WITH ALL YOUR NEEDS ATTENDED TO AND NO REAL decisions to make you soon find yourself wholly absorbed with the few tiny matters that are actually at your discretion—whether to have your morning shower now or in a while, whether to get up from your chair and pour yourself another cup of complimentary tea or be a devil and have a bottle of Victoria Bitter, whether to stroll back to your cabin for the book you forgot or just sit and watch the landscape….It was like being given a preview of what it will be like to be in your eighties. All those things eighty-year-olds appear to enjoy—staring vacantly out windows, dozing in a chair, boring the pants off anyone foolish enough to sit beside them—took on a special treasured meaning for me. This was the life.
A Deck, Stateroom 793 MS Maasdam
Bill Bryson’s comments on traveling by train across Australia could equally apply to cruising. To them I add, “You have to be somewhere, so it might as well be here.” And for the next 17 days our somewhere will be between Sydney and Papua New Guinea on the Holland America ship Maasdam, our third time. Come along for the ride