Hell is a ship with other people

Original TripAdvisor Review

On the 10.5 hour overnight ferry from Sardinia to Genoa there are not enough cabins for all of the passengers. If you miss the cabins, an alternative option is to book a seat. The seats look plush in the images and they lean right back. I paid to reserve one.

It is best to arrive at the port early. Italian ports operate with almost no signage and queues of traffic with undefined endpoints merge, bifurcate, and intersect at random. At the smaller ports these queues mix with the traffic of the town in which the port is situated. At any given time you have no idea whether you are queuing for the supermarket car park or a ferry.

The Italians have a sense outsiders lack which tells them which queue to join and when it is possible to pull out of the queue, drive past it and pull back in at the correct location in the far distance. Presumably this sense is why the only signs you see are: 'PORTO', with helpful arrows pointing in the direction of the sea.

After boarding, we saw there were seat numbers on the ticket, but we hadn't selected a seat when booking, "Do we need to sit here?" I said, pointing at the number on the ticket.

"No, no, seats are free. Sit anywhere." said the receptionist.

We arrived at the seating area, set up like a large aeroplane with rows of seats in three columns. It was a room full of people who all wanted the best possible seat for themselves, all holding tickets that have seat numbers.

Many people had not noticed the tiny number on the ticket. Some had noticed and assumed that they need to sit where the number says. These people were German or Dutch. People with bad seats were ignoring the numbers or they had learnt from reception that the seat number on their ticket has no bearing on the seat that they are allowed to sit in. The people with good seat numbers stuck to the reasonable logic of "I have a ticket with this seat number on it. You do not. You need to move." The crew who could have acted as peacemakers were nowhere to be seen.

In the seating confusion we secured seats in the front row of one of the sections and placed our yoga mats and towels in front of us. On the five hour journey to Sardinia we had seen people sitting happily on yoga mats and towels. This time we'd brought ours. We were in the know.

We were glad to have this option. The seats are nothing like the pillowed cloud of an armchair that was advertised. They are dense and covered in shiny plastic. They do lean back, but almost imperceptibly.

The long night begins.

Two hours in this chair and you finally surrender to the nagging thought which arose the moment you sat down, "I cannot sleep here." An ache has spread through your body. You have tried every contortion that your flexibility allows. You know the only reason you stayed this long is because you paid for it.

So many people are walking in and out of the seating area that you cannot sleep in front of the chair without being stepped on. Some of your neighbours' frames are very well cladded. The man at the end looks like he has bladder issues. You need to move.

You wander through the now fully loaded ship. Every dark corner and padded sofa is taken. You lament that had you left the seat earlier one of those spots could have been yours. Staying put you have also missed an interesting transformation, the ship is now carpeted with air mattresses.

It cannot be that hundreds of people sleep on air mattresses on their holidays. These people must take air mattresses on holiday just for the ship. Some of these mattresses fit so perfectly into the darkened alcoves that you wonder whether they were made for them. Is an entire niche of the air mattress market focused on these ships?

The yoga mat that you smugly brought on board now singles you out as an overnight ferry amateur.

The crew do not seem to think eight air mattresses by the stairs are a safety hazard. You wonder if watching Jack and Rose battle past air mattresses as water poured into the passageways would have made the Titanic a better film.

You find a play area. A huge carpeted room, most of it empty space for children to run. There is a climbing gym with netted rope gangways spanning gaps between platforms. Until now you never realised that they look just like hammocks. The multiple levels of the platforms are all gloriously padded. And all of them are already full. Maybe the ball pit is-? No, after shining a light into the multicoloured balls and looking closer, hands, feet, and some patches that must be denim are visible. No room.

On an overnight Italian ferry you will learn that there are types of air mattress that you did not know existed. Some air mattresses in this play area are so large that they are indistinguishable from beds. People are a meter above the ground on king size air mattresses. They have pillows, duvets, and eye masks. Some have bedside tables with lamps on. It is surreal.

As you look at the flotilla of mattresses in the room, the thinness of the yoga mat rolled under your arm pounds at your sanity. All of the darker areas are taken, you roll out your mat under one of the room's many spotlights. You look jealously at the mattresses and tents around you. The tents probably have mattresses in them too, you think.

Everyone in the room is trying to sleep except one group who are sitting outside their tent on camping chairs. They have bottles of beer in the armrests and they cheers them often. Clink! Clink! Clink! They are mainly talking quietly. Except one woman whose high pitched, excited voice cuts across the room. She chatters endlessly.

The air in the room is stale and musty. You can feel the fumes of the ship's engine. Spaced around you people are snoring. Deep, throat shredding snores. KKKKKrrrrrckkk-Ukk. Some of the mattress people have no sheets and their naked skin squeaks loudly against the plastic every time they move. They move a lot.

At 1am a brave woman near you has had enough. She is a fellow yoga mat sufferer. She stands up and walks over to the campsite. The tent vibrates violently and bulges as a beast inside barks madly and lunges at her. She jumps backwards before regaining courage, "Can you please be quiet?" she says. You can't tell whether the campsite can hear her over the furious, snarling animal. The entire room is awake again. You have disturbed the peace the room thinks looking at her and the shaking, barking tent. You think it is not fair that she gets the blame. She walks quickly back to her mat. The chattering woman is quieter after that and allows other miseries a chance to torment you.

