it tasted so good. You needed your own teeth to handle it. I would have killed for a glass of Ch. Musar. Next morning we were up and out to more archaeological sites, neither of which quite hit the spot like Hegra. Then we had 30 minutes to admire what must be one of the five greatest buildings of the century, the totally mirrored concert hall the Saudis have built in this incredible sci-fi landscape. It is like something out of Dune, a man-made mirage that is hard to describe and even harder to photograph. Our final call was lunch at the Banyan Tree, a resort hotel charging $1500 per night and upwards and by the looks of it that’s quite a bargain. The food, a fantastic Lebanese-style feast with proper service, was the best we have eaten since breakfast at the Shangri-La back in Muscat. The resort covers 33 sq kms and I got the manager to drive me in a golf buggy to see the famous rock-cut pool. He was a model of hospitality and also an interesting man, a Syrian whose previous job was at the Four Seasons in Damascus, not the most desirable hotel in the world. The Banyan Tree might be. So that was Al Ula done and dusted. There were a few logistical glitches and a lot of hanging around. Some people seemed to get a bit tense and shouty but we felt it was little short of a miracle that the show happened at all and we know they will get things right for the group that leaves tomorrow. It was a simply stunning place to visit. I’ll never forget our night with the inselbergs. You’ll forgive me if I dash. I have a train to catch . To the Holy City of Medinah. Crikey! My wife and all the other ladies in our group will wear an abaya. It’s going to be 44 centigrade.

Journal 12: Detox In my dissolute, wretched world, most days start with two fingers of Jack Daniel’s. And when I am in foreign climes I brush my teeth with it to fend off diseases which lurk in the local water, a trick I learned from Betty Bacall who once told me that was the way she and Bogey stayed healthy when shooting The African Queen in the Congo. Now you can believe that or not. My second slug of Jack is usually around 6.30pm in the Panorama Lounge. But yesterday, Monday 1 May 2023, in the middle of the Red Sea bearing NNE, I took my last alcoholic drink for a week as I am going on a detox regime. Not voluntarily you understand. My word no. It is because Saudi Arabia has decreed it so. On the ship the shutters are down, the padlocks are locked, the bottles are invisible, the bar staff are on holiday, the passengers are streaming The Lost Weekend or Days of Wine and Roses. The Cloud has, in effect, become an outlying branch of The Betty Ford Clinic. We now have something called Mocktail Hour. This morning we watched Pedro’s video of the Muscat-Djibouti leg and admired its photography, especially the game-changing drone footage, but we wished it told a story. A family friend watching the video would never have known we were on a cruise with other people. The video seemed oddly disembodied. By the end of the movie presentation we had reached Jeddah and were towed and pushed to our berth, right alongside the car import piers. I was fully expecting to see serried ranks of Mercs and Masers not the Chinese-made cheapo MGs which lay before us. This freight terminal is the Cloud’s home for the next five nights. Tonight many guests went out on the town, dining at a local restaurant well accustomed to feeding hordes of foreigners. We had a quiet dinner at The Grill and set the alarm for 5.30am which is when we start an overnight excursion to a place in the desert called Al Ula. I am fully expecting this to be the highlight of the trip. As this is a 40-hour excursion you, dear readers, will have to be patient for I will not be writing again until Coronation Saturday as after Al Ula, on Friday, we take the bullet train to Medinah on a 14-hour excursion which I expect will be another highlight. But fear not, you will be fully apprised of what Saudi Arabia had to offer. All good things to those who wait. But you never know in a place like this - we could arrive at the airport to find our chartered plane re-chartered by a Saudi royal. Or the train drivers might be on strike. So far, though, things have gone smoothly and we are down to two passport stamps a day from the previously envisaged six. Everyone had to clear immigration today which meant a bus to the terminal, fingerprints, photo, all smiles. The logistics of running the mightily complex Silversea programme here in Jeddah is all down to Expedition Leader Schalk and his team. He’s riding the whirlwind. Let’s hope we’re not. INTERMISSION

