Cruises, like tongue sandwiches and baseball, remained a part of my alternate fictional life for all of childhood, pieced together in memory from descriptions by several authors from books from the world over, at diverse points of time. Naturally, the idea of what a boat trip was as varied as Tom Sawyer’s adventures in the seas, to Katy’s cruel gruel-filled expedition braving choppy waters at the beginning of a girls’ Euro trip (when they were a demure, hand-maidenly version of what they’re now in pop culture) in What Katy Did Next .
Living in a landlocked part of the country, I wasn’t quite in on the cruising life. Getting aboard the Genting Dream, Asia’s first luxury cruise was about to change that. Sitting down to a formal dinner, simultaneously a part of the audience in a fashion show inspired from the cheongsams worn in one of my favourite movies In the Mood for Lov e, digging into a plate of that vintage dessert Baked Alaska, I told myself I could get used to this. But let’s start at the beginning.
While Genting Dream has a lot of cruises on offer, I was invited to be a part of the ex-Hong Kong weekend cruise, that touched international waters and passed over Macau. After long queues of entry into the cruise, where passports were duly checked and temporary visas issued, reading material about swine flu distributed, the line slowly snaked upwards from the Hong Kong port terminal into the ship, so seamlessly from one industrial structure to another, that it took me a second to realise I had set foot on my ride for two days. Inside, we were welcomed by the ship’s crew, given complicated instructions for navigating our way around the vessel, and escorted into our sea-facing cabins.
There are several kinds of cabins to choose from. I had a balcony stateroom, with an ocean-view. The garden view penthouse, the most luxurious accommodation on board, is a dreamy assemblage of stately interiors, a personal jacuzzi, a Japanese-inspired vertical garden and a self-playing piano. Built for two, its not your regular kind of indulgence at sea. Everything is ship-shape as far as maintenance is concerned. The pleasant beige-and-rust floral carpeted corridors lead up to rows of cream-coloured cabins on either side. With 17 floors, it is difficult to see every bit of the ship in two days, I am still disappointed about not discovering that one ice cream parlour rumoured to do a particularly mean matcha and white-chocolate chip flavour that I heard a lot about from fellow mates. We hit the ground running, and barely had half-an-hour before going to one of the ship’s Michelin-starred modern food themed restaurant Bistro by Mark Best, where we tucked in to exquisite Wagyu beef steak, and popped a bottle of wine open as the ship sailed past the twinkling Hong Kong shore. I could’ve called the day a hit here, but we were later ushered to a special welcome performance held in the auditorium, where the cruise’s production team had a concert prepared.
The old-school vibe of the entire dinner-concert routine was charming, we could very easily have imagined ourselves in 1980. The intermittent wi-fi helped, soon we gave up our phones, and settled into the evening.
There was a lot of exploring to do through the next day. If you are a locomotive nerd, the bridge room, at the northernmost tip of the ship, where a miniature model of the entire ship is kept, would interest you. One could do some yoga-with-a-view at the cruise’s gorgeous spa, or even get a massage-with-a-view, but it was the top-most deck that kept me engaged post breakfast. Oh, did I mention, thanks to the bounty of the Orient, breakfast can be a plate of tropical fruits, a shrimp and chicken meatballs pho, a fresh berry Danish, and invigorating Indonesian coffee? The top-most deck is an all-day carnival, with two pools, jacuzzis, a pool-side bar, a rope-climbing wall, four-kinds of water slides, and an apparatus that allows you to walk out of the ship towards the sea. In a sling, but still, pretty cool. After digesting some amount of the breakfast in the warm jacuzzi with fellow ship mates, it was time for a few laps in the pool. Lunch felt almost too soon, in a cabaret bar, set up in Shanghai-style opulence. No cabaret was there during this meal, only some portraits of women, in distractingly various stages of a striptease, to keep you company while you ate. The previously set menu was also Shanghai inspired, a bit of a hit-and-miss for me. While the fried rice with roasted pork was just the right kind of comfort food, the appetizer — ‘Sea Food Treasure with ginger, apple essence lobster and scallops salad’ as delightful as it sounds, the braised abalone (sea snail) with black mushroom is not for everyone. The vegetarians had a woeful main of steamed sundry vegetables. Stitches in the stomach were ignored as we headed to the top deck again, to subject ourselves to the wrath of gravity in water slides, or play a round at a miniature golf course. The braver ones attempted walking out of the ship in said sling. The lovely performance crew put up a theatrical performance on the name of the ship, inspired by a love story between a mermaid and a sailor (saucy).
There is no time to take a step back from having fun once you’re on this cruise, so it was soon time for a sundowner. The beautiful drowsy feeling inevitably induced from being in the water all day was setting in, helped along by the breezy skies, obliging pink sunset and a cocktail, when the show began again (or did it ever stop?) One of the ship’s dancers was suddenly sitting inside a huge oyster shell, dressed as a mermaid, the theme party had faux pearl necklaces, feather-tipped hats and satiny fedoras for everyone (and old Bollywood music). The night never ended from there, or so it seems now. I remember going to the plushest karaoke room I have seen. There was crisps and beer to be had, shady songs to be sung, and casino losses to be forgotten about.
The author went on the invitation of Genting Dream Cruises. The tariff for a balcony stateroom between April to October for a two-night ex-Hong Kong cruise on twin sharing basis, is ₹69,050, and the garden penthouse is ₹2,66,350.