The snoring, the skin squeaking, the fumes, the numbness in your hip, the rocking floor, they form a mind splitting symphony. You feel smothered and sick. There is a rasping heat crouched in your sternum, threatening you.

The anger you feel at your self-inflicted, cabinless situation is stopping you feeling tired. You try to breathe deeply and calm down. The fumes and musty carpet dive deep into your chest and hook the hot bile in your sternum and start to drag it upwards. You revert to quick shallow breaths.

You see a large dog across the room and learn that dogs can look seasick. He is motionless. Trying not to move lest he throws up. He knows his owners are furious at him whenever he throws up. His eyes are wide open and wretched. They look into yours and recognise the kinship that you are feeling.

You unfold yourself creakily. There must be some place better to sleep on this ship of the damned.

You walk down timeless, brightly lit hallways with fake marble floors. People are laying down on every surface. They have twisted themselves to fit onto S-shaped benches. One is laying across the info desk with her head on the phone. Two women have fallen asleep crammed into the mickey mouse kids' ride in the arcade. You think about putting a coin in to set it off. There is a room with televisions running soundlessly. People group loosely around them them like forgotten souls around a chink of light. They watch vacantly.

You go up to the upper deck and step out into the wind and see the dark expanse of sea. A few maniacs are on the deck, curled in sleeping bags behind bulky masses that provide slight protection from the wind. You see a room with dark eyes looking out from behind bars, locks are slid over the doors. It is a kennel. You peer in hopefully, but the cages are far too short for you and so you move on.

You go back to the room with the chairs where you began. As you enter a cinema of faces look back at you. Frozen upright in their chairs with rigor mortis setting in, they appear terrified. They grimace in the sunk costs crisis they have fallen into. You turn around. It is not something you want to see.

You go back to your mat and lay down.

There are flashes outside the window. At first you think it's a light on the ship, but it is lightning. It becomes more frequent and gets closer and the ship begins to rock. You thought that the ship was rocking before but it wasn't. It was barely moving. Now it swings.

As the boat rolls the people around you become an orchestra of torturous pendulums. RRRRrrrrpppp. RRRRrrrrppppp. That skin rubbing symphony ripples out with each sway of the ship. The snorers have not stopped snoring, but their snores now change pitch with the rolls of their bodies. You glance at the dog. He blinks slowly at you.

Laying there, not sleeping, with your stomach gyrating around its acid, the acid becomes the center of you. The acid is the air bubble of the spirit level that is you. It becomes your existence and engulfs you. Seasickness has become something you cannot help but vocalise with prehistoric groans.

Some time that you did not notice the ship stopped swinging. It is calmer now. You find yourself curled in a tight ball and unfurl tentatively. You feel tired. Maybe you can sleep. Someone begins unzipping bags. Infinite zips on infinite bags.

You roll over onto your back. You never realised how much your insignificant mass was able to crush you into the ground. Beached whales and tranquilised rhinos are added to seasick dogs as creatures that you now have something in common with. The area of skin that you hadn't noticed move off your thin yoga mat onto the carpet has a rash. Unfathomably a neighbour in one of the tents decides to open and noisily eat a large bag of chips.

The high-frequency ripping sound of the immense friction forces between skin and plastic mattress wakes you again.

A dog is walked too close to another and they erupt in barks and yaps. The too late, panicked hushes of the owners have no effect on the dogs. The room awakens and rumbles with a plastic mattress thunderstorm. The owners must know there is a kennel.

You almost fall asleep when you hear someone say your name. You pull the t-shirt off your face. The person that said your name was just a pair of flip-flops moving past. Flip-flops carrying one of the one thousand bladders in this godforsaken playpen to the toilet. Those feet will soon be back as the crew has locked almost every single toilet, leaving just a few secluded bathrooms open. Every trip to the toilet is forced to criss-cross the entire ship in an increasingly panicked tempo. It occurs to you that wearing flip-flops to walk through a room of sleeping people is incredibly rude.

At 7 A.M. the tannoy wakes you, announcing that you need to get up as the ship is beginning its docking operations. In the only just brighter light of day you see that you have slept near a pillar that has a microfilm of rusty liquid running down it to the carpet below. Civilisations of moss and mould have reached advanced stages at its bottom. You cough and think your throat feels strange.

A couple on a king size meter thick air mattress backed snugly into a dark alcove sit up. Removing their eye masks they stretch and yawn. They look tired.

The official arrival was scheduled for 7:30 A.M. but you will not leave the ship for two more hours. In a less shell shocked state you would have noticed that the harbour is in fact nowhere to be seen. They were just trying to sell you breakfast.

At the 7 A.M. announcement the passengers begin to crowd at the exits. You join them. Desperate to escape. After an hour you go out to the deck to escape the increasing tension by the doors. It felt as if a riot was building.

At 9 A.M. you are down in the guts of the ship. The engines of the cars shout impatiently, the door to freedom lowers down slowly. As you weave through towards your car you see the seasick dog. He moves towards you and the owner braces himself, wrapping the lead twice around his thick hand such that he cannot pull away. You reach out. The owner says 'Vorsichtig'. The dog tilts his nose up at you and you rub the top of his head. The owner is surprised, normally the dog is not good with strangers he says. It's ok you say, you press your forehead to the dog's thick skull, "We've been through a lot together." The owner is perplexed as you walk away.