After our jolt getting into Kepez, Turkey, earlier on my Spirit of Adventure cruise, it was a pleasant surprise when the captain came on the tannoy in my cabin this morning at 7.30am - yes, really, and in the cabin too; there is no sleeping in on this cruise - to announce we had tied up. I hadn't even noticed we had stopped moving.
But imagine my shock when he announced we were in Malta. We had only left Sevastopol late the previous night and were supposed to be in the Black Sea. Was I mistaken? Was it his Aussie burr? Not if half the passengers on this cruise can be believed.
Naturally it was a great joke and the talk of breakfast.
Anyway, the truth is, we had arrived in Yalta, the third and last port in our Black Sea odyssey. Most of us spent the morning at the Livadia Palace, the summer residence of the last Russian Tzar, Nicholas II, and famous as the place where the Big Three - US president Roosevelt, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and Soviet leader Joseph Stalin - met at the end of World War Two to carve up Europe.
According to Irina, guide of bus 6, both Western leaders got tired of Stalin's oneupmanship - he even provided a lemon tree for a US delegate who complained there wasn't a slice of lemon in his drink - so they decided to play a trick on him.
One morning Roosevelt told Stalin he dreamed he was leader of the whole world, Churchill that he was ruler of the universe. Quick as a flash, Stalin said he had also had a dream: that he was the person who refused to sign the papers appointing each of them to these positions.
"It's just a joke," Irina emphasised, having just told us what a kind, hospitable man Stalin was. Or maybe that was the joke?
Jane Archer
