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Uniworld is over the top....

Yes - a lot of waiting on board the ship as any landing site can only have 100 passengers on the continent at any given time. This is Antarctica law/rules. Because you are daylight 24 hours, we even had excursions that left the ship at 8:30pm at night. This is what they have to do to get everyone a landing especially if there have been weather issues that prevented earlier day landings. We lost one full day to weather but the next four days were amazingly sunny and beautiful and the expedition crew did everything in their power to get us all ashore hence the 8:30pm excursions.

Hello - We did the Hurtigruten Antarctica trip about 18 months ago now and this was the situation then. I cannot comment if anything has changed since, but think not... You are given a metal water bottle when you board. This is in the cabin for you as a brand new item. On each deck near the elevator lobby is a water purifier station that you can fill your personal water bottle with purified water. Hurtigruten does NOT have individual plastic water bottles on the ship. You could bring your own water bottle if you wanted. They have sessions where you can go (free) and decorate/paint your water bottle to customize it. You DO get water at all meals. Every table in the dining room has a glass water carafe on the table and glasses when you sit down. This will be refilled if you drink it all. I am not sure why anyone would say that you have to purchase water at the meal - not true. The only time that you may find that water is not on the table is if the Drake Passage waves are very high and the ship is listing then they will temporarily remove the glass carafes from the tables as they can fall over and crash to the floor. Wine and beer is free flowing at both lunch and dinner. There is no limit that we found. We often has multiple glasses and they freely refill without question. In fact they are quite generous. Some get the glass refilled before leaving the dining room and carry it out with them. The premium beverage package we did not look into because you typically have to purchase that as every person in a cabin and for the entire length of the cruise. Because of the Drake Passage - and the recommendation that you don't drink if you are even remotely seasick - we did not ask or investigate this package. Ideally, there could be 4-5 days that you may not access the package if you are seasick and then you are paying for that time. In fact, we did try to investigate this before travelling until we learned about the Drake Passage no drinking recommendation and could not get any real solid information about a drinks package. You are on your own with this one... Does Hurtigruten have an online planner where you can purchase additional packages? Can you please give me more information? Do you mean prior to the cruise to purchase the optional excursions like snowshoeing and kayaking? If this is what you mean, then NO. No one can purchase these before they trip. You board and there is a sign up process then a lottery draw. There is no need to rush to sign up as long as you are on the list. It is a true lottery and you either win or you don't. These are the excursions that if you DO WIN, then you pay extra. I think that there are 4 or 5 options that you can sign up for. We got snowshoeing and kayaking and some people we talked to got nothing. This all depends on weather and numbers of people that they can actually accommodate of these optional excursions and the fact is that they cannot accommodate everyone on the ship. What are the drink prices? We never really found out... I did order a few vodka drinks but never really looked at the price. We had OBC and were just trying to use that up. The fact is that after dinner we were so physically exhausted from our landings each day that we really never spent time in the lounge after dinner - we often just went to bed. Also there were times that our excursions started at 8:30pm in the evening so we ate and then went on excursion... no drinking before the excursion if you want to endure the physicality of the excursion and be safe. This is different from other cruises - very different. Hope this helps. I will provide some links here for you: Here is our review of our trip during and after: Here is our video - the link in the review is dead:

I am not infallible, however we traveled as soon as travel started up again during/after Covid and we have been in many parts of the world since travel started. One had to get resourceful in understanding what were the travel requirements for every country you were going to and even for the countries that you were transiting through by air. I have spent hours researching and always fall back to the country's own sites for the most accurate information. With things like eTA's and Visas, there are often third party sites with different information and I will always default to a country's own site for the best information. Good luck with it all... you will be fine, I am certain.

Found the prescription: Was prescribed Streptoquin, Ciprofloxacin, and Visceralgine by the Doctor at the hotel. Within 24 hours I was ok to fly home. Not out of the woods, but ok to fly.

My doctor visit - all done in the hotel room - included an IV with anti-spasmodics and then three prescription pills. The main anti-biotic was Ciprofloxacin and then one other - cannot remember the name - and also pill based anti-spasmodics. The prescription pills were 7-10 day duration and less than $5.00 CDN for all three. No English on the boxes of pills except the drug name. The doctor visit was $200 USD arranged by the hotel. I asked the Doctor if he has many hotel calls, and his response was that this was his business. This was all he did - hotel calls for tourists. For future travel like this I will meet with my GP at home in advance and see if there are any recommended prescriptions I can take with me to be prepared. I had no idea that Immodium would not work. I have friends in Australia that do crazy travel to very remote areas where hygiene is not always first thought, and they carry a range of drugs with them to combat bugs that they might pick up.

