Fletcher

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.

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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.

Journal 5: South to Sur Yesterday was lovely as all sea days are. Conditions were totally neutral - flat sea, flat sky, a sort of doldrums. We saw lots of dolphins and our group of Japanese squealed with delight, seeing potential plates of sushi. There were many colossal tankers and container ships and also a speedboat which suddenly appeared aft, caught us up rapidly, the four men aboard waved, they did not fire machine guns and soon vanished. One gnarled expedition team member thought they were either smugglers or police looking for smugglers. We are merely looking for our next G&T. Today we went to Sur, a typical Omani town, low-key and lacking high-rises, uniformly white, stretched around a deep bay, an agreeable vista. In the post-Roman era, right up until the abolition of slavery and the opening of the Suez Canal, Sur was an important port on the trading route with Zanzibar and the Orient. Shipbuilding was its speciality and remains so today. We went ashore in zodiacs. Awaiting us on the quay there was a small, Indian-looking man named Rishi wearing a tight-fitting black suit jumping up and down shouting ‘Stop the small boats!’ With him was an elegantly suited Indian woman named Suella pointing to buses which said Kigali. Our bus only took us to the fish market, then a restored fort, then a hotel for a wee-wee, then the dhow shipyard which made the excursion worth doing. I thought this particular shipyard was there for tourists but it was still interesting. You climbed a ladder to find yourself looking inside the hull of an enormous half-finished dhow. It was like being inside the mouth of a baleen whale or the Cinecitta set for John Huston’s 1966 movie The Bible . . . in the beginning. The timber comes from Burma. We had a chatty Indian guide who told us lots of good stuff, such as the reason for the large houses. Apparently couples routinely have 15 children or more and share the house with their own parents and their parents, a microcosm of the world’s massive over-population. We are at plague proportions. And our guide also answered the secret question on everyone’s lips - what do the men and women wear underneath? It’s a question often asked in Scotland and not only of Ms Sturgeon. Apparently the women of Oman wear t-shirts, jeans and M&S knickers under their burkas. And the men wear some sort of white towel thing which doesn’t seem that secure. I thought they’d all be in M&S briefs. The last stop on our excursion was Sur’s souk which wasn’t nearly as interesting as a Lidl in Cheam. We gave up on the souk after ten minutes and faced a choice between sitting on a rubbish strewn beach or back on the air-conditioned bus. Guess which one we chose.

Journal 4: Threads of the crocus Our first ever long-haul flight was in 1982 when we flew from London to the Seychelles. The British Airways plane touched down in Bahrain to take a deep drink of cheap fuel. Passengers did exactly the same in the duty free shops. That was what the Gulf was all about in those days, a quick splash and dash, a lot of sand, and a mosque in the middle of nowhere. My word, how that has changed. In 2012 we did an interesting trip. We flew into Abu Dhabi, rented a car and drove all seven of the United Arab Emirates. I wrote about that trip and it seemed that hardly anyone had done it before us. Or wanted to do it. For most people the UAE just meant flopping and shopping, mainly in Dubai, increasingly in Abu Dhabi. That trip was quite an eye-opener for the UAE is culturally and economically diverse. Abu Dhabi is immensely rich yet still tasteful; Dubai is Instagram central; Sharjah is deeply conservative and shuns tourism; Ajman was full of foul-mannered Russians; Ras-Al-Khaimah was developing fast as a resort; Fujairah was remote and discreet; and then there was Umm-al-Quywayn, the backward child, scruffy and impoverished, the home of migrant workers who work in the luxury hotels and shopping malls of Dubai. From Ras-Al-Khaimah we ventured across the Omani border to Khasab for a dhow trip on the Musandam Peninsula, that rocky exclave separated from Oman by Fujairah and Sharjah which I told you about yesterday. That was a great trip - the dhow itself was fun, the scenery was grand, we met some nice folk including an American woman who was writing a book on Arabian cookery, and from the dhow’s skipper we bought some saffron from Iran. Apparently that was a great trade - then as now Iranians sail across the Dire Straits of Hormuz laden with saffron along with goats, cheap diesel and drugs and they take away TV sets and used cars in return. The used cars, by the way, come from Dubai and they are less than three months old. We always fancied doing that dhow trip again so here we are on another dhow, departing once again from Khasab, where the Cloud has docked for the day. There was 35 of us aboard the dhow, a traditional vessel with lots of brightly coloured cushions. They served bananas, dates and cardamon-scented coffee. Almost from the off we came across a pod of dolphins who we played with for a while before heading for the deep fjord. The light was hazy and blinding, the scenery brutal, unforgiving and spectacular, towering limestone walls scarred by millennia of wind erosion. A few stunted trees cling on for life. There are some fishing villages, accessible only by boat, and lacking every amenity except electricity. Water is taken to them by tankers and children are taken by speedboat each day to attend school in Khasab. Dolphins accompanied us to Telegraph Island, deep inside the fjord, where the Victorians had built a repeater station as part of the London to Karachi telegraph service. Men stationed in this terrible place spoke of going round the bend, geographically speaking, which became a euphemism for madness. Or so the legend goes. There were quite a few seasonal jellyfish but not of the stinging variety so many of our group swam and snorkelled. When we were here in 2012 there was just the one dhow. Today, the last day of Ramadan, there were at least a dozen, most of them filled with Indians who had come here for the day from the UAE. The days of buying saffron on these dhows were long gone so once I got back to Khasab I took the shuttle bus to Lulu’s supermarket and bought 4.5 grams of premium Iranian saffron for a fraction of the price you pay in the UK. Buying saffron was my main mission on this holiday so I could have gone to the airport and flown home. But I was drawn back to the Cloud where my wife was having a cup of tea on the back deck. The sun was going down, the light on the mountains was tinged with pink, and the sounds of muezzin filled the air. Goodnight possums! (Barry Humphries 1934-2023)

