All Aboard The MS Geoffrey Chaucer

Our wandering north along the River Rhine, alas, is now over. Usually, as we are getting towards the end of a holiday, I am ready to get home, but on this occasion, I just wanted the experience to keep on going.

Given that the ship was nowhere near full, and had it been continuing onto Amsterdam, we would, most definitely, have asked to stay on board. It was, however, turning tail and heading back to Basel. It’s not that we had a problem with Basel, but we have been there already, there’s something to be said about not going back.

This time we will take a look around the ship and furnish you with some facts about the river, on the part we covered and beyond. I would have no hesitation in recommending this as a holiday, and I for one cannot wait for the next one.

There is an ongoing debate taking place at Taylor Towers, Jane is liking the Danube whilst I would opt for the Duro, so I am getting street maps ready for the likes of Bratislava, Budapest and Vienna. I am sure you fellas can empathise. A happy woman in your life equates to a blissful existence, I think that was one of Newton’s first laws of physics. Well, if it wasn’t, it should have been.

For those of you who have been with us since we got on board, you will be aware that we started our journey in Basel, the Swiss bit, aboard the extremely well-appointed floating palace, MS (Motor Ship) Geoffrey Chaucer, run by Riviera Travel, with the ship being exclusively chartered from the Scylla Fleet. We were to be on board for seven glorious nights before disembarking in Cologne.

Shall we start with the numbers? The ship has space for 167 passengers, but when we travelled there were only just over 100 on board, so it felt really spacious and incredibly homely, one could spread out in luxurious comfort which a full ship may not have afforded us in the same way. Not sure we could have taken homely as far as laying out on the sofas, wearing our evening comfies, jimjams, or placing our drinks on the floor.

The ship boasts a crew of 44 who attend to your every need, everyone, without fail as far as I can recall, coming out of the politeness top drawer. There are 88 cabins spread over three decks, meaning that some of them will cater for solo passengers, and if you are on your tod, you will receive a warm welcome and be accepted as if you were everyone’s best friend. Just between me and you, there was one individual traveller who I struggled to accept into the shipboard fraternity. Don’t tell her, though. We always found that she would join us, others having rejected her approaches.

The decks are called, in order of ascension, Emerald, Ruby and Diamond. In addition, there is a sun deck; well, you probably need some sunshine to enjoy this at its best, which, I am sorry to say, in a summer that often appeared like it provided wall-to-wall sunshine, was seemingly in short supply. We did, on occasion, promenade around the deck, which includes a putting green and a swimming pool, but both, on the few occasions we visited, were void of golfers and swimmers respectively. Can’t blame anyone for not taking a dip to be honest. I would certainly have never considered it.

I know the ship has a bloke’s name, but as far as I can tell ships are still referred to in the female gender. I accept that this might be a little confusing, but I am a great fan of tradition. She is 135 metres long with a beam, that’s width for you-non-nautical types, of 11.45 metres, and then, quite incredibly in my opinion, a draft, that’s the bit below the waterline, of only 1.96 metres.

I think that would mean that, if I could find a big enough truck, I could relocate her to our village pond and charge a couple of quid for a short cruise around it. Not sure if you need planning permission for that or not? Before you get ideas in your pretty little heads that we were residing in the presidential suite, or whatever it’s called, we weren’t, we were on the Emerald, down in steerage, the same as the orlop deck on ships of the line in olden times. Perhaps it wasn’t quite that bad, in fact, it was nowhere near that bad, but because we were so low down in the ship, our deck floor was probably a metre or so below the surface of the river, we had a sealed window rather than a balcony; an orlop is usually totally below the waterline.

This made us over reliant on mechanical air cooling and fresh air, but it was better than waves splashing in through an open window, or at least, I told myself it was. Honestly, we didn’t really notice as we spent an inordinate amount of time, by my standards anyway, milling about and socialising. We only used the cabin for things like sleeping and abluting. Oh, and our morning cuppa. This is where Mrs T proves to be a useful acquisition, in that she makes the morning tea when we are on holiday.

For the ladies among you, who think I am taking advantage of a woman’s goodwill, I do actually trudge down the stairs at home on every other day of the year for her morning dose of green. Reason: so that I don’t knock everything flying in an unfamiliar surrounding.

The river is 1,233km from source to mouth, the third longest in Europe, behind the Volga and the Danube, and if you want that in miles you will have to read on or work it out for yourself. It rises in the Swiss Alps at Tomasee, Lake Toma, before it starts its journey through six countries, can you name them? Great quiz question, before discharging into the North Sea, at the rate of 2,900,000 litres per second, or 29,000 average bathtubs worth, at the Rotterdam Estuary in The Netherlands.

There you are, I have given you two for starters. It is divided into four sections: Higher, Upper, Middle and Lower. I understand that this is confusing when looking on a map, and you wouldn’t be the first to fall for this. When I was at school, I wasn’t always the quickest to catch on, so when I was looking at a map of the River Nile, I think we were studying the pros and cons of the Aswan High Dam or some such, I was confused that Lower Egypt was at the top of the map whilst Upper Egypt was at the bottom.

Working on the principle that there was no such thing as a stupid question, and that no-one else had opened their mouths to infuriate our geography teacher, Major Lawton, I asked, what I thought to be, the obvious question. Well, I can tell you that there is such a thing as a stupid question, especially if you hadn’t been listening about ten minutes earlier.

