By Numbers
Soon after boarding, an alarm bell signals the start of the mandatory safety drill. You grab your lifejacket and join the milling throng of bemused passengers in the stairwells as you head to your assigned muster station. It’s more fun than it sounds. Be advised, though, that making bleating noises is as frowned upon as being late to your muster station.
At 3pm, the ship gives four, deep, throaty blasts of its horn. The dock workers cast off the mooring hawsers and, thrusters churning the harbour waters into a froth, the 58 000-ton behemoth eases away from the quay.
SAIL AWAY
Soon we are steaming down the channel to the open sea. A lone fisherman on South Pier, on the Bluff side of the channel, waves goodbye. As the ship exits the channel, a slight roll underfoot lets you know the ship is alive.
The thud of dance music from deck 11 — the pool deck — means the Sail Away party has kicked off.
I open my balcony door as wide as it will go and take a long afternoon nap with the sound of the sea working its way into my dreams. We are now at sea.
Dinner is a pleasant affair. I am in the 6pm sitting. It sounds early — like eating with toddlers — but for me it’s the way to go. It means I can catch the late show in the Teatro San Carlo and watch the dancers and acrobats do what their landlubber contemporaries would likely suck at — pulling off their routines with a certain flair on a moving dancefloor.
The last thing to do is fill out my breakfast order — coffee, croissant, Danishes, toast and more coffee to be brought to the cabin at dawn. Then to bed while the ship steams north into the velvet tropical night.
Dawn finds us a few miles off the coast. A line of dunes marks the western horizon. The sea is a royal blue. Flying fish skitter over the wavetops.
On the pool deck, passengers haul their deckchairs into the sun or bob in the pool. A barman brings ice and cider, and the water in the pool sloshes gently back and forth with the easy motion of the ship.
Nothing matters out here. Any troubles have been left ashore.
Lunch. Nap. Dinner. Then an evening at Pasha’s, the disco, where I squeak a takkie into the small hours. A fellow passenger says: “You dance well ... for an old man.” I laugh about that for the rest of the voyage.
LAND AHOY
On the second morning, we are just a few kilometres off Pomene. The land shimmers greenly in the morning heat and the beach is a dazzling line of sand.
By 7.45am the early risers are already heading ashore.
MSC have the landing procedure tuned to a fine art. Instead of using the ship’s boats, the company has dedicated landing craft based at Pomene and Portuguese Island.
If you saw Saving Private Ryan you will be familiar with that kind of boat, only the ride ashore is drier and nobody is shooting at you. Slacker that I am, I go ashore in the last wave.
MSC have struck the jackpot with the Pomene investment. It has a long lease on a spit of land in the bay. A low-impact restaurant and bar have been built amid a forest of casaurina trees, along with a row of beach cabanas for passengers to rent for the day.
There are tours to the ruins of the old hotel — from whose terrace my six-year-old eyes once gazed at excitement at the Berea on the beach below — and guided trips by speedboat into the mangroves. There is snorkelling and kayaking and lolling about under thatched umbrellas.
I take a boat ride into the mangroves. The guide’s eyes widen when I tell him the story of the Berea. She is gone now — rusted to powder — but part of her keelstill rests under the sand.
I let the rest of the afternoon slide away while I sit in the shade of a casaurina tree and gaze across the bay to where the Sinfonia sits on the blue like a great, gleaming seabird.
I’m pleased that the voyage is only half done — and that I’ll be sailing away on the same ship that I arrived on.
Ash was a guest of MSC Cruises.