Around the World in 99 Nights - We Did a world cruise!

Long before the North Pole or Iceland, one of the trips that really set the tone for our life at sea was a 99-night world cruise aboard P&O’s Arcadia in 2018, sailing from Southampton on the 9th of January and looping the entire globe before arriving back home in the UK in April.

The itinerary alone reads like a bucket list: Madeira, Barbados, Curaçao, a full transit of the Panama Canal, Mexico, San Francisco, Hawaii, the South Pacific, New Zealand, Australia, the Great Barrier Reef, Manila, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Vietnam, Singapore, Malaysia, Sri Lanka, India, Dubai, Oman, Jordan, Egypt and the Suez Canal, before finishing up through the Mediterranean. Three months, five continents, and more stage set-ups than we could count.

A few stops, though, have stayed with us ever since.

Singapore After Dark

Singapore by day is impressive enough, but Singapore by night is something else entirely. We weren’t singing in the evening that day, so we took an evening to see Gardens by the Bay, where the towering Supertrees light up after sunset in a synchronised sound-and-light show — futuristic, slightly surreal, and completely unlike anywhere else on the itinerary. It’s the kind of place that makes you understand why Singapore keeps winning “most liveable city” lists.

Hong Kong’s Food Scene

A day long Hong Kong stop gave us just enough time to dip our Char Sui Buns into the culinary scene here, as the food was the highlight by a distance — from street-side dai pai dong stalls to dim sum that reset our entire understanding of what a dumpling could be. Hong Kong has one of the highest concentrations of restaurants per person of anywhere on Earth, and after a couple of hours there, our stomachs didn’t want us to leave.

Shanghai’s Scale

Shanghai was a genuine jaw-drop moment — the Bund’s colonial-era buildings staring directly across the river at Pudong’s forest of ultra-modern skyscrapers, a city that seems to contain about three different centuries at once depending on which way you’re facing. We couldn’t get our head round the mass of humanity at any one place at a time. And we’ve lived in London most of our lives!

Petra, Jordan

Docking in Aqaba gave us the chance to take an excursion inland to Petra, the ancient Nabataean city carved directly into rose-coloured sandstone cliffs. I had been there before with the family, but it was Rach’s first time seeing the facades and where Indiana Jones rode his horse! Walking through the narrow Siq canyon and having the Treasury facade suddenly open up in front of you is one of those “actually speechless” travel moments — a UNESCO World Heritage Site that still has an estimated 85% of it unexcavated. What an unbelievable experience that was.

San Francisco: Alcatraz and the Piers

On the other side of the world entirely, San Francisco gave us Alcatraz — the former federal penitentiary sat right out in the bay, now a genuinely fascinating (if slightly eerie) museum — and the classic wander around Fisherman’s Wharf and Pier 39, sea lions included.

Performing on a World Cruise

World cruises are a different beast entirely from a standard week-long sailing — the same guests are with you for months, which means constantly refreshing the show so you’re never repeating yourself, and getting to know an audience properly rather than playing to a new crowd every few days. As a harmony duo, it gave us loads of room to dig into our full 700-plus song repertoire and to start doing more of what we love: telling the stories behind the songs. We’d expanded it to over a 1000 tunes by the end of the 99 days!

Skip the International Date Line Date Night

We crossed the International Date Line on Feb 13th, so it immediately became Feb 15th!! Someone onboard decided to skip Valentine’s Day! (Maybe the husbands onboard all signed a petition.)

This world cruise is still one of the trips we talk about most — proof that sometimes the biggest adventures start with just saying yes to 99 nights at sea.