“How is this even real?!”: my first ever cruise made me question the very fabric of reality

A lot of people talk about Simulation Theory nowadays. The idea is that our universe could be an elaborate film set made by a higher intelligence. Like The Truman Show, only we’re all Jim Carrey. Others use a video-game metaphor: the world needn’t load every pixel till you’re there to see it. So ‘reality’ is an infinite sea of wave-like probabilities snapping into something solid when you look.

Now, despite it being popular with podcasters and tech mavens – Elon’s a fan – I’ve always thought it a bit far fetched. Right up until I boarded the AmaMagna on the Danube in Giurgiu, Romania. Because when you lie on your stately bed in your stateroom, staring out of your floor-to-ceiling windows, you are presented with a flawless projection of landscape.

So far so normal. But there’s an uncanny quality. First, the window immaculately frames your view, omitting neighbours and other distractions. Second, the ship moves with a ghostly hush: the purling water is what’s loudest. And finally, it is smoother than a cruise-ship crooner. So quiet and smooth, in fact, that you feel as if you’re not moving at all. And then you begin to question physics.

Every other vessel I’ve been on either rocked with the wind or hummed an unremitting diesel dirge. So this was odd. Nice odd. But odd. For the first hour, I felt as if, perhaps, reality was being generated for my pleasure. The Sims: Cruise Life.

Part of the reason this trompe l’oeil is so convincing is that the southern Danube is much less eventful than the Viennese drama of the north. Here, through the old Eastern Bloc, one is gently presented with a modest sort of beauty. The kind that doesn’t change much and therefore makes space for micro-excitements: a bridge, a duck, a solitary fisherman. When a skein of geese skimmed the water past our cabin, I spat out my latte and hollered to my dozing beloved to come and see. The rest of the time, the conveyor belt of nature looked like a late Turner study, washes of yellow, red and brown articulating the serried poplar and willow on the banks. What I’m trying to say is that it was pretty.

We were, probably by a decade or so, the youngest guests aboard. And yet we were, by any measure, the most boring. I have never sat still for so long in my life. Like an Italian grandad, I did nothing on my balcony for hours at a time, experiencing what life must’ve felt like before broadband. I’d have gone full analogue were it not for the boat’s defcon wifi (the captain later told me that they spend more on connectivity than fuel).

When everyone – and I mean everyone – alighted for the daily excursions, we delighted in staying put. My favourite spot to loaf was the ship’s miniature libraries, one on each side of the bow. A faux fire with complementary crackle sounds flickered as I sipped a decent cab sauv (boat wine is usually swill) and read The Oldie magazine’s 2009 annual in an armchair. Dolce far niente, I think the nonnos call it.

Eventually, I decided it was time to take a tour. Two, in fact, on consecutive days. The first, in down-at-heel Vidin, wasn’t to my taste. After 20 minutes of suffering a lugubrious guide, we waited for the pack to walk around a corner and ran off like naughty school children. I asked ChatGPT to show us something it thought I’d like and it suggested an abandoned Soviet-era observatory a few hundred yards away.

The building is a surreal communist relic. Originally intended to bring “astronomy to the masses”, it never found its footing. The weather didn’t help: Vidin is perennially cloudy and the Danube is God’s own dry ice machine. A false start turned to a full stop when the Iron Curtain fell. Nowadays, it’s a derelict place for teenage hook-ups and UFO sightings. I climbed a set of overgrown stairs and hopped around the roof. “Imagine explaining this to my travel insurer,” I shouted to my beloved below, as I balanced precariously to peer through its broken dome. Fun.

From there, we walked, like Girl Guides on tour, atop an ancient wall that ran parallel to the river, ultimately ending at Vidin’s star attraction, the medieval Baba Vida Fortress. A mooch of its grassy ramparts was cut short when we spotted our group yonder and made another dash for it. The glasses of wine we bought in a local bar tasted like a vinaigrette from Chernobyl, so I surreptitiously walked them to the loo before suggesting we repair to the safety of our library for a game of chess. They had the pieces, but no board, so one was expediently printed off on paper for us. Now that’s service.

The other tour, in Vukovar, was excellent. An ebullient academic took us up the Vukovar Water Tower, delivering a lucid and moving account of its role in the siege of the city during the Yugoslav Wars. In 1991, 1,800 Croatian policemen and civilians held out against a force of some 36,000, using the tower as an observation post. It was hit more than 600 times but never fell and each time the Croatian flag was shot down, someone climbed to the top to raise it again.

That evening, we bravely mounted our own rooftop to drink fizz alone in the hot tub as snow fell around us. AmaMagna moved along with such liquid celerity that it reminded me of Jamiroquai’s seminal single ‘Virtual Insanity’. In it, the floor of an apartment moves beneath the singer giving the impression of a space walk. At that moment, I realised the best thing about being on a cruise is that the destination politely comes to you, rather than you to it. One travels without moving. And you get all the credit. Is that not the ultimate luxury?

Duly, it felt as if we’d defied Newtonian mechanics again when we glided into Serbia’s capital, Belgrade. After a solo tour of the Nikola Tesla museum, I joined my ship mates for a plum brandy tasting. Rakia, as it’s called, is not love at first sip. As our host explained: “I describe everything in song names and this is ‘Burning Love’.” It’s also, she informed us, an effective prophylactic against Covid. But actually it grew on me. Enough to buy a souvenir measure in a bottle that looked like an artist’s tube of paint. The perfect feint for the travelling lush.

For the boat geeks reading this, you may be interested to know that the AmaMagna is special because at 22 metres it’s almost twice as wide as a typical European river ship. It only sails on the Danube, where the locks are big enough to receive its girth. Speaking of, going through the Iron Gates dam, with its Suez-core lock, was another of those quiet excitements. In the same vein, a special mention must go to the laundry team, whose immaculate turnaround of my socks sits confidently atop the trip highlights list.

“Relaxing” is a word so egregiously overused by travel marketeers as to be rendered bereft of any semantic value. But here, to my astonishment, the brochure delivered. Not bad for a video game, eh?