I give up. Three hours I got this time. And I was SO tired. I went to bed at 9.30 and it is now quarter to one and I’m wide awake. Ironic, really, as Timmy Mallett disembarked yesterday.

For those who led a more sheltered existence in childhood, Timmy Mallett presented a Saturday morning television show called Wacaday. WAC stood for the Wide Awake Club. So now you see why it is relevant to my insomnia. Clever, innit, this writing lark. 😉

I used to love Wacaday, used to watch it religiously, but I didn’t get a chance to talk to him much, as he was being hogged by old people who watch I’m a Celebrity, Please Torture Me in the Jungle and wanted to suck up and have their photos taken. Most of them probably didn’t have the faintest idea who he really was (and I heard several say they didn’t even like him!).  He’s now an artist, and a rather good one at that. Rolf Harris taught him to paint, so he’s quite fearless with colour and the results are stunning. He painted live for us several times and did scenes of places we have been to. Needless to say, the paintings have all been snapped up, despite the four-figure price tags! I’m hoping that some will be made into prints, so that us normal people can afford to buy them, too, but this is apparently by no means a certainty.

So, anyway, I can’t sleep. My body clock has officially given up the ghost. My computer tells me it is 4pm in London, my bedside clock says 1am and my internal systems have thrown their cards up in the air and walked away from the table in disgust.

Osaka was fun. And I finally got to part with some money! In the morning we met up with two of our tablemates, Sonia and Mike, and shared a taxi into Den Den Town. This is the electronics quarter, where all the computer, camera and similar shiny things are sold. Osaka is quite like London in the 1500s – shops are grouped together by product. Hence in London there is Fish Street, and Milk Street and Pudding Lane and so on. We walked down a covered street (nice touch, that) and every single shop sold kitchenwares. Every single one. Chopsticks, pepperpots, ovens, condiment dishes, signwriters, lighting, air conditioning and so on. Everything you need to fully stock a brand new restaurant was available in the one place, in a variety of shapes, sizes and colours. You nearly all got bamboo pancake warmers as souvenirs until my dad whispered in my ear “How are you going to pack them, exactly…?”

Of course, when I say “shared a taxi”, I am glossing over somewhat here. Every single taxi in Osaka is licensed to carry four people and four people only. Sonia, however, is tiny and could quite easily fit in my pocket – well, sit on Mike’s lap, anyway. (I kid you not. She’s four foot eleven and thin as a rake.) We managed to find a taxi driver who would take five of us, as long as Sonia agreed to duck if we saw a policeman, but we weren’t so successful later in the day, once the police were up and about, and we ended up coming back in two cabs, rather than one. Made for quite a giggle in the morning though, I can tell you! Good thing we all like each other!

Anyway, Den Den Town. If anyone tells you that Osaka shops open between 10 and 11, just slap them round the back of the head and be done with it. 11.30, if you’re lucky, thank you very much. This meant a fair bit of rather fruitless wandering past rolled down shutters that may well have hidden precisely what we were looking for! Anyway,  we finally found a store that sold what we were looking for. Mike and I bought blank CDs to burn photos onto and flash drives for further storage. I relieved the nice people at Mastercard of about a hundred quid, all in all.

We then found another willing taxi driver who drove the five of us to the Sheraton Hotel. In the basement, there is a rather good restaurant (well, actually there are three, but we went to the President Chibo), which I highly recommend, if anyone’s going to Osaka at any point. They served lovely, simple Japanese food (which has an astonishing obsession with garlic, which surprised me) which they cooked in front of us. It was delicious. I had Japanese tea after. I’d never tried Japanese tea before. Well, you know how Chinese tea is Green Tea with Jasmine in? Well, Japanese tea is black tea with nothing. Just ordinary tea, like we have at home! So now when you serve someone tea, you can ask if they would like Japanese tea or whether they would like milk as well!

We then went back up into the Sheraton proper to use their rather lovely loos (heated seats were a bit startling though!). We then grabbed (two) taxis to Bic Camera. I understood Bic Camera to be Osaka’s biggest camera store. It’s WAY more than that. It’s six floors, for a start, and is basically a department store that is REALLY obsessed with electronics. But it also sells children’s clothes, golf clubs, cosmetics, air conditioning units, white goods, you name it. There’s even a McDonalds on the 2nd floor (apparently).

