The Costa Concordia and Contagion

Yeah I thought it seemed too good to be true –lodgings, travel and food all covered for one reasonable price. Now I know that the real Cost a’ cruising is that you might sink and children and the elderly will have to fight grown men for seats on the life boat.

Had MSC Yatch Club Head Bulter, Hery, not negotiated for us to be on this MSC Cruise at the last minute in all reality we may have been on board the Concordia. The Costa Concordia, departing Civitavecchia (Rome), several days after this ship was our next favourite option. There is nothing quite like being on a Cruise ship heading for Rome when all that seems to be on TV is images and passenger accounts of the Costa Concordia, of similar size to our cruise, sinking. Everyone has their opinion; what sort of Captain abandons his ship (clearly he is no Captain Sully). why did passengers and crew have to wait until hours after the incident to be told to evacuate. The latest reports suggest that the Captain was steering the ship past his home town and went close to the land as a sign of 'Bravado'. Crazy to think of playing a game of dare when you're responsible for the lives of 4200 people. When the ship started to sink it was panic stations. If what happens at the buffet on board this ship is anything to go by I can imagine; it is often every man for himself. On boarding busses etc. rather than a queue, there is more often a tight, strangled knot of people, where others may just jump in randomly at first sign of a space. Naturally, we now have a family evacuation plan. Being stowaways we didn’t actually get a safety briefing, though we made sure we got the kid’s life jackets. There have been discussions about how you might respond in an emergency situation; calm like the honeymoon couple who move to the top of the ship and wait for the helicopter to arrive or stampeding over everyone to get to the first life raft. I hope we never find out.

To take a break from all the TV footage of the Concordia we decided to watch a movie, 'Contagion' with Kate Winslet. It is about the ease with which new virus's can be created and how quickly they can spread across Continents. Fascinating movie and it has has us using the hand sanitiser dispensers on board with increased regularity. It's not all doom and gloom, we are seeing an amazing part of the world. I have written posts on the ports we are visiting but uploading photos to the blog is very slow. The plan is to finish of the posts once we've disembarked. Despite our proximity to disaster it feels like our time on the cruise is going very quickly - we only have 3 of the 11 nights left.