A series of articles about our Mediterranean Explorer cruise onboard the Island Star, 25 August - 1 September 2007. Our itinerary is Palma, Majorca > Day at Sea > Livorno, Italy for Pisa > Genoa, Italy > Marseilles, France for Cassis > Barcelona, Spain > Valencia, Spain for Sagunto and the San Jose Caves > Palma< Majorca.
Clicking or tapping the photos below will take you to the articles for each day. A link on each page will bring you back here.
Friday 31 August 2007. We emerge from the caves at San Jose and into the sunshine and heat of Spain. The coach takes us back to the Island Star where we get a bite to eat and then join Cissie and Ada as usual on the Pool Deck.
They have a final gem to tell us. First of all let me explain something about the ship's toilet system... Ships have a different flushing system that works on a vacuum rather than just a simple flush of water. Connecting toilets to an outlet to the open sea can have disastrous siphoning effects where the toilets can turn instead into fountains of spectacular proportions. The vacuum makes a wierd and quite noisy PHHHHT-POOOOOSH! sound. Having a vacuum system means it's safer to get off the toilet before flushing of course as otherwise you can find yourself slightly shorter... Hence the old joke about the lady who gets stuck and her husband has to call for help. "But they'll see me with my pants down!" cries the lady.
Her husband chivalrously places his cap over his wife's lap and the ship's engineer comes to deliver his verdict. "Well, we can get your wife up without any problem, but that chap's a goner...!" Got the idea? So, the vacuum system is prone to blockages because the pipes are smaller than usual and during the week both we and the ladies had experienced a couple of problems when the system became blocked somewhere along our corridor and the ship had cleared it without problem once it was reported. Cissie and Ada though seemed to have a wierd problem with the flush operating after some delay once the knob was pushed.
And so to today's tale of woe and hilarity... "Eeh, I just fancied some crackers!" says Cissie. "It was about half past one and I'd just been to the loo but it wouldn't flush. Anyway, I didn't want to get crumbs in my bed so I took my crackers and went and sat on the loo to eat them." Yes I know... it's not what you were expecting is it...? "Well I was sitting there in my nightie on the loo, enjoying my crackers when all of a sudden: PHHHHT-POOOOOSH! I jumped out of my skin and got crumbs all over me!"
One of our favourite spots overlooking the pool deck.
This is our usual afternoon view from where we sat with Cissie and Ada. We enjoyed it so much that Fran decided in a moment of madness we should book another for next year and -eek- we're going to take my mother along! So tune in this time next year as we take our very own equivalent of Cissie and Ada along! We booked with a nice young lady who spent the rest of the week saying "Hello" to me every time we passed and therefore getting me in a great deal of trouble... Although not as potentially disastrous as the day a young lady had walked past our table in a very (and I mean very small bikini). I pulled my best leering face once she had safely passed only for Cissie to boom out at the top of her voice; "Oh! Liked her did you?!?" I didn't look round to see if she'd heard...
As we leave Valencia to head back to Majorca, we book a table in the Steak Restaurant and enjoy a sumptious silver service meal. The excellent starter is followed by a salad course and then the main meat course. The knives they brought could have done serious damage - I think they get them from the same source as the lumberjacks... Fran opts for slivers of lamb, I go for the filet mignon and we have a superb meal, helped along by an easy going conversation with our waiters and a bottle of wine, drunk from some generously-sized glasses! Fran lets me have the lion's share, luckily the lion doesn't mind and soon I am beyond caring that we have to go home on the following day!
And so Saturday 1st September dawns and we find ourselves back in Palma, Majorca where we had set off on our cruise one week before. We have breakfast with the two ladies we had had so much fun with. "Tell him what you did last night!" urged Ada.
"I went to the loo and forgot to pull my nightie up," Cissie confided. "I only noticed when I stood up..." Our flight is called. We say goodbye to the ladies, who have another week left on the ship, and they wave us off from the Pool Deck as we collect our luggage and get on the coach to the airport.
I was to get a letter from Cissie on the 26th of September. She wanted to know whether she was Cissie or Ada - it should really have been obvious flower! And said: "I'm glad you had a great time on holiday. We had a lovely week after you had gone. (Take it the right way) I don't mean because you'd gone. I mean we did. Nothing happened. I mean...oh never mind!"
It is Friday 31 August, the last day of August and the last full day of our cruise. The ship pulls into Valencia, and we pile off onto a coach which is taking us for a morning's excursion to Roman and medieval Sagunto and the San Jose caves. "I hope he knows the way..." I say brightly, the only one daring enough (or stupid enough) to actually say it out loud.
We haven't noticed, but the excursion had been clearly labelled as a grade 3 excursion, meaning steep hills and more walking than other tours. Great stuff! Let's fly at it! However perhaps the tour guide wasn't as enthusiastic, because he stops every five paces to tell us something that we could have figured out for ourselves... Here he helpfully points out a drainpipe.
All the way from the drainpipe to halfway across the road: "These trees," he says solemnly, as we come to a row of trees planted in large pots, "have to have water brought to them." A little put out perhaps at the lack of oohs and ahhs, he moves off for another five paces...
