Friday 28 June 2019

A Postcard from Dark Mofo - The Pacific Norovirus



The Owl and the Pussy-Cat went to sea
In a beautiful pea-green boat:
They took some honey,
and plenty of money
Wrapped up in a five-pound note.

The Owl and the Pussycat would indeed be well advised to take plenty of money if they were travelling on a pea-green P&O boat because the buggers sting you for whatever they can, things that are normally part of the deal on other cruise lines, things like drinking water!  Then there's a surcharge here and a surcharge there but never mind, let's just focus on the positives like seamless check in.  We were strolling the ship’s passageways in search of our room just an hour after boarding a city bound train at Hornsby Station.

I splashed out and booked a mini-suite with a balcony at the stern of the boat which really is the place to be when leaving Sydney Harbour.  It was also rather nice to lie in bed and watch the sun rise over the ocean before girding one’s loins to do battle for a breakfast table.  P&O attracts a certain bovine element which at times had me wondering if we weren't actually aboard one of those horrendous live cattle transport vessels.  I'm not just talking fat here, I'm talking leviathan! There were people who simply wouldn't fit through an aircraft door let alone in a seat on the same making an ocean voyage their only possible route to Tasmania.  I was left feeling slim and fit which has done wonders for my self-esteem!  


And dress codes, there were none!  Forget about packing jackets for dinner as we did and the only thing I saw that approached ladies’ evening wear for the first four nights was a bejewelled lanyard.  And speaking of the same, we were distinguished by our lack of lanyards, sparkly or otherwise.  Everybody else on the boat had their room keycard and general passport to P&O happiness strung around their necks like PE teachers’ whistles but we shunned the pressure to conform.

There was no Captains Dinner with a hundred metre long queue of tuxedos, Lurex, Glomesh, Botox and big hair waiting to pose for pictures with Captain Stubing; no Friday night services for the Jews onboard (although I truly doubt there were any); no Sunday morning mass for the Roman Catholics; in fact no Americans who might expect such things which would never had occurred to me had we not been on the Royal Caribbean Line’s Vision of the Sea out of Vancouver to Alaska in 2000.

I did, however, still find myself wandering the decks searching for a disco rabbi and wife like the pair on the Vision.  He looked like a younger but pudgier Billy Joel with rolled up suit coat sleeves and yarmulke while she, also pudgy, wore a wig and thick white stockings - hip young Hebs!  I'm certain there's a David Bowie song in that somewhere.

Cruising Tip #1 - Showering

The previous sum total of our cruising experience was the aforementioned Inside Passage to Alaska event, no open water as such and quite smooth sailing.  Not so the Tasman Sea approaching Bass Strait.  Our shower was above a spa bath in a faux Tiffany marble bathroom and let me just say that holding onto the safety rail whilst trying to wash one’s clacker is a skill set I'm still yet to master.  

All that pitching and heaving set the kitchen sink in our sitting room off on a spate of gurgling that made it sound like a very busy bucket bong.  And no, I've never used such a device but was once at a party which provided all I require in order to draw a well-qualified comparison.

All the rocking and rolling was the perfect accompaniment to Bohemian Rhapsody which we missed at the movies but caught in the theatre at the pointy end of the ship.  You all probably loved it but five minutes in I was thinking “We know how this ends, just get a wriggle on and die will you, Freddy?!”  Cruel I know but not entirely unfair.  Rocketman was a much better flick that also had plenty of sex, drugs and seriously bad diva behaviour.


After just 40 hours afloat it was back down the gangway in Hobart and walk, walk, WALK!!!  I haven't walked so far since a stroppy little guide with the flu and a short man's complex took us on an 11km forced march around the base of Uluru, the grumpy little sod!

We were on our own this time though.  The supposed 10 minute walk from the ship to Salamanca Place took 20 but never mind, we needed the exercise and so did the megafauna that we'd observed roaming the feedlot at the front of the boat but we didn't spot too many of them out and about.  We had a lovely morning at Salamanca Place ten years earlier and we're determined to repeat the experience, which we did.  There are some very smart glass shops along the strip, Gallery Salamanca being notable amongst them, so our return journey to the ship was a little slower weighed down by several nice pieces that somehow threw themselves onto my credit card.