Journal 3: Dibba-di-do-da Today the Cloud is standing off a place called Dibba Al-Baya, some 200 miles north of Muscat. We are told this is Dibba’s first ever visit from a cruise ship. Separated from the bulk of Oman by a border with two Emirates, Sharjah and Fujairah, it’s part of the Omani-run enclave of Musandam Peninsula. All this dates back to messy historic skirmishes, rival brigands, British diplomacy and a few slapped wrists. The excursion today was a zodiac ride to a pier and then an hour ’s 4X4 drive to a viewpoint and an hour back. Describing the viewpoint, our Expedition Leader conjoined two words - ‘grand’ and ‘canyon.’ People always do that. We were warned the road was bumpy and pot-holed all the way. That sounded just like the roads in the UK so we decided to preserve our remaining cartilage by staying on the ship, have a dip in the pool, have a nice lunch, get into our novels, jettison the jet-lag. And that is exactly what we did, so nothing much to talk about today. The excursioneers got back around noon. Reports reached us of ruptured spleens, sore backs and pummelled kidneys. Everyone left gold fillings behind. There were one or two tricky moments because rest room facilities did not exist and ablutions in public cannot be performed during Ramadan which is lasting two days longer here than in other parts of the Moslem world. Offshore on the Cloud alcohol is abundant as is crispy piggy bacon for breakfast. That will change in 10 days or so, though no seems to have told our butler who said we could always drink on the ship. I asked a sommelier in La Terrazza what he would be doing on his week’s enforced sabbatical in Jeddah and he said he would be hitting the electronics shops. This is the same sommelier who asks, ‘May I bring your wine glass up to date?’ and fills you up with a wine called Blanc which rhymes with Plonk. At last night’s interminable briefing we were introduced to the 21-strong expedition team. They all look keen and strapping. The executive chef from India also took a bow to thunderous applause which struck me as odd since new arrivals had yet to sample his food. I hope he didn’t get a false sense of security. Tonight it was the Captain’s turn and all those other people who make the wheels go round. Tomorrow we are in Khasab and will be taking a dhow tour in the Fjords. The word ‘Norway’ was mentioned at the briefing. Probably not a reindeer in sight.

It's actually an ibex. The hotel has several of these sculptures dotted around.