Journal 11: Crocks, zodiacs & Captain Invisible Today was spent chugging up the Red Sea. My word it’s a steep hill going in this direction. By 9am we had already spotted many hundreds of spinner and Indian Ocean dolphins. Huge freighters trundled past, laden with containers resembling dozens of Rubik cubes. There were sightings of Yemeni islands to the starboard side, though Eritrea on the port side was never visible. There were many activities and talks today, including a briefing from Expedition Leader Schalk about our arrival at Jeddah tomorrow. When he finished I thought why don’t we just turn round now. For Schalk and other crew members this looked like a nightmare - people off on two separate tours, people leaving the ship, people arriving on the ship, all in a country seemingly determined to make life difficult. We were told we would get six - yes, six - stamps in our passports every day. Alcohol would be banned on board for seven days. Temperatures could reach 105F. And then someone asked about taking medicines on the overnight trip to Al Ula. This prompted Schalk to hand the mike over to a passenger, a retired doctor, who said you could be arrested by simply having paracetamol and cough mixture. This was probably enough to send some passengers into a state of panic. That same retired medic, by the way, later forced us from our dining venue by the volume of noise she generated. And for those passengers leaving us in Jeddah there was a goodbye bash from the Captain which is odd considering he hardly said hello. He has been the least visible Captain we have ever not known. He came on the blower during our “Turtle Overboard!” incident but has maintained radio silence ever since. While most expedition ships we have been on have had an open bridge policy, the door here seems firmly shut. This isn’t exactly a complaint as we tend to opt out of most things and always turn down dinner invitations. As one passenger said to us long ago on the old Island Sky, “We don’t dine with our staff at home so why would we do so on a ship?” I think this ceased to be an expedition cruise several days ago and I feel rather sorry for the zodiacs stacked inertly if neatly on the deck by the Observation Lounge. They want to be out there in the pounding surf, soaking their passengers and ruining their cameras. They look so sad I sometimes go up to them, give them a pat and say, “There there Cloud 9, it won’t be long before Greenland.” And I also feel sorry for the expedition team who can’t play with these lovely rubber boats anymore. Like seals or walruses, expedition team members always look a little lost and awkward on land and bury their heads in books like Birds of the Middle East or Snails of Micronesia. Sitting in the lounge I did think there is probably a fabulous expedition cruise to be done in this region. Call it something like Islands of the Red Sea and visit Socotra (Yemen), Moucha (Djibouti), the Dahlak Marine Reserve (Eritrea) and the Farasan Islands which belong to Saudi Arabia and were on our original itinerary. That’s the sort of itinerary I spend hours looking for and usually never find. Come on Conrad, Walter and Federica, this would be a doddle to organise. What could possibly go wrong? As for the Observation Lounge itself, it offers a stunning view, atlases, a screen showing where you are, and surprisingly good coffee from the machine. I can happily waste an hour or two up there. It has a sort of crow’s nest vibe. However, there is a drawback because it has taken away a lot of the original deck so the Cloud is unusual for being an expedition vessel without a proper forward-facing outside deck. And to me, that’s like a camera body without a lens attached. These Red Sea evenings are gloriously balmy so we have become rather fond of The Grill and always get the kitchen to do the cooking. The Maitre D here is also a real star. We totally ignore La Dame which has been closed on several nights due to a lack of bookings. It’s a dark, pokey little room anyway though we are reliably informed that the cutlery, crockery and glassware is worth paying $60 for because it’s simply terrible in all the other venues. The workaday knives and forks roll about, they don’t cut anything including mustard, they slip into your sauce, they drill a hole into the palms of your hands. Simple things like these awful stainless steel milk jugs are just design-led useless. The tall and narrow tea mugs are guaranteed to topple in high seas. The coffee cups don’t fit the saucers or your index finger. The plastic wine glasses are old and scratched. It all feels cheap, like a state school or a prison has had a clear-out. And while I am on the subject of knives and forks, let’s talk about the food that goes with them. For instance last night . . . hang on, wait a sec, oh darn it, I need to put another shilling in the meter as my time is running ou

