07.-08.04.2016 Limassol, Cyprus

No Taramasalata

The Memsahib was busy so I took the bike into Limassol for a quick look around by myself. Food is the best thing in Cyprus for me but when you are on a temporary diet which includes no fats, proteins, carbohydrates or alcohol then eating out is more than frustrating. The town centre was swarming with Germans. No surprise. The town is quite nice. Small but with some old stuff here and there. It’s a bit too well supplied with tourist tat shops for my taste but even so the shopping streets are worth a stroll. I went to look at Lemesos Castle for an hour or so. According to the leaflet, it seems to have been built and pulled down repeatedly like a giant Lego set by the Byzantines, Venetians, Genoese, Mamelukes and Ottomans. I also wandered over to the new Limassol Marina which looks good and may be worth considering for a longer stay. There are some good chandlers around the marina as well.

More observations about Germans at play. About half the people on this boat look like they are part of an Olympic running team from somewhere. When they are not pounding the exercise equipment or racing around on bikes ashore they are contorting themselves into provocative positions in exercise classes. The other half, on the other hand, waddle between sun-lounger and bar and crush each other against the doors waiting for the restaurants to open. I originally thought of myself as being somewhere in-between the two groups but realistically I might be coming down on the waddler side these days.

09.04.2016 Antalya, Turkey

Turkish Delights

Arrived in Antalya in the early hours and the Memsahib and I took a taxi to collect Papa Roland, mein Schwiegervater, from his hotel. Roland is joining us for the last leg to Venice mainly so that my otherwise empty cabin is used. The ship made me get an e-visa for Turkey for $20 but it seems like it was completely wasted as nobody wanted to see it and in any case my passport stayed onboard.

11.04.2016 Piraeus and Athens, Greece

Lost Marbles

A day at sea across the Aegean and arrived at Piraeus. I got an open-top tourist bus into Athens and went to the Acropolis Museum. All the trees in the streets were full of oranges. The museum is nicely done. There is a lot of bleating in the information materials about Lord Elgin stealing their Marbles and giving them to the British Museum. This is a tricky one as unstolen they would have been wrecked by now with the polluted air of Athens. Hauling away bits of foreign places was in any case standard practice two or three hundred years ago. Berlin has its share of archaeological loot as well and would we expect to have Venice return the stuff it swiped from Constantinople? Having said that, I think the Greeks would look after them now if they got them back. Just as long as they don’t try to stick the originals back on that permanent building site called the Parthenon. I’ve visited the Acropolis more times than I’ve visited the British Museum so what does that say?

12.04.2016 Katakolon and Olympia, Greece

Non-Olympic Games

There were three cruise ships in port. Say around 7,000 passengers and all of them descended on a tiny Katakolon like a plague of locusts. I gave the bus trip to Olympia a miss this time. It seems like there is nothing much left to see of the once splendid original Olympic Village and there would have been too many people as well. Instead, Roland and I took a kitsch tourist train to a winery for samples and then back in Katakolon we did some more sampling of gyros and ouzo in a street restaurant. The weather was perfect.

13.04.2016 Corfu, Greece

Magnetic Correction

A return to Corfu but this time there is no anchoring out of the wind and pootling in with the dinghy. Roland and I got a tour bus to go into town from the port and we checked out a restaurant for a later lunch. Some strange attraction draws Roland to shops selling fridge magnets but it stops when he has one in his pocket. We also stocked up on candied kumquats and kumquat liqueur as well. No idea why. They are horribly sweet.

The Memsahib got a taxi from the ship and joined us for lunch. The place called ‘En Plo’ at Faleraki, which we knew from years ago, has the best view in town of the Old Fortress and the Albanian coast.  The restaurant is hard to find and you need to go down an uninviting ramp and through a tunnel to get to it but it keeps the riffraff away. I wandered over the Old Fortress for a while in the afternoon. The biggest and ugliest buildings are old Victorian barracks from the time us British were in charge of Corfu but at least we didn’t blow up some of the 15^th century Venetian buildings like the Germans did during the war. I must find out why we left.

