The first image that I recollect when I hear about the word cruise, is that of the mighty Titanic. It got deeply etched in my childhood memories. I still remember the day I came out of the theater watching Titanic movie. While everyone around me were discussing about the ship sinking, the love story and how it could have avoided hitting iceberg etc, I was still in a surreal state thinking about the huge ship and the experience of being in the middle of ocean in that. Somehow, I took the positives of the cruise experience than the dangers that were exposed in the second half. At that age, I couldn’t even dream of being in a ship like that as I thought that can happen only in movies. Little did I hear about anyone around me going in a cruise or if such cruises exist in real.

Fast forward to 2016, my first close experience of a cruise is with Halong Bay cruise in Vietnam. It was not in an ocean, but a bay with clear waters and great views and I extremely enjoyed the 2-day cruise. The same year we went to Greece and the ferries were bigger than the Halong Bay cruise and that was my first ever experience of traveling in a sea. It was only for a shorter duration of 3-4 hours and I remember spending most of the time on deck enjoying the views and breeze.

Cut to 2019, after a month of moving to Sydney, we took a ferry to Manly beach from Sydney Harbour and during that journey, I got to see a real big cruise which reminded me of Titanic. I was amazed by its sheer size and I took a photo of that and checked later on on how much it costs. I was very happy that it was affordable and we can take one from Sydney and there it got added to my bucket list. We decided to plan the cruise trip with friends/family whenever someone visits us.

One month back, when the discussion of our Anniversary trip came into picture, I checked the same cruise and we found an irresistible deal on the Carnival Weekend Sampler cruise. We were skeptical on whether we should take the cruise in winter and how cold it would be etc, but the deal was too tempting to miss it and we decided that it was our present to each other on our anniversary. It felt as a good way to test the waters too, to see if we have any kind of sea sickness in case we want to take a longer one later.

I was crazily excited about our cruise trip that I couldn’t sleep the night when we completed our booking. It was my dream come true moment! 🙂 I am very fond of water that the mere sight of any water body brings in so much excitement in me, and I couldn’t imagine my state being surrounded by water for three days.

Our cruise starts around 3pm on Friday from Sydney and drops us back to Sydney on Monday morning 7am. Our journey had no ports in between and we will be on the cruise completely. It was rightly named as weekend sampler cruise, designed for all those who want to get a taste of the cruise experience to decide if they like it or not before booking a bigger one. I had been asked many questions by my friends and family about the cruise and the most common one and the toughest one to answer was: “Where are you going?” and my answer was Nowhere! The boarding pass of the cruise also mentioned the same “Cruise to Nowhere” 🙂 How crazy it was! It was completely about the journey more than the destination. Most of the times, our thoughts would be on the destination more than the journey, so this trip felt different and ideal, where it forces us to be in the present and experience it. Another question was about “Why are you going?” and my answer was clear, “I want to watch sunrise, sunset and night sky from the cruise”! For those who were not startled by my first answer, they would have been baffled by my second answer and might have thought that I went crazy! Jokes apart, I think it was definitely tough to answer these questions, as I had no clue on how it is going to be and just want to experience it.

Day 1:

Finally, the D-day came in and we packed our bags and reached Circular Quay by train, from where our Cruise starts. I was in awe looking at the size of the cruise at its first sight.

We went near the cruise and started checking on how we should be boarding it and if there was any staircase. But we realized slowly on how we underestimated the boarding process. There was a huge setup of a two-storied building which looked similar to that of an airport, where the we had to check-in our baggage, get boarding passes, immigration counter, followed by security check. It was pretty quick and we finally entered the huge cruise containing around 10 floors. We were super excited that we couldn’t decide whether to have lunch first or go to the room and guess which won? Hunger 😛 There were many food options for lunch, I have to stress this point as I got a good number of “VEG” options. We slowly had our lunch enjoying the Opera house view and went to check our room.

There were four options available on the cruise: Inside, Ocean View, Balcony with Obstructed view and Balcony. Ours was a Balcony room on 6th floor, which got upgraded from an obstructed view Balcony room, a few days before our journey. So, I couldn’t have wished for a better room 🙂 The room looked beautiful and the view from the Balcony was amazing. It felt like a perfect room with a view and how cool it is when the view changes at regular intervals, no hotel room could beat this view!