Journal 2: Embarkation Day I was up early this morning because a photo was waiting for me. There was a nice symmetrical alignment at the hotel of an ornamental pool, an Arabian archway, the swimming pool and the sea beyond. I wanted to get the Silver Cloud bang in the middle as it moseys into Muscat all the way from Mahé in the Seychelles. One click and I got it, but only just, as the Cloud was too far offshore to be seen in any detail. Anyway, I thought I would show it to you. I should mention that we arrived in Muscat at the end of Ramadan. This is a time of fasting and devotion and also of celebration. Muslims cannot eat or drink - not even water - between the sun’s daily rising and setting. Smoking is forbidden and public places like hotels cannot play music which is a blessings-be-upon-him. For the heathen tourist, Ramadan is both culturally interesting and a minor inconvenience. Dinner was rather strange. At 6.30pm the hotel organised a cocktail gathering, free to all guests. We arrived to find that everyone had to be seated at regular restaurant tables. There was no mingling. Wine was served and filled up at regular intervals until at 7.30pm they ceased. There was then a 30-minute lacuna until they started serving dinner. While those seated inside could buy alcoholic drinks to go with their food, those seated outside, on the very table where they quaffed free pinot grigio, could only drink water or fruit juice. It was the Moslem version of what we call a Very British Compromise. This morning we went back to the same restaurant and ate an absolutely historic breakfast. We asked if we could take the whole buffet with us on the Cloud because no way could they match it. We then inspected the hotel’s rather beautiful planting schemes as well as their attractive private beach which overlooked a rock formation called the Bandar-al-Jissah Arch. We think this adults only hotel is somewhere we could happily return to. We got aboard the ship in time for lunch. Departure from the hotel to arrival in your cabin where our cases awaited us was a masterclass in organisation. Apparently there are 42 passengers who boarded as long ago and as far away as Puerto Williams and have already knocked off South Georgia, Tristan da Cunha, South Africa, Mozambique, Madagascar, Comoros and the Seychelles. We have already discovered that they welcome us to break their tedium and they do not regard us as hostiles. This evening there was a briefing, which was anything but brief, at which we learned there are only 15 Brits aboard and some 'seventy odd Americans.' All of them odd? Isn’t one of them normal? We have been on the Cloud before, when we cruised the Côte d’Ordure, otherwise known as the coast of West Africa, but that was before the ship was reconfigured as an expedition vessel. It’s old school with classical lines and shockingly small compared to the last ship were on, Seabourn Sojourn. There is one other ship here in Muscat, the MSC Poesia, and I think that is the only cruise ship we will encounter until we get into Piraeus on 15 May. That seems a lifetime away but I know it will pass by in a flash.

Journal 1: Salaam Alaikum I am slightly astonished to say, here we are in Muscat, the low-key and low-rise capital of the Sultanate of Oman. And not only that, we are staying Silversea’s Simply Hotel, the Shangri-La Al Husn Resort. Our spacious room has a pool and ocean view, a lovely balcony and all the trimmings. While the other two hotels of this huge resort area look rather like 3-star package blocks on the Costa Brava, the Al Husn has tried a little harder with a stunning lobby, courtyard and pool area. The surrounding landscape is deeply scarred rocky abrasions. This is our starting point for a 25-day expedition cruise aboard the Silver Cloud which will take us around the Arabian peninsula, through the Suez Canal, to Athens. I fancied this trip on the day it was announced because it was an unusual, possibly unique itinerary, visiting the little known African nation of Djibouti, followed by five ports in Saudi Arabia, then the Canal and across the eastern Med. We dithered for a month or two before booking because, as keen gardeners, this is a bad time of year to be away. Missing the English asparagus season was hard to bear. But having secured the services of our neighbour, who will keep our tomatoes alive, we went ahead and booked it. We thought, what the heck, we are saving thousands just by not turning the oven on to cook that asparagus. The fact that we will miss King Charles’s fancy dress parade and the rather less campy Eurovision Song Contest does not bother us in the slightest. Another concern was the weather in Arabia. In April and May, most denizens of this part of the world pack their Bentleys and Ferraris into containers and send them to Belgravia for a few months of tyre screeching around Harrods. Meanwhile, mad Silversea people like us pack pith helmets and a grin-and-bear-it attitude and prepare to be roasted alive on the shifting sands, served with slivered almonds, plumptous dates and couscous. A famous Noël Coward ditty springs to mind - ‘Mad dogs and Englishmen.’ You must remember that. Since booking last November we have watched the itinerary undergo as many changes as a chameleon’s skin. If you are itinerary driven like me, if you are a bit of a list ticker like me, if you have already worked out your fancy camera angles like me, even if you have written your blog in advance, you will come to dread another email from Barbara Muckermann saying sorry we are not going there anymore. The last email was only four days ago. While we think Silversea’s destinations department have made the best of an undoubtedly tricky situation by being genuinely creative with their excursion programme, we think the uncertainty might have forced some prospective passengers to jump ship. And maybe the lack of alcohol in Saudi waters might be a factor as well. We have been told there will only be 150 intrepid souls on board. This is a fickle and dangerous part of the world, so that’s another deterrent if Captain Phillips gave you the jitters. We expect an armed escort at certain points along the way, possibly a British gunboat commanded by a descendent of Jack Hawkins, and while the war in Yemen seems now to be reaching a permanent ceasefire another war, in Sudan, has suddenly popped up to replace it. From the pinch point on the accursed Horn of Africa right up to the Egyptian border, we are sailing the gauntlet. This Silversea cruise promises to be quite an adventure. Stick around and I’ll tell you all about it on a roughly daily basis.

