Travelling light – along the Rhine and beyond 2024

Travel during the global pandemic had become an artform. After our first ever cruise, from London to Bergen, via North Cape, way above the Artic Circle, in 2019, we decided to try something very different – a river cruise. We chose a short week-long one from Amsterdam up the Rhine to Basel in Switzerland. Due to the pandemic, this was postponed several times and then finally converted to a cruise in local waters, when Viking started to operate from Australia. It was then postponed again, before we finally sailed. Apart from the many attractions of travelling the length of the Rhine, the trip meant that I saw two cities in two countries I had never seen before – Amsterdam in the Netherlands and Basel in Switzerland.

At the start of 2023, my fellow traveller and I journeyed on a Viking ocean cruise from Sydney to Auckland. It was only the second Viking cruise we had been on. Almost three and a half years after our first, and until then, only cruise – from London to Norway in 2019 – it finally happened.

On our return from New Zealand we immediately rebooked the original river cruise for 2024 and persuaded two friends to join us on it. We’d had years to research it, so we knew exactly what we wanted. Before we knew it we were on our way to join one of the river ships that we had planned to travel on in 2020, four years earlier.

Houses, so familiar from a million films and guidebooks, along the myriad of canals in Amsterdam

Seeing the future
En route from Sydney to Hong Kong, I thought that when you are flying long haul flights, there is a great emphasis on inflight entertainment. For me, I don’t really need it – flying itself is my inflight entertainment. I was also reminded of what I’d said before, when we arrived at Christchurch Airport in 2023, ready to fly home to Sydney – when we walked past the Economy queue for a Qantas Then I suddenly realised that it was not our queue and there was only one single person in the Business Class queue, and there and then I saw my future.

Travelling light – the largest islands in the Pacific 2023

I’ve been to New Zealand only twice – once on a brief stop in Auckland on the way to Tahiti in 2014 and then on a longer trip around the North Island at the end of 2016. On the first trip my fellow traveller was in New Zealand because she wanted to visit Tahiti, whereas I was in Tahiti because I wanted to visit New Zealand - though, mmm, as everyone commented, Tahiti was nice. On the second visit, we had planned to continue on to the South Island – till it became clear this would be biting off more than we could chew. Then, finally, six and a half years later, we were going back to New Zealand – and this time we would visit the South Island. We had sold our house after 12 years and we were on the road again. We were on the train to Sydney. On Tuesday we would board a Viking ship for a two week cruise down the East coast of Australia, across to New Zealand, finishing in Auckland. Then it would be four weeks of trains, ferries and hire cars as we got to know one of our favourite countries even better.

Holed up in Sydney
After our train trip from Canberra to Sydney, we were holed up in the Fullerton Hotel in Martin Place, readying ourselves to board our ship, Viking Mars the next morning. We had been wearing face masks everywhere (probably even more than we usually did at home), because we had to have a negative COVID test within 24 hours of boarding in order to join the cruise. Once we'd had the tests, nothing was going to stop us boarding that ship (except possibly World War III or something of similar magnitude). I’d told everyone I’d be posting commentary and photos regularly for those interested – I’d warned them ‘watch this space’.

Viking Mars anchored in White Bay, alongside Balmain, opposite the Sydney main city centre

While we waited to board our ship for light relief (not to mention food) we went to Bambini Trust Restaurant and Wine Room opposite Hyde Park for lunch. It's an old haunt of ours, where many a dry martini has passed our lips. It's amazing how good zucchini flowers stuffed with four kinds of cheese, spaghettini with prawns and, to finish off, affogato can make you feel – especially with a glass of Gamay. Sigh.

‘The last time we looked out from one of these ships we were staring in amazement at the Norwegian coast. Now we were staring in amazement at Australian shores.’

All aboard – travelling with the descendants of the Vikings

Once I had never been on a cruise and never imagined I would ever go on a cruise. That all changed when I visited Scotland in 2017. I became fascinated by the degree to which Scotland and Northern England were connected to Norway. A cruise to Norway on a Norwegian ship seemed highly appropriate. When I saw Viking Jupiter sitting high on the Thames, waiting for us to board I knew I had to come to the right place. The year before last, in September 2023, having recently returned from what was only my second journey with Viking Cruises, with another one planned the following year, I wanted to send the company some feedback about our experience. This is an expanded version of what I sent them back then, with another cruise under our belt since and a further one booked for 2026. 

At the start of 2023, my fellow traveller and I journeyed on a Viking cruise from Sydney to Auckland. It was the second Viking cruise we have been on, the first a cruise from London to Bergen in 2019. The most recent cruise was originally a river cruise from Amsterdam to Basel which was postponed several times due to the pandemic and then converted to a cruise in local waters. On our return from New Zealand we immediately rebooked the original river cruise for 2024 and persuaded two friends to join us on it.

Viking Jupiter in Geirangerfjord Norway

Getting on board
Once I had never been on a cruise and never imagined I would ever go on a cruise. That all changed when I visited Scotland in 2017. I became fascinated by the degree to which Scotland and Northern England were connected to Norway. We decided we would like to see Orkney and the Shetland Islands and after looking around settled on the Viking cruise. A cruise to Norway on a Norwegian ship seemed highly appropriate.

