When I was asked to ‘sing for my supper’ on a cruise liner, I sympathised with the passengers. Luckily this wasn’t a karaoke evening – otherwise they would have been heading for the lifeboats long before I had sung a note.
As a veteran TV news presenter, I was giving a series of world-affairs lectures on board the luxury Crystal Cruise liner Serenity as we sailed across the South Pacific on its Mysteries Of The South Pacific leg from Lima to Auckland, which was part of the line’s 25th Anniversary Round the World cruise.
Ask well-travelled cruise experts what their favourite destination is and many will say the South Pacific thanks to its overwhelming beauty. Crystal Serenity achieves a high rating because of its fine facilities, service and crew.
We transferred to the luxury ship, where you are presented with an overwhelming choice of daily activities and evening shows, and embarked on the four-day journey across the largest and deepest ocean in the world to Chile’s Easter Island.
I talked to many cruisers who had travelled with Crystal several times and were happy to go around the world with them again. One regular cruiser, Vince McGinlay from West London, said he felt he was living in a luxury hotel but with constantly changing scenery.
With so many days at sea, on-board entertainment becomes a priority, so there were headline acts in the Galaxy Club at night as well as lectures during the day.
In one day you could have heard US Senator Bob Graham talk about the unanswered questions raised by 9/11, gem specialist Laurie Wickwire talk about diamonds or astronaut Dr Tom Jones, who made three space walks, talk about the risks of asteroids hitting Earth.
All the speakers told their tales to full houses.
The cruisers seemed as thirsty for intellectual knowledge as they were for the superb cocktails when the sun was over the yardarm.
The cruise business is well, how should I say, very buoyant – mainly because of the UK’s decision to allow over-55s to draw on all or part of their pensions as a lump sum. And we are cruising in record numbers – 1.79 million travellers took a cruise in 2013 and it’s expected that this year will beat all expectations.
And I can see why. Time spent on board is a quiet pleasure, not least because of the absence of mobile phones.
We looked forward to becoming landlubbers again but we also knew that in the future we would certainly carry on cruising.