With goods and chattels safely deposited back on board we hopped a cab to the Royal Tasmanian Botanical Gardens which is a favourite place of ours.  We spent a few magic hours there in 2010 but that was during summer so it was interesting to view the gardens at the other extreme of its annual cycle but being Australia something is always in bloom.  In this case it was two absolutely stunning luculias that have grown into small trees.  They are a favourite of mine and I've never seen them so big.  My grandmother planted one in the front yard of my family home 80 years ago and, native to the Himalayas though luculias are, it survived until the new owners bulldozed the entire garden last year which was just heartbreaking.  The clusters of pink flowers are glorious and their perfume has defined my winters since childhood.  I am currently attempting to grow an emotional replacement so green thumbs crossed.


Cruising Attire Tip #1

I rarely see a reason to wear anything other than shorts, sandals and Hawaiian shirts; all clean, fresh and terribly tasteful of course.  I can't begin to tell you how much time this saves in both mornings and evenings, but I do digress.

I did, of course, take several pairs of long trousers, a pair of shoes and plain long sleeved shirts for evenings stupidly thinking this would be appropriate but I wore them anyway.  My point here is the reaction one gets from fat bogan women both onboard and ashore when they spot you dressed in aloha attire in Tasmania in winter.  It screws with their heads and it was always megafauna rugged up like Scott of the Antarctic, women over 60, never men.

“Aren't you cold?” it always went with face contorted.

“No, not at all.” I would reply with a friendly smile.  “Aren't you hot?  You've got an awful lot of padding there!”

I'd look back occasionally and sometimes the penny actually dropped but they were all too morbidly obese to catch up even though I was on a stick.

We hiked from the gardens back to Salamanca Place for the somewhat wet but cheerful and very fiery Winter Feast and got a good view of the Pacific Norovirus on the way.  Our cabin was at the stern of the ship, far corner on the flat bit.  The view from within was a stunner, all of the Tasman Bridge and there about just as it had been with the Harbour Bridge in Sydney.




Next morning we fronted up at the Tasmanian Parliament on the dot of 9.30am.  I know it's considered boring in these increasingly neo-fascist times but I'm passionate about democracy and especially our Westminster system so was able to organise a private tour of Parliament where we had a wonderful and highly informative time.

I also got to sit in the Speaker's and President's chairs in their respective Houses. The latter has been used by the Queen so I feel it significant that the most recent bum to be parked upon it was that of a Australian republican.


Some 90 minutes later we bad a reluctant farewell to our guide and host, Charles, and headed across to road to the MONA ferry terminal.  Charles looked like a younger version of Frank from the Vicar of Dibley and shared a similar degree of passion for the task at hand.  Now 62, Charles has worked at Parliament since he was a uni student so what he didn't know simply wasn't worth knowing.

And speaking of knowing, I know some of you love the place but I thought the Museum of Old and New Art was a giant fist-full of cock, which is to say a bloody great wank in a way which might actually be worthy of curation.  God knows there were far less interesting things there!

MONA is an amazing fortress-like, largely subterranean structure which contains masses of wasted space.  There is minimal text so you are expected to wander the darkened caverns with a device pressed up against your face like all the smart young things who go there to drink espresso martinis and whinge about how they can't afford to buy a house because evil Baby Boomers have tied up the entire economy.

Of course you have to be a smart young thing to have the stamina to stand in one of the numerous restaurant or bar queues to purchase said martini in the first place.  On reflection I think the bars, restaurants, function facilities and accommodation options associated with MONA are its actual raison d'être, the art is quite incidental and sometimes rather inconsequential.

Anyway, I thought the most engaging thing in the whole place was Cloaca Professional, a giant artificial digestive tract that is 'fed' daily at 11.00am and 4.00pm so that it poos on the dot of 2.00pm.  Some art really is shit!  I proudly identify as plebeian when I say that to me the best thing about MONA was the ferry ride there and back, especially back!  