I want to ask a really innocent question here to understand this. Please don't take this as an insult or with any intent to offend.... Why do you want to travel with a gay group and not just meet whoever on a ship? For me, I was immersed in gay culture and everything gay when I was younger, but for a very long time - decades - been removed from any suggestion of gay culture, and just don't feel any need or desire to include that in my life. Don't get me wrong, we have gay friends, both single and coupled, but they are truly a very small percentage of our friendship base. My joy is meeting and talking to everyone and anyone and is not based on who they are with. Again, there is no offence intended in this question, I am just curious as to why you would want to travel in a gay group? Perhaps I am missing something and this might be something that we should consider?

We went Hurtigruten. At the time they were less than half the price PP than Viking. That aside, as Viking loyal cruisers, we decided that this cruise was about the expedition and not about the restaurant or the theatre or a spa. We also found after the fact that Viking excursions are easier and less demanding than those of Hurtigruten - we would have been upset had we gone Viking. Hurtigruten expeditions were physically demanding, but that was what we signed up for. To your question.... Our story in a very brief set of bullet points. Left Ushuaia on time. Drake Passage 9-11 metre waves First morning at lunch Captain informs us we are returning to Ushuaia because of an ill passenger. Turns out that she fell in the high waves and broke her hip and this was far too extensive for ship medical to take on, and we were just starting our journey. We immediately thought - crap - here is a day of our journey lost. Turns out that Hurtigruten builds in time for weather and other delays. Captain turned our journey around so instead of sailing to the southern most part of our journey we started at the north end and then modified as we went. We were to have 5 full days around the continent - which we did. BUT, there is still no guarantee that you will land on the continent any given day. The first day was to be Deception Island and we arrived but the weather was too uncooperative for landing so we sailed around instead. We lost one day of landing. Next four days were superb weather and we got landings every day. With Antarctica you are never guaranteed that you will land. In our first briefing the Cruise Director informed us that they start with Plan A everyday and move to B, C, D, E, F and to whatever it takes to get us to something... Plans are constantly on the move, and you have to be flexible. Heck, the Viking ship left one or two days early because of the Zodiac accident and then was hit by the rogue wave. Plans change. We did a LOT of research before taking this trip and we were hit with a potential disaster with the first day in the Drake Passage, but our expedition crew worked overtime when we were at the continent and we got what we felt was our money's worth out of the experience. However, if you lose one day - which we did - or two days, that is just the luck of the draw. The crews and Captain are expert at navigating around the weather which can change in a moments notice. They have many, many landing spots that they can take you to. My suggestion is go with a long experienced cruise line. Here is our experience. The opening scenes are around Deception Island, and the weather does not look that bad, but for launching Zodiacs is was....

The tour company that hosted us for Uniworld in Egypt met us at the airport. On the bus to our first night in the hotel, we were warned very strongly, NOT to eat or drink outside of the hotel or off the ship. Only water provided in bottles by the hotel or ship and never food on the street. Their claim was hygiene was not there at all and that western stomachs were very weak in comparison. 70 of us on the ship and the tour together and two of us got sick only. Our friend on second last day on the ship had to have doctor come to the ship she was so bad, and me the very careful one, got sick on the final day in the hotel in Cairo the day of the Pyramids. I was so bad had to have doctor come to the hotel. We were flying home next day but doc assured me the meds he was giving me would put me in shape to fly and they did. Typical anti-diarrhea medication we use in North America will not work for Egypt stomach bugs. Immodium (Loperamide) did nothing. Nothing at all. Yes, be careful. Once you see the state of the streets and the food available, you will likely decide not to indulge anyway. Not the cleanest cities I have ever been to - in fact they are the dirtiest cities I have traveled to yet.

We will never regret our Uniworld Egypt trip. It was brilliant to have the ship to return to each night. We had friends do a more land based tour on busses between cities and hotels each day... not for us. I get why you like Ocean, but don't discount River without trying a river cruise in Europe. The ships are stunning - Viking is our experience - and in our opinion you get deeper into the culture of the country than you will on Ocean. We are about to embark on Passage to Eastern Europe that starts in Romania, then to Serbia, then Croatia, then Bulgaria and ending in Hungary. This cruise goes to many countries, but our favourite river cruise to date was Portugal's Rivers of Gold. Such an amazing trip. Take a look at our video of this trip: Also here is the link to our Egypt video:

I will say this about river cruising in Egypt. There may be exceptions to this but the cruise lines - in my understanding - don't own their Egypt river ships, they lease them. There are over 400 river ships on the Nile. We went with Uniworld on the Nile this past spring. This is our first time on Uniworld. We have always done Viking, but we went with Uniworld this time and our understanding was the Uniworld was at least Viking standard if not above. I was suitably disappointed in the ship. Don't get me wrong it was not like ending up in a Super 8 motel after booking the Ritz Carlton, but it was not to the standard that I expected. The other River Cruises we have done with Viking in Europe - and just about to depart on another - top this ship 100 times. When you are at port, on a river ship you are often if not always docked next to many other river ships. We had to a couple of times walk through the lobby of 3 or 4 other ships to get to ours. None of these ships were any better than the one we were on. Final statement.... Do the trip. This was a trip of a lifetime to us and we are happy we did the river cruise. The food was excellent, the Egyptologist / guide was amazing. BUT, don't base the experience you will have on the ship as basis to do or not do any other river cruise.

