Cruise Control 3: Kristianstad

by Chris Harris

Day 3 of a week aboard Cunard’s Queen Anne, sailing from Southampton to Norway and back. This is not a cruise review so much as a diary of what actually happens when you put 3,000 passengers on a floating hotel, give them unlimited food and, in our case, a drinks package. The good, the bad, the ridiculous and why, despite everything, I’d probably do it all again.

After yesterday’s revolting cooked breakfast, we went the other way and headed to the Wellness Café. The lunchtime menu had been pretty small, and we were hungry, so between us we ordered three different breakfasts. With some embarrassment, we watched two waiters turn up carrying them, because there was so much food. It was all eaten. Of course, the only hot item on it, the scrambled eggs, arrived warm. The bowls of fruit, yoghurt and muesli were very good, though.

The good news, as I looked out of the window, was that we had just stopped at Kristiansand in Norway and there was an ambulance waiting to take the man who’d had the heart attack off to hospital. I believe that if he had died, there is a morgue on the ship and they would, of course, have taken him back to Southampton in it. So that was one bit of good news.

So we headed into Kristiansand, somewhere I’d never even heard of. It’s basically a very large town, and we took the anointed recommended walking route. It was a very underwhelming place, I have to say. But you did get a feel for it: it’s not like a large town in the UK. There was none of the badly kept and untidy feel or obvious pockets of deprivation. It was all just very nice and really well organised. Pretty much the stereotypical Scandinavian town. Functional. Very functional, if slightly bland. Everyone looked healthy, something you do not see in the UK.

The only interesting thing, to me, was outside the front doors of the houses. At the top of the steps, loads of them had these tiny benches where you could sit and take your shoes off. It was cute. But maybe that is a very low bar when it comes to interesting!

There weren’t even any particularly interesting buildings apart from a church, and that wasn’t even that interesting. The inside, though, was lovely, with lots of exposed wood, and it didn’t have the sombreness of a British church.

We were back on the ship by half past ten, which was just as the vast swathe of cruise travellers were beginning their own journeys around the disappointing town of Kristiansand.

We sat and had a coffee with various other people who clearly had no intention whatsoever of getting off the ship. One rotund lady was sitting there drinking a pint of Heineken and eating a piece of cake, telling her friend and the waiter, ‘Oh, I know I really shouldn’t.’ She got that in one!

I then went for five laps around the boat, during which there was another ‘critical health incident’. Two heart attacks in two days. The café where we’d been drinking our coffee was on Deck Three, so when I came round again, I looked across to check whether the medical emergency involved the cheerful lady with her Heineken and cake. It did not. She was still very much in situ, I am glad to say.

We returned to the café where we’d had the coffee because we’d noticed some delicious-looking open sandwiches. We didn’t need them, but they were free. I had beef and a fish, both delicious, aided by not needing to be heated, and almost immediately wished I hadn’t, feeling the indigestion kicking in. So, another two miles around the ship for me, then upstairs to the cabin for some writing.

And then one prepares for battle again. We found another bar called the Sky Bar, which is actually quite big and hidden away up on top. I mean, this cruise ship is a labyrinth of bars. It was sunny but windy out there, and further along people were playing golf and some form of bowls. Some places on cruises just have people you look at and immediately decide you don’t like. You may read that and think, well, that’s a bit of a sweeping statement, but it was just how I felt up there. There was something about the clientele that didn’t particularly appeal to me, so we went back down and headed for some cocktails on the back deck by the swimming pool.

This was the first time on the entire cruise we’d found ourselves somewhere quite busy, which is never particularly pleasant, and to fit in with the general mood and ambience, I had my first-ever Piña Colada. I didn’t really like it. Before leaving, however, there was the small matter of the Trough. We’d been walking past the beef every time we went up through the Trough and looking at it longingly. From our cabin to the back deck, where we spent a lot of time, you have to walk through the Trough, and eventually it all became too much. We stopped and had three slices of beef with Yorkshire pudding, even though we were now less than an hour away from dinner. But as the portions at dinner are quite small, I suppose you could just regard it as another starter. That was certainly how we chose to look at it. Then it was up to the Commodore Club for another drink before preparing ourselves for dinner.

