On a River Cruise: pleasures and perspectives

We are back on the river again. 

Five years ago my wife and I took a river cruise on the Danube. We travelled upstream from Budapest to southern Germany. I wrote a blog charting our progress day by day. We enjoyed it so much (and learned so much) that we decided to make the journey downstream from Budapest to the Black Sea one day, if we could. Retirement has given us that opportunity. So here we are on board the MS William Wordsworth gliding seawards. Once again, I’m writing a blog about the voyage as we make it. I’ll publish it soon after we get back when I’ve had time to process my thoughts about the cruise, tidy up the writing, correct factual errors, remove actionable comments and include some photographs. 

Meanwhile, I thought I’d reflect briefly on the experience of river cruising. This is now the third time we’ve chosen this pleasant way of taking a holiday. The first was the Danube voyage I’ve just mentioned, and then, two years ago, a Rhine cruise from Cologne to Strasbourg and back. There’s lots that’s really enjoyable about it. Compared to cruises by sea, river cruising is small-scale and intimate. The company is convivial and the conversation often lively. The ships carry no more than 100 to 150 passengers (fewer on this cruise) so it’s fine for introverts, believe me! And unlike sea voyages, the scenery is changing around you all the time. The river does all the work. You only have to unpack your suitcase once and you only have to sleep in one bed. 

It’s hugely relaxing to sit on deck or in your own cabin watching villages, towns and landscapes drift past. The excursions to places of interest are tailored to the particular theme of the cruise and participants’ likely interests. On this cruise, we have seen two Hungarian cathedrals, several museums, and visited an extraordinary late Roman underground Christian burial site. We have walked round the capital of Serbia, Belgrade, not a city on many people’s bucket list but fascinating for its long and troubled history from the Roman Empire to the Balkan Wars. We have sailed down the spectacular Kazan Gorge through the Iron Gates, once the most dangerous stretch of the entire river for its treacherous shallows, rocks and cataracts. 

At its most enriching, travel will be both enjoyable and inspiring. But it also needs, I think, to be ethical and to offer new perspectives. I’ve suggested what’s enjoyable about river cruising. When you’re as well looked after as you are on a cruise ship, what’s not to enjoy? But that in itself raises ethical concerns. Tourism that entails air travel (which this trip does) at once poses questions about environmental sustainability. A river cruise ship, however modest compared to its huge ocean counterparts, still adds to my carbon footprint. What’s more, our ship is a bubble of luxury and privilege compared with most peoples’ lifestyles in the countries through which we are sailing, all of which are taking decades to recover from forty years of communist rule. It’s true that none of these ethical challenges is unique to travel. We face them at home on a daily basis. But travel at its best heightens them by making us more aware of our context and more sensitive to it. Like so much else that we enjoy, it’s a case of discerning how to find pleasure in principled ways, with integrity and conscience, never taking any of it for granted.

Inspiration, too, seems to me to be an essential ingredient of the good journey. I mean by that the capacity of travel to stretch our horizons, make us see the world and ourselves in new ways, be genuinely touched by what we experience and enjoy. All this happens, I think, when we make the decision to travel not as spectators but as participants. “Those who never travel think mother is the only cook” says a Bantu proverb. A couple of weeks ago I was in Santiago de Compostela with a group of clergy from Wales. I’d been asked to lead four Bible studies on the theme of pilgrimage. The central insight I wanted to share was that the difference between tourism and pilgrimage is that while tourists observe, pilgrims join in. To me, this is fundamental to travelling ethically and with a good conscience: trying whenever we can to engage with local people and their culture, allow ourselves to be enriched and inspired by what we encounter and join in with. You can read my blog about our pilgrimage to Santiago here.

Which brings me to my final ingredient of a good voyage, which is that there is that aspect of it that searches us, interrogates us, asks us how we might be changed as a result of what we discover and experience. Again, in my pilgrimage talks in Spain, the theme of transformation was central. We should not go home from our journeys the same as we arrived! In the case of Eastern Europe, I am finding that I am being challenged about my awareness of modern European history, especially the ordeals the Warsaw Pact countries went through under communism. On this cruise we are visiting places in former Iron Curtain countries Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria as well as Serbia and Croatia, part of the non-aligned communist former Yugoslavia. Many of the ship’s crew members come from these countries. Some of them are glad to share their experiences of life in nations with recent histories that are so different from ours. 

For example this afternoon we listened to one of them give an illuminating talk about growing up in communist Hungary in the 1970s and 80s. He described what life was like in those bad old days - acknowledging, he said, that times were nowhere near as bad then as they had been in the 1950s and 60s. The uprising of 1956 and its brutal repercussions are seared on the corporate memory of Hungarians of all ages. It’s good that a cruise can make room for potentially uncomfortable content like this so that we can be intelligent guests of these countries rather than mere voyeurs. It’s to be hoped that one of the benefits will e to make us not only better informed but more curious. The best travellers are surely those who are excited by a sense of curiosity. Isn’t that what makes us want to travel in the first place?

This cruise has made us think of more recent events too, the Balkan Wars that brought such misery to the nations of the former Yugoslavia. Serbia had a central role in those conflicts. People like me who are champions for the European Union often say that thanks to the EU, our continent has enjoyed seventy five years of peace. That’s true of the EU nations. But not of the Balkans. It’s sobering to see in Belgrade, for example, ruined buildings that were bombed by the NATO allies in an attempt to call a halt to Serbia’s aggression in the wars of the 1990s. (But the very fact that I state it in that way perhaps betrays my own western assumptions about the causes of those conflicts in the first place.) On the return journey we shall stop at Vukovar, a town that suffered terribly when it was on the front line of this desperate conflict. It will no doubt be a searching experience, and very possibly a troubling one. 

We set out on this journey on the day the UK voted in the European Parliamentary elections. (We voted first, then headed for the airport in case you’re wondering.) Today, we have been digesting the results of the elections both in Britain and across the EU. It seemed nicely symbolic to be afloat in central Europe while the outcomes were being analysed and debated, with an EU country on one side of the Danube (Romania) and a candidate EU state on the other (Serbia). Lively conversations about the elections are taking place on this ship too. So I’m grateful that this cruise is not simply about having beautiful experiences, but is posing real questions to us about the politics of Europe east and west, our European identity, and more broadly, our vision for the good society. What could be more important? Or necessary? And, I want to say, stimulating too. That’s a big part of the enjoyment.