A CRUISE WITH CHARACTER
Cook in a chef ’s home on this tasty Caribbean sailing with a pinch of local flavour
Here we are, drinking rum in a stranger’s kitchen in Antigua, when I notice something strange stuck to the fridge door. It’s an election poster. ‘No to nose-picking. Yes to emily for class president.’ Without warning, the candidate sweeps in. She’s 11 years old, dressed in school uniform and helps herself to a bowl of soup and a slice of butter rum cake. Then, before anyone has noticed, she nips up to her bedroom.
Hold on a second: I cooked that soup and cake! They’re mine!
This is a cruise trip like no other. We’re midway through a week- long island- hopping tour of the Caribbean on the Celebrity Summit.
We’ve booked a shore excursion: a cookery lesson called At Home With Chef Nicole. And we really are in the chef’s home (fridge notes, cheeky daughter and all). There are just four other people from the ship in Nicole Arthurton Dennis’s pretty seaside house.
If your idea of cruising is a onesize-fits-all experience — arrive at port, thousands of people pile out of the ship, some herded this way, some herded that — maybe it’s time to re- evaluate. We’re discovering that it’s possible for a cruise holiday to be surprisingly . . . intimate.
It would be daft to pretend the Summit is a private yacht: in cruise ship terms, it’s mid-size, meaning that there are more than 2,000 other passengers.
But what makes Celebrity different is that you can find plenty of quieter experiences, if that’s what you want.
For example, we’re staying in an ‘Aqua Class’ cabin, which gives us the use of a private restaurant. At a stroke, the least appealing of cruise traditions — the queue for dinner — is abolished.
every night, the maître d’ whizzes us straight to our table. (The food on Celebrity is fantastic, by the way.) It’s not a question of shunning other folk — every night, we head off for pre- dinner cocktails at the Martini Bar, which is always buzzing; after dinner, we sometimes pop in to the casino or catch some late-night comedy — but it’s nice to be able to find some quiet moments off the beaten track.
And until now, I hadn’t thought that was possible on a cruise ship.
Our voyage begins in Puerto rico and takes in six Caribbean islands, from the relatively smart Martinique to the more homespun attractions of St Kitts.
There’s a pretty broad mix of ages onboard. One night, we meet a ten- strong group of fortysomething British here to escape their children. Another evening, we get talking to an extraordinary fellow who virtually lives onboard: he’s been on 291 Summit voyages, typically spending 240 days per year at sea (he only goes home to pay his utility bills). I don’t let on that he reminds me of the Major in Fawlty Towers.
Our ‘avoid the crowds’ ethos serves us well in Barbados. It’s easy to find a quiet beach if you’ve done your research. The cabs at Bridgetown port quote £30 each way to Holetown, but we hop on a tatty local orange bus (route 4, fare: 75p).
When we get to the pretty bay, it’s every bit as white and sandy as we’d hoped — and not at all busy. I do a headcount. We are sunbathers number 11 and 12. The journey back is a little less dreamy (though, in retrospect, rather fun). I stick my hand out at the bus stop, the bus screeches to a halt — and, in a split second, we learn an important lesson: don’t catch the bus at school chucking-out time. Too late. The conductor jumps out, grabs us both and with a big heave, hurls us onboard. There are 80 schoolchildren on a vehicle designed to carry 30. It’s so busy my feet hardly touch the floor. And the driver knows only one speed — breakneck. We get back to the ship in one piece, smug in the knowledge that no other passengers are likely to have enjoyed a white-knuckle ride like that. We ha v e another beach experience — this time via a rather gentle taxi ride — in St Kitts, where we head off to South Friars Bay and spend a merry few hours in a rickety bar drinking beer and eating red snapper. In St Lucia, meanwhile, we take a trip aboard an ‘ aerial tram’, an open-air cable car that glides high above the rainforest.
But the highlight of our onshore experiences is a day at Martinique’s Jardin de Balata, a botanical garden built into a dense green valley. There’s a new sweet smell around every corner: in this direction, Parisian cologne; over here, sweet beer; over there, marzipan.
The downside of some cruise holidays is that all of the experiences merge into one, each stopover reduced to a tick-box experience of ‘ somewhere I’ve been’.
That approach saddens me. But this brilliant cruise wasn’t like that. We had excitement when we wanted it, peace and quiet when we needed it.
And we even learned how to make an excellent bowl of sweet potato soup.