While our cruise started moving out of Sydney, we enjoyed the city views from our balcony. After around 15mins into our journey, we could hear people shouting “dolphin” and we immediately looked into the water outside to find few dolphins jumping around. It felt amazing to see them playing and lucky to spot them 🙂

I forgot to mention our bumper bonanza offer on the cruise, which is NO mobile signal and if we really require, we have to pay an additional amount to use WiFi (comes from satellite) on a daily basis. So, it was a forced and much needed tech detox trip for both of us :D. After around 30mins into the sea, I forgot to put my phone on airplane mode and the time got automatically shifted to NZ time, which was 2 hours ahead of our local time. That was when I realized that I will be charged for roaming if I didn’t turn off the network and that we were on international waters. I was surprised to know that as I never wondered about the territories of water as such. So, we were officially out of Australia for a while 😛

I realized that it was closer to sunset and our balcony was in the opposite direction of sun. So, we headed to the deck on top of the cruise to watch sunset. The deck had cute cabins where two people can sit and relax and the deck was divided into sections, one exclusively for adults and other one for everyone. We found one cabin in the direction of sun and enjoyed the sunset.

It started getting cold after sunset and we went inside the cruise to explore the inside of it.

There were few indoor games like Basketball, Table Tennis, Mini golf etc. It felt tough for amateurs like me to play the TT as the ball goes down if it was hit hard outside the board.

After around 10-15mins from the Sydney Harbour, the water changed from bay waters to sea and we could continuously feel the sensation of something moving under, as if there was a constant earthquake happening. I had a bit of headache in the start for around 30mins, but after having a light snack, it felt fine. One of our biggest worries of taking the cruise was about sea sickness and we chose the small duration one to understand how it feels. Luckily, after 3-4 hours into the sea, we felt fine and we almost got used to the feeling of water movement by night.

There was a huge tempting casino inside the cruise in the second floor and the interiors looked royal that we just enjoyed walking around.

We had two choices for dinner, one was to have it on the top floor as buffet and the other one is to have ala-carte meal served in the restaurant on the second floor. We chose our dining time to be 7:30pm and we were provided with a reserved table throughout our journey. We got a six-seater table and before we wondered on why we got a bigger one, another couple from Canberra joined us for dinner on our table. It was a good idea to socialize and make new friends.

After dinner, we found a dine-in movie theater which was screening some movie and a piano concert happening at the same time.

I forgot to mention that we could install and use the free Carnival Hub app which works on the cruise with their internet. That provides us with the list of events happening in the cruise, with the location details. We observed that at any point of time, there were around 2-3 events happening in parallel and we can choose the one which interests us. We made a note of the events which we wanted to attend for the next day and relaxed for the day! We went up the deck to watch the night sky and it looked spectacular 🙂

What a magical day, it still feels like a dream for me, I hope not to wake up tomorrow at my home 😛

Day 2

Hurrayyy..This is for real and not a dream. We got a good night’s sleep as it felt like sleeping in a cradle 😀 I woke up in the morning to realize that I missed the sunrise!

I was ready for today’s exploration, I went in search of jogging track on the deck.

The front part of the cruise was wobbling more due to direct winds and it felt tough to walk steadily and briskly on the track.

After breakfast, me and my husband went on different routes in the cruise, as our choices of sessions/events was different.

While I went to attend a health seminar on “Increase your metabolism”, my husband was busy playing a poker game in the casino. Though the seminar was insightful, it ended up as a marketing pitch of a health product which made me disinterested completely. While my smarter husband won 350$ on the table 🙂

I had my lunch and relaxed in the cabin watching the endless blue ocean.

I randomly ended up in a health seminar about “Improving Posture” and I was the odd woman out there between all senior citizens. It was good, but it was again a product marketing brief and I couldn’t stop laughing at myself on my choices 😛 The other event that was happening at the time was “The Hairy Chest Contest” for men 😀

I relaxed in the room for sometime and was back to my favorite cabin to watch sunset.

I realized that the sunset always happened on the land side as we were on the east coast and hills on the land covered the sun.

We could get the complete 360 degree view of the sunset sky and it looked spectacular in all directions with varying shades of color 🙂

We had a light snack in the evening after sunset and started getting ready for Elegant Cruise Night.