Ok... so my brother's experience with Hotels are that the Crowne Plaza had the best deals in the past for staying overnight and leaving your car in their lot. I think that some of these hotels have sections that you are supposed to park in. The last time he had a friend locally drive him and subsequently pick him up. He has also just used park and fly and been happy with that. I personally think that car theft is a possibility anywhere and that should not be the reason you don't use parking at Toronto airport. At any given time there are likely 50,000 cars or more between all the airport onsite and offsite parking lots. I don't think that theft is a major problem. I think that there have been rashes of theft from time-to-time but also if you Google it now and look at the dates of these articles, they are not recent. The option to stay in a hotel is good if your outbound flight is early morning, but if you have a 6pm or 8pm or later flight and you have to check out by 11am, then what are you going to do until your flight time? The Toronto Airport Strip as they call it is not that exciting. VIA and the UP is an option, again if the times all match up but the challenge is that there is not a plethora of trains between Toronto and Sarnia all day long, so this would only work if you can align all the times. I suggest drive and park as it will be your best option. Just ensure that you take pictures of the car garage, where you parked, where the entrance is to get back to your car in the airport... is it near the international end or the domestic end... what level of the airport terminal is the entrance, etc. I have known people to spend 30-40 minutes trying to find their car again.

As LHT28 mentioned, I would wait until early 2024 to look and see what is required then. This is way too early to make decisions. I just recently (8 weeks ago) flew into Sydney and out of Melbourne - both NSW - but was not asked on entry for Covid vaccination proof. In fact, because I had my Visa and my Canadian passport, I only had contact with electronic entry gates and did not see or come into contact with an Australian agent of any kind on entry. Your entry requirements could differ based on the State that you are flying to, but again look in early 2024. Regarding vaccinations. I believe that you are considered by MOST countries as fully vaccinated if you had the first two doses. I have had 5 now, and see that some countries and cruise lines consider you fully vaccinated with the first two but recommend - recommend is the operative word here - that you have boosters as well. This would mean to me that if you have NOT had the boosters that you would not necessarily be turned away... but that could change at any time. Look at Canada planning this fall to release a new Covid vaccination that addresses more recent strains... if we see a resurgence this fall of new or more recent strains, then AU could say that they want you to have this booster. This stuff gets so confusing, and language is involved as the other poster mentioned. Recommended vs. required is what you are looking for. I always start with the Canadian site: https://travel.gc.ca/destinations/australia#entryexit Then move to the country site that I am travelling to and compare. Canada is up to date, but if AU changes something on the fly, then you don't know if Canada has updated quickly or not. https://www.australia.com/en-ca/travel-alerts/coronavirus.html Here you can key your dates, your vaccine status, where and when you are flying and get up to date information. Right now, the site states that proof of Covid vaccination is not required for AU. This was the case when I recently traveled but I always still carry paper and electronic proof of my vaccine history.

This is NOT our experience with Viking food at all. There is always a dish or two that do not exceed our expectations, but we learn through trial and error. We also immediately will turn a dish back to the kitchen and request something else if the dish is not satisfactory. For me there have been local specialties that I have tried and not liked, but that is not necessarily a Viking food issue. It is that I am not loving that flavour or specific food. We have found in general that Viking do not excel in fried foods, so English Style Fish and Chips and Soft Shell Crab, we just avoid now. The only night that we will avoid in the Chef's Table is the British night. We have eaten the world over in close to 40 countries now and we consider Viking food to be of high quality and part of the reason we sail Viking. I also disagree that the vegetables are all frozen. Just not the case.

There are articles about this if you Google, but most are older and not current. I know that this is probably not an option for you because your profile suggests that you are in Sarnia, but I personally would never leave my car at the airport if I did not have to. I use a limo service but I am only 20 minutes away. I have a friend that travels frequently for 3-7 days at a time for work and always leaves her car in the airport covered lots attached to the terminal. Expensive, but she has had reasonable luck. She has had damage - people backing into her and denting her doors, etc., but in general been lucky. And not serious damage - just what I would call expected parking lot damage. Heck, prior to pandemic when I still commuted to Toronto Downtown daily I used the GO Train out of Mississauga and never in my life had I had so much parking lot damage as in the GO Train lot daily. That is a risk in any parking lot. I would choose the main lot at the airport attached to the terminal that you are flying out of. I would suggest that the security here is probably better than in the off site lots. Also when you arrive at the airport and return, you are not chasing and waiting for shuttles - you can walk to your gate and back to your car. You could try the hotels that have a stay and park feature. My brother lives in London Ont and he does this often. I will check with him and see what he suggests, however my choice if in your shoes would be the attached lots at the terminal. The other option a friend does that lives similar distance to you is she has friends that are 20-30 minutes from the airport and she parks at their home and takes a limo to the airport. Is that an option for you?

