Culinary cruising: Silversea's Silver Nova is a foodie's paradise. Here's why.

Keen foodies will delight over the many culinary experiences available onboard the Silver Nova. Photo / Tim Faircloth
From caviar canapes to elegant French restaurants, foodies looking for the ultimate experience should hop on a cruise ship, writes Ashleigh Cometti
Our private butler, Chester, used the word 'indulge' so many times I'd convinced myself I'd be rolling off the Silver Nova by the time our six-day cruise came

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The Spinoff

9 hours ago

The Spinoff

Riding in the shadow of Nancy Wake

Writer Maria Gill follows the trail of the subject of her next book: New Zealand special operations executive in World War Two, Nancy Wake. 9–11 May 2025: In transit I landed in Paris on a Wednesday, trained to Toulouse to meet my 28-year-old son Tristan and his Irish girlfriend Caoimhe (pronounced Queeva) on the Thursday and picked up rental bikes and caught a train to Châteauroux on the Friday. The mission? Retrace part of Nancy Wake's legendary 630-kilometre bike ride through Nazi-occupied France. My upcoming young adult novel on Wake had pulled me deep into her world. And now, I wanted to feel it in my legs and lungs. In 1944, with her resistance network compromised, Nancy set out alone to find a radio operator in Châteauroux. Denis Rake, Nancy's radio operator, had buried the equipment to prevent it from falling into enemy hands. She needed a new drop from London. No backup. No guarantee. Just a bicycle, a forged identity, and the hope that she'd pass as an ordinary French housewife. The next day, we would set off on Nancy's route, reversed to suit our logistics. Not quite authentic, but close enough to follow her path. 12 May: The ride begins In the city centre we cycled along the ring road, the very place where Nancy once hunted for a hunchbacked radio operator. He turned her away, suspecting a trap. Undeterred, she detoured three hours into the Creuse region to find the Free French; resistance fighters loyal to Charles de Gaulle. They relayed her urgent message. We snapped photographs of the town's old gates and cobbled streets, then set off, supposedly for four hours. Our route skipped Nancy's detour through Bourges and Issoudun, as it added 100 extra kilometres on already dangerous roads. Instead we took the so-called shortcut to Saint-Amand-Montrond. Google Maps led us through tractor rutted paths, across flooded dirt tracks, and along glowing fields of rapeseed in bloom. We passed three-house villages, badgers paddling in ponds, and a lone deer in the woods. Then the rain came-cold, heavy, and relentless. We soon discovered that not all raincoats were waterproof. Ten hours later, soaked and mud-splattered, we finally arrived at our lodgings at 9pm. Tristan, clutching a hot chocolate, looked at me and said, 'This is not how I thought I'd spend my last weeks in Europe.' He was nearing the end of a 20-month Navy course. Not quite the send-off he imagined, but unforgettable. 13 May: Montluçon Sunshine greeted us the next day. We cruised along smooth canal paths to Montluçon, where Nancy and her resistance fighters once reclaimed the town from the Germans, only to retreat days later. At a brasserie we ordered drinks, possibly the same one where the owner had shouted to the resistance fighters, 'It's on the house!' Quaint on the outside, more biker bar on the inside, a heavily tattooed, ring-nosed bartender dropped our drinks with a scowl. Needing supplies, we browsed aisles full of cheese, patisseries, and cured meats that begged to be tasted at a local supermarket. A surly shop assistant, with a revolver tattoo behind her ear, slammed our produce onto scales. A far cry from the villagers who once toasted Nancy's bravery. 14–15 May: Resistance strongholds For the next two days, we stored our bikes in the Airbnb's basement and hired a car to take us to key nearby sites where Nancy fought with the resistance. First stop: Vichy, where Nancy had celebrated the war's end, only to learn the gestapo had executed her husband, Henri Fiocca. It was also where Marshal Philippe Pétain led the Vichy regime in the unoccupied southern zone of France after Germany defeated the country. It's now a busy town that has tried to leave its grisly past behind. But it's there if you look close enough. Historic buildings still bear gun-shot pock-wounds. We searched for the manor house where Nancy, fed-up with sleeping in the woods, decamped in the last months of France's war. After circling Fragnes aimlessly, Tristan pulled it up on a virtual Google Map but refused to join us. 