The Young and The Restless | All aboard the waterlogged snail

Night after night, I listened to the steady rhythm (and slightly unsettling reminder of where we were) of waves crashing against the ship’s hull, coat hangers clanging in the nearby wardrobe, robust farting, erratic snoring, aggressive teeth grinding and unwarranted bickering.

I craved bed hours earlier than I do on land because the motion of the ocean rocked me into certain lethargy by dinner time each night.

The sheer volume of food consumed, coupled with a significantly lower step-count each day no doubt played some part, and, of course, relentless motion-induced nausea is also tiring.

But despite retiring early in the evenings, my sleep was patchy every night until I was wide-eyed and fully awake by 4am each morning, while my cabin mates continued farting, snoring and grinding (and probably still dreaming about bickering with one another) until long after daybreak.

I’m not sure what I really thought about cruise holidays before I went on one.

They’d always seemed to me like a holiday you take in retirement.

But I’d had many middle-aged friends take them in recent times and come home raving about their experiences.

Having thought about taking my kids on their first overseas adventure for some time, the idea of a cruise was planted in my head after watching the big masses of floating metal being shepherded in and out of Circular Quay on our Sydney trip at Christmas time.

It kept growing when I considered it might be the safest, easiest and most affordable way as a single parent to introduce them to international travel.

Ten nights’ accommodation, three (three-or-more-course) meals a day, entertainment every day and night and your actual passage overseas for around a grand per person truly is unbeatable value.

Return flights to Darwin last year were that per person, but included no ticket overseas, no accommodation or meals, and no entertainment.

But did you know these ships only travel at 20 to 25 knots, which is around 40km/h?

That is some seriously slow transport for adrenaline junkies, or the young and the restless.

It’s like riding a waterlogged snail to your destination.

It takes a cruise ship three-and-a-half long, swaying days to get to the same place a plane could take you in a quick three and a half hours.

A cruise holiday is like going on holiday and spending most of it inside your motel or resort.

We don’t generally holiday like that; usually only stopping at our accommodation to shower and sleep.

It might be fine if there were things to see along the way — other boats, planes overhead, marine or bird life, a few islands.

At the risk of sounding dramatic, if the room wasn’t the only way I felt slightly imprisoned, the ship itself was.

Sure, it was big enough for me to get lost on and require my far less directionally challenged kids to guide me (I got more confused every day, not more used to it!), but for days on end, all I could see was a vastness of water in every direction I looked.

Though we were on a 261-metre long, 18-storey high, 110,000-tonne floating village carrying more than 3000 passengers and 1000 staff, I couldn’t keep that anxiety of just how small and vulnerable I felt out on the Coral Sea at bay (yes, pun intended).

I didn’t get used to that either.

As a parent, I hadn’t yet found the thing that scared me so much I couldn’t still manage a poker face in front of my children, but I’d suspected a cruise had the potential to be it.

I tried not to think about it too much before leaving and out there, you know if I didn’t think about it, it didn’t matter.

But if I opened the door to the balcony after dark and stepped outside, I was moved almost to the brink of fetal-position-corner-rocking, so I learned it was best not to look outside once the sun was sleeping and another long day had worn on all my feels.

It got harder each night to look over the edge at the swirling black water (7km deep in places) directly beneath us as I felt more isolated out there in the middle of nowhere, girt by sea.

There was an ever-present eerie slapping of waves against the ship and an equally creepy whistling of wind.

Despite the 4000 souls on board, the air from your room at night was void of acoustic evidence that any nearby human life even existed.

We were supposed to set sail at 4pm on a Monday from Sydney’s Circular Quay after waking to a 3.30am alarm at home in Shepparton, a drive to Tullamarine, followed by a flight to the NSW capital and a taxi ride to the overseas passenger terminal.

But a rumoured man overboard at the same time our alarms had gone off all those hours before threw the embarkation process into turmoil.

Guests waiting to board stood for lengthy periods in a line that snaked far up a busy city street as it rained intermittently on us and our luggage — and by the time all the red tape was dealt with, we didn’t depart until after 7pm.

I’m nearly certain my middle child had a bout of COVID-19 early in the trip, while his older brother and myself suffered a few days of upset stomachs.

Mine was manageable, but it was touch and go as to whether my firstborn’s affliction was going to morph into impulsive surges of vomiting.

When we stepped off the ship for the first time in three and a half days at our first port to join a shore tour we’d booked, we’d just made it through disembarkation and customs and a wave of sickness consumed him.

I had to rush him to the restrooms — where I left two of my kids waiting for us, their first moments ever in a foreign land — while a ship staffer rushed back onto the ship to get us some vomit bags.

I was told if he felt he needed to return to the ship for the day, he would need an adult with him, which would mean all of us would have missed out because the others couldn’t stay on shore without me either.

Thankfully, he chose to push through, but our water taxi had pulled away when the staff member appeared running desperately down the road toward us with the sick bags, so our captain kindly looped back to shore (even though I’ve heard vomit does make the best burley).

Political unrest had caused riots to break out in Noumea the day before, so our whole itinerary had been changed to drop all planned New Caledonia stops, which meant existing booked tours got rearranged.

In our confusion, we didn’t realise we were snorkelling and kayaking that day, and, while we’d packed our swimmers, we weren’t wearing them.

We arrived at a floating pontoon in the ocean with no privacy to get changed, so again, our accommodating water taxi captain kindly took me to shore to get changed in a resort restroom while my kids (who’d gotten their kits on behind a towel I’d held for them) stayed bobbing among the coral reefs in the sea without me.

It was the second time the captain had altered his route to help us, but still not the last.

The third was when my youngest son’s souvenir cap flew off on the way back to the shore, and the keen-eyed, quick-thinking Vanuatuan angel immediately chucked a doughnut to scoop it up before it was lost in the Coral Sea for ever.

As we herded like sheep back onto the cruise ship later that afternoon after exploring Port Vila — on time as had been specified we needed to be, and in time for our also scheduled dinner — I pondered how much it felt like being a child on a school excursion.

I could say a prisoner with an identification tag assigned to a small cell, given three square meals a day, and access to an exercise yard up top, but then I really would be giving in to my own drama, so I won’t.

My point, I think, is that cruise ship cruising doesn’t exactly lend itself to the nature of spontaneous and adventurous travellers; it’s a very strict and prescribed process.

But as with every ebb, there’s a flow; every yin, a yang.

And now you’ve endured my intense dark cloud description; if you stick with me, next week I’ll share with you the magical silver linings of our first (and probably last) cruise ship experience.