I’ve been wondering if we should have gone on an organised tour. We did have one booked, but it was eight hours long, so we cancelled it. I’m wondering if we missed out on the “traditional” Japanese stuff. You know, girls in kimonos, temples, cherry blossom, tea ceremonies and the like. Oh well, maybe next time, but even then, not eight hours of it, please!

But we definitely saw Osaka, which is, much like Hiroshima, not a pretty town. It’s just a big city – and don’t let the Port Guide map fool you, it’s HUGE – although with the same temporary-looking overhead wiring we saw yesterday. It is by no means a beautiful place. I’m starting to see why people make such a fuss about London, Edinburgh, Paris and the like. They are very PRETTY cities, particularly if this is what you’re coming from, if you see what I mean. I suppose it’s true of all war-ravaged cities. When you rebuild, you rebuild fast and useful, like I said yesterday about Hiroshima. This is the same, only WAY bigger. And with a rather cool double-decker road bridge, with one level going each way.

I could barely stay awake during dinner, so afterwards, I took the money I owed back to the cabin of the lady who lent it to me and then I went to bed. And here I am, four hours later, wide awake and talking to you. Good thing tomorrow is a sea day. I have a feeling I will be spending most of it asleep!

The ship was moored, incidentally, at the foot of the World’s Largest Ferris Wheel, which Mike went up on. It looked a bit vertiginous for my liking. The pods are grouped into colours and one of each colour contained a giant Winnie the Pooh. We never did grasp why, exactly. Just half a dozen four foot Winnie the Poohs going round and round and round and round every twenty minutes or so. Deeply strange.

Today I finally set foot in Japan for the first time. Big anti-climax. HUGE. No taxis, no one who spoke English to meet, greet or assist. A ludicrously long wait for a taxi, actually. There was a well-meaning old taxi marshall, who eventually rang someone up and yelled at them until they sent more cabs to the port. Mind you, it was long conversation. The person at the other end was clearly unwilling!

We went to the Peace Park. This is the park that the bomb was dropped on. It’s big and T-shaped and easy to spot from the sky (and probably wasn’t called the Peace Park back then…). There are a series of memorials and fountains set up, including an arch with the names of all who died on the day and as a result over the longer term from the effects of the radiation. There is also the Children’s Memorial, which is in the shape of the bomb but has a bell hung inside, which you ring for world peace. If only it was that easy! The symbol of longevity is the crane (bird) and a young girl called Sadako who had leukaemia tried to make 1000 origami cranes so that she wouldn’t die. She did 1300 but she still died, but the crane has now become the symbol of Hiroshima’s hopes for peace in the world and the bell clanger is a brass origami crane. We rang the bell, for what it’s worth…

Hiroshima is not a pretty city. In fact, it is downright ugly. Hardly surprising, considering, but still… When the air was safe and they started to rebuild, the thinking was clearly “Get it up fast and make it useful – to hell with pretty”. It is a very utilitarian place. Only marginally less stark than some Soviet suburbs in Eastern Europe. They were often just concrete blocks with window holes. At least in Hiroshima, they have tiled over the concrete, but they just bunged them on – no need for pattern or colour. It’s also a surprisingly untidy place. I expected a Japanese city to be clean, efficient and modern. Not here. The electricity supply that was strung up all those years ago is still there – the streets are a spaghetti maze above your head of telephone and electrical cabling. We were surprised they hadn’t buried it all by now, but, as I said, it’s a very utilitarian place. Ain’t broke? Don’t fix it. Mind you, if it costs 30 quid to get a taxi for 15 minutes, maybe they just can’t afford to dig holes!

The important thing to see was the Peace Dome. This is an old brick building near where the bomb hit. It was the Industrial Promotion Hall, built in 1914 and had a dome on the top. The roof of the dome was vaporised by the bomb blast, leaving only the struts behind. They left it just as it was, as a permanent reminder of what happened on 6th August 1945. Very poignant. And very necessary, because the entire city was razed to the ground and nothing whatsoever remains other than that.  But anyway, we came, we saw, we paid our respects, we took photos, bought a t-shirt, some postcards and a couple of cranes and then we left.

