piper28

1 hour ago, ORCAORCA said:

Star Seeker Alaska 2026

Just a heads up:  Looks like no glacier viewing on these cruises.

I have a hard time believing there really wouldn't be any, so I just kinda wonder if the listed itineraries are missing things like that.  There's a couple of spots in the itineraries that it could fit as I recall.  That said, especially without details like that, I found the itineraries to be a little on the disappointing side, with not quite enough off the beaten path.  I'm not quite sure exactly what I was hoping for, but a bit more "different" than mostly the same stops everyone else makes.  Even the voyage at the end of the season that goes Alaska to Japan, completely uninspired - basically, do the alaska route, then 13 sea days to Tokyo?  Ok, yeah, there's not a *lot* out there, but I've definitely seen other lines do a more interesting trip on that route.

That said, I'm a little jaded on Alaska at the moment I guess anyways, it's just gotten to be too busy to be as enjoyable of an experience as it used to be.  I'd kinda hoped that I might see something with the windstar trips for that summer that might inspire me, but as it is, nope, think I'm going to pass on that.

Yeah, Motu Mahaea will be the motu beach day.  In fact, outside of booking a tour, you don't actually have any access to Tahaa itself.  Our experience was that they had tours available in the morning, that after the tour was done dropped you directly off at the motu.  Those not doing tours in the morning were able to take either zodiacs or some local boats to the motu starting at a specific time.  There were also afternoon tours for those that wanted to do them, I *think* they required that you went back to the ship for departure, didn't depart from the motu itself.

I don't remember opening hours, but from what I recall from the cruise I just got back from, in general when the water sports platform was open, it seemed to typically close about 2 hours before sailing.  I think 3pm was a pretty common closing time for most stops.

As someone that's also started to move away from Princess at times, I do think the comparisons are pretty reasonable so far.  We've done 1 cruise on Crystal, and 1 on Windstar (leaving for another windstar cruise very soon now).  We did everything with Princess for quite some time, and only really relatively recently started trying other cruise lines.  For me, a good portion of this reason is that quite frankly, I'm getting tired of the larger cruise ships, and I feel that the experience I used to have on Princess is just not really there anymore.  That said, I'm not saying we won't cruise them when the itinerary and timing works out (We just did a panama canal cruise over winter, and have the Sun booked for thanksgiving).

Unfortunately, my wife's a teacher, so we can't cruise during the times when schools are in session and avoid the kids.  That's definitely been a factor at times in what we've chosen to cruise.

For us, the one Crystal cruise we did was a truly great experience.  That said, we also got it at a really good price.  (And the sailing after us was when the ship got arrested.)  In particular, I found the crew service to be absolutely top notch.  It felt like the days back when we'd cruise the small ships on Princess, when the crew would get to know you, recognize you, and know what you wanted pretty quick.  Entertainment was pretty good for the types of things I was looking for - one of the enrichment lecturers was an astronaut that had done work on the space telescope repairs.  Course, the company then went bankrupt, and we haven't had the chance to try them again since then.  The very small fleet of ships they have makes it tough for us to actually be able to book them in times that work for us in places we might be interested in.

We've tried Oceania once, and have another one booked for them.  I'm not really someone that is really in a place to judge whether they offer the finest cuisine at sea, I just don't have the palate to be able to make a judgement on that.  I will say that they were the most thorough cruise line we've ever been on in handling food allergies (Princess does pretty well on this in my experience, interestingly, Celebrity has been by far the absolute worst in dealing with this on the couple of cruises we've done there).  Souffles every night pretty much (something Princess used to do, but which seem to be getting pretty rare now).  That said, variety of those souffles wasn't a standout - and was often something like vanilla with a vanilla sauce, the pairings always seemed off to me. Entertainment on Oceania I didn't find to be all that great, but I don't necessarily need a lot of entertainment.  We were on an Alaska cruise, so we were largely doing other things.  That said, in the evenings, whatever production show they were running only would run one show, and you'd have to work your dining around it if you wanted to see it.  On the R class ships, unless you're in one of the upper categories, the showers are absolutely ridiculously small (even compared to the R class ships when Princess had them).  (The art scavenger hunt they had was also a pretty interesting experience, that ended up with a lot of passengers all comparing notes trying to figure out where the last couple real tricky ones were.  I don't normally do this kind of thing, but it was actually pretty fun.).