Travelling light – Into Northern seas: UK, Norway, Denmark and Germany 2019

Neither I nor my fellow traveller had been on a cruise before, but suddenly we were sailing from London to Bergen, retracing the steps of the ancient Vikings. When we were in Scotland in 2017, we became entranced by the centuries of exchange and movement between Northern England and Scotland and Norway. We saw a cruise that travelled from Edinburgh to Bergen and became quite excited about the idea. Before you knew it, we were booked to sail from London to Edinburgh, then across the Norwegian Sea far above the Arctic Circle to the Northern-most tip of Norway before working out way down through the fjords and passages of the Norway coast to Bergen, the second largest city in Norway. We hadn't even been discouraged by the fact that earlier that year another Viking cruise ship was nearly wrecked when one of its engines failed in a huge storm and passengers had to be lifted off by helicopter above raging seas.

‘How’, I asked myself, ‘ did I find myself on the deck of a Viking ship at midnight cruising silently through the night between the towering cliffs of Norwegian fjords? I am still amazed that my fellow traveller and I sailed on our first (hopefully not last) cruise only two years ago – in a very different world to the one we inhabit today, just before world cruising shut down indefinitely. Ironically our first ever cruise was barely six months before the whole cruising universe was turned on its head by the global coronavirus pandemic. Overnight the holiday ships of the cruise industry were transformed into refugee boats that were no longer welcome anywhere.

Travelling light – Journey to the North Country: Scotland and Northern England 2017

Our trip to Scotland and Northern England in 2017 was our first serious international foray in eleven years – trips in our own backyard, to New Zealand and Tahiti, don’t really count. We flew to Singapore – my first night ever in an Asian city – and then to mega airline hub Frankfurt and on to Manchester, followed by a drive through the Scottish Midlands – Glasgow and Edinburgh – and then Durham and York and back through Manchester to Singapore. Somewhere in there we ended up in a stone cottage for a week on a peninsula with the Isle of Islay on one side and the Isle of Arran on the other. Of course it all involved more Roman ruins than you could count because my fellow traveller is both a complete Anglophile and a Roman tragic – possibly, though inexplicably, due to her Austrian and German ancestry. All in all, it was a recipe for lots of fun.

Our trip to New Zealand at the end of 2016 whetted our appetite after a long dry spell of staying put – except for our much-loved regional road tours through the smaller towns and cities of Victoria to Adelaide. In August 2017, we took off for Singapore (once again on Singapore Airlines, of course, thanks to Chief Minister Andrew Barr, whose Government had persuaded the airline to be the first to fly internationally from Canberra – no more the need to get to Sydney first).

Updates on creativity and culture an email away

After many decades working across the Australian cultural sector, I have been regularly posting to my suite of blogs about creativity and culture, ever since I first set them up over 10 years ago. You can follow any of the blogs through email updates, which are sent from time to time. The app that I have used for this is shutting down the feature, so I have found a replacement, ‘follow.it’. If you don’t already follow my blogs and you want to take advantage of this new service, you can simply add your email address to the blog page, and then confirm that you want to receive updates when you receive the follow up email.

There are four blogs in all, covering the gamut of creativity and culture; humour; food and cooking; and creative writing. ‘indefinite article’ is irreverent writing about contemporary Australian society, popular culture, the creative economy and the digital and online world – life in the trenches and on the beaches of the information age. ‘balloon’ is thought balloons for our strange and unsettled times – brief quirky articles about the eccentricities of everyday life, almost always with a sense of short black humour. ‘handwriting’ is homegrown graffiti from the digital world – writing, rhyming and digital animations; ‘tableland’ is food and cooking from land to table – the daily routine of living in the high country, on the edge of the vast Pacific, just up from Sydney, just down from Mount Kosciuszko. The blogs are complemented by two briefer social media channels – indefinite article on Facebook, which is short arts updates and cultural commentary; and Twitter, short, sharp and shiny.

If you want to make sure you don’t miss any of my updates, simply select the blogs you are interested in and set up the update by adding your email. For ‘indefinite article’ on Facebook or for Twitter simply follow or like my feed.

Travelling light – Island on fire: Tasmania 2019

On an island you’re never far from the sea – that is unless the island is huge, like Australia. In tiny Tasmania, perched like an afterthought at the foot of Australia, even the mountains in the centre are not far from the ocean raging around them – just as in the distant homeland from which those who settled it came. On the main island, though, everywhere is a long way from everywhere else. Two islands, very different in size, in many ways with both similar and different histories. Both on fire. But this not just about the fires – it’s about what happened in front of the fire, the life lived in a time of warming and burning, even if it sometimes felt like a rehearsal for the end of the world.

The year before the new decade started, the last year of the old decade, began with fires in the centre of his island home, Tasmania, where he had grown up. It was burning in the very spot where he spent his earliest years. That year he had decided it was time to travel back. It didn’t start well. The year started off dry and hot and ended even drier and hotter. Luckily global warming didn’t exist or who knows how bad it could have been. Luckily the Earth was flat, because that would stop all the water needed to fight the fires running down the sloping edges of the world and falling off.

Ferry leaving Melbourne for Tasmania

It was a year book-ended by bushfires. A year that began with fires and ended with fires – a warning of a future to come.