√ Journal 10: Djibouti and the Lights of Yemen Are we the first cruise ship to drop in on Djibouti? If we are, maybe we are also the last. Maybe you once came here on the old World Discoverer, or the QE2. If you did, let me know by Monday. Tiny Djibouti itself only came into being in 1977 since previously it was France’s last colonial grip on continental Africa and known as French Somaliland. A proportion of its income comes from allowing various countries to have air and naval bases on this strategic pinch-point between Africa and Arabia and the southern entry to the Red Sea and Suez. The USA, China, Japan, France and Italy all have bases here which probably makes the bar at the local Kempinski quite a source of gossip. I brought a novel with me, Elmore Leonard’s Djibouti, a trash thriller about piracy in the Horn of Africa. I drew the line at also buying a 2022 book called I Don’t Need Therapy I Just Need To Go To Djibouti. There are, as yet, no reviews of that one on Amazon. There is also an interesting-looking book called Welcome to Djibouti: Arrive, Survive, and Thrive in the Hottest Country on Earth by Rachel Pieh Jones, an Englishwoman who moved to Djibouti. Today passengers were to have been offered snorkelling off Moucha Island in the Bay of Tadjoura. The Djiboutis nixed that so we were offered a city tour which was OK with us because we missed the fabled delights of Djibouti city on the lake tour. Also, we heard couples who did the city tour yesterday, including @MuseCruiser, say it was the worst excursion ever. That makes us eager to see this eponymous capital city, one of only seven in the world according to our count. We ventured out at 8am. When we got back four hours later we met our Expedition Leader who said he’d fixed the glitches from yesterday. I suggested money changed hands. He said no, just violence had been threatened. Whatever it was, the tour was a stunner, a raw, immersive and visceral glimpse into Djibouti’s pulsing heart. We began at the fish market, a fabulous vista of boats, men and garbage. Inside we compared male and female crabs and my wife started chatting to a man gutting fish. He said he once worked in the UK at a place called Wembley which is where my wife started her working life. They knuckled each other. We filed that bizarre encounter under Small World Department. Next was a walk through the street market, an incredible assault on the senses. The fresh fly department also offered meat for sale, mostly lamb. There was some resentment from traders not wanting to be treated as exotic exhibits and one woman selling lamb mimed throwing a knife at us. Our Silversea videographer urged caution and respect regarding photography as he himself lugged two enormous, tonsil-inspecting Canon lenses with him. He seemed to be the most conspicuous person around while I, with a small Leica, was a model of photo discretion. I was in fact deeply into Cartier-Bresson mode. Next up was a wander through le quartier Française which made us wonder what this place might have looked like in the 1960s and 1970s. Did Catherine Deneuve ever sashay down these boulevards? Did anyone drive a Facel-Vega? Was there a branch of Chanel or an African offshoot of Le Tour D’Argent? While a few of the French buildings are being restored, mostly it’s just crumbling and, of course, the rubbish is everywhere. Then to something called the People’s Palace, built by China, for a dance display, a thrumming and thrillingly loud routine with girls and boys that seemed like West Side Story by way of Cairo. We stopped by the Parliament building, built by the Iranians, then the Catholic cathedral, built by the French in 1902 in a modernist style, and then it was back to the ship. The whole tour was wonderful, a rare encounter with a place totally untouched by tourism. How privileged we were. We slipped our lines at 1pm. Farewell Djibouti. What an experience this was with amazing sights for jaded eyes and numbed nerves. For people who think they have seen everything, here was something to see. Later on we looked off the bow and saw the lights of Yemen, surprisingly close, and the lights of Eritrea, alluringly distant. I doubt if either country will ever see our footprint. I think this is one of very few places on Earth where you can see one continent from another. Our next stop is Jeddah. This cruise has really caught fire.