Waiting for us at the top of what is quite a steep climb, is a Roman amphitheatre. With an easy grace (in the way he puffs and pants) he leads us up a flight of stairs to a locked gate... "Well they told me to come up here..." he grumbles as we all puff and pant all the way down, round the back of the building and then up the other side. Council workmen are hosing down the rubbish bins outside, the hosepipe coming from the ladies' toilets. One of the workmen goes in to undo it from the tap and take it out. There are a few grumbles from the ladies. Fran, who is in the queue, say "It's ok, he just wants to take his water pipe out!" Screams...
Astoundingly the amphitheatre had been rebuilt. "Ah, well, it is illegal of course," our guide tells us. "The architects have been told to dismantle all the restoration work by next January..." In a way it's a shame, but I can't agree with the way most of the Roman remains had been covered up. Sometimes I feel that a bit of restoration wouldn't go amiss to give the visitor an idea of what it may have been like in its heyday. But this should either be minimal or by way of constructing a model of how it used to look.
The accoustics are superb. I climb up the stepped seating and can still make out conversations people were having below. I'll get even with them later... We leave Sagunto and travel along some fairly rough and ready roads to visit the San Jose caves. These were formed by an underground river and the visit is by way of a boat ride, punted by a boatman.
We have a short wait before going into the caves and use it to get a drink and sit for a while. Our time comes and we make our way into the caves, getting into boats shaped so that the front and back were exactly the same. The boatmen nudge them up to the landing stage and simply swapped ends. There are 14 of us in the boat and it is a strangely silent first few minutes. Presumably the Spanish boatman doesn't speak English, and it means that the least little noise comes loud and clear.
"What was that?" a young girl gasps as a distant echoing booming is heard.
"Orcs!" I say kindly... The boat ride takes quite a while and then we all get off and troop down a fairly well-lit but narrow pathway on our own. There aren't any side turnings or alternative routes to ponder over and when we come to the other end the boat is waiting for us to embark again.
Photography isn't allowed, but then I suppose most people would have used flash and then ruined their dark vision and be bumping into other people or failing to see the bits where the ceiling came down low over the boat, requiring passengers to duck or... "Ouch!" comes a cry... Yes it's me, not taking notice of how close we are to the side of the cave...
"Where are the bats, Dad?" demands an eager boy several times.
"Never mind the bats, lad...it's the underground river monster you have to worry about..." I draw the sketch from a postcard once I am back on the Island Star.
Thursday 30 August 2007. We have had a good brisk walk up Las Ramblas in Barcelona during the morning and it is now around one o'clock in the afternoon.
So we arrive back at the Island Star and head for the Beachcomber Restaurant in search of some lunch. Lunches for me during the week were mainly salad with a bit of cheese and some fruit. I actually lost 4 pound in weight whilst we were on holiday! (Pauses to cheer!) Cissie and Ada are sitting at a table. Ada starts chatting away but Cissie is strangely quiet.
"Are you alright?" I ask brightly. A grin comes over her face but her mouth is still tightly clamped.
"I can't chew my meat!" she eventually confesses. I can't remember whether it was beef or lamb but anyway it had gotten the better of her.
We have some lunch and then together with the ladies we take our usual places again on the Pool Deck. We are chatting about previous holidays and it comes out that the ladies had apparently been cruising on the Carousel around the Canaries as had we.
"We met up with this couple," says Cissie, "he had no voicebox, he could only make noises."
"Did he not have an electronic voice thing?" I ask, remembering a wonderfully lively 86-year-old on a weekend trip to Paris.
"No, he could only make little squeaking noises but you could normally tell what he was saying," Cissie continues. "Anyway we had all got sloshed one night and we went down to our cabins and his wife walked past their cabin and he got all excited and started making these noises really loud and it was just like squeaks. It was so funny I couldn't help myself and I laughed that much I dribbled all the way to our cabin!" She breaks off looking at me in a hypnotising manner, worried in case I haven't got her meaning. "You know? I was weeing!"
"Yes, Cissie, I've got the idea!"
"Well, he or his wife must have had the same problem because the next morning he knocked on our cabin door and gave me a huge pile of incontinence pads!!!"
Both Fran and I as well as Cissie and Ada are invited to a special Captain's Reception for returning cruisers that night. We go down early to get ready so that we can watch the ship leave the port and then not be rushing to get ready. The ship pulls away from the quayside and then... "We're going back!" says Fran. The ship indeed heads back to its mooring, after having swung both ends clear. We wait a moment and an ambuance can be seen heading along the port road. This is the second such night - in Marseilles a crew member had to be put ashore into an ambulance. Tonight it is a woman who is stretchered off and into the waiting ambulance. She has a drip feeding into her arm. We both think the same.
"She's had too much sun!" Fran said it first. It had been an extremely hot day and it would have been all too easy to have gotten too much sun up on the Pool Deck. I can't recommend it simply as a way of getting value from your holiday insurance...
The ship has another go at leaving Barcelona and as we get to the harbour wall we have to chuckle at this graffitied farewell!
