First Time On A Cruise Ship (2)

At check-in, each passenger was issued with a personal access card. It was used as a "passport", room key and credit card, all rolled into one.


Our room was on the port (left) side. The carpet and doors in the long corridor leading to our room were red.


In contrast, the carpet and doors in the corridor on the starboard side were blue. Hence you were unlikely to make a wrong turn even when your were returning to your room drunk like a sailor.


Our room was not very spacious. Yet there were 4 single beds in it - 2 were along the walls opposite each other, 1 was mounted on the wall (can be folded against the wall), another was a sofa bed. I slept on the sofa bed which was not very comfortable. Had we taken a room with balcony, it would have been much more luxurious. However, there was no such option for us.


The toilet-cum-bathroom was only slightly bigger than those you see in an aircraft.


In fact, the feeling on board was quite like flying on an aircraft. Why, they even had a route map on one of the TV channels!


And just like on an aircraft, safety procedure was demonstrated separately by pretty crew members in different parts of the ships.


Dinner was served not long after boarding. We had a choice of 3 "inclusive" (meaning we didn't have to pay anything extra) restaurants - Pavilion Room (Chinese), Mediterranean Buffet (International) and Bella Vista (Chinese/Western). We had our first dinner at Bella Vista. It was a sumptuous 6-course meal - braised sea cucumber, steamed prawns, half-a-fish, kai lan vegetable, roasted pork with jellyfish and soup. (Since it was not a whole fish, we flipped it over and indeed the ship didn't capsize.)



The restaurants had very good ambience. You could get a seat by the window from where you could get a good view of the sea.


And if that is not romantic enough for you and you don't mind paying a little extra, you can even have serenading musicians to set the dining mood just right.


The ship set sail at about 9 pm. We were having supper at the Mediterranean Buffet on Deck 12 when we felt some tremor-like vibrations when the ship started sailing. We could see ripples in our glasses of water. However, we couldn't hear any engine noise. Other than the slight vibrations, the ship was very steady - we didn't feel any rolling of the ship in the waves at all. Even the vibrations went away after a while. We knew we were in the good hands of the captain and his crew.


A few hours after sailing, our handphones were no longer connected to our usual service providers. Sometimes, we were connected to Indonesian service providers while at other times, we got connected to Malaysian service providers.


At one point, we even thought that we had reached Great Britain!


Most of the time, we were connected to Navitas 1 network. (Navitas is a subsidiary brand of UK's Jersey Telecom Group Limited. That probably explains the "Welcome to G Britain" sms. Read this document about the installation of Navitas GSM-based services on board the SuperStar Virgo.) However, communication on the Navitas 1 network was not cheap. I made a 1-minute call to Singapore and was charged $2.39 while each outgoing SMS cost me $0.96.


We saw some celebrities on board the ship. Moses Lim was probably on board to review some of the restaurants' food.


You Ya (尤雅), the Taiwanese songstress who was as famous as the late Teresa Teng (邓丽君 or Deng Li Jun) in the late 70s and the 80s, performed two 45-minute concerts in the Lido auditorium. My wife and I watched the show. At $40 per head for the cheapest seats, the tickets were quite reasonably priced. Anyway, my wife I saved us some money by not watching the topless show which was priced at $20-$25 per ticket. Hmm... it's good that You Ya's concert was still worth more than the topless show. And she didn't have to show anything more than her voice which was still as good as ever.


The facilities on board the SuperStar Virgo were indeed very comprehensive. If the ship was a star in the Asian movie industry instead of the Asian cruise business, it would definitely have won multiple Golden Horse awards.


My third and final entry on the cruise will cover the facilities on board the ship.

(To be continued.)

First Time On A Cruise Ship (1)

Our forefathers probably came to Singapore from China as human cargo in the hold of a ship. You could see the pathetic condition of a cargo hold from the following video-grab of a 1984 local TV series, Wu4 Shuo3 Nan2 Yang2 (雾锁南洋):


Unlike our forefathers, my family has never taken a trip on board a ship. So for the experience, I paid $1630 for four of us to go on a cruise-to-nowhere from 10-12 Aug 2007 on board the luxurious SuperStar Virgo. At 76,800 gross tonnage and 268m length, the Virgo is the largest ship in the Star Cruises' fleet. It has 13 decks and 980 cabins which can carry 2,000 passengers. From what I was told, it takes more than 1,200 staff of a dozen nationalities to keep the ship's operations running smoothly.

We boarded the ship at 5.30 pm on 10 Aug 2007. Embarkation at the Singapore Cruise Centre at the Harbourfront was a breeze as my wife had the foresight of pre-registering a day earlier.


Our cabin number was 5520 on Deck 5.


I was sort of relieved that it was above the waterline.


It was an "oceanview stateroom with window" on the portside of the ship.


(It is obvious that both my sons are avid fans of Walt Disney cartoons.)

Being someone who is quite observant, I noticed that on the entire ship, there were no cabin numbers with a figure "4" as any of its digits.


Notice the missing cabin numbers (marked by red arrows) 5502, 5514, 5524, 5004, 5014 and 5024 in the deck plan above. Also, cabin numbers on the portside run from 5500 to 5610 (with no numbers beginning with 554) while those on the starboard side run from 5000 to 5100 (with no numbers beginning with 504). It looks like a deliberate attempt to avoid the number 4 at all costs. I can only think of superstition as the reason for such a weird numbering system. (The figure 4 when pronounced in Cantonese sounds like 死 or "die".) Yet surprisingly, there is a Deck 4 which houses the tendering area and the medical centre. Hmm... how then would you rate your chances of recovery should you ever have the misfortune of being cared for in the medical centre?

I also heard of this superstition - when you are sailing and eating a whole fish at a meal, never flip the fish over to get at the meat on the other side. Instead, always try to get to the meat from between the bones because if you flip the fish over, the ship may capsize!

(To be continued)