Oise at Plantation House on St Helena
passengers — including several South African engineers on their way to build St Helena’s first airport — happy. So we have a host of daily activities posted on a programme sheet slipped under the cabin door every night, nightly shows brought to you by “your cruise director Stephen Cloete”, and ever-changing, sometimes themed, sometimes formal, mostly casual dinners in the dining rooms.
Eleven days of all of this results in a sort of choose-your-own-adventure experience — go to the casino, deck games run by a group of youngsters called the Dream Team who remind one of summertime festivities on the Durban beach front, and nights of musical theatrical shenanigans at the Teatro San Remo, where you can deduce the movement of the ship from the movement of the curtains.
As a smoker my choices are limited as to where I can imbibe while chugging on cigarettes, so I spend much time in the Irish-themed Shelagh’s Pub below decks. Here I listen to the humorous duo of Vernon and Jason karaokeing to the sounds of Streets of London, Piano Man and other jukebox favourites.
I can also smoke on the port side of the ship, in keeping with age-old associations between the left and sinister activities.
When we dock in Walvis Bay, I’ve booked a tour of the town and neighbouring Swakopmund through the ship’s onboard excursions office. Advice to first timers: don’t book through the excursion office — it’s cheaper and probably more rewarding to just get off the boat, find a driver and do your own thing. After a night at anchor in Walvis, the Sinfonia — for a brief moment the tallest structure in town — sets sail for the South Atlantic and St Helena.
After five days at sea with nothing to note except how the colour of the sea changes so much it resembles a Dulux paint sample strip, it’s with eager anticipation that I drag myself out onto the deck early on the morning of our arrival at Jamestown to see “land ho”.
A volcanic island in the middle of the ocean is impressive to see after nothing but sea but from the vantage point of the deck the island doesn’t look like much. It’s not that big, but there will only be one way to really tell and that’s to get ashore.
Even from the deck of a 12-storey cruise ship with satellite television and Wi-Fi, you feel like an 18thcentury explorer about to meet the natives. It also helps that I’ve been reading Gulliver’s Travels for the last five days.
I join hundreds of eager passengers in the lounge on the Brahms deck waiting to go ashore for excursions. Time passes. The captain and the ship’s engineer return from shore with the news that the swell is too dangerous to allow us to disembark.
Napoleon spent years looking out to sea wishing he was on a ship sailing back to France and now we sit helpless on our ship looking at the island, longing to visit Napoleon’s house.
You can tell the cruising old-timers by their relaxed expressions as they sit unworried by where they can’t go, happy to sit, drink, read their books, look out to sea and work on their tans. The airport builders are smiling — they have to go ashore and we watch them enviously as they leave the ship.
The captain relents — we will spend the night in the anchorage and in the morning, if everything is calm, we can go ashore.
In the morning we visit Napoleon’s house and tomb and the governor’s mansion. We also see Jonathan the tortoise, flanked by signs urging