Clay - there are many on here that seem to know you and in that regard, I assume also know you in person from sailing on the same ship.... I can only imagine your personality, but I do imagine you as engaging, and likely humorous, or at least your posts suggest this about you. I have listened to some of the most boring content in the past delivered by the most engaging speaker and the content comes alive. I am NOT suggesting that your content would be boring. If you can capture the audience, then you will be successful. Speakers have different skills. I am a corporate learning and development professional and I travel globally to train all the regions of my company. My sweet spot however is a room of 20-30 people. This is where I do very well. I am not a speaker that can hold a room of 100's. That is just not my thing. Most of my audience members are known to me before and after my sessions. I am not capturing a room of strangers. I have a friend that speaks at conferences of 2000 to 5000 people. That is another skill all together. If you can capture the audience and keep them engaged, then I believe that you will do well with this.

I am not standing up for Viking but many companies have training issues since the pandemic when operations were shuttered. Many people left their occupation and during that down time found alternate employment and did not return. The travel and especially the restaurant industry is a perfect example of this. That meant when operations started again that they had a huge training agenda in front of them and probably limited training capacity. Post pandemic became like a start up for some Viking ships. I fully agree with the statements that I am quoting here. We love Viking at its best too. We are mostly ecstatically happy on board, and can deal with a newer less experienced crew member. Where we have most of our dissatisfaction is reservations, air plus, and general issue resolution when you have to talk to someone in customer service. I have said this before, and this is a harsh statement to some, but Viking's customer base is aging fast and they will need to start to appeal to a younger base. They cannot afford to not recognize this. This does not mean that they need to install casinos and water slides, but it does mean that to command the price they charge they must meet expectations for that price level.

To a non Viking bus driver or tour operator, we tend to tip $1 PP to the driver and $2 PP to the tour operator. Basically we are suggesting that we give $6 total per excursion. As others say, it is up to you and your preference. We see people that we are on multiple excursions with that never tip.

Clay, When I read this I got a bit excited! I am lousy at history and lousy at architecture facts too. One of my favourite tours ever was the river boat cruise of the Chicago River with an Architect Historian as the tour guide. It was fascinating how she tied modern architecture to past architecture, and pulled out elements of different buildings that I would have missed all together if just gazing at the buildings as we sailed past. In a similar sense, countries and cities of Europe with their blocks of buildings that don't go above - I think - 4 stories... and the reasons why. Cities like Dubrovnik where the city is built on hills flowing to the centre of the city so that the sewage and waste water can run away.... I have sometimes found some of the pure history lectures on Viking to be terribly boring, but what I do remember are bits and pieces of stories told where architecture comes into play. I would be interested in new and old architecture. How does a city like London England decide to build the modern buildings that they have built against their historical architecture, and so on.... Go for it. I will attend!

These are the crew that we will recognize with a cash gratuity mid to end of the cruise.

Part of the experience that we enjoy with the skilled and tenured crew are things like this: In the WC at lunch, we had the same serving team every day. The Wine server on seeing us would immediately approach and say, "Good Afternoon Mr. L and Mr. K, would you like your usual glass of Prosecco to start?" The answer was always YES and he knew this, but always asked. We actually list this as higher end service and this person never overstepped with conversation, it was just the recognition of what our preference was.

Very fair view and expectation where you want to enjoy the "luxury" but not make friends with the crew. I get it. We are one couple that does like the recognition from the crew and in that sense, we could take a different table in The Restaurant every night but if we like a serving team we actually ask for them each night. We also go to the same area of the WC for breakfast and lunch and for that reason get to know the team that serves in that section. We go looking for it, but I fully understand why someone would not want this.

To us, we have always appreciated that crew we got to know knew when to "turn it on and turn it off". They were great at greeting us when we first sat down, but did not push it during the meal. The bartenders and servers in the Living Room and Explorer Lounge were more informal when they got to know us and that was fine because we were not having dinner. Recent cruises however it was more that we got the feeling that the newer crew had not developed the skill of interacting with the guests... They were more serious. It is my feeling, and those who disagree will chime in, that we all like to be recognized by the crew, and I never felt that they overdid it. I think that they were a good judge on when to turn it on and off.