You've planned for months paid a fortune and have now embarked on the cruise of a lifetime. Writer Gwyn Topham tells Marina Skinner about the horrors that can happen on board ship.

I declare my hand straight away. I've been on two Pacific cruises. On the first, the ship turned back to Auckland after two and a half days because it sprang a leak. On the second, a stomach virus confined me to my cabin for two days - two of the three port days of the cruise.

I know other people adore cruising - my partner, my daughter among them - and I can see its many charms. But I take comfort from the belief that I will never set sail on a cruise liner again.

Overboard: The Stories Cruise Lines Don't Want Told, released in New Zealand last week, is not the sort of publicity cruise companies seek. It was written by Gwyn Topham, the travel editor of the British Guardian Unlimited website, who spent six months working for the Sydney Morning Herald last year. He covered part of the coroner's inquest into the death of Dianne Brimble on a Pacific Sky cruise, and his interest in the sometimes grubby reality of cruising was piqued.

The inquest into Mrs Brimble's death in 2002 from toxic levels of alcohol and a party drug resumes in Sydney on February 5, after starting last March. Lurid, cruel stories of her first night on the Pacific Sky - and her last night alive - have been told. She danced with men at a nightclub, and her drinks might have been spiked. Other passengers were shown digital photos of her having sex and passed out naked on a cabin floor. She was found dead the next morning, and if anyone was responsible for her death, they have yet to be identified.

Her death is as sad a tale of cruising as you're likely to find in the pages of Topham's book. But this is not his only story of death at sea. A 15-year-old Irish girl, Lynsey O'Brien, in January 2005 fell overboard off the coast of Mexico while vomiting after drinking heavily in a bar. Her body was never found. Between 2003 and 2005, cruise industry figures show 24 passengers and four crew members disappeared from cruise ships, Topham writes. Then there are the unhappy or inebriated passengers who take it upon themselves to jump overboard. Rescue is not usually possible.

Okay, with millions of people taking cruises every year, the chance of coming to a grisly end is highly unlikely. But, by Topham's reckoning, there are plenty of other more common unpleasant aspects to cruising. Noroviruses, also known as viral gastroenteritis, are tiny but effective ways of ruining a once-in-a-lifetime holiday at sea. Outbreaks of stomach upsets are not confined to cruise ships but the cramped quarters of the ships hasten their spread. "Even the new Freedom of the Seas - the enormous ship that Royal Caribbean launched last year - had huge outbreaks where hundreds of people got this norovirus and ended up projectile-vomiting, locked in their cabins for a couple of days," Topham says on the phone from London: "When it starts, it goes through the ship very quickly".

Some ships rate poorly for sanitation. Cunard's Queen Elizabeth 2 scored just 79 per cent in a 2000 United States sanitisation inspection. The spread of viruses isn't solely the cruise lines' fault, of course. Topham says one passenger told him that on his cruise women used the sanitising liquid in dispensers outside the dining rooms but the men walked straight past them.

The risk of becoming ill isn't putting people off cruising. Topham attributes this to declining fares and cruising's appealing image. "The British think it's a glamorous thing to do still, especially for older people. In Australia it seems like it's become quite a party scene," he says. "In America, it's a huge thing there. A lot of them don't have passports, and don't travel particularly, yet they all do these cruises. I've even seen advice to Americans reminding them . . . about taking passports or getting travel insurance. They didn't realise that when you get off the boat in a certain port you are in a foreign port and things can happen to you."

After getting stuck into the tacky side of cruising – shuffleboard and drinking games – and the stigma that sticks to former cruise ship entertainers, could Topham be accused of being a snob? "I think it's always had these slightly camp and comic overtones in Britain – there's always that slightly cheesy thing of being at sea. It's seen as a touristy thing to do in that snobbish sense." Topham interviewed former cruising staff and passengers for his book, which makes many other criticisms of the industry, including the poor pay and conditions for most crew; the huge numbers of passengers descending on ports; and the terrible pollution ships create.

Topham says the cruise lines are trying to improve and want to be seen to be doing the right thing. "I hope that in the book I have been fair to the cruise lines and generally put their side of it, and, as I say in the preface, most people are going and having a good time, and this is just a compendium of all the bad bits, really. P & O, for example, in Australia have certainly taken a lot of measures to improve their security and recently they banned the schoolies cruises (for school-leavers) and changed their alcohol-serving policy.

"Some of the things I don't think they've addressed yet, but they have a lot older ships in Australia. A lot of the improvements to things like the environment are generally coming with new ships – you're seeing that in America."

Topham went on a short cruise along the South American coastline a few years ago, and his research hasn't deterred him from going on another cruise. "One of the things I always thought before I started writing the book was that a cruise would be boring but I don't think that anymore."

stuff.co.nz

24 January 2007