Cruising with Sophie

(This was a funny one and typical of what can happen in the freelance writing game. The MV Reef Endeavour was decommissioned a month before the story was due to run in a national travel mag. Fortunately, I still got paid.)

I’ve always wanted to go on a cruise. It’s the stewards in white shorts thing, the cocktails with strange names thing, all mixed up with the chance to do very little yet end up somewhere interesting thing.

Even the vernacular is sexy. Celestial navigation. Promenade. Horsepower. Mmm.

When I ask my nine year-old daughter if she’d like to come along with me, I feel I need to dangle a few carrots. I tell her about clams the size of labradors, the magical dugong, how we’ll get to spend some quality time together.

Sophie thinks for a moment and asks if they have buffets. Yes, I say, They do have buffets. And she smiles that toothy, Simpson-addicted grin of hers. And I book.

MV Reef Endeavour is waiting at the wharf; a big, white Tonka toy with narrow, wraparound decks and shiny wooden handrails.

One of the company’s fleet of small ship cruisers, she sleeps a maximum of 150 passengers and features all the accountrements of a comfortable cruise; a small bar, a lounge area, a dining room which takes all passengers at one sitting and a couple of spa baths.

The tiny little gym fits in two excercise machines, just, and there’s a largeish pool on the main deck. Unlike some of the bigger vessels, the Reef Endeavour offers no yoga classes, no kid’s club, no late-night disco.

That first night as we sleep, our world changes. In the morning, the mainland has morphed into a necklace of lilac-tinged islands. Wake up mummy, says my daughter, jumping on the bed and pointing out of the window. Today we’re somewhere else.

Days meld into nights. The weather holds. A zillion miles from the usual rituals of cat feeding and homework, we get lazier and lazier. Sophie makes friends and I catch brief glimpses of her new gang frolicking in the pool, chatting to staff, helping set tables for lunch.

The boat is small enough for me to feel safe about letting her roam. We usually reconnect at dinner, where I try not to lecture her too much about vegetables, and again at bedtime, when, for a precious, gentle moment, she lets me tuck her into bed to the pendulum sway of boat meets ocean.

Each evening while we’re at dinner, a young crew member sandwiched between the earplugs of an MP3 player leaves a copy of The Cook’s Daily on my bed, which tells us what to expect the following day.

We relish the rituals of cruise life, Sophie and I. The dinner bell. The daily briefings. Afternoon tea in the lounge.

The cruise from Cairns to Thursday Island retraces Captain Cook’s epic journey north. Sometimes we drop anchor near an island and ex-Captain Norm Liddle, a bit of a history expert with a Scottish brogue as thick as setting glue, tells us what Captain Cook got up to while he was there.

On other days, the boat pauses near a reef and we snorkle. A glass-bottomed boat allows the disinclined or infirm to join in. This is just as well. Two thirds of the passengers are over 60.

At Cooktown, we transfer onto the mainland by tender and explore Australia’s first white settlement. In 1770, way before Cook got around to founding Sydney, he spent seven weeks here patching up the good ship Endeavour after a run-in with the reef.

One hundred years later, Cooktown was the main port for the Palmer River goldfields. Today the population has diminished to around 2000 and the local cafe sells mud crab and chips to the tourists, who fish off the jetty and try to get a glimpse of the giant groper which hangs out in the murky depths of the harbour.

Our last stop on the journey south is Lizard Island, where we spend the day on the beach, snorkelling and taking trips on the glass-bottomed boat. The reef is a tropical rainforest of colour, a living movie. I want to touch it, take it home in a jar.

In the rock pools, we watch the filligreed antennae of sea slugs silhouetted against the sand. Further out, Giant clams purse their pincushion lips as we swim overhead.

And always on the horizon is the MV Reef Endeavour, hovering like an anxious mother waiting for the kids to come home. In truth, by late afternoon we can’t wait to get back there, to cocktail hour, pre-dinner canapes and, for the real die-hard funsters, a late-night singalong around the piano.

On our last day, Reef Endeavour docks at Cairns and we stow our bags in the company’s large hanger while we head off on a crocodile spotting expedition. When we return for our gear a few hours later, the ship is making ready to head off on her next cruise.

Sophie watches the new batch of passengers sitting on the pool deck, making new friends, eating fat sandwiches and chatting with the staff.
She calls out the names of her favourite deckhands, Jack! Chris! .

But they’re no longer listening and we’re just a bunch of folk waving madly at a ship we once called home.

C’mon Soph, I say. Let's go watch The Simpsons.

O.M.G. Edinburgh was COLD

I guess it's inevitable that dining in Edinburgh in the middle of Winter is going to be mostly about carbs.

White bread, pasta, lots of fried stuff and hardly a salad leaf in sight was what we got on a daily basis when dining out.

The upside was Lidls (an Aldi-like supermarket selling European exotics from single-estate chocs and vacpac beetroot (okay, the beetroot isn't exotic) to trowels (yep, trowels) and Chilean wine. God I love the place.

It's haphazard but addictive, particularly at Christmas when you get all these lovely Euro-yuletide lines like cinnamon biscuits and stollen and, yep, even MORE single-estate chocolate.

They eat battered, deep-fried Mars Bars in Edinburgh. And chip butties. And deep-fried pizza. Order a meat and salad sandwich, however, and it's time for a spot of hunt-the-greenery.

Enough already. Suffice to say it's good to back in the land of Boost Juice franchises and rabbit-sized helpings of green stuff. AND the weather's better.