Coming to the themes onboard, based on the length of the cruise we get different themes. We had two theme nights on the cruise, while the first one was Elegant night, the other one was 80’s rock and glow theme. I had to buy a dress specially for this elegant night, so that I don’t look odd. I was reminded of Titanic where in the movie, they have a night with proper elegant attire. We tried our best to maintain the theme.

There were many photographers on the cruise to take family photos. They display the photos next day on the wall, from which we can pick the ones we like and buy them. We got a couple of photos taken and then proceeded to our dinner table. At the dinner table today, we were accompanied by a different couple from Melbourne and got to hear their stories.

After dinner, we went to the dive-in movie theater to watch “Avengers: End game”.

It was open to air and we had to prepare ourselves well for the cold weather to watch the movie till midnight.

I felt sleepy after sometime and couldn’t watch the movie completely. When I planned to go back to our room, I heard a lady singing and performing beautifully in the lobby. I sat there for sometime listening to her song as a lullaby and took rest for the day.

It was an eventful and relaxing day onboard! 🙂

Day 3

I woke up early and felt mesmerized by the view outside. I knew that the direction of sunrise was towards our balcony side and the sun was hiding somewhere beneath the clouds. But the reason why I was extremely happy was because the sun felt very close to us and it made me feel that we reached the other end of the ocean. It was tough to capture that in a photo, but it was a beautiful moment.

I couldn’t witness the sun rising above the water with clouds around the horizon, but the sunrise was simply stunning.

An another exciting day on the cruise begins and we still have many places left on the cruise to explore. Today I decided not to attend any events during daytime and to just roam around as it will be our last day.

The cruise lobby interiors were among the best, which made us feel like we were traveling in a palace on water.

We realized that the direction of the cruise changed after a while which felt logical, as we have to travel back to Sydney now. But the direction felt against the wind and we could feel large tides hitting our cruise hardly. It took us a while to get adjusted to the new cruise pattern and it felt better sitting in our balcony looking at the tides outside.

We had our lunch and went on to check different halls on the second floor. Second floor appeared closer to water, but surprisingly we felt more cruise movements on the 2nd floor than on the 10th floor. We expected it to be vice versa though.

The room was designed for kids with various animal sculptures around. We found many places exclusively for kids actually on the cruise. This one was just one of those.

With the change in direction of our cruise, we realized that we can watch sunset from our balcony. It was a perfect day with both sunrise and sunset visible from our balcony!

I loved the sunset sky color and the small clouds dispersed along the sky 🙂

We avoided the dinner restaurant for a day and decided to have it at buffet counter. We realized that it was taking longer getting served at the dine-in restaurant and we get to order only couple of dishes there. At buffet, we tried a small portion different food items.

After dinner, we attend an 80’s pop show, it was brilliantly performed that I couldn’t stop appreciating their coordination and creativity. We realized that we can attend live shows of this kind in Sydney too. The cruise was rightly named as a weekend sampler where in we get to try various things which we would never have paid and tried in our city. There was a comedy show too which we wanted to attend, but the seats were filled very early that we had to skip it.

There was an 80’s rock and glow party on the deck around 10:30pm, but we fell asleep before that and missed it. It was yet another amazing day on the cruise and the feeling of leaving the cruise felt sad. I wondered how we will feel going back home and preparing our own meals, as we were pampered a lot there with variety of food options almost 24/7.

Day 4

By the time we woke up, we found the cruise very close to the city. We requested an early disembarkation time as 7am (to catch our work). Sunrise was around 6:50am and we went on to the deck one last time to watch it. There were clouds near the horizon and sun didn’t rise above those for sometime that we had to leave the cruise before the sun’s actual rise.

We were back to where we started from nowhere!

Disembarkation process was simple and it hardly took any time to come out of the cruise. While bidding one last good bye to our cruise, we could spot the sun rising behind the Opera house 🙂

This felt like a completely different experience compared to our usual trips and at the end of it, we were completely rejuvenated! The journey surprised us in many ways and we got to hear many stories onboard. It was almost a different way of life being on water. We met a person who was on the cruise 40th time and his longest journey was 55 days from Sydney to London covering all the ports on the way New Zealand, Hawaii, Canada, Greenland, Iceland etc. We wondered when our next cruise would be and where it would be to. Pacific Islands cruise felt ideal, as we will get to stop at multiple islands on the way! This post was a difficult one for me to write, as it was a tough task to pen down the experience. This trip re-instated my belief that dreams come true 🙂