The sea is the colour of slate, today, as the sky is overcast and grey. It’ll probably start raining shortly. The view from my massage bed (I know, it’s a hard life…*) was of a fairly smooth ocean as far as the eye could see, the colour of slate, with white horses cresting the waves forming ripple patterns similar to those found in the surface of natural slate. It’s all rather pretty, despite the dark grey overall effect. Sometimes, I spend so much time running around “doing” stuff, that even I forget to look out the window and marvel at the magic of the water. It’s never the same colour twice or the same shade all over. It’s constantly changing and shifting, with the wind, with the clouds, with the sun, mist or rain. It is actually quite dangerously hypnotic and if you look at it for long enough, you’d never get anything done at all! You’d never move. It’s still bitterly cold out, though, so the effect is currently a little diluted from being witnessed through glass. It is still pretty, but it doesn’t have nearly the same visceral power as when you are outdoors, with nothing between you and the infinite but a waist-high barrier and a steady footing.

* In my defence, Beijing has done something catastrophic to my neck. Don’t ask me what or how, I’ve no idea.

Just the best day ever. Just brilliant. P&O offer rather expensive excursions at every port, but the ones at Beijing didn’t interest us. They offered us EITHER the Great Wall OR Tiananmen Square and the Forbidden City OR the Olympic Stadia (although without going inside them) OR something else. We took one look at it (back in November) and said “Nah, we can do better than that”. We found a tour company on the internet and booked a tour with them. They picked us up from the ship in a beautiful Dodge minivan-type thing. Leather seats, air con (or rather, today, heating!), working seatbelts, just lovely and comfy. They drove us into Beijing which took a couple of hours, and we saw Tiananmen Square, Mao’s Mausoleum, the National Museum of China and the Monument to the Nation’s Heroes. We didn’t get out of the car because (a) it was bloomin’ freezing and (b) we could see fine from the car! You’re not allowed to see Mao, the Monument is an obelisk-type thing, the Square is… a square (not nearly as big as I expected, to be honest!) and we REALLY didn’t feel like doing a museum. Maybe next time…

We then went to the Forbidden City and a little electrical bus like a long milk-float took us around to the entrance (the entrance near the parking area is closed). We went in and had a look around. It’s very nice and Susie, our guide, told us all sorts of facts. Such as, although 6 and 8 are now considered lucky numbers to the Chinese, back in the Emperors’ times, it was 9 that was lucky. Which is why there are 9,999 rooms in the Forbidden City. And all the statues and gargoyles and bits and pieces add up to nine.

Factoid of the day: The ancient Chinese believed there was a purple star at the centre of the Universe, where God lived in a palace with 10,000 rooms. The Emperor’s Palace had 9,999 because he didn’t dare project himself as equal with God.

We were then running ahead of schedule, so Susie took us to a tea house. No, me neither. I associated them with Japan as well. We tried four different types of tea and were taught the different ways in which you’re supposed to drink them. You slurp Oolong, but only Oolong. We also had Jasmine (the one we get in Chinese restaurants in the UK), Puer (pronounced pure) which has no caffeine and is like whisky – thirty years old is best, apparently – and Litchi (lychee, to you) tea, which is naturally sweet, because of the lychees, funnily enough, which was REALLY nice, which is interesting, because I don’t like lychees themselves. Then we walked down the road and round the corner to a silk factory. We were shown how silk is harvested. Vegetarians shouldn’t wear it. Basically, when the silk worm is 5 years old, it builds itself a pupa from a single thread of silk about a mile long, so that it can become a moth. To get the silk, they drop them in boiling water, which kills the worm and softens the pupa, so that it can be peeled apart. It’s fascinating, but I did feel a bit bad for the worms.  They don’t waste the worm, they eat it. Apparently it’s a very nutritious, high-protein delicacy, but still…

Then we got back in the minivan and went to lunch. We took a detour, however, to find some posh loos. They had to be posh because due to the broken wrist, mum is currently one-handed and she needs a handle to hold onto in order to be able to stand up again! Only hotels aimed at Westerners seem to have grasped the concept of disabled toilets, which seems odd, no matter how low the average age of your society… We ended up at the Pangu Hotel, a SEVEN star hotel with VERY nice loos indeed! Then on to the Dragon Land Jade Gallery, the largest jade shop in Beijing, where we ate lunch in the restaurant. Lunch was yummy. Chicken in sweet chilli sauce, beef in black bean (I think), cucumber, broccoli, greens, mushrooms, all stir-fried, pickled cabbage (which is especially important at New Year), an egg and tomato dish, tofu and egg soup, steamed rice, green tea and watermelon for dessert. We then admired the jade on offer, including some ENORMOUS pieces, including a ship that was probably eight feet long and five feet high, a virtually life-sized bull and eagle and a set of eight virtually life-sized horses made from a single piece of jade. We bought a few souvenirs and then we drove to the Wall.

