Day 6: Hygiene hysteria

A sanitizer

Hygiene plays a major role in the daily life of a Saga cruise ship. The entrances to all public areas have sanitization points, and nobody is allowed to enter any of the restaurants if their hands have not been properly disinfected. The members of crew are continuously wiping and polishing every surface to ensure that the ship maintains the same hygiene rating as a hospital operating theatre.  

All this extra vigilance is standard fare on a cruise ship today and was originally put into place to counteract all the media interest in the norovirus aboard cruise ships. There are many horror stories out there of ships being forced to quarantine passengers to their cabins for the duration of the holidays in order to contain outbreaks of the illness.  Disinfecting passengers at every opportunity may seem a little over the top, but the procedure does work in terms of preventing disease, and after a while you hardly notice it going on at all.

Valencia

Our crew on shore leave

Today we arrived at Valencia, Spain. The harbour is a major container hub and for me the best thing about the city was watching the activity around the port area. Such hubs are where the biggest container ships offload their cargo before it is reloaded onto smaller ships for distribution to smaller ports. Unfortunately, I am sad to say that this really is the most interesting thing about Valencia in my opinion. I so much wanted to like Valencia but I didn’t. We took a shuttle bus into the centre and wandered around for a bit. Admittedly, there are nice buildings there but nothing really inspiring that we saw. However, we did spot some of the ship’s crew enjoying a few hours of shore leave in the city. They were having their pictures taken by the Cathedral door. 

Apart from that nice moment, I seem to recall that the cathedral square was full of litter, the few buskers around were looking more sinister than friendly, and the parks and alleyways were reeking with the unmistakable pong of urine.  I would have so much wanted a few of those hygiene dispensers around. Obviously, I am becoming far too institutionalized by life on a cruise ship.