post deleted

Journal 9: The sun’s anvil We got into Djibouti and found a rather awkward berth, next to a French gunship. At 7.30am we were off on our excursion, a 60-mile drive to Lac Assal, apparently the lowest point on the continent of Africa, a continent with an abundance of low points to choose from. I had been told by David Stanley, a Silversea regular, not to bother with Djibouti because it was just a rubbish tip. And you know what? David was quite right. Djibouti was my 122nd sovereign state and I have seen quite a lot of poverty and slums in my time. Take Cambodia for instance. We went there in 1992, shortly after the war and the genocide of Pol Pot, and the country was on its knees. But there was an optimism about it, a passion, a ravishing beauty, that was quite touching. I cried when I left. Nothing like that in Djibouti. The landscape is sort of planetary, desperately unkind, a sea of basalt rock, other sorts of geological rubble, razor-sharp lava fields and thorny scrub where goats, camels and even a few baboons scrape an existence along with the humans. We passed many nomad camps where people live in tents, shacks and shelters built of whatever they can scrounge from the mountains of rubbish. There is seemingly no attempt to control it or bury or burn it. The bottles, cardboard, paint cans, corrugated iron, crashed cars and lorries, are just part of the vast landscape of litter. And then you have the heat, well into the 90s with horrendous humidity. This is the sun’s anvil. The road out of Djibouti was the main road to Ethiopia and to Addis. Almost everything that arrives at the port of Djibouti is destined for Addis and the road was full of enormous trucks. Consequently we had a police escort to ease our way. I have no idea which side of the road they drive on. Our guide kept up quite a repartee and he used to pronounce the word Ethiopia as Utopia which was not on offer today because it was most definitely dystopia. We also learned from our guide about Djibouti’s severe migration crisis. Which country does not have one right now? Djibouti used to get migrants from Somalia and Eritrea and now they come in their tens of thousands from Yemen. They have no means of processing them or feeding them so they are in the hands of the World Food Programme which has built huge grain silos on the edge of town. Looking at this for hours on end from the window of a bus I’d say everyone’s prospects here are less than zero. It seems that China is building all the big stuff, from a train to Addis, to a water pipeline from Utopia, to a salt processing plant on the lake we were driving to. China has the biggest naval base here. It has built the biggest tech centre in Africa here. China is buying up entire countries like a Monopoly player. And what are we doing? Standing by and watching. We got to the lake in about three hours. I had seen some photos which made it look like a version of paradise. It wasn’t. Maybe it was the hazy light. I got one or two nice pictures and also some pictures of camels which carry heavy bags of salt for many miles for just a couple of dollars. We stood around in the furnace for half an hour or so. Some of our number paddled in the salty water, even saltier than the Dead Sea. My wife took the photo today. We were being offered lunch on a beach about an hour’s drive away. It was a rather squalid place down the most arduous of tracks. The big coach never made it and it was peremptorily abandoned. I’m sure you could go back in ten years and that coach would still be there, stripped of engine and seats, and just a rusting carcass left behind. It was a two-hour drive back, past the same squalor, and we fell into La Terrazza for afternoon tea. This was an extraordinary day out in a weird country which I doubt Silversea will ever return to. The trip was exciting, thrilling, depressing, appalling, exhausting. The coaches were chronically uncomfortable. It was an absolute killer and I ache all over. I’ve done it so that you don’t need to.

Journal 8: In the Gulf of Aden Today was a sea day and I love sea days. Time to get your snaps in order; time to trim those toe-nails which grow so fast in warm weather; time to visit the laundry; time to finish off that novel, either the one you are reading or writing; time to attend some extra-mural events, though probably not the Arab fancy dress party which wouldn’t pass a woke tribunal. at the BBC or the Labour Party. Time to take part in water polo or Hubert’s Fashion Show and wonder if the Cloud has been taken over by Costa Cruises. And time to simply stare at the far horizon, the sinking of the sun, best viewed from the Bridge, and ask yourself what the sum total of your life represents. What difference your being there at any time made to anything. Hardly made any difference at all, really, particularly in comparison with other men’s careers. I don’t know whether that kind of thinking’s very healthy. But I must admit I’ve had some thoughts on those lines from time to time. There was a talk called Journey Through Words. Anyone who talks of a journey needs to think again. Such a cliché. Tony Blair called his autobiography A Journey. I thought, come on Tony, conqueror of Iraq, you can do better than that. Anyway, I went to this talk which was a sort of mumsy tutorial on how to write a diary or a blog about where you have been and what you have seen. Something loftier than, say, “We went to London. We went to Trafalgar Square. We had dinner. It was nice. We went to bed.” In an earlier life I was a professional writer and the only lesson I ever had was from one of my editors on the London Times who told me not to use the word ‘but’ in the middle of a sentence. So I went to this talk on the Cloud not expecting to learn anything but to my amazement I did. My wife attended a talk about life, culture and art in Oman and Saudi Arabia. She