We were planning on going to the Badaling section, which is the usual one, but Susie said that this wasn’t very accessible for mum, so she took us out of the city to Ju Yong Guan, which is a section which is an almost complete circle built by the Ming Emperors. By now, the sun was out, so it wasn’t nearly as cold as it had been earlier in the day, so Dad and I climbed up. He did one tower, I did two. This means two watchtowers, which are dotted along the entire wall and seem to be the standard method of measuring distance on the Wall.

It is quite spectacular, the Great Wall, there’s no other way of describing it. It stretches as far as the eye can see, climbing mountains, running along ridges, 7000km long, several metres wide and very high indeed. It must have been very daunting to approach from the other side, as an outsider. It was daunting enough as a tourist, so what it must have looked like bristling with soldiers, I dread to think!

It’s cold out. I may have mentioned this. We are now running three hours late on our way to Beijing tomorrow morning. Why? Ice. The sea has turned to ice. I kid you not. It’s creepy. It doesn’t help to walk through the pub and hear ‘My Heart Will Go On’, I can assure you. (No, the band really were singing this)  Not iceBERGS, obviously, but large chunks, several metres wide some of them, and heaven knows how deep they go. So we have slowed down. We’re a cruise ship, not an ice breaker. We’re solid but we’re not reinforced to that extent! If I had to describe the sight, and I will have to, because it was impossible to get a picture in the darkness, it was like your local lake when it freezes over in winter. Small bits floating on the top, that gradually join together to form bigger and bigger bits, rather like the way the universe came into being. Then the bigger bits stick to bigger bits and form bigger bits, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera and so forth*. These bits didn’t look particularly big, but we were looking from a hundred feet up, so they were probably a metre or so across. And the whole sea was covered in them. Not just one or two floating past here and there. As far as the eye could see in every direction with nary a gap between them. Just like you see on documentaries about the Arctic or Antarctic. So cool. I wish I could share a photo with you, but I don’t think anyone got a good one. I’ll ask around and see if anyone did, just in case, but you may just have to use your imaginations, I’m afraid.

On the plus side, all this cold over the past two days has meant that the ambient temperature down in the bowels of the ship has dropped, which has meant that I have been able to brush my teeth in cold water for the first time since Egypt. Usually, it’s all a bit tepid, verging on the warm at times, which is singularly unpleasant, I have to tell you. It’s not a major problem in the grand scheme of things, which is why I haven’t whinged about it (there are plenty enough whingers on here without my joining in, I can tell you!), but it is nice to have cold water for a change! I have had to turn the shower up from 15 to 20 degrees though, to compensate! (cos when the cold feed is warm, you don’t need much hot!)

We make our own water. I think we can produce about 100,000 gallons a day, but we can only do this when we’re doing over 12 knots (the desalination equipment can’t run at less than that, apparently). This meant that we made no water for two days when we were in Egypt (Port Said and the Suez Canal transit, where the speed limit is 9 knots). Mind you, when we were running past pirates in the Gulf of Aden we were doing over 22 knots, so I guess we made up for it then! We got so low on water that we loaded several tankers-full at Sharm El Sheikh, but when it came out it was such a dodgy colour, they quarantined it and I think they decided not to use it in the end! The yellowness may have just been caused by sand, but I prefer my water to be as near colourless as possible with a vague tinge of blue, if it’s all the same to you!

I should warn those of you that have never taken a cruise that the tap water isn’t as lovely as that you get at home. Not by a long chalk. Some days it’s salty, some days they go a bit nuts with the chlorine, sometimes it just tastes plain odd, but it’s nothing that a couple of ice cubes can’t fix! And the bottled stuff we buy on is nice enough, usually. On a previous cruise, we had some bottled stuff that was absolutely horrid, but so far, the Buxton we loaded in Southampton and the Krivos we loaded in Athens have been lovely. Now we have stuff called Splash that we loaded in Singpoare, which is also very nice, so when the tap water is having a bad day (it varies considerably depending on which tank we are drinking from!) that even ice cubes can’t redeem, there’s always something drinkable somewhere on board!