The Captain's Party is being held in the Bounty Club on Deck 7. We hadn't been in there too much but the entertainment in there was a mix of nightly bingo, dancing to SP3, the resident band, and recreated game shows such as Mr and Mrs, Deal or No Deal and The Generation Game.
Fran with Cissie (right) and Ada (centre). Waiters are bringing trays of nibbles; canapes mostly. The ladies weren't for trying them. "He'll have some!" Cissie told each and every waiter or waitress, waving at me as though I were some ravenous canape fetishist.
By the time the party is over and it is time to head for our evening meal, all I can manage is a few crackers and cheese...
Thursday 30 August 2007. The Island Star reaches Spain and Barcelona is our port of call today. On last year's cruise we opted to do a tour on mountain bikes. That's been well and truly crossed off the bucket list so we'll just hop off the ship and use our legs as nature intended today!
We wanted to see one of the famous Gaudi houses and after perusing the map, we head out confidently up Las Ramblas. If you look at Barcelona close up on Google Maps it is called "La Rambla", so why do we give it the plural form as though there were more than one? For the obvious reason actually - the street is a series of shorter streets, five in total: Rambla de Canaletes, Rambla dels Estudis, Rambla de les Flors (site of a flower market), Rambla dels Caputxins, and Rambla de Santa Mònica. We were warned to keep an eye out for pickpockets, but we saw no untoward behaviour at all.
Well... we did come across a few naked ladies in a park, but they were all stony-faced.
What a feast for the eyes Barcelona is if, like me, you love architecture and beautiful street furniture. Set the buildings against a deep blue sky and some stunning iron street lamp standards and I'm quite happy clicking away!
The sky was cloudless and I always have a polarising filter on my camera which makes the most of a blue sky. Look at the number of statues on this corner building. Even if finding the Gaudi building eludes us, I can't complain that the day has been a disaster!
But then, here it is anyway. This is Casa Batlló. There are virtually no horizontal straight lines whatsoever.
The Catalan artist and architect Antoni Gaudi (1852-1926) has works all over Barcelona, the most famous being the as yet unfinished cathedral La Sagrada Familia, the most-visited monument in all of Spain. Casa Batlló is known locally as the House of Bones as it does look a little as though some of the shaping has been modelled on various skeleton parts. It was built in 1877 and is just one of Gaudi's creations to be granted a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
It is an extremely hot morning. Gasping for a drink we make it back to the coast and find a stall selling fruit juice that is a very welcome sight on our way back towards the ship.
By the port, at the foot of Las Ramblas there is a statue of Christopher Colombus. He is portrayed as though pointing towards the New World, though actually he is pointing south south east, to somewhere in Algeria... Or perhaps, judging from the colour of his head, he is pointing accusingly at a pigeon...
Wednesday 29 August 2007. We move away from the beach and into the town itself. The town of Cassis is quite busy this morning. There are market stalls set up, so perhaps it is market day.
A biscuit shop! There was such a wonderful smell coming from it that we had to go inside just to soak in the flavours. They obviously bake a lot of their stock themselves in the shop. Their way of selling was fun too. You could buy an empty decorative tin and cram as many biscuits as you could fit inside all for one price! We did!
We come out and of course have to immediately try one of the biscuits each! The market is a riot of colour and bustle. All sorts of food, meat, vegetables, breads, fruit and of course fish. But lots of other goods also from textiles to CDs.
Did I mention the hand-painted tiles, flowers and pot plants and rolls of linoleum floor covering? Well I have now! Not to mention tablecloths that come in a choice of rectangular, round or oval!
The pigeons on the ornamental fountain make a very appealing picture. Cassis (you do not pronounce the final 'S') is twinned with our own Burnham-on-Sea. The site was first occupied 600-500 BCE by the Ligures (the Italian Liguria region was named after them). I love a sentence from Wikipedia: "...Cassis could have been inhabited by the Greeks, though no proof has yet been found." Brilliant. It could also of course have been inhabited by a three-legged race of pygmies from Planet Bxsvi but strangely no proof of that has been found either...
It's time to walk back to the meeting spot and as we waited for the coach I took a photo of the expensive looking villa or hotel high up on the cliff.
We got back from Cassis to the Island Star and found our favourite spot by the pool. I'd got through the Bernard Cornwell book and was starting Bill Bryson's "The Life and Times of The Thunderbolt Kid" and so was chortling happily when a look of concern came over Fran's face. Cissie and Ada were struggling to the table. Cissie was bent over to the right and Ada was holding onto her as they crawled over. I went over to help.
"What on earth have you done?"
"It's only my back, it's gone!"
We got her sat down - lucky I was there otherwise she'd have done a sideways somersault over the arm of the chair... I'm still not sure exactly what she'd done but: "Heineken Light - two for one!" she hailed a passing waiter. After half an hour she was as right as rain. It really must reach the parts other beers can't...
"Are you going on the talent show?" asked Ada. I was a day late in asking if I was going to and I wasn't all that bothered anyway.
"Is it..." Cissie leaned over, either because of her back or to look into my eyes in a vague hope of reading my mind "...Grumbleweeds?"