The SS Uganda Cruise Retro-diary 11th June 1977 Rough Seas

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Like many of our party, I woke up feeling groggy. Breakfast came in an option of full English breakfast or a Continental breakfast, which amounted to a bread roll and a glass of orange juice. I was glad of the second choice as it was about all I could cope with. Around me, many passengers and fellow students were being sick in the paper bags provided. Nothing puts you off eating more than the sight of diners vomiting in the cafeteria. I saw the rise and fall of the waves now in the daylight, mostly through portholes in the corridor around our porthole free dorm. – By the end of the day, even I had succumbed to seasickness, even though I had thought I was fit to escape it as it had taken so long. We were given a lifeboat drill and talked through how to put life-vests on if required. Then it was time for school. On an educational cruise, much of the time at sea is taken up in lecture theatres and classrooms. We were presented with large Geography workbooks, which included details of the countries and peoples we were visiting, and we were told to write down anything we found out as the cruise went by. Our parents might have seen the trip as an education, a low-key version of the Grand Tours of old, but for us, it was a holiday. As soon as it became apparent that no one was going to mark or study our work, many of the workbooks fell overboard. Mine included. It wasn’t all school. We were given time to watch films in the ship cinema. Logan’s Run, The Revenge Of The Pink Panther, and a Bond movie were among those that I saw. The students in the cinema room were unsupervised and many just threw things about and boasted of the sex they would have with the various attractive women who appeared ion the screens. I found the atmosphere too much akin to a zoo, and stopped bothering to go and watch films there at all. I actually became quite reclusive. The sea itself fascinated me. I would wander round the decks staring, half mesmerised at the ocean, the horizon and the sky. I found a quiet stretch of deck that hardly anyone seemed to visit and made it very much my own. There were a few deck chairs there, and I just put my feet up, stared at the sea and sky and read my own books. I was quite happy with this. Only the choppiness of the sea made me realise that I was still uncomfortably ill. I wasn’t sick any more as I simply wasn’t going to eat anything just to end up feeding it to the fish. By Disco time, dancing around like a lunatic took my mind off the seasickness. Arthur Chappell