The Island Sky is currently approaching Cape Town, having sailed across from Antarctica. I guess it was scheduled to visit South Georgia and Tristan da Cunha but its track is extremely weird, missing both islands and sailing far more south than is usual before turning north to Cape Town. Has anyone heard a peep from anyone aboard?

This is a wonderful itinerary which we have done twice on different ships. Funnily enough, we have been to relatively few of the islands chosen by Seabourn which proves the incredible choice you have in the SW Pacific. Many of these islands will be extremely remote and have no tourist infrastructure at all. You will just show up on a beach in a zodiac and go with the flow. Generally villagers are warm and welcoming, sometimes they will put on a little dance show. I wish you went to the French territory of Wallis & Futuna which is one of the best places we've ever seen - amazing churches, world class beaches - but you are visiting Bougainville which is unusual and also Pentecost. Hopefully they will do the bunjee-jump for you, though you are there on a Sunday which might preclude it. Honiara, on Guadalcanal, has a superb US war memorial. You are way off the tourist track in this part of the Pacific. It is by far my favourite part of the world. My photo is of Rabaul -

I attended the World Premiere of that movie at the Dominion Tottenham Court Road in London. In Super Technirama 70mm. Several years later I met Samuel Bronston, Charlton Heston, Ava Gardner and a few others associated with the picture. Did you know that every Chinese restaurant in London was closed during the making of the film because all the staff became extras on the enormous Peking set in Spain.

Just a little update on the Pursuit voyage in September to the Guianas and the Amazon. If you take the 24-day cruise from Miami to Manaus in the UK it's about £8500 plus airfares. If you take the 14-day cruise from Barbados to Manaus it's about £10,500 plus airfares. Confused? A Seabourn rep today said the long cruise is amazing value. And it most certainly is. She also confirmed that the Barbados-Manaus portion is now a full expedition cruise with all excursions included. Miami to Barbados is just a regular cruise. Two downsides - Tobago has been replaced by Port Of Spain and Georgetown, Guyana, has been nixed altogether and replaced by a sea day. So the Guianas have been reduced by a third. Great value, most certainly, but the itinerary isn't what it should be. Definitely a no for us.

Take the cannoli.

We rented ours in advance from Hertz which has a sort of desk right at the cruise port. It's all very casual, not like an airport pick-up.

You might check the weather first . . .

A few thoughts here. We once went to the Falklands on the Island Sky, a small ship with about 50 cabins, so we were able to come alongside in the inner harbour and simply walk down the steps to the pier. In the Silversea fleet I think only the Explorer could do this. Not sure about the Endeavour. All other ships, including the Cloud, will anchor in the outer harbour which is where the weather can play a significant role in whether you land or not. A lot also depends on other ships in port, so before you book it's worth checking on CruiseTimetables to see if any big ships are expected that day. (Expedition ships, such as the Cloud and Endeavour, are not listed in CruiseTimetables.) Any ship with zodiacs will get people ashore on the spectacular outer islands but I do appreciate that people interested in the Falklands War etc will want to visit Stanley and environs. Ironically, South Georgia is probably easier as far as landings are concerned. I remember our Captain said he has never failed to land passengers at Grytviken, though places like Salisbury Plain can be a challenge due to the deeply shelving beach. That doesn't seem to faze the penguins.