There are two main sittings for dinner and, if you choose one of those, you have the same table for each sitting, which, as I’ve said before, had worked out particularly badly for us. So , they also operate a roving system where you turn up, generally at a time that’s going to be relatively quiet, and they find you a table. They asked us if we minded sharing, to which, of course, we said no, and this time we ended up right in the middle of the restaurant. Having spent my only other meal in there staring at a wall, this was a considerable improvement because I could now see all the workings of the place. My God, the efficiency and organisation are mind-blowing. Managers walk around carrying all sorts of electronic devices; everything is done electronically, er… obviously, and there are men and women in black hopping around left, right and centre. It’s awesome to watch. The restaurant is on two different levels and must seat something like 1,200 people, all being fed simultaneously by this extraordinary operation going on around them. There are two sittings, so 2,400 covers!

Most of the people sitting in there looked a bit miserable, it must be said. Me being one of them, so I got it. Some were quite jovial, but everyone else seemed slightly pissed off about something. The service itself, whilst super-efficient, was still quite slow and nowhere near as good as we’d experienced on the Queen Victoria the previous year. We generally seemed to sit for about twenty minutes with a bread roll and some water, and then suddenly everything happened at once and we had about twenty minutes in which to get two glasses of wine down us along with a starter and a main course. The food wasn’t a problem because the portions were small, but it was very good. I had an Australian fish I’d never heard of as a main, which could have been absolutely delicious, and some sort of smoked haddock with salad for a starter, which was equally excellent. In fairness, having eaten three slices of beef and a Yorkshire pudding less than an hour earlier, I could hardly complain about being underfed. The meal, lovely as it was, would have been dramatically improved had they not left it sitting on the pass for too long, it was not hot. The starter worked as it was supposed to be cold.

But the people-watching was great fun. Next to us were two couples sharing a table of four. One couple were very subdued and quiet, working-class people, while the other pair were definitely chattier and more middle-class. Whether or not they were being condescending, who knows, but the quieter pair appeared to be doing exactly what I would have done and trying not to speak to them.

The table behind them had two young couples, one of the women being the only genuinely rude person I’d seen so far on the cruise. She was being rude to the waiter, who, in fairness to him, just laughed it off and managed to make the other three people at the table laugh as well. But you do wonder why, when you’re that young, you’d pay all that money to go on a cruise and spend your holiday sitting amongst a load of old bastards. But hey ho, they obviously got something out of it.

The funniest were a table of six, we later learned, Chinese people who had some of the worst table manners I’ve ever seen in my life. It was something you’d expect from a load of five-year-olds. They were literally passing and throwing bits of food across the table for each other to taste, while one small woman , in the group , was absolutely necking back pints of lager. I mean, I was so impressed with her. Two of them appeared to be eating off the wrong side of their forks and, although they all looked perfectly well-to-do, the whole thing had the air of a chimps’ tea party. It was magnificent people-watching, although by the end of dinner I was quite glad to get out of there.

The restaurant experience was poor compared to the Queen Victoria, which was far more organised, relaxed and had the advantage of delivering hot food. On the Queen Anne, it feels more like an exercise in turning tables than providing a quality experience.

By now, however, the alcohol consumption, and more importantly the zest for it, was beginning to decline. We went to the Golden Lion and resumed our battle with the drinks system. By this stage we’d become so fed up with waiting so long between drinks that we’d begun ordering beer with whisky chasers, a simple tactical adjustment that meant we weren’t sitting there becoming increasingly irritated with an empty glass. What had started as leisurely cruise drinking was slowly becoming a battle of wills. If the idea of making people wait was to encourage them to drink less, it was having precisely the opposite effect on us. The longer we waited, the more determined we became to make sure we weren’t defeated by the drinks package we’d already paid for.

Eventually, we went back up to the Commodore Club, where we sat with the swagger and chat now at an absolute minimum as the third consecutive night of high-spirited drinkery began to take its toll. The enthusiasm of the first evening had gone, the whisky chasers were becoming less of a triumph and more of a necessity, and even the prospect of another drink was beginning to lose some of its appeal. There comes a point on a cruise when the body starts quietly reminding you that, despite what the drinks package might suggest, consuming alcohol is not actually an obligation. By the end of night three, we were beginning to get the message.