Windstar, to me, that almost felt like coming home again finally.  To me, i really thought some of what I'd used to find on Princess that's lacking now was there, and it just felt really comfortable.  Now, there's definitely trade-offs to the smaller ships they run.  The biggest is entertainment - generally they just didn't have much, with basically about a single show of some music by the house band on any given night.  Then again, once night they brought on a local steel drum band on board, which was excellent.  Crew talent night was also very good.  Crew on this ship was excellent, again - back to the small ship Princess, but even smaller ships here.  We seemed to mesh with the passengers pretty well on this cruise too.  Food I thought was really excellent.  My wife thought it was a bit on the fish heavy, but as someone that doesn't eat fish, I didn't run into problems with that myself.  They're not cooking for thousands of people, and it shows.  That said, dining hours were definitely somewhat limited, especially for breakfast and lunch.  And the buffets for those meals, well, they're small.  Now, if you're an RCL fan that loves the 6800 passenger ships and all the activities on those, would I recommend this for you?  Almost certainly not, unless I knew you're someone that likes to just wind down at times.

For me, a lot of why I've ventured out to these cruise lines after a long time cruising on Princess (we started I think in 2006, and pretty much did only Princess for probably at least the first 10 years?) just comes down to trends in the cruising industry in general.  Bigger ships, more mass market, more cost cutting, but not cheaper cruises.  I'm also at a different point in life, and find I like different things than I used to.  Plus, quite honestly, I can afford different things that I used to be able to.  We're still both working though, so realistically, my limitations are more that I only have a certain amount of time available, so more cheaper cruises isn't a viable option, so something that costs somewhat more isn't necessarily meaning I'm reducing my travel because of it.  That said, while I do find things like Oceania and Windstar to be more expensive, there's caveats to that.  Both include non-alcoholic drinks in the fare.  Realistically, when cruising on the R class ships on Princess, most of the time I'd be paying a premium to take them anyways because they were smaller.  Which means that the premium to move to the other lines is less than it can appear to be for what we're looking for.  And of course, the smallest ship now for Princess is the Island/Coral.  These days, that's about as large as I really want to get on.  Oceania in Alaska was IMHO a better experience that what Princess now offers in Alaska, because the ships are just too big.   We were able to get a couple of stops that larger ships just wouldn't do.

Ultimately, though, people have to find their niche, and sometimes that niche changes over time.  If you'd told me 10 years ago that I'd be doing the Tahiti trip we're leaving for real soon, I probably wouldn't have believed you (and probably couldn't have afforded it).  For me, going forward, I'm definitely open to trying different lines that we haven't been on (although there's a few that I have no interest in).  But realistically, our criteria for what we do for a cruise basically goes along this line:

a) Fitting my wife's schedule as a teacher

b) itinerary

c) ability to get to and from the cruise reasonably, especially with schedule limitations

d) cost

For our 1 week thanksgiving cruise, that ended up with us trying the Sun Princess.  Definitely a bigger ship than we'd prefer, but it's a new experience.  Price was reasonable (especially compared to RCL's pricing on newer ships).  Is the itinerary that exciting?  Not really, but it's a one week caribbean cruise, so you're not likely to find much that's interesting.  And I'm definitely not paying things like Crystal prices for a one week cruise to the same islands as everyone else (Even if they offered a one week cruise fitting the time).  Christmas, more flexibilty on longer on time, we decided on an Oceania cruise, largely because it visited a lot more ports that we don't get to as often.  

So all I can really say is I'm far less into loyalty to the cruise lines than I used to be, and it's far more looking for the best experience I can make work with our budget and timing.  If that's a Princess cruise, that's fine with me, but it's less often that that's true these days than it used to be.

On 5/17/2024 at 12:22 PM, zalusky said:

I wonder how much they spend on mail flyers.  I get at least 2 a week.

2 a week, you're barely scratching the surface.  Heck, I've gotten multiple brochures in a single day from Oceania.  If I didn't get Oceania marketing stuff, I'm not sure I'd actually get mail every day.  Too lazy to go in and find the spot to turn it off, and not sure I believe it would stop even if I did.  

