Wednesday 2 May The Grimaldi ferry
Orestis (Serendipity Hostel) has kindly agreed to let us
stay around all day. The other remaining guest (the girl from Argentina)
leaves today, having had her daypack stolen with passport etc while she was
somewhere out in town L
We got up relatively early and went walkabout while the owners were still
sleeping. They will wake up and find themselves in an empty guesthouse – like
the Marie Celeste.
We made a celebratory lunch banquet,
which we shared, and prepared some chicken pieces and strawberries to take with
us. We also have yoghurt and muesli, bananas and mandarins – so we shouldn’t
starve.
Orestis called us a taxi for 7pm
after we took farewell photos to celebrate our status as First Guests at Serendipity Hostel.
The
driver wasn’t sure where to go and took us to the cruise terminal, then to the
Grimaldi boat, and finally to the warehouse where we had to check in. He was
kind enough to stop the meter after the first attempt. The voyage got off to a
bad start – they had demanded that we attend before 8pm, under threat of
refusing boarding, but then left 200 or so people in a room with 20 chairs for
90 minutes. We finally got out and had to wait for a coach, then watched a mob
of 16 year old girls trying to shove and stack large suitcases into the
underfloor of the coach. This turned into a shambles and eventually they
wandered off and we repacked some of them in order to fit our bags in. No porters or loaders!! There seem to be
dozens of unsupervised teens aboard.
They had a pair of escalators
onboard which whisked us up to the 7th
floor. We had to deal with one flight of stairs and then found our way to our
(separate) cabins, which we each expected to share with 3 others of the same or
similar gender. You can't book doubles on here, only fours. The two
upper beds in each cabin were folded against the wall and it seemed were not going to be
used. We left our bags and wandered off to watch the sailaway.
We got talking to a Kiwi/Canadian
father/daughter couple and didn’t make our way down for some time, to find
another bag in my cabin but nobody else in J’s. Huzzah! So we ended up with a
private cabin after all, at a far cheaper rate. The Cruise Roma is like no ferry we have been on –
almost a small cruise liner except that it takes trucks up its bottom, in a
manner of speaking. The cabin was compact and would have struggled to take
luggage for 4 but we were very comfortable sleeping in there for one night.
Certainly much better then sleeping in a room with 150 reclining (not very
much) chairs packed in front of a TV screen, which was the cheapest travelling option.
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