14.04.2016 Bari, Italy

Skipper on the Bridge

Bari is a strange town which has oddly very few places to eat. We took a look at the Norman Swabian castle and some old churches but ended up back on the ship for lunch. I was invited onto the bridge of the ship for departure which was an experience. You could fit three Graptolite’s on to the huge bridge of the Aidabella but most of the kit is the same as you have on a small boat. I still think using a bow thruster is cheating but I am toying with the idea of getting one now.

The Memsahib got a bottle of 2006 Grand Vintage Rose Moet & Chandon to open after midnight at the start of my 60^th Birthday. Strange to think that the grapes were actually growing while my 50^th Birthday on the Hamble River was underway.

15.04.2016 Dubrovnik, Croatia

Go to Jail. Do not collect…

The day started out well enough. We looked out of the cabin window from the bed as we docked in Dubrovnik. A little later a Security Officer I’d never seen before came to the cabin and asked me to follow him. I found myself, for the first time in my life, thrown into a prison cell, or the brig as they call them on ships. I sat staring at the unbreakable toilet and washbasin and sat on the hard bench for ages and then the Chief Security Officer, Michael, came to get me and took me to a room full of security cameras, including one looking into the cell. In the room were the Captain, the Staff Captain, Chief Engineer, Memsahib and Father-in-Law all beside themselves with German-style hilarity. There was a 60^th Birthday cake for me so all was forgiven. Breakfast was in one of the ship’s fancier restaurants away from the ordinary Menschen.

We got a taxi into the old part of Dubrovnik and walked around the city walls and then had a nice lunch overlooking the harbour from the Arsenal. We had a little glass-bottom boat trip around the bay but the fish were tiny and the rocks slimy. We went back to the ship and the Captain and officers held a surprise party for me with champagne, food and a Canadian singer called Cassidy. I was more than a little surprised and very honoured. Departure was viewed from the Wellness Suite. We were both so tired that we fell asleep on the waterbed.

17.04.2016 Venice, Italy

The Skipper Pipes the Captain Aboard

The 16^th was a day at sea and we arrived early in the morning in the Venice Lagoon on the 17^th. It was our usual view of St Marks but from a bit higher up. There was no Prosecco or loud opera from the cockpit and nobody upset the gondoliers by pretending to sail up the Grand Canal. Cruise ships are not so good for that kind of thing! There were lots of other cruise ships in the harbour that had mysteriously been drawn to this spot for the spawning of passengers. One of the world’s great natural spectacles, apparently.

I took Roland across the lagoon by vaporetto and by bus to the marina where we collected a dusty car. I drove back to the ship and later took Pedro the Captain to look at his motorbike stored in a place I found for some of the officers in Jesolo. We stopped at the marina again and I showed Pedro the engine room and bridge on Graptolite. None of the restaurants aboard were open at the time.

18.-19.04.2016 On the Road

Venice to Berlin

Roland and I set off northwards through northern Italy and the Brenner Pass to Austria and then in to Germany. Miserable wet, snowy weather over the Brenner Pass brought an end, weather-wise, to the trip.

We stopped for the night in a place that Richter’s always stop in on the way back from Italy. This was the Gasthof Obermeier in Allershausen. They only had one room left so I had to share with Roland. An old man wandering about the room in his underpants and farting is not the best of roommates but Roland didn’t complain. We stopped at a butchers before we left in the morning, a place also owned by an Obermeier, as are most businesses in town. This was to stock up on Leberkäse. Leberkäse is like Spam but not in a tin. The name means “liver-cheese” but it contains no liver and no cheese. Go figure.

20.04.2016 Schulzendorf, Germany

Back Home

A time for getting medical check-ups and inspections for me. Majorca next Monday. Shutting down this blog until then.

25.04.2016 Palma, Majorca

Ryanair Sucks, Official

Roland took me to Schoenefeld Airport in the morning. I had a shouting match with the Ryanair Gestapo over whether my carry-on bag was the right size or not. The bag was the right size. It just required a little pushing to get it in the box. Apparently there is a secret rule that says it has to go in the box without shoving so I was charged €50 anyway. I resolved there and then to do whatever it takes to destroy Mr Ryan’s business. Bastards.