I'm sure somewhere some bean counter at least has some stats to justify the number of brochures they mail out, although I have to wonder if those numbers are like a lot of statistics, and open to interpretation in favor of the way you want them to be.  

Just double checked and indeed our departure time on the second day is listed as 6pm, so I'm still inclined to think on our cruise it'll be the first day, even if it's the day after motu mahaea.  Weird thing is I know at one point there was language in the windstar excursions saying things like "this tour will not interfere with your motu day" and things like that, none of which appears on anything anymore.

On 2/1/2024 at 11:26 AM, yeah!!! said:

If you look on the Windstar website, and look at excursions, you will notice that there are no afternoon excursions on April 2, and the watersports platform is not open when at Motu Mahaea and the beach lunch is on a Motu.  Also, there are no evening excurions on April 5 on Bora Bora, as this would conflict with the beach dinner.   Also, from what I understand, the beach dinner is always on the 2nd night of the Bora Bora visit.

 

 

I'm curious what time they say you're leaving Bora Bora on teh second day?  To me, it seems kinda weird that the beach dinner would be on the second night of Bora Bora, because they ship seems to leave pretty early that day comparatively speaking.

I've been trying to figure this out for the Tahiti and Marquesas cruise on July 4th this year, and it's not making much sense to me (and calling Windstar didn't really answer any questions about it).  On our trip, Motu Mahaea is one day, the next day is the first bora bora day.  To me it makes more sense that the dinner in Bora Bora would be that first night since the ship is there overnight, and I think we leave at like 6pm from bora bora the second night?  But that would also imply that the beach day and then dinner were on back to back nights.

We finally got a chance to try O this summer for Alaska, and I'd have to say the experience had it's plusses and minuses.  As someone that had spent a lot of time on R class ships with Princess, I really liked the idea of doing the oceania trip to Alaska on one.  

Pluses:

- food alergies: I thought O did a great job of handling this for my wife.  Menu delivered to our stateroom the night before, we just had to turn it in by 10am the next morning with her selections.  And they caught the nights we were doing specialty restaurants.  Other than a couple of nights where they changed the menu between when they delivered it to us and dining time, and then kinda randomly assigned a dish to her.  That has handled easily enough at dinner, but was a bit weird.

- I'm one of those in the categories of people that does personally like it when a cruise ship includes coke as part of the cost.  Having a couple of cans in the stateroom fridge is particularly convenient for me.  I'm not a coffee drinker, but I don't feel that's unreasonable to have included too

- smaller ships, that's definitely a plus for us

- staff: I'd be remiss if I didn't compliment the staff on the ship.  As I've generally found on small ships especially, these crewmembers truly do a great job of making your cruise go well

Minuses:

- I think the OP mentioned a lack of classism as a reason to try O.  Unfortunately, for me, I found that right after getting on the ship you kinda got slapped in the face with classism.  The availability of your cabin was based on what category you booked.  As someone in the cheap cabins, they weren't available until 3:30pm on boarding day.  Sorry, but that's just plain absurd on a ship that size.  (And quite frankly, the exactitude of them announcing it at 3:30 tells me that the cabins were almost certainly ready well before that.)  While I recognize that even Princess I think has moved away from cabins being ready immediately, that was something I always liked about them - the ability to drop my junk off and not have to deal with it for hours after boarding.  3:30 is the latest I've ever seen barring some other factor involved.  (I'll note, from doing some reading, it looks like Regent is similar in being exceedingly late available for their cheap cabins)

- specialty dining reservations:  sure, specialty dining is included.  But expect very limited availability on when you can book it.  Even booking the minute that it was available for us, looking for a table for 2, all we could get were like 8 and 8:30 times.  I don't tend to like to eat that late.  I think people with status might be able to book earlier?  So all the good spots are already taken.

- entertainment: on our cruise at least, shows were once a night, at 9:30pm.  Thankfully I don't necessarily care that much about shows, because I just don't find that schedule works well.  While I'm up quite late on shore every night, for whatever reason on a cruise ship I tend to get to sleep a lot earlier.  Part of that is sometimes there's some pretty early mornings that need to be made for excursions.  

