MacWiz

Per CDC, Yellow fever is not required for the itinerary of the Navigator Cape Town to Cape Town cruise starting next week. We called Regents and the staff was inflexible. They claim their port agent has the ultimate word on this. CDC agrees with us that unnecessary vaccines are more harmful than beneficial. Oh well, we got letters from our doctors.

We're on this same cruise (Cape Town to Cape Town.) We leave for SA on Saturday, starting with a pre-cruise safari. We went round-and-round with this yellow fever shot, first having gotten the waiver and then reconsidering, and going back for the shot. We did all this through our county health department. It's been a few weeks now with no side effects (knocking on wood.) For us, we just didn't want to take any chances as to Regent's (or the port agent's) reaction to the waiver. Thankfully, we didn't have any reactions to the shot. :)

Hi azcruise,

How long before your trip did you (or have you) paid your Argentinian "reciprocity fees"? The website says as close to your departure date as possible. I'm thinking I'll do it a couple weeks before hand just incase there are any glitches in trying to get it done.

>> Did you use the H transfer to the AEP airport in BA, or did you do it yourself?>>

We're staying at the Emperador too although we let H arrange our stays (2 nights pre-cruise, 1 night post-cruise.) When we got our travel docs, we noticed they did NOT include the transfer to/from the domestic airport for the flights to/from Ushuaia. I called H directly (we had booked with them directly) and asked about the transfers. Through H, they're $66/pp each way. We went ahead and booked them through H just for the convenience of having it all done. Within a day, we received a new itinerary and travel docs showing these transfers. We arranged our own transfers to/from the Emerador and the international airport for when we arrive/leave BA. We arranged those through Viator.

>> Did you take the optional excursion to Tierra del Fuego National Park? Was it worth the price? Did you go the TFNP on your own? Did you just hang out in Ushuaia? How did you get to the port if you didn't take the tour? >>

We decided against the Tierra del Fuego National Park tour in favor of just spending a few hours in Ushuaia wandering the streets. We've never been there before and decided we'd like to experience that town a little rather than being rushed through the national park tour. Based on the forums on TripAdvisor, that tour, when taken as part of the transfer from BA to U, is VERY rushed. We're hoping for a nice day in U to just walk around and stretch our legs before boarding the Fram.

>>On the return, it sounds like you only get the transfer to the Ushuaia airport from the Fram if you book it through H - is that the case? Did you take the additional excursion? >>

We booked the cruise and hotel in BA directly through H. Our booking included the transfers in Ushuaia between the airport and pier and were listed in our initial travel docs. We did nothing special to request them. We decided to not do a tour in U post cruise. Hopefully, the flight from U to BA will not involve an all day wait in U for the post-cruise excursions to complete. We want to get back to BA ASAP to have a few extra hours there before returning to the US.

So very easy...... I disagree with the new smoking policy and therefore cancelled 2 future cruises on Princess. I voted with my wallet.

We recently booked a Princess cruise BECAUSE of this policy. We had our choices narrowed down to three cruises we were considering, one on RCCL, one on HAL and one and Princess. We choose the Princess cruise because of this policy change. We made sure Princess (through our Princess travel consultant) was aware of why we choose Princess over the others.

(Subject should probably say "That's minus two and plus one.")