Wanted: Cruise partner: Must be <STRIKE>tall, blonde, beautiful</STRIKE> willing to give me 450 pounds

April 2, 2015

With my cruise booked for the 25th of May I moved once again back to Andy’s apartment on the afternoon of the 1st of April and immediately set about the difficult task of trying to figure out just what I was going to do with myself for the next seven weeks. My first distraction was trying to find someone to accompany me on the cruise, and with the subletting of one half of my cabin being worth 450 quid, this was an important undertaking. My first thought was of inviting Dea, everyone’s favourite primary love interest (played by Charlize Theron (but not Charlize Theron in ‘Monster’, hell no)). There were only two problems with this plan. The first problem was that Dea was currently completing a semester of English Literature studies in Istanbul which, despite Turkey appearing an unusual place to go to learn English, still seemed quite a serious thing to be doing and probably wouldn’t allow time for going on cruises on the other side of the world. The second problem was that if I invited her in a romantic sense I would probably not be able to get away with asking for the 450 pounds.

Changing tact I thought that the only people willing to pay out a lot of money for a cruise to Australia would be people like me, who were trying to travel without flying, and the only type of person I’d imagine would be confident of making their money back at the buffet would be a fellow cyclist. I rushed over to crazy guy on a bike dot com, and I wrote out what I thought was a fairly unambiguous question – Anyone else trying to get to Australia without flying?

I hoped that the collective knowledge of the CGOAB readers would be able to point me in the direction of another cyclist, similar to myself, who might be willing to share the cost of the cruise, and so I wrote out a message asking to be told of any information that might lead me to such an individual. Unfortunately my mentioning the word boat and Australia seemed to mislead everyone and I simply got a string of replies advising me on how I might go about getting a lift on a sailboat.

This information might well have been of some use to me had it been addressed back in time by a week or so, but at the present moment it wasn’t. I tried to correct the direction of the discussion but to no avail, I was being urged to get on findacrew.net pronto. Finally I spelled things out, even if it did give my blog away a bit “Does anyone know of anyone else like me, cyclist or otherwise, traveling overland to Australia who might be willing to share the cost of a cruise with me?”

There. That was it. No more confusion now. The first response came in:

“As a former sailmaker in Hawaii, I can say there are always some boats looking for crew, even for short passages. There are few cruising yachts…”

Oh, forget about it!!!

This was all a little bit frustrating but fortunately enough there was one person who did understand my question. That person, perhaps the only individual in the entire world who was on my wavelength, was me. Yep, me. I understood what I was looking for very well and after putting the question to myself and racking my brains for a minute or two I remembered a cyclist that I had met way back in Kyrgyzstan who had told me that he wanted to try and get to Australia by boat. His name was Tom and he was from Belgium, and after a good rummage through my stuff I managed to turn up a piece of paper with his email address on. I also seemed to remember he’d laughed off taking a cruise ship at the time and said that for him it had to be a sailboat. As I wrote my email to him I thought about explaining that I’d found a sailboat willing to take the both of us, a very large sailboat with a swimming pool and twelve restaurants and for some reason no sail. But I thought I’d call a cruise a cruise, and just see what he’d say. His response was fast, surprising, and, well, quite good:

yeah yeah yeah, yes man

count me in all the f*cking way

Waaaaw this is amazing news

money is no problem.

do you need any details from my passport or anything just let me know.

And yeah count me in

woehoew

alright

cee ya

I put him down as a maybe.

One thing about Singapore was that it would rain almost everyday with fierce thunderstorms that lasted just a little while

This guy came out to soak up the sun in Andy's backyard once the rain stopped

It's a monitor lizard by the way, isn't it great?

So with my boat passage to Australia all sorted out and a companion organized all I had to do now was wait for those seven weeks. This was probably not the sort of situation Andy had envisaged when he said that I could stay in his apartment for as long as I wanted, but I thought I’d make him pay for the foolishness of this remark for a little while. In truth he really didn’t seem to mind at all as the days went by without me showing any signs of going anywhere, being an extremely nice and also extremely laid back sort of man.

"Oh Andy, hi! You don't mind me making myself at home do you?"

I made some use of my time by purchasing a new tent and a new camera for very reasonable prices via gumtree. Andy told me that I’d find some bargains here because people in Singapore tend to buy things and then never use them, a theory that was backed up by the man whose good-as-new tent I bought: “Me and my friend were going to go camping, but then my friend got married, so we didn’t.”

Andy's hamster Dangermouse - almost as laid back as Andy

Andy also showed me around some of Singapore. We took a walk around Chinatown, which appeared to have very little at all in common with the China that I remembered. Little India was a similar story. Far from being the noisy and chaotic places that the names might suggest, both locations were peaceful and orderly. The main distinction between them were that the first had a lot of Chinese-looking people in it, and the second had a lot of Indian-looking people in it. Other than that they both fitted in very well with the rest of this clean and modern city.

Chaos in Little India. Look, those boxes are a little crooked

Andy can be seen bottom right as we explore the CBD of downtown Singapore

This is called the Merlion and Andy told me that I should not make fun of it on my blog because Singaporeans are very proud of it

We met a random Japanese cycle tourist here randomly

Myself and random Japanese cycle tourist having a random conversation. Despite his light load he said he'd been on the road four years already

One thing I liked about Singapore was the modern architecture, with many of the skyscrapers being visually dynamic. This was really the developed world and there was something strangely comforting about that. There was also something rather difficult about it – escalators. Everywhere we went there were escalators. The first time that we encountered one was on the way down to a bakery where we could eat free samples of expensive Japanese bread. “I’m sorry Andy,” I said, “But I can’t use escalators. Are there some stairs?”

Perhaps understandably he looked a bit confused, and asked me what the hell I was talking about.

“I’m trying to go around the world using only my bicycle and boats Andy. If I take that then I’ll have gone around the world using only my bicycle and boats, and that escalator for a few metres.”

Big shopping mall near Marina Bay Sands - you see my problem

Andy took this in his usual good natured way (whilst I believe secretly making a note to get me out of his life as soon as possible) and we went off to look for some stairs. We couldn’t access any and instead took the elevator, which I explained was just about okay because it only moved me in the vertical plane and therefore did not contribute to my progress around the world. All of which led Andy to pepper me, for the rest of our time together, with a series of questions:

“What about roller coasters? Can you go on them?”

“No.”

“What about treadmills?”

“As long as I keep running they are probably okay.”

“What about roller skates?”

“Erm…. No.”

"Skateboards?"

"No."

"Skis? Oh, you can't go skiing anyway."

"No, I'd have to walk back up the mountain every time."

“What about revolving dance-floors?”

“What? No, I don’t think so.”

“What about escalators on boats? Does the fact that you are on a boat counter-act the movement of the escalator?”

“They don’t have escalators on boats.”

“What about revolving dance-floors on boats then? There’ll be one on your cruise ship!”

"Andy, thanks for hosting me and all that mate, but I think I'll be off now."

09/04/15 – 11km (9km in Singapore)

Today's ride: 9 km (6 miles)
Total: 39,967 km (24,820 miles)

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