- showers:  Ugh.  As I noted, I've been on R class ships a bunch, something like 140 days  with Princess.  For whatever reason, Oceania decided to literally cut the corners on the showers in at least the cheaper staterooms.  Princess had these as more of a round footprint.  Oceania takes a chunk off the side of the circle.  The old joke of soaping the sides of the shower and just turning around to clean yourself?  Well, that wasn't much of a joke anymore.  Looking at the floorplans, it looked like you had to go pretty far up in category before you got around it.  I never thought I'd say this type of thing, but to me, it's almost a dealbreaker to have to deal with that shower to cruise those ships.

Neutral:

- food:  Obviously, this is one of the most subjective things on a cruise.  Oceania bills itself as the finest cuisine at sea.  I'll fully admit, I really probably don't have the sophisticated palate to judge that.  And I recognize that in general, food quality is something that everyone has complained across all lines that it's gone downhill in recent years.  But honestly, to me, the food wasn't anything to write home about.  It was decent, but I wouldn't call it great.  Quite frankly,  a couple of nights where I had steak, the cuts I had were about as bad as I've ever had on a cruise ship.  Other nights were fine.  There were some good deserts.  I personally thought Windstar's food was better though.

At the end of the line, I'd probably book Oceania again, if the itinerary was a good fit.  While I doubt I'll ever get a chance to do one, I've always thought O's world cruises were some of the most interesting looking ones.  Although I don't think I could do 180 days with that shower.

That said, for me, the biggest question I was left with was the value one.  Oceania is a significant step up in cost over the mass market lines.  And I'll be honest, I was left kinda questioning whether I thought that the experience was really worth the extra cost or not.  

That's the great thing though, there's still enough different cruise lines out there that something will git some people better than others.  We recently did Windstar also, and quite honestly, I thought that was a better experience than the Oceania trip, and look forward to going back on them soon.

While the McCullough book is the one lots of people tend to recommend, personally, I'm not really a huge fan of it.  I can't fault his research and dedication to detail, and the book is probably the definitive history of the project, but god is it a dry read.  Personally I prefered Matthew Parker's "Panama Fever: The Epic Story of the Building of the Panama Canal".  It's definitely not quite as detailed, but I feel still does a very good job of covering the topic, and personally I thought it was far more engaging and easier to read.

Renting one, or perhaps buying it then selling it, is definitely a pretty reasonable option.  Lenses retain enough value, that the buy/sell option isn't necessarily that bad of one, and the rental on a lens like the 100-400 isn't too bad.

I know before buying the 150-600 that I took, I considered potentially renting it for the trip.  I think for my trip length, it would have been about $150-$200 to do that?  After looking at prices for used versions, I figured that I could buy one new, then sell it after the trip if I decided I wanted to, plus have it for a while before to get used to it.  Now that I've taken the trip, I do need to decide whether I want to keep it or go ahead and sell it though.  I'm finding that to be a tough decision.

Everything I've seen says that's a pretty good lens for something that's not in an L lens, and whenever I get around to moving to a mirrorless camera, I'll probably pick that one up as a pretty good option.  Anything better is going to be a lot heavier and more expensive.

That said, as an only lens?  100 seems a bit long for the short end to me.

Personally, since I haven't moved to mirrorless yet, on my crop camera, I'm planning on bringing my 18-135 and a sigma 150-600 lens that I picked up recently.  Although the sigma lens definitely makes carrying things a lot more complicated.

2 hours ago, MAEUNC said:

We would be on the Breeze.  It has balconies.  I'd like to see a menu.  My husband is a meat and potatoes guy

I don't have any menus, but did do a WS trip in the caribbean this last christmas.  I'm definitely what you'd call a pretty plain eater (like, meat and potatoes without the potatoes I've been described as at times 🙂 ).  I didn't have any problems really with the menus.  Sure, there were a couple nights that were less thrilling, but I get that on any ship to be honest.  Candles (steakhouse) I thought was real good, the french restaurant was less appealing to me.  The one meal I really had the most trouble with myself was lunch - on the sailing yachts at least the buffet itself was pretty small, and often filled with things I had no interest in.  Not sure if the motor yachts are any different.  I did end up eating a lot of burgers for lunchs on that trip.  

