Cooking, cleaning, purchasing, generating beds. All of it goes out the window, leaving planet cruisers no cost to do as considerably or as tiny as they want. They fall into a rhythm of waking, consuming, dozing and consuming once more, interrupted now and then by port calls, line-dancing classes, choir practice or a higher-brow lecture or two by historians, art and architecture authorities, geopolitical commentators and some well-known faces: Lord Digby Jones, Lord Jeffrey Archer, Steve Wozniak and former Royal butler Grant Harrold on Seabourn and, in the previous, the late Archbishop Desmond Tutu on Holland America Line and, on Cunard’s QE2, the late Alan Whicker who described the ship as “a space capsule drifting about the planet in a delightful way”.

Fred Olsen Cruise Lines’ planet cruises and lengthy voyages also have a chaplain on board, ministering to these who want to be ministered to (don’t forget the 2013 Television series The Cruise: A Life at Sea, which followed the Rev Colin Nonetheless on a 112-evening worldwide odyssey with the line?). “There are much more applications from chaplains than we have cruises,” says Tim Spicer, a former Fred Olsen cruise director who now has a land-primarily based part with the enterprise. Caring for a floating flock when seeing the planet? What’s not to like?

I added washing and ironing to my list of issues you do not have to do on a planet cruise, but other passengers had been laundry-space regulars due to the fact it was the most effective location to catch up with the “village” gossip. It felt like St Mary Mead meets Midsomer Murders without the need of the physique count – but we had been fortunate. Globe cruisers are a mature lot – an age group with the time and cash for a lengthy trip – so losing a single now and then is not unheard of. Cruise lines do not speak about it, but it occupied the thoughts of quite a few of these cruising with Rev Nonetheless.

Mine was a Phileas Fogg-style whizz about the planet in 80 days, which is a drop in the ocean compared with most circumnavigations. Silversea’s 2025 controtempo planet cruise (so-referred to as due to the fact it begins in Tokyo) lasts 136 days. Pah! That is absolutely nothing. Regent Seven Seas Cruises’ 2025 circumnavigators will be at sea for 150 nights, throughout which time they will imbibe about 11,000 bottles of champagne and consume some 200,000 eggs. 

Not to be beaten (pun unintended), Oceania Cruises and Viking present 180-day planet cruises, when Royal Caribbean International has an epic 274-evening voyage. It was 70 per cent sold a week right after going on sale, with half of these who booked performing the entire point (planet cruises are also readily available in sections). All that, and you only unpack as soon as.

It is time adequate for friendships to kind (a group on my cruise told me they met up every single year on a round-the-planet sailing) and romances and eccentricities to blossom. One particular instance is the Fred Olsen passenger who believed it would be a great wheeze to come to an Indian-themed celebration dressed as the elephant god Ganesha. “We had to clarify that it wasn’t proper, specially as a lot of our crew are Indian,” Spicer says. Cunard had a retired surgeon who wanted to play golf in each port. The crew pulled it off, even if a single time it was just a hole in a field.

Viking has initiation ceremonies that involve ice-filled pools and glugs of the Norwegian firewater aquavit. On its 2019 planet cruise, a bunch of knitters got with each other and produced much more than one hundred hats for babies in Madagascar, which a month prior to the ship’s get in touch with had been devastated by Cyclone Idai.

QE2’s initially planet cruise, in 1975, price from $four,800 per particular person for an inside cabin (equivalent to £3,994 at present exchange prices), which was high-priced back then but a snip compared with right now. Not that a planet cruise has to break the bank. Settle for an inside cabin and you can have 120 nights on Ambassador Cruise Line’s 2024 planet cruise from £7,999 per particular person, or 99 nights on P&ampO Cruises from £9,629.