was enthralled. She came back and said that places like banks, shops and McDonalds have separate areas for men and women, just like mosques. Lots of other stuff, too, which made me wonder why we are going there. Of course, it is all to do with religious repression and fear. Fear of the fall of a feudal system. Cracks are appearing, though, and we on the Cloud are evidence of that. My own view is that religion, like flared trousers and Betamax, has had its day; in fact, its plausibility became shaky in the Victorian age of Darwin & Co and becomes shakier by the day. For instance, this new spaceship heading for Jupiter’s moons, if they find microbes there did God create them as well? All religion, it seems to me, was just a salve for primitive and superstitious societies and the more knowledgeable and sophisticated we become the less justification there is for it. It should be an outmoded concept. I find it fascinating that some countries are still in thrall to it. There was also a talk on manta rays, one of the most beautiful creatures of the sea. Whenever I think of mantas I also think of Bora Bora where we first went in the early 1990s. In those days you stayed at the fabled Hotel Bora Bora on Point Matira and at night, from the pier or from the deck of your overwater bungalow, you could attend a sort of pelagic version of the Bolshoi Ballet when several mantas would glide up from the deep and perform cartwheels for you. That was one of life’s most magical experiences and of course the hotel no longer exists and neither does the Bora Bora of our memories or our dreams. On sea days a ship shows its full colours and I wonder why a ship capable of taking 250 passengers has only 14 seats on an outside deck. Yes, there is the pool deck which isn’t our favourite place on this ship, or any ship. Yet this 14-seater space on the back deck, our favourite spot on the ship, is usually empty and we can only assume that most people don’t know about it. In this regard, we got some bad news the other day - in Jeddah our numbers will increase from 150 pax to 220. This might make the Cloud seem rather crowded. Tomorrow it’s another sea day and then it’s still Djibouti - yikes! - and we have a big outing. BIG outing. HUGE. If I survive I’ll tell you all about it. I have decided to give you the day off tomorrow.

Journal 7: Gina Lollobrigida slept here, maybe Lots to get through today so pay attention at the back! We were clambering ancient ruins this afternoon where, according to legend, a man encountered this alluring but standoffish woman outside his shop, a sort of Occitane of the day, specialising in frankincense. He said, ‘Come inside and sample my precious oils, smell my fluids.’ She gave him a sneer. ’Who do you think you are,’ he said, ‘the bloody Queen of Sheba?’ And she replied, ‘Yes, that’s me, creep.’ She walked away pouting, looking for Yul Brynner. This afternoon we were deep into her epoch. We started the day steaming down the coast of Oman, slightly off the main shipping lanes so there were no lights or shadowy bulks of container ships to be seen. By dawn the coast off the starboard side was dramatic, with a long high escarpment and several jagged peaks right down on the shoreline. We were accompanied by masked boobies, petrels and an enormous orange-looking turtle which seemed to be sucked under our vessel. Today might have been a different tale had it not been for another turtle. Maybe it was the same one. We were having an early lunch outside on the back deck when the call came - “Man overboard! Man overboard! Man overboard!” The call came from the port side below us. Everyone rushed to the rail to see. The Cloud sounded three horns, came to a halt and turned around. The Captain ordered spotters on deck. Bang goes our excursion I thought. We paddled about a bit until the Captain and others agreed that it was not a human being overboard, just another turtle. Panic over, mango ice-cream and espresso to follow. We came alongside at Salalah, a large town with proper infrastructure. The Sultan’s family came from here so the place is uniquely favoured. A load of money is being showered upon the city to develop its tourism business. There are already several hotels, including an upscale Anantara Resort, and old neighbourhoods are being flattened to make way for shopping malls. The port itself is vast and includes a monumental gas pipeline and also emergency pipelines to enable Gulf States to send oil through in the event that Iran closes the Straits of Hormuz. The place is buzzing. It will never be Dubai, thanks be to Allah, but it will be a nice place to visit. It probably is right now. Much of the hinterland hereabouts is a UNESCO World Heritage site called Land of Frankincense. This combines ancient cities, wadis and groves of the trees from which the precious resin is obtained. There were quite a few of these faddish trading routes in ancient times - frankincense, tulips, nutmeg, cloves, silk and so on. You wonder what the trade is in today. Our tour started at 2.30pm with an hour’s coach ride to the archaeological site of Sumhuram, once a great port on the Egypt to Indian trading route. Dating from millennia ago, but mainly from the 4th century BC, the ruins are an archaeological palimpsest, difficult for the amateur to disentangle but compelling and evocative. While they just look like drystone walls, you can easily work out the layout of the fortified trading post on the hill. The lagoon below and the ocean adds to the allure of the place. We loved it on sight. It is not known if the Queen of Sheba ever really came here. We like to think that she did. We got back to the ship at 6.30pm. Dinner was at The Grill in the pouring rain. At 9.30pm we heard the Captain say, “Set leads and braces. Make way for the Horn of Africa." That’s our next stop in two days’ time. Djibouti. Flippin’ heck!