Booked for the 14 day Tahiti and Marquesas trip next summer on the Breeze.  Looking forward to it very much (although less so the flying there and back part).  

1 hour ago, Charles4515 said:

The number of Samsung phones is immensely larger than the number of phones with the Tile app but the problem with that methodology is that it really just works with an app.

Hmm, I had to dig and turns out it's indeed opt-in on the samsung phones, for some reason I thought it was opt-out like apple does.  That said (at least according to Samsung, so take it with a grain of salt), they're up to about 300 million "find nodes" worldwide, with 100 million added in the last year.  If that's accurate, I'd say it probably still exceeds Tile significantly.  (What's also kinda interesting is that based on looking at my phone, they *don't* turn on the checks for unknown trackers by default.)

I think the number that have opted in probably is a sign that people think apple's find my idevice stuff has worked well enough that it convinces them that it's worth doing.  I've been playing around with one for a little bit now trying to get a feel for how well things work before we take our next airline flight.    So far it's been interesting to see how often it really does seem to get picked up.  I'm definitely curious to see how well that ends up working when we actually travel soon.

1 hour ago, babysteps said:

We have galaxy phones but use Tile and not the Samsung version. More phones connected seemed like a good idea. Just replaced the batteries for the first time after almost a year. I keep one on the pouch my wallet is in. 

This is something I'm kinda curious about, but unfortunately, nobody would ever really tell us the real numbers - Does the installed base of the Tile software exceed the user base of samsung galaxy phones?  Clearly, whichever one has the larger user base would be the winner between the two of those.

Also, from what i'm seeing, it looks like the more generic android find my device compatible trackers are just starting to hit the market in the next couple of weeks.  Looks like those are going to be open to a number of brands, but will all work with the built in android tracking.  Doesn't help for anyone who needs something now, but will probably be a strong choice in the near future. (Makes me wonder if that also might have something to do with the current availability of the samsung ones).

I'll give them credit for being the one area of Oceania that really seems on the ball to me.  Submitted my request late last night (July 4th no less), and by midafternoon I already have paperwork forwarded from my ta that shows the credit.

Hmm, with ipads you might be able to go with the airtags too?  I'm not sure I've seen for sure whether that's viable or not, and I'm not familiar enough with the apple side of things to know for sure.  If it does work though, right now it's probably cheaper, and with the number of iphones out there to do the tracking, would be a good choice.  (Brief search seems to indicate that it's feasible to use airtags even if you only have ipads and not an iphone.  Given that, with the current supply situation with the samsung tags, I'd probably say airtags might be the better choice right now.)  

If you have samsung phones, I'd probably consider the galaxy smarttags (or the plus model).  Only issue is that I've seen rumors that they might be doing an update to those later this year, and right now stock seems to be very limited, and places are charging a premium for them now.  Otherwise, for android, I'd probably say Tile.  I'm not sure how the installed base on Tile is, since they're basically limited to only devices that have the app installed, versus airtags that can access any iphone, and smarttags that can hit galaxy phones.

I've yet to manage to catch whales breaching like that.  That was definitely a nice looking experience.  Personally, what I'm curious to see this year is if I can manage to catch another shot of the same whale we've seen on previous trips - I've got photos from 3 trips in the past, and on each of those trips I was able to get a good enough fluke shot to identify that we saw the same whale on each of them.  It's been a few years since our last trip, so who knows, but I'm looking forward to the possibility.

I will note that at the various ports, it's probably less sure exactly what will be used.  The tides in Alaska can make the gangways very different at various points of the day, and sometimes can be quite steep.  That said, I've always found the cruiselines there to be pretty good with helping people that need assistance on those gangways.

Yeah, I think you'll find that they're not going to be very hard to find.  They're very abundant in Alaska.  You'll probably see a lot of them in harbor areas, and I know in Juneau, if you look in the trees on the hills along where the ships are docked, you'll probably see them there.    Basically, anywhere that fish might be available in the nearby area, you'll probably find them.