I arrived in Palma, got a car and had a little explore. My hotel was the Almudaina. Expensive for what it was but it had a nice view over the harbour from the roof terrace. Dinner was in a tapas place near the opera house.

26.04.2016 Alcudia, Majorca

Hairpins and Skewers

In the morning ,I drove north to Port Alcudia and got a cheap hotel above a restaurant overlooking the big marina. I wandered into the marina office to see if they had any space but a nice little girl on the desk said “No signor, but we have a waitin’ leest”.

I had a drive up into the mountains. These mountains are very scenic which surprised me as I always thought of Majorca as being a tiny place with nightclubs. There was a huge cycle race going on which slowed things down a bit. The race was a climb up about a thousand metres of hairpin bends. It wore me out and I was in a car. Respect. Most of the cyclists looked very professional judging by their sinewy legs and logos on their bums. I got as far as Sa Colobra and the Torrent de Parais, near the race start. The Torrent de Parais is an impressive canyon cut down to sea level. The canyon can only be reached on foot through some man-made tunnels, or by sea. There were two Canadian yachts anchored just off the entrance which was both annoying and inspiring. 

Dinner, back in Alcudia, was a goat’s cheese salad and shrimps and monkfish on a skewer in a harbour-front restaurant. Out of season, or in this case very early season, Mediterranean resort towns are depressing places. Nobody knows if it is bikini or woolly jumper weather, or if a table inside or outside a restaurant is a good idea. I chose woolly jumper and inside but inside there was a football game on the TV watched by noisy buffoons wearing Continental jackets. You can run but you can’t hide!

27.04.2016 Sa Coma, Majorca

The Count of Porto Cristo

In the morning I took a stroll around the Medieval and Renaissance city walls of Alcudia. The walls and buildings are all a warm honey colour from the weathered limestone. This is also the colour of the local sheep but I’m sure this is a coincidence.

Heading south there were still hundreds, if not thousands, of cyclists on the roads. How all those bikes were transported to the island remains a mystery. My next stop was the Caves of Drach near Porto Cristo. These caves are a big attraction and tourists pulse through the place  in groups of many hundreds. I’ve been to a good number of caves around the world and while these are not the biggest I’ve been to, they are among the prettiest. The most amazing thing is that there is a huge lake underground with a four-piece orchestra playing on a row boat. Hard to beat in the show-cave market.

I found a room for the night in a big concrete hotel in Sa Como just up the coast. The hotel is run in a similar way to a cruise ship with an enormous buffet restaurant and all food and drinks charged to a room card. It was described as an “Adults Only” hotel. I wasn’t sure what to make of that and half expected orgies in the lifts and naked people running squealing between rooms. It turned out to be just a hotel for old people who don’t like children. They should make the Caves of Drach “Adults Only” as well as children, echoey caverns, darkness and chamber music do not mix well.

The hotel also had some dodgy entertainment by a magician and his heavily eyelashed dancer sidekick. They are probably all the rage in Minsk or wherever it is they come from. I managed to suspend disbelief for a short while as they did quick changes into increasingly silly costumes and pulled things out of hats. Gin and tonic helped. The show’s compere had the most difficult job, having to give announcements in Spanish, English, German and French. It was wasted though as most of the audience spoke something else.

28.04.2016 Hamburg, Germany

End of First Contract

I drove down to Palma to meet H on the ship in port. For insurance reasons H had to get an official transfer to the airport so me, the unofficial transfer followed behind and we met again at Departures.  An Air Berlin to Hamburg and a taxi to a horrible hotel that had been booked for us but as it wasn’t a normal business trip we couldn’t complain.

29.04.2016 Hamburg, Germany

Prima Premiere

We were invited to spend a night on the new ship ‘Aida Prima’ berthed in Hamburg just before she takes on real passengers for the first time. The ship is a bit bigger than the Bella and has some new toys. We tried out the climbing garden at the insistence of the Memsahib. She keeps forgetting that she gets petrified on such things. Anyway we kept off the ‘black runs’ and it was OK and had a good view of the lazy river pool winding its way across the deck some hundreds of metres below us. The whole ship seems to geared up for vertigo with glass floors and glass lifts.