 

Delighted to have returned to town we shuffled off to the Salamanca Place shops to pick up a couple of postcards only to discover the Wild Island shop we’d searched for the previous day.  We had a wonderful time there in 2010 buying enough cards to last till just last month so in we went to restock and what a fortuitous visit it was!  Travel writer, artist and all ‘round interesting person Rebecca Robinson was working there that afternoon and had, in fact,  painted the images on several of the cards we’d been drawn to.  Rebecca donates a percentage of the her sales to environmental causes and is now on my fantasy Tasmanian dinner party guest list along with former Senator and environmental warrior Bob Brown who we met last visit, legendary gay rights activist Rodney Croome, Ana from the Gallery Salamanca and Charles from Parliament House.  A short bracket of entertainment will be provided the madman we observed in the newsagent next door.  His passionate rant about God being an alien was as plausible an idea as any I've heard.  He’s a colourfully bedraggled local character who was extremely amusing but I think the key to that amusement would probably be brevity, perhaps a five minute set, no longer.  His act certainly wouldn't extend to three courses, port, a cheese platter and coffee.

Next morning it was anchors away at 8.00am and we were off back to Sydney.  We left the wharf at about the same time the annual Nude Winter Solstice Swim got underway a little up river so damn, I missed it; perhaps next time!  We also missed the Saturday Salamanca Market which is a brilliant arts, crafts and food event that's a weekly tradition in Hobart and an extremely good reason to return.


People finally turned out in some decent clothes that evening, well some people.  Others had decent clothes which were several sizes too small.  We had large mirrors in our cabin but that mustn't have been the case in all of them.  There were young women who looked and dressed like a fusion of Magda Szubanski's Pixie Anne Wheatley character and Miss Piggy.  Then there was the 60-something we hope was trying to be funny by channeling Mae West in a full length red velvet vintage evening gown that looked like it might have been made from a 1940s theatre curtain, you know the kind.  Either that or she was the recently retired head of English from an Anglican girls’ school, it really could have gone either way.  But the best of the lot was the chap who seemed to confuse Masquerade Ball with Fancy Dress Party and turned up looking just like Wal from the Footrot Flats cartoons although there's a fair chance that the Swanndri, footy shorts, thongs and can of VB that was perpetually clenched in his fist was just his particular signature look much like tropical attire is mine.  We decided to go with the latter because the mullet pretty much sealed it.

It was an amusing evening although the margaritas were far too sweet and a bit shy on actual alcohol, being as we were cruising with P&O.

The next day, our last at sea, had me gazing out on the wake of the ship reciting lines from Robert Lowell’s Sailing Home from Rapallo which is one of his darker poems and that in itself will appear quite tautological if you've read Lowell.  The final line is the most poignant and made me wonder just how many fat bogans had in fact eaten themselves to death during the cruise.  There was a growing unpleasantness the smelt somewhere between shit and morbidity around the forward elevators and stair well that connected the feedlot on Level 14 with the medical centre on Level 4.  That’s where they store those who pop off during the cruise.

The corpse was wrapped like panettone in Italian tinfoil.


Now everybody sit up and take note!

I solemnly affirm that I will never again make commentary on fat Americans.  A P&O cruise is like Jenny Craig Day at Disneyland; it's packed to the gunwales with the fattest people on Earth, all of them Australians and all of them in a constant state of expansion!

I am deadly serious when I say I have no idea how some of them got through cabin doorways or into bathrooms.  They must have slept in the cargo hold and been evacuated with bilge pumps because there's no way that around 10% of the passengers on that boat would possibly have fit through a standard ship's bathroom door.  It would have even been a squeeze for the next 20% and I truly wish I was exaggerating but I'm not!

I know I'm overweight in the real world but I had a brief six-day existence in an alternate universe where I could get into a George Clooney's pants, and I do mean George Clooney’s actual pants although I'm also up for the metaphorical kind!


P&O Dining Tip #1

Settle for nothing less than Royal Caribbean.  The food on P&O is absolute crap!  There is total disconnect between the text on the menus and the reality on the plate yet still they feed!

Fatnote: (sic)

We had just sat down to our final breakfast of fruit and muesli prior to disembarking when there was a great flurry of activity at the next table.  An entire cadre of waiters approached two young girls who were seated with their parents.  They came bearing chocolate milkshakes in Mason jars with a chocolate donut perched on top and a stripy pink straw through the middle of each deadly concoction.

Back in the day the Christian Brothers were known for employing far more subtle grooming techniques than that!