Looking at doing our first Oceania cruise in July to Alaska, so I'm definitely interested in seeing how it will be.  We started cruising in 2006, on the Crown Princess tilt cruise, and in spite of that incident, found that we really did like cruising.  We also felt the way Princess treated us after that was very well handled, and at the time, the product fit our interests and our budgets.  We did a lot of cruising on Princess, I think we're around 22 or so cruises with them?  But of that, 140+ of those days were spent on the small R class ships.  We haven't actually been back on a Princess ship since the Christmas 2019 Pacific princess sailing (although we do have one scheduled for december).  As Princess has dropped their smaller ships, our interest in them has definitely started moving away from them, so it'll be interesting what I think of the december cruise.  I think prior to the shutdown, we'd only done 1 cruise that wasn't Princess, and that was a Royal Caribbean cruise on the Anthem.  (My parent's really like Royal, and we went with them.)  It was interesting, but not really my idea of what I want from a cruising experience, but I won't rule out going on them again (and have since).  I do think whoever programmed the elevators in their ships needs to be fired.

Since the pandemic, as we've started taking a few cruises, we started with a Crystal cruise shortly before they went under (second to last sailing I think), and definitely enjoyed that, but realistically, we took that because of some very good pricing offers, and I don't know that it would normally be something that fits our budget.  We then took a cruise on Wonder of the Seas, which even half empty reenforced our view that those monsters ships aren't really our thing if we have a choice in the matter.  Originally last summer we had planned 28 days on Princess' Island Princess doing a baltic then iceland cruise, but canceled that even before Russia caused problems because I was still leary of whether everything would be open enough to make it worth it, and instead were going to try our first Oceania cruise.   Day before we're supposed to leave for that, wife tests positive for Covid (with no symptoms, but very fast positive, that lasted a long time before she finally tested clear).  I ended up sick with it by a few days later, so it probably wasn't a false.  Wasn't too bad for me, basically ended up just being like a regular cold, but obviously we missed that cruise.  We ended up doing a quick jaunt on a Celebrity cruise just to get away for a few days.  Celebrity was interesting, but after now having done a couple cruises on them, I'm not entirely sure they quite know what they want to be as a cruise line - they're trying to project an image as being a step up from Royal, but I'm not convinced they hitting that mark.  They also far and away have been the worst cruise line to deal with for food allergies of any that we've dealt with.  Thankfully my wife's allergies aren't real serious, but if you had a serious food allergy problem then I honestly would advise against Celebrity based on my experience.

After that, decided we really wanted to try something different, and since it fit our schedule, we did an 11 day Windstar cruise on one of their sailing ships.   And quite frankly, that feeling of home we had when we first started with Princess was back.  I'm really looking forward to our next cruise (although not the flights too and from it).   The biggest problems for us with windstar is cost and convenience - depending on the cruise, it's definitely on the more expensive side of things for us (we're not exactly suite people on the mass market lines), and since my wife's a teacher, fitting cruises into her schedule can be a bit tough, especially with some of the flight routings required for it.  I'll be honest, there have been times when I really wish I'd booked the windstar cruise to alaska instead of the Oceania one we have booked.

So that brings us to now, just a couple months from our first Oceania one.  I'm hoping we'll get that same feeling of home.  I've wanted to try Oceania for quite a while, but part of it's been finding an itinerary that fit our schedule wasn't always easy, and part of it has been cost issues.   I fully admit that I'm going to be one of those down in the porthole oceanview rooms.  I know the R class ships aren't necessarily universally loved by the Oceania fans, but at least for us, it'll be a very familiar experience, so I'm probably willing to overlook some of the shortcomings that O fans that like the bigger ships point out.  If we decide we like it, I've already got my eye on an itinerary for Christmas 2024 that I think looks interesting, although there's a couple others that have some competition for it.  Unfortunately, also I think R class, making the other ships fit in our holiday schedule just seems to be tough.