“It is called Upper Egypt, you-stupid boy,” it seems to me that high ranking army types like to employ those two words, remember Captain Mainwaring and poor old Pike. “Because Upper means higher, like up in the mountains, and Lower means it is low down and close to the sea.”

That was it, half-an-hour’s detention at the end of the same day. None of this poncy booking it in for some day in the future at a time of your convenience. It was designed to teach you to pay attention, and I am sure that the hope was your parents would beat it into you when you got home. I think I may have pleaded some sort of disorder in today’s world.

I did learn a lesson, though, if my mind wandered again, I would not show myself up by asking what I thought was a well constructed enquiry. Strike two would have been the classroom cane and strike three would have been the assembly cane. Actually, I think strike two was the slipper. Different times! The good old days? I’m not sure about that.

There are 14 locks on the Rhine between Basel and Amsterdam. This is where we realised that travelling in steerage wasn’t so bad after all. When we were traversing a lock and we were right down at the bottom, all we could see was a concrete wall, exactly the same view as the Diamond Deck, even though they had a balcony, which might have allowed them to reach out and touch the walls of the locks, if they really wanted to.

Each to their own, I suppose, and if that does it for you, then who am I to question this. The largest lock along the route is at Iffezheim, where two parallel sluices, each measuring 24 metres wide x 270 metres, about three football pitches, long. They can move a ship up or down by over 12 metres. Can you imagine the hydraulic power needed to work these magnificent feats of engineering.

I know some will marvel at Stonehenge, but these are equally incredible, and at least we know why these were constructed whilst Stonehenge is still a mystery. I know some will say that we do know why they built a circle of stone I don’t think, unless we were there, we can be really sure. Let’s stay at Iffezheim for a bit. When salmon were reintroduced to the river, it would have been most difficult for them to navigate the locks, so the thoughtful river management team provided them with some fish passes, one of which is sited here. If you have seen the fish ladder at Pitlochry, you will have a fair idea of what I am talking about. Mind you, I have never seen a fish climbing said ladder. Isn’t that nice.

There are loads of bridges crossing the river, road, railway and tram. I searched for the lowest, another stupid question as this can depend on the water levels. Some of the bridges had such insufficient headroom that the ship’s crew had to put a well rehearsed drill into practice.

The installations on the sundeck are of a temporary nature, not because the owner ran out of money during the ship’s construction, but because they knew that some bridges would slice off the top bit if they collided with them. I think it is safe to say that the ship would come off second best. It takes mere minutes for the shelters to be dismantled and stowed away for safety’s sake. The team then move with equal efficiency to reassemble the structures for our convenience upon navigating the crossings. Brilliant.

I have to say, though, there was an even stupider question in Google than I conjured up at school. Some numbskull had asked why the Rhine flows northwards rather than southwards. My word, did you not go to geography lessons? Duh! The ground is higher in the south, which is why the water flows downhill toward the north. God, some people. You, my friend, should never have been let out of school at all.

Did you answer the queries I set earlier on? The river measures roughly 766 miles and passes through Switzerland, Lichtenstein, Austria, Germany, France and The Netherlands. If you got them right, well done. You don’t have to stay behind at the end of class.

Despite my owning up to being the poor relations onboard, by travelling in steerage, the cabins were incredibly well designed and fitted out, nothing was missing, at least nothing I could think of. Other facilities on the ship included a gym room, don’t get too excited, it was more a gym cupboard, a main lounge complete with bar and dancefloor, a restaurant as well as an intimate little bistro aft, a library, which I did not frequent, and a welcoming atrium style lobby, offering an incredibly light first impression of what was to come. First class and really quite posh.

I realise that I often feature the White Cane Ratings without any real explanation. In general, I cannot really fault the operators of this vessel.

The corridors were exceptionally well lit, as were the lounges and restaurants and bar, and the dancefloor looked like it might have provided me with all the light I needed, but there was more chance of me driving the ship, successfully, through a lock, than getting me anywhere near a dancefloor.

I think I might have wandered across it by accident once, perhaps it should have an alarm system in place to stop non-dancers entering dangerous territory. Seriously, though, I do feel I need to highlight one shortcoming. If, like me, you will need to rely on holding onto handrails to negotiate stairs, and whilst I usually count and memorise all the risers, and for that matter, downers, in unfamiliar environments, I also use the rails to guide me. I am sure that the rails looked most attractive where they joined newel posts, they were, potentially, a finger trap, thus resulting in broken digits aplenty.

I need to remind you here that none of this would have been possible without the fantastic service we received from Premier Travel in Swaffham. They do everything for you, which is so, so important to any person with disability, but especially the blind, negotiating online forms is fraught with challenges too numerous to mention. So, a big, big thank you to the team at 13 Market Place. We really are looking forward to you sending us on more fantastic holidays. As long as I can breathe and walk, there will always be a need.

I was going to feature another local attraction this week, Wild Ken Hill, which I was lucky enough to visit earlier in the week. I am going to defer this, however, until next time, as I am planning to have a chat with one of the volunteers who helped put the tour together. I think that these people who work with Vision Norfolk are the salt of the earth. Catch up with us, hopefully, on Saturday 8th November.

Find Out More
Riviera Travel: www.rivieratravel.co.uk
MS Geoffrey Chaucer: www.scylla.com/river-cruise-ships
Premier Travel – Swaffham: https://www.premier-travel.co.uk/branches/swaffham

White Cane Ratings
MS Geoffrey Chaucer: very good- see above narrative; * * * * (4)