an autodidact meets a dilettante…

A couple of not-so-interesting pics taken of the reception area, Danube deck

All euroed up, my TC and I returned to the Mercure Korona where a great many other travellers were gathering in the lobby with their baggage. I presumed that, unbeknown to us, all of these people were our fellow-cruisers staying at our same hotel, perhaps from all corners of the globe. We hadn’t apparently noticed them because as privileged guests we had the dubious honour of dining and breakfasting, more or less alone, in the elite dining area while our fellows were, as we heard, making happily raucus noises in the hoi polloi eating hall. It really is lonely at the top.

So after a while we were scooped up, along with a handful of Travel Marvel travellers, and taken on a (not Travel Marvel) bus to the Travel Marvel boat awaiting us on the Danube, where we were checked in, assigned a cabin, and given an hour or so to freshen up and explore our new homes before assembling in the lounge for a captain’s welcome and a briefing preperatory to our first guided tour of the city.

Our captain was a tall jovial Serbian or Slovakian with over 30 years of river-cruising experience. He was apparently fluent in German, Dutch, Slovakian and the various Slavic languages but had very limited English, so he had to call on Marion, the cruise director, whenever he groped for an English word, which was often. He introduced Marion as his daughter, and I actually believed him until, at various points during the cruise, he described the bursar as his son, the second captain as his nephew, etc. It was all very merry and familial.

Marion, from Austria, was, of course, our main guide and booster throughout the cruise. She sort of introduced us all to each other, and I was mildly irritated to learn that we were all Australians apart from a half-dozen New Zealanders. And here’s where I should make some separation between my humble piece and Dave Wallace’s essay about the ‘Nadir’ (I must say I effing hate those double-barrelled literary monikers beloved of Yank writers, sorry Dave, RIP). I can’t recall if Wallace mentioned the approximate number of passengers and crew on his Nadir, but it was surely in the thousands, and in fact a few of our passengers had been on these big sea cruises and gave them the thumbs down in comparison to our scenic/historic land/river cruise. It was my TC who garnered this info, being far more convivial and extravert than my shy/aloof self. Our own boat, which I now christen the Rough Diamond in remembrance of my Aussie fellow-travellers – doctors, nurses, teachers, truckies, shop assistants, landscapers, postal clerks, real estate agents and others we didn’t know of, some of them morbidly obese, others like myself only mildly so, and most of them in retirement – had little in common with the Nadir. For a start, it was too modest a beast to be treated with absolute disdain. No write-ups by famous prostitute-authors, and certainly no need for red dots telling you where you are on the boat (I call it a boat though I overheard a nautical chat between passengers one of whom was officially advised, he said, that it was a ship, not a boat) . Its maximum carrying capacity, in people terms, was 140-odd passengers and 42 crew. There were 4 decks, the lower deck, the Moselle, which had only a few cabins, as well as a fitness room and storage areas, then deck 2, the Danube, deck 3 (our deck), the Rhine, and above us the sun deck. It was all very tight-knit and cosy.