I will say, things leading up to that first Oceania cruise, I do have mixed opinions.  There's a number of things that I think Oceania just needs to figure out how to do better.  One is definitely their IT.  I think it's a given that everyone complains about the IT department of whatever cruise line they're dealing with.  I've done enough now, that outside of maybe Windstar that is on the simplistic side of their IT interactions, Oceania is by far and away the absolute worst.  The simple fact that their website can't show proper pricing for excursions when you try to book them is a disgrace - and it's not like this is a new issue for them.  Of course, part of that stems from the fact that Oceania probably has the absolute most complicated fare structure for their cabins and then pricing structure for their excursions.  It's silly, and something they really should simplify.  And it's already been a pain on this coming cruise where they charged me the reduced rate for the YWC way of buying excursions, but then actually billed the account the other 25% of the cost for it to be paid when final payment was made.  Dealt with, but if they didn't make life so complicated, probably wouldn't have been needed.

So, overly long, and nobody probably made it to here.  Looking forward to trying Oceania, and from the outside in at least it looks like the type of thing we're looking for.  I'm just hoping it meets expectations.

On 4/24/2023 at 1:03 PM, SueMo said:

I have to correct myself.  I did this tour in Punta Arenas, Uruguay, not Costa Rica!

I'm guessing you actually probably mean Chile, not Uruguay based on the tours that were offered on that site :).

I did the Amazon back a number of years on Princess, so obviously somewhat different experience.  One way Manaus to FLL.  We did it during christmas break time period, where the river is really at it's lowest point - so low in fact that a number of tours that involved taking boats into the jungle areas were canceled because of lack of water.  I found it to be an interesting cruise, although the ports on the river itself weren't necessarily the most exciting stops.

For me, one of the more interesting things was just the massive size of the river.  You've always heard that the Amazon is huge, but seeing it in person just really emphasizes just how big it is.  And as I said, we were there during the low period - the area we docked in Manaus was about 30 feet lower than it can reach, and that's on section of river that's something like 2-3 miles wide.  The amount of water it takes to raise a river like that 30 feet is just hard to comprehend.  Once reaching the ocean, it took about a days worth of sailing before the ocean water turned back to it's normal color, the amount of silt and sediment that was being washed down the river discolored the ocean that far out.

I didn't find bugs to really be a problem, although we had the usual precautions about lights at night and drawing the curtains.  But during the day, not really.  Heck, we have more problems with mosquitos at home than we ran into down there.  Did have to take a lot of shots to prepare for the cruise.

I will say, probably one of the top excursions we've ever done was out of Manaus.  It was arranged by one of the other passengers through a local company, and ended up with about 10 of us, where we took a speedboat up the river some, we swam with the pink dolphins, spent a little bit of time on a beach, had lunch with a local at their house with a representative spread of food that they would normally eat.  And at the end visited a reservation for one of the local native tribes where they did this welcoming ceremony thing.  Absolute highlight of the cruise, and to this day remains one of the most favorite excursions I've ever done.

Sorry, ended up duplicating.

On 4/13/2023 at 8:47 PM, vaitape said:

Why not cut back on the contant onslaught of O brochures? That would save $$ on postage as well as printing costs and cut back on recycling/landfill costs.

I've been working on an experiment.  Since the beginning of this year, I'm holding onto all the mail from Oceania to see just how much it adds up to during the year.  So far, I've never done an Oceania cruise (had one booked last year, had to cancel at the last minute).  In general, I receive multiple brochures from Oceania every week.  Whether I actually manage to keep everything for the whole year who knows.  

I'm not exactly what anyone would call a hard core environmentalist, but even I find that the amount of stuff that Oceania sends out to be excessive.  Quite honestly, the cost alone of producing this stuff has got to be fairly significant.  Like 2-3 brochures of some sort every week, including sometimes things that are even bound booklets.  I think I get less email spam from some cruise lines than I do physical mail from Oceania.  It's definitely more physical mail I get than from every other cruise line combined,  probably by at least an order of magnitude.  And I question the logic behind it - do they really think people are going to book that may more cruises because they get that much advertising junk from them?  

While I certainly wouldn't object to having luggage tags mailed to me, it's not something that particularly bothers me either (although i feel you should be able to print them oneselves, getting them at the pier is questionable, especially as ships get larger).  But I have to admit when I got the packet of documents last year before our aborted cruise, I was at least somewhat bemused that they went through the effort to put that much together.  While some might prefer to have that big booklet as a souvenir, I tend to fall into the category where it seems like I've just got too much random paper floating around for everything these days and I'm trying to reduce it.  It's just getting to be too much to want to keep it all.