Thanks to Terry from Ohio, I seem to have regained a connection, so here’s whatwe did yesterday! Journal 6: Desert Island Dismay I was looking on CruiseMapper and saw that there isn’t a cruise ship within a 1000 miles or more of us. This is highly unusual in this region and I think it’s because cruise seasons are being stretched, especially in Antarctica. People go there earlier and later than they used to which explains why we are in Arabia a month or so later than desirable. Perhaps this is why our weather has been slightly disappointing so far. Yes, it’s been hot but also very hazy, sometimes foggy, bad for photos. And last night we had torrential rain and a lightning storm which lasted for several hours. Another thing I looked at was the Daily Mail so you know that what I am about to say is totally, irrevocably, unutterably the truth. They had a map of the Red Sea like it was World War Two. Big red arrow graphics to the north and south, from left at Port Sudan to Jeddah, on the right. Graphics of battleships, submarines, choppers, troopers, all like a Roland Emmerich picture. And here we are on the piddling Cloud sailing into the inferno. Well, reader, I tell yah, something needs to perk this cruise up a bit. We spent today on an island called Masirah. It belongs to Oman. When this itinerary was announced I did my usual thing and did some deep-dish research. I could not fathom why Silversea wanted to take us to Masirah. I have now been there. And I still don’t know why we went. It was our first and only wet landing and it was at 6.30am sharp. There is a big pier here but I think they needed a wet landing to prove this is an expedition cruise. The island is long and narrow and they amazingly had the same buses and guides we had in Sur. The landscape is basically coastal desert scrub, with distant mountains, roaming camels, goats and sheep, and sparse human settlements. Houses are haphazardly placed, with a pen for animals, landscaping is non-existent. There are dozens of tiny mosques and a vast new police station to keep everyone in line. We went to see a house with a skeleton of a humpback whale in the front garden. Next was an hour’s drive to the southern tip of the island. There was absolutely nothing to see. But we can now boast we have been to the southernmost tip of Masirah. You say you’ve been to the Taj Mahal or Iguassu? That’s pathetic to what we achieved today. Our guide felt he had to talk every second of the way. When he started pointing out Toyota pick-up trucks you knew he was getting desperate. Our Silversea videographer started photographing camels so he was getting desperate as well. We visited some ancient graves but no one knew quite how ancient they were. Then we stopped at a scrap metal yard where old ferries were being dismantled. Finally a stark new hotel which served us brunch. I say brunch because they served spaghetti with chocolate muffins. By this time, after five hours, I sensed most people had by been thoroughly sated by Masirah’s charms. Getting back was very wet, made all the wetter because a passenger on our zodiac sent his shoes overboard so we had to go back for them causing a brief tsunami over everyone. Masirah Island, jewel of Arabia Felix? Eat your heart out Bora Bora.

Sorry to report I probably will not write again as the last posts took hours of trying to connect and this one is from the Photo Studio on a Norwegian keyboard. It took about 20 minutes to get through and log in. Seabourn Internet last October was brilliant. This is not. I am really sorry as I wanted to tell you about all sorts of things but things are what they are on this ship. Goodbye.