Retired cruise liner The QE2 is ready to steam from Dubai to an unknown destination in China, where the once graceful liner will become a floating hotel.
The anchor will be weighed in October after a refurbishment and engine servicing for her final 4,000 mile voyage to a new mooring.
The QE2 sailed from her home port of Southampton, England, for the last time in November 2008, for Dubai after changing hands with from her former owners Cunard for £50 million.
Her current owner is transferring title to a group of investors for an undisclosed price.
The QE2 is scheduled to depart Dubai in a blaze of publicity on October 18, 2013, with stopovers at Singapore and Hong Kong before steaming on to a Chinese shipyard for conversion into a floating hotel.
Famous liners
The ship’s classic fixtures and fittings will be stowed in a secure warehouse in Singapore during the rift.
The current owner had planned a similar fate for the liner in Dubai, but the economic downturn ended those plans.
The liner carried 2.5 million passengers across the Atlantic 800 times after launching in Clydebank, Scotland, in 1967.
Other famous British cruise liners of the same generation as the QE2 met similar fates.
The Oriana was sold to a Japanese firm as a floating hotel and was moored at Osaka in 1986. The venture failed and the Oriana was sold to a Chinese company in 1995, when she was moved and moored at Shanghai.
In 2002 , she was moved again to Dalian, but was badly damaged in a storm two years later and deemed unrepairable. The Oriana was scrapped in 2005.
Suspected arson
The Canberra was a popular cruise liner in the 1960s and 1970s that was requisitioned as a troops ship for the Falklands War.
Her wartime service rekindled her popularity, but high running costs led to The Canberra retiring in 1997, when she was scrapped.
The much older Queen Mary 1 was retired as a cruise liner by Cunard in 1967 and steamed to Long Beach, California, where she has berthed as a floating hotel and tourist attraction.
She cannot move under her own power as most of the boilers and screws have been removed.
The QE1 sank in Hong Kong harbour after a fire in 1972. Investigators suspect arson, as the ship was worth around $5 million but insured for $8 million and fires broke out in several places onboard at the same time.