Mon 06.02.12 – Tue 07.02.12:

As dawn broke over the eastern horizon, the Sea Princess eased herself under the Sydney Harbour bridge, bringing to a close the mini adventure I’ve been on since I last passed under the bridge on P&O’s Pacific Pearl. I had stayed up all night with Joseph, Joey, Richard, Sarah, Jacinta, Rachael, Niki, Andrea and Angiee and my fatigue was starting to show. I did the customs thing and then returned to my cabin, only then remembering that I hadn’t even started packing.

I was met off the ship by David Jones, the head honcho at Carnival here in Sydney, as well as a Channel 7 news team. After a quick bleary-eyed interview David took me to the Carnival head office where I was scheduled to conduct a short talk with the staff about my travels. Condensing three years of travel into 15 minutes ain’t easy, but I think I covered the main points. After profusely thanking David and the team for their generosity and being 100% genuine when I said that the cruise was a total blast, I headed out to Leichardt to meet with my old friend Alex Zelenjak.

After a couple of drinks in Alex’s (startlingly cheap) local, we returned to his flat for pizza and the all-important talking of bollocks. The next day I had a radio interview over the phone at 6.20am: I can’t remember quite what I said, or even what radio station it was. In the afternoon, when I was a little more lucid, I went to the 2GB radio station for a recorded interview in the studio and, this time, remembered to name-drop Princess Cruises who had sorted all this publicity in the first place.

So then it was a taxi with the lovely Christine from the MD Media company (the publicists for Carnival Australia) and dropped off at the bus station for an overnighter back to Melbourne. ‘Luxury’ they call the coach. Ha! Luxury… they don’t know the meaning of the word.