I do like Hong Kong. It’s not as cheap as it used to be, and the people can be annoying but I do like Hong Kong. It’s a very cheerful city, even in bad weather.

One of the things we did twice was we took the Peak Tram, which is a wonder of Victorian engineering. Built in 1888, it is the steepest tramway in the world, and runs up to the top of Victoria Peak. It’s a slightly hairy ride, but it’s a fascinating experience, in lovely old Victorian cars. The view from the top is spectacular. Apparently. The peak has been shrouded in mist for almost all of the two days we have been here. We caught a glimpse on our first trip up, but on the second, it was a complete white-out. Visibility was down to a matter of about twenty or thirty feet. I felt bad for those who hadn’t done the morning tour. They essentially got the top and saw nothing. Absolutely nothing.

As part of our morning tour, we were taken on a sampan ride. Sampans are small motorised boats that seat ten or eleven and are essentially motorised rowing boats with a canopy over the top. They are not particularly stable and the harbour is surprising choppy, but it was a very enjoyable ride. It only lasted about twenty minutes though, which was a shame. Oh well, can’t have everything.

Overhyped. The light show in Hong Kong Harbour. Seriously, don’t bother. When we came before, we went out on a harbour cruise and saw all the lights on the skyscrapers. Very pretty. This time, they have apparently created a light show and set it to music. Well, you know what? They flash on and off all the time, anyway. We couldn’t tell the difference. The “music” was dire, the “show” virtually non-existent. As far as I could tell, the only difference was the apparition of green lasers on three roof-tops. There was one building that seemed to turn its decorative lights on and off ALMOST in sync with the music, but that was it. Big deal. Good thing it was free, otherwise people would have been very annoyed indeed! Granted, it was a bit misty, which may have muted the potential effect slightly, but it was singularly unimpressive, I’m afraid.

This morning, we went to the Peninsula (one of the world’s top hotels) for a cup of coffee. Has to be done, darling. It’s SO civilised. Imperialism was probably a Bad Thing, but the hotels left behind are Fabulous.

Came to buy electronics but totally failed to buy anything. Those who did want to sell either didn’t have what I wanted or wanted ludicrous prices (higher than London!). Others wanted to sell but seemed so shifty and untrustworthy, we walked out. Apparently, asking for a digital camera with a viewfinder that works well in low light is astonishingly overdemanding of me. They could or would only offer me one or the other. Moral of the story: do more research before you get here. Know EXACTLY which model you want before you arrive. Then go out and find it.

HK is nowhere near as cheap as it used to be. We were only here in 2005, but it is certainly not the bargain capital it used to be. Not by a long chalk. There are also now a LOT of fakes in the market. So you can buy something that looks like a Sony, has all the right blurb and bits, guarantees, holograms, the works, get home and find out when you ring for help that that model simply doesn’t exist. This problem also exists in Tenerife, but it makes shopping very trying. Moral of the story: as above!

So I’ve bought nothing. I bought a bag for mum for her birthday and some postcards. That’s it. That’s the product of my two-day spree in Hong Kong. So disappointing. And it’s not like I wasn’t eager to buy. My camera has a dead pixel which is ruining my photos, so I REALLY wanted a new one! But if you don’t have what I want, I can’t buy it from you. *shrug*

This is the problem with buying clothes as well. There’s some beautiful stuff and I really wanted to buy some, but they don’t make western sizes. I don’t just mean big enough for my fat rear, I mean anyone over five foot tall with breasts or hips, or (heaven forbid!) both, can forget it. It’s bizarre. They know what we look like. They act like they want the business. They survive on tourism to a large extent these days (Hong Kong now “makes nothing” according to our tour guide yesterday), and yet they absolutely refuse to make clothes big enough for their customers! Mum found one shop in Stanley Market that sold her type of stuff and bought all she (or rather dad) could carry. Maybe that’ll give the neighbouring businesses a clue as to what they need to do to get some business. Or maybe not. I’m getting very philosophical about it – although no less bitter or annoyed, bizarrely – if you don’t want my money, you don’t have to have it. No skin off my nose. If you provided my size, I’d probably buy LOADS, but if you won’t, I can’t, can I?

Today is our second Vietnam stop, Halong Bay. This morning, we went out on a junk cruise around the bay. It is a World Heritage Site and the scenery is stunning. Lots of tiny islands of limestone and volcanic rock rising vertically out of the bay, like James Bond Island in Thailand. Several hundred metres high and maybe half as wide, carved into different shapes by the wind and the sea. There was a heavy mist all morning, which kept things nice and cool (mid-20s Celsius), kept the waves to a minimum and also gave an air of mystery to the rocks as you couldn’t see the tops of them. Quite magical. Unfortunately, the tour would have been just as magical in half the time. Four hours driving round in one big circle wears a little thin after a while!

There was a woman on the boat selling handicrafts and t-shirts. She spoke no English whatsoever, but she was very sweet. And VERY persistent! I bought a t-shirt and a silk shirt, but I think I’ll wash them before I use them. I particularly liked the fact that once you’d bought something from her, she just assumed you’d buy anything! She came back with the most hideous stuff, including some plastic toy crabs and a Duracell bunny toy banging on a drum (except white plastic rather than pink and fluffy). No thank you! There was also the fact that the engine fumes in the boat were so strong, I thought we’d be dead long before we got back to the ship! Surprisingly, the toilet on the junk was quite good. We’d been warned to expect “basic” so I was pleasantly surprised to find not only a proper, flushing toilet, but toilet roll, running water, soap, the works. All that was lacking was something to dry your hands on, which in this humidity is vital. Well, that’s what t-shirts are for, I guess!

When we got back to the ship, we grabbed some lunch (not pleasant, best glossed over – not sure how you can get cold roast beef and coleslaw wrong, but still…) and then headed to the shore on a tender (lifeboats used for non-emergency purposes are tenders). We went to a local market that had some lovely stuff.  Unfortunately, several of the stalls sold the same things, which got a little repetitive, but the people were lovely and their wares were beautiful. Mum and dad went back to the ship, intimidated by a sharp shower, and I carried on wandering on my own.

I decided to walk back, but got distracted by a 4 star hotel called the Halong Dream Hotel. The logo was a smiley face. It would have been rude not to go in!   Their interior designer was probably the person that designed the original Brent Cross shopping centre (Britain’s first purpose-built mall) – all big white shiny tiles and large grey marble panels and the wall signs were brass with black writing. The picture on the mens’ loos was a silhouette of a man in a bowler hat and the ladies’ had a woman’s head wearing a sort of Ascot-suitable headpiece. I’m not sure how many milliners there are in Vietnam, and I must confess that on my several visits I have yet to see anyone wearing a bowler, but I suppose it’s as good a differentiation as any! I used their (rather lovely) loos and their cheap internet connection and then they called a taxi for me so that I got back to the ship in style. I bumped into a mate back on board who said that walking back was a nightmare of beggars and hawkers, so I made the right choice. And it only cost 2 dollars.

Talking of harassment, nowhere in Vietnam is safe from beggars and hawkers. Even when we were out in the bay, on junks or tenders, there were beggars in small boats (sadly, mostly with small children on board) and other boats of people chasing our boats to try and sell us fruit or just stick their hands in the window and beg. One of the women begged while she rowed, while her two small children, probably no more than two and three years old, baled out the boat with their cups. It feels bad saying no all the time, but I can’t afford to buy tonnes of stuff I don’t need or want and have nowhere to put or keep it just because I feel bad. I can’t afford, full stop. Of course, there is also the risk that once you give to one, they all come swarming after you. I watched someone make that mistake at the Pyramids at Giza once. He disappeared under a stampede of small children and was never seen again.

Factoid of the Day: Hanoi means Dragon Ascending and Halong means Dragon Descending. The myths goes that dragons protected the country in a war and then lay down in the water to protect the bay in the future (they’re the rocks we saw). So there you go.

Funny thing, cruising. Humans are quite target-driven creatures. They aim for stuff and either succeed or fail. Other animals are more content to just be. Cruising, however, is, almost by definition, aimless. Yes, you go TO places, but they are not your destination. They’re a passing point. And the day to day existence of eating, sunbathing, filling your time with nothings – internet, learning a language, learning a craft or a new game or sport, bridge, table tennis, cricket – none of it has a meaning or purpose. It’s just filler. Filling the time between meals, theatre shows, parties. All of which is also filler, designed to distract you from the passing of time and distance, or the risk of piracy*. You go to places so briefly, they barely notice your presence, charge around in an air-conditioned coach for four hours or so, buy some tacky locally-made knick-knacks and ludicrously over-priced postcards, and then leave. It’s a good taster of whether a place would appeal vis à vis a longer return visit (Key West, yes, Colombo, no, for example), but it’s hardly in depth discovery of another culture or way or life. Everything on the ship is transient and everything is filler. It’s all really about the journey. Travelling across the ocean. Nothing but water in every direction. The horizon is visible up to about 15 or 20 miles in every direction and there is nothing but sea and sky. Elemental stuff, if you can only drown out the noise of all the filler long enough to hear it. Even a stroll around the deck is disturbed, by the health nuts charging past doing lap after lap after lap. They never turn their heads sideways. They never stop and admire the view. They never slow down and contemplate the enormity of what they’re doing here, their minuteness in the face of the endless seas. Too busy charging past trying to burn off last night’s trifle. You know what? If it bothers you that much, DON’T EAT THE TRIFLE!

And so the ship tips gently from side to side as each gust of wind lifts the waves, the wire coat hangers chime gently against the wardrobe doors, and the world turns. It’s a very, very big world and we are a very, very small ship tootling across the surface. Not as small as the ships that the discoverers and explorers travelled in, but small enough in the grand scheme of things. We’re a speck, even on our own maps and charts. And all most of the people on this speck are worrying about is getting a good sunlounger and what to wear for dinner.

* Footnote re: pirates. We emerged from the Gulf of Aden unscathed, but apparently, the ship behind us in the convoy (which was slower and lower in the water than us) was shot at. So there you go.

Two things I didn’t expect in Dubai .

1. The traffic. Absolutely solid. All day. Our tour bus took five cycles of traffic lights just to get away from its starting point!

2. The humidity. I just assumed that because it’s an oil/ desert- type country, the heat would be dry heat. But, it is much further north than most “Arabian” countries and is actually sub-tropical, same as Mumbai. The humidity was astonishing. Of course, as Dubai has the highest water consumption in the world (they seem oddly proud of this…), most of which they use to water their lawns and spray into the air via their myriad fountains, it’s perhaps not all that surprising.

Dubai is the manifestation of what happens if you have WAY too much money and WAY too much time on your hands. From a small pearl fishing village to a massive modern city in less than forty years. A city built almost entirely of follies. Not little bitty follies, like a miniature castle at the bottom of the garden. Big, massive, multi-billion dollar ones that glint in the sun. A massive ski slope with 250 million tonnes of real snow on 5 pistes. In a sub-tropical desert state. The World – a set of man-made islands that form a map of the world. Own your own island! Own your own country! The Palm – a purpose built set of islands in the shape of a palm tree, with Atlantis on the Palm at the end, one of the most extraordinary holiday resorts in the world at the far end. Another hotel built to look like a wave, which has it’s own PURPOSE-BUILT PRIVATE CORAL REEF 4km from the shore. The Burj Dubai, a hotel that looks like the sail of a yacht. With it’s own limo team to get you from the airport. By helicopter. And, of course, the Burj Khalifa (known to most as the Burj Dubai because they only changed the name on the day they opened it, after all the maps had been reprinted!), the tallest building on Earth. Half a mile straight up. I was hoping to go up it, but not only is it rather expensive to do, but the opening was so recent, that you still have to book over a day in advance to be allowed to go up it. Mind you, as the lift apparently travels at 18m per second, I’m not sure I’m all that disappointed…

Another thing the people of Dubai are not short of is shops. Of the twenty-odd stops on the Hop-On Hop-Off Bus Tour thingy, probably more than two thirds were shopping malls. Big ones, bigger ones, small ones, cheap local ones, ones built to look like Egyptian pyramids – Debenhams, Waitrose, Bloomingdales, Saks Fifth Avenue – you name it, they’ve got, not just a presence here, but a whopping great store that you need a rest halfway around. Some malls are so large, they have golf carts to get you from A to B, because B is just so far away from A. The largest shopping mall in the world is here, unsurprisingly. It has a 12 million gallon aquarium in the middle of it. Another is attached to the ski slope and is the biggest in… oh, I don’t know. Everything is the biggest. It’s exhausting!

Factoid of the Day: In the days after Nine Eleven, when all flights were grounded in the USA, the average temperature across the USA rose 3 degrees. This is because aeroplanes cause vapour trails and vapour trails cause clouds and the clouds reflect the heat of the sun back away from the Earth. So if we stop flying, global warming will actually get worse. There, that should mess with your head nicely for a while…

Anyway, back to the present day. Tropical night/ deck party night. Which means all the waiters at dinner wear Hawaiian shirts, we all got a lei with our dinner napkins, and we were asked to dress up “tropically”, i.e. Hawaiian shirts, flowery dresses, flowers in the hair, etc. I wore navy trousers with my silk Hawaiian shirt with the parrots on, and three scrunchies – one blue to match the shirt, one with a white flower and one with a sunflower. There’s a disco on the top deck, around the pool (well, one of them) – this is the “deck party” bit. Had a superb time, but discovered that the same cocktail on Deck 12 in the Riviera Bar is SIGNIFICANTLY stronger than the same cocktail on Deck 7 in the Masquerade bar. Got quite sloshed, frankly, let’s not mince words. I was swaying, literally. And, unfortunately, as the sea was smooth as glass, I couldn’t even blame it on the ship! So sloshed was I that there may have been dancing, there may even have been some Macarena.   Sorry… I do apologise, really I do. Mostly to poor Guy and Simon, with whom I spent the evening. Poor souls… Bed at 2.30am. Clocks forward another half hour.

Final thought. There are a LOT of teetotal people on this ship…and they’re a grumpy bunch…

No, don’t worry, we haven’t hit stormy seas! Just the usual peaks and troughs of daily life.

Up

Today, the new couple on our table provided several moments of entertainment. Firstly, Sonia decided against ordering the soup. She said she didn’t like the sound of plum soup. When we’d all finished crying with laughter, we pointed out that the menu had said plum TOMATO soup.

Then her husband, Mike, told about their visit to the Coliseum in Rome. He went to the toilet and found himself standing next to a Roman Centurion. As you do. So he took his picture! In the loos! Poor bloke couldn’t even pee in peace! They’re lovely but a bit mental, the new couple.

Down

Dinner was a bit of a disaster, really, all in all. Both our waiters disembarked today (they’re almost all Goan, so Mumbai is their stop), so we have new ones, who don’t know our foibles or peccadilloes, and they struggled to cope. Simple things like remembering to refill our water glasses (which bearing in mind how hot it was in Mumbai today and the average age of cruise passengers is actually slightly dangerous) or giving me a teaspoon to eat the ice cream I had ordered with (triple chocolate with chocolate sauce, before you ask). (I am aware of the grammatical clumsiness of that last sentence but “with which” sounded so pompous, I decided against it). I’m sure they’ll get the hang of it in a day or two, though.

Down

Today I didn’t get off the ship. I’ve seen Mumbai several times, and I don’t much like it, to be honest. It’s such an assault on the senses – sight, sound, smell – and the crowds are ceaseless. I’m not a big fan of crowds at the best of times, but crowds of people with no concept of personal space is beyond me, I’m afraid.If you’ve never been, you should, but once or twice is plenty.

Up

Instead, I decided to pamper myself. I had a massage, a pedicure and a manicure. In future, I’ll do it the other way round. I ruined my manicure getting changed for dinner. Next time, if I have it first, it can dry during the massage. I’ll have to have at least two fingers redone tomorrow. Bum. Left thumb and right little finger, fact fans. Dionne, the nail technician, is obsessed with Justin Timberlake and plays no other music. Gabriel, my (male) masseur, is brilliant and lovely. When I waved at him with wet nails to say my water bottle was empty, he offered me the hand sanitising gel to drink! Well, it has got alcohol in it, but I’m not sure that that qualifies it as potable… The pedicure chair has a footbath and is also a massage chair, so I actually got TWO massages!

Up

Australia Day. All very silly. Drinking games and competitions between Brits and Ozzies. Good fun. The Ozzies won, resoundingly. I joined the Ozzie side, but I wasn’t much help!

Up

Went out on deck with a smoker friend at midnight and found a man (passenger) playing Meat Loaf songs on a banjo. No, really. He did other stuff, obviously – Dolly Parton, Eagles, Tom Jones, all sorts – but it was Bat out of Hell that really stuck in my mind. Can’t think why…