OwenSmith

Is there a 2024 thread yet?

Length makes a difference on all rivers. 135m ships can't sail on the Seine, and on my recent Bordeaux cruise the captain told me that is not because of the locks on the Seine but because 135m ships can't navigate some of the bends. Most companies use 110m cruise ships on the Seine as a result, Viking have built custom length ships a little longer (124m if I remember correctly but annoyingly Viking always quote in feet). I rejected MS Swiss Ruby for a Seine cruise, I'm not about to cruise the Elbe on her. The Seine gets many of the old ships in Europe, and some of them like Swiss Ruby are cramped with very small cabins. Eventually companies had enough 135m ships for the Rhine/Danube system that they started to move 110m ships to the Seine, at which point some of them were nice enough we did a Seine cruise with Riviera.

You haven't heard the half of it, there were so many things wrong on our Noble Caledonia cruise. We have more anecdotes from that than all our other cruises put together. It's funny now but by week 3 we were wondering whether we'd survive.

Having cruised with Noble Caledonia once in 2008 I don't ever want to again. It was an epic 3 week cruise from St. Petersburg to Moscow then back to the Volga all the way down to Astrakhan. What we saw was amazing, but it is the only holiday I have ever lost weight on. Even some locals that joined the cruise for 3 days on honeymoon didn't like the food. We bought breakfast cereal, dried fruit and biscuits at a supermarket half way through to supplement meals, but it wasn't enough. Also Noble Caledonia charter Elbe Princess II from Croisi Europe, and having looked on Croisi at the ship the cabins are tiny and the ship looks pretty basic.

It's not going to be November/December for us. It's also a shame about the restricted set of cruise lines on the Elbe. We'd like to sail into Prague but CroisiEurope's fixed menu for dining ("Chef's Choice" they call it) just isn't an option, there's too many things both of us don't like to eat. Most of the other Elbe cruise lines are too down market for us to consider, so our choice ends up being Viking almost by default.

My mum wants to do Elegant Elbe on Viking. We're flexible on dates and are more interested in choosing a time of year least likely to be disrupted due to water levels (low or high). Based on reading this thread, April or the first half of May look like the best best. Any comments? I know nothing can be guaranteed, I'm just looking to improve our odds.

My understanding is that if the flow from the rivers is too low the ships can't get into some of the ports or landing stages even at high tide.

Is there an equivalent to this thread for water levels river cruising around Bordeaux ie. rivers Dordogne, Garonne and Gironde?

On my Basel to Amsterdam cruise a couple of weeks ago we were never asked for covid vaccination certificates. Not in the hotel in Interlaken, not on Eurostar, not on the Rhine cruise, not in the hotel in Amsterdam nor any museums anywhere (eg Speyer), nor on the flight home to the UK. No-one except the three of us were wearing face masks. Very dissapointing, and unsurprisingly as a result I came home with covid. As far as I can see the entire of Northern Europe is behaving as if covid never happened. What a complete bunch of idiots.

Depends what you want to see in it. I have friends who would consider a month insufficient, and I'm not exaggerating.

Yeah, I don't like that aspect of the Viking longships. All the cabins are tiny, except for the enormous (and very expensive) ones. There is huge gap in the cabin sizes right around the size we normally book. It pretty much rules out Viking for us on rivers.

I had one of those cabins once on the Douro with Riviera, it was one of the two "no single supplement" rearmost of aquarium class. The cabin was fine but I couldn't sleep with the near constant noise of the plumbing from other cabins in the ceiling above me. Even earplugs didn't help. Never again, top deck for me and to hell with the single supplement cost.

As a passenger you only find out about it afterwards, they don't give people the chance to get off if they don't like the sound of the next stretch. And I've cruised with that little clearance and some scraping before, on the Danube in 2015. On that occasion APT brought a river pilot on board.

I'm currently in Amsterdam at the end of my 7 days Basel to Amsterdam on Amadeus Imperial (135m). At the farewell dinner, we were told the captain said that with 1.55m draft we had less than 10cm below the keel at times, and he's sorry if the occasional banging on the rocks and gravel underneath the ship kept anyone awake. So it was clearly very tight, and water levels have dropped since. The ship is meant to be carrying another Great Rail Journeys cruise to Basel. I suspect they'll need rain to make it.

It's 7 days from Basel to Amsterdam. Amaserana could do that trip three times between now and your embarkation date, so it depends what she's scheduled to be doing.