MV Discovery - interior photos 2010

[Sekhmet]

My husband and I just joined Cruise Critic and we are taking the Voyages of Discovery Cruise starting in Alexandria and continuing on to Libya in early November. How do we get on to Roll Call so that we can contact others who are booked on the above cruise so that we might arrange some private tours?

 

We will be disembarking when you embark, having completed the trip from Istanbul to Alexandria. Our shore excursions became available about a week ago, and we have booked the ones we want.

 

One thing you perhaps ought to bear in mind when deciding between ship and private tours is the visa situation in Libya. I obviously don't know what the rules are for other than UK citizens, but Voyages of Discovery say they will obtain a 'blanket' visa for passengers taking the ship's tours, with the proviso that you don't have an Israeli stamp in your passport.

 

Hope this helps.

[dnbnor]

are there options to eat in the open air, or are all the dining rooms indoors. Is it easy to dress casual all the time i.e. no suit or tie?

[judb]

There are open air options for breakfast and lunch but the only dinner option is indoors, usually in the main dining room or a once weekly trip to the Yacht Club.

 

I would say the dress code is quite sedate and 'proper' shirt and trousers would be the norm (I am assuming you are male). On the formal nights many people wore tuxedos and the others were in jackets and ties etc. Quite formal looking

 

There are also casual and informal nights, the difference being marginal. I dont think tee shirts and/or shorts are the thing in the evenings.

[SwissMyst]

My overall impression of the fellow passengers is they dressed up for dinner at home too, not because it was some stuffy or status fashion statement, but because they just did out of older traditions and manners. Dress down during the day was very casual - tee shirts and shorts - which left room in the suitcase for a few more dressy items at night.

 

This was a very nice group of fellow passengers who have travelled a lot and are always in good sport when out and about. No complainers, everyone on time for departures, good spirited and took any adversities along the way in good stride. Since many were British and of the age where WWII realities were part of their backgrounds, they were a very stalwart group to be spending time with. Just wonderful people. And ones that would also be too polite to complain if anyone were not dressed to any particular standard too.

 

(This itinerary exploring British history across the Indian Ocean may have also attracted this particular group as well, plus more Australians who carried many of the same traditions but were a bit livlier and chattier than the Brits themselves)

[Pheebs]

Thanks for these pics, I remember looking at them only a few weeks ago before going, now I have returned and miss my new "home" so much. Such fond memories. I was going to go round and take video of the ship myself, but ran out of oportunities, I wanted a time with not many people about!

 

I wish I could be travelling to South America on Discovery next January *sigh* We were trying to find ways to stay onboard :D from day one!

[walkersmith]

Hello,

I too have booked on this cruise out of Alexandria through to Barbados. I am very new to cruise critic in fact this is my first visit to this site. So let me know if you receive this message. Walkersmith

[walkersmith]

I am booked to go on a 34 day cruise on the above ship. Can anyone tell me about the cleaniness of this ship. It is rated 3 star.:)

[staub]

Hello,

I too have booked on this cruise out of Alexandria through to Barbados. I am very new to cruise critic in fact this is my first visit to this site. So let me know if you receive this message. Walkersmith

Hi Walkersmith,

 

I am new to the cruise critic site too. It doesn't seem to be used much for our Voyages of Discovery cruise. My husband and I are taking the 28 day cruise through travltips , gateway Toronto. We're trying to find people who might be interested in sharing some taxis /excursions. Any interest?

 

STAUB

[walkersmith]

Hi Staub,

I am flying out of Jacksonville FL thru to Cairo, arriving November 4 I think. I would be interested in sharing taxis or excursions. I have received the book on excursions from Discovery and I will definately be using them in Libya and Tunisia but otherwise I'm hoping that I can line up something myself in other cities.

 

Have you spoken to anyone that has been on this ship?

Walkersmith

[staub]

Hi Walkersmith,

 

If you look at all the threads about this upcoming cruise, you will find some of the answers to your questions. One seasoned cruiser, Swissmyst was very helpful. He recommended the ship's excursions and as a result, we took a lot of them. The only ones we didn't take were in Cartagena, Cadiz, Gibralter, Malaga and the five islands- nine ports in all. We figured we could share a cab with others.

Check out online excursions. We found they were pricey for only a few people. We are flying out of Toronto to Alexandria.

 

STAUB

[walkersmith]

Great photos very helpful for me. I leave Nov 3 for 34 day cruise on Discovery :). I did notice the little clothes rack in your room, was that yours or did it come with the room??? Also it looked like you might have had a collapsible clothes line....did you? Was it yours??? I have bought an expanding clothes line with pegs (pins) will I have somewhere in the cabin to put this line up...it hooks onto something I guess. Did you have a hair dryer in the cabin? Can you tell me if the laundry was expensive? Also is the ship highly air conditioned so therefore cold mostly?

 

Hope to hear from you and again thank you for the photos.

[SwissMyst]

I am booked to go on a 34 day cruise on the above ship. Can anyone tell me about the cleaniness of this ship. It is rated 3 star.:)

 

It was a very clean ship. It is old so the worst fault is that crusty build up of rust under heavy coats of paint on railings and window frames, but it sparkled with new paint and cared for teak decks. The crew was always around and about cleaning and polishing things up. I think it is overall a happy ship with a unique niche and an exceptional group of seasoned travelers who love being on a ship that is still a ship.

 

The telling moments for me are when we leave port and all the procedures that have to take place until we finally disembark the pilot to the waiting pilot boat - always a thrills and spills moment. There are so many people on deck waiting watching this on the Discovery, where we find few to none watching this old sea ritual on our mainline cruise ships. This is what I mean about Discovery passengers being ship people.

 

All that was missing was tossing out the serpentine for our last tie with port, which probably does not get done anywhere these days - pollution of the seas and all that. Pity. My last time seeing serpentine was listening to the Maori Farewell sung leaving Auckland on the Galileo Galiliei in 1976.

[SwissMyst]

Thanks for these pics, I remember looking at them only a few weeks ago before going, now I have returned and miss my new "home" so much. Such fond memories. I was going to go round and take video of the ship myself, but ran out of oportunities, I wanted a time with not many people about!

 

I wish I could be travelling to South America on Discovery next January *sigh* We were trying to find ways to stay onboard :D from day one!

 

Awww, you are making me cry now too! :( Glad you enjoyed the photos. They are my opening screen "wall paper" slide show and it is fun to keep getting peeks of those now so familiar spots around "our" ship.

[SwissMyst]

.........

Have you spoken to anyone that has been on this ship?

Walkersmith

 

Hi and welcome to the Cruise Critic MV Discovery discussions here. I posted a series of detailed articles both on this "Other Cruise Lines" forum on the Cruise Critic member reviews that set out a lot of detail about various topics on the MV Discovery, including room amenities (Coral Deck), drawer sizes, lecture series, and dining options. Everything I also wanted to know and found such a dearth of real time information about this ship.

 

Hopefully if you do a search of this forum for "MV Discovery" you can pick up those posts or look for them under a search with my screen name (SwissMyst) though you will have to read through hundreds of Holland America posts too, but look for the "Other Cruise Lines" heading and you should be able to find my Discovery series. I think there were three main topic headings. I wrote them in March/April 2010 shortly after we got back.

[SwissMyst]

Great photos very helpful for me. I leave Nov 3 for 34 day cruise on Discovery :). I did notice the little clothes rack in your room, was that yours or did it come with the room??? Also it looked like you might have had a collapsible clothes line....did you? Was it yours??? I have bought an expanding clothes line with pegs (pins) will I have somewhere in the cabin to put this line up...it hooks onto something I guess. Did you have a hair dryer in the cabin? Can you tell me if the laundry was expensive? Also is the ship highly air conditioned so therefore cold mostly?

 

Hope to hear from you and again thank you for the photos.

 

Yes, we bought a lot of things for our 42 day trip in our first stops in Hong Kong and Singapore which were perfect stops to stock up to make things in our room work best we could for this long of a trip. Starting in Cairo will be much harder but it may be surprising what handy things you can find. Having a drying rack really helped. We did not find easy places to string things up without getting in the way of using the room.

 

There was a hair dryer in the room that was fine, though I liked my own better. We never used the laundry because we found doing things in the sink and shower worked out surprisingly well for us .It just got to be our routine to keep things washed up, and they dried over night. I had heard it would take several days to get things back from the laundry and it was "hard" on the clothes.

 

We were mainly in very hot climates so things really got soaked when we were out and merely rinsing them off in the shower (great shower with lots of hot water and a detachable gooseneck shower "wand" made it easy to just hang the clothes up and hose them down and leave them dripping in the shower until they stopped enough to take them out into the room to further dry. Linen shirts were our friends as well as drip dry pants and skirts.

 

The dress up clothes did not get worn for very long each evening in the A/C ship that they recycled well enough over the duration of the cruise with no need to launder them. It was pj's, socks and underwear primarily, as well as our touring clothes that got most of the room washing action.

 

The ship A/C is weak and we added a small room fan which we also purchased in Hong Kong. Since we were traversing the equator, sometimes particularly in