'You're trespassing,' he warned. Caoimhe and I ignored him. We strolled down a quiet country lane and found it: a three-storey château with a bell tower, and an air of untouched history. This was where Nancy and her team had launched plans to sabotage German activities, had supplies from England parachuted in, and where she watched the German army march by, worried they would discover them any minute. We snapped a few photos, then slipped away unseen. The next morning, we drove to Cosne d'Allier where Nancy had parachuted into after a six-month spy training course in England. Near the war's end, she returned with the Spanish resistance to blow up a key bridge in this village. Locals gathered dangerously close to watch. Nancy had to wave them back. The villagers clapped when their bridge exploded before their eyes. Today, the town seems unchanged — same tolling bells, same narrow road, but a modern bridge now spans the river. From there, we drove through the ancient oak forest of Tronçais, once a resistance stronghold. Now a plantation, where logging trucks ruck the tracks to ferry logs out. At a nearby lake, we imagined Nancy bathing while Denis Rake stood guard, preventing any of the 8,000 resistance men taking a sneaky look. We ended the day at a winery. After a generous tasting, we asked what we owed. 'You're not in New Zealand now,' the owner said with a grin. 16 May: Sleet and hills Day three in the saddle: Montluçon to Mérinchal. Google Maps again promised a four-hour ride. We should've known better. Our journey included several steep ascents; one reached a height of 1170 metres. I had an electric bike so could inch up the hills. Tristan and Caoimhe were on push bikes. When Caoimhe couldn't continue, I swapped bikes. My legs quivered. My breath rasped. I'd ridden 20 kilometres daily for a year in preparation, but this was exhausting. Darkening clouds then released freezing sleet that lashed our already worn-out bodies just as we discovered we had another flat tyre. Tristan repaired a tube beneath a crooked lean-to, fingers numb. By the time we reached our destination 10 hours later, we were once again soaked to the bone, shaking, and spent. 17 May: A tactical taxi On day four of the cycling trip, Tristan and Caoimhe refused to ride the full route. By then, my son regretted not hiring electric bikes and had developed a strong dislike for Nancy's legacy. We opted for a taxi, cutting through villages that would've taken us three hours on bikes in just one hour. From Ussel, we cycled the last two hours onto Chabrat. The landscape echoed New Zealand: green fields and cream cows. But the similarities ended there. Every village boasted a Notre Dame church and stone houses centuries old. Many were half-abandoned; shuttered shops, crumbling walls, and endless fields of rapeseed, beautiful but reeking like urine. An unpleasant scent that lingered in the air. 18 May: The final push Two brutal 1,200-metre hills stood between us and our final destination in Laroquebrou. From there, a train would take us to our booked accommodation in Aurillac at 4.40pm. Our early departure took us past sleepy villages, down twisting descents, and up two steep hills. At 4pm we arrived early in the town, a rare occurrence. Laroquebrou hosted a castle on a hill, cobblestone streets, every stone soaked in history. Proud of our progress we celebrated with blonde beer and chocolate biscuits on the platform, beside tracks with grass growing through them. We should have paid more attention to that. Tristan checked the schedule. 'Are you sure it's a train we're catching, not a bus?' Sure enough, a bus flew past the train station. He ran after it. It didn't stop. The crushing reality: we'd have to bike another two hours to Aurillac. Caoimhe and I insisted on the car route, thinking it would be faster. The traffic flew past at over 110km/h. We persevered for 30 minutes, but it was too dangerous. Briefly, we considered a slippery quarry route before abandoning it. Reluctantly, we called a taxi. Forty minutes later it arrived, squeezing our bikes on two bike racks, and the car's boot. 19 May: Toulouse, and reflection In Toulouse, we returned our bikes. A friend later asked: 'Do you think you failed, taking taxis?' Not at all. My goal was to see Nancy's roads, feel her journey, and translate that into my novel; now in its second round of editing with One Tree House. Nancy Wake cycled 630 kilometres in 72 hours, with only one night's rest. She had no gears, no GPS, and death looming at every checkpoint. We rode 300 kilometres (not including the taxi miles) over five days. I rode an electric bike, knowing I would slow the team down if I used a push bike too. My son and his girlfriend, thirty years younger than myself, on geared push-bikes, found it tough going. My military son said, 'In wartime, you draw upon hidden reserves. In peacetime, you have choices.' He hoped he could do the same as Nancy under similar circumstances. Our ride wasn't flawless. There were flat tyres, wrong turns, rain, missed buses, and fatigue-fuelled arguments. But we earned every kilometre. We saw France from her pedals – not from a window seat – but with grit and effort. We glimpsed the forests where Nancy hid, the villages that turned a blind eye, and the fields where she raced against death. That's what makes Nancy's feat extraordinary. Following in her tyre tracks, we found respect and connection. It was a way to understand courage through motion. To trace the path of a woman who risked everything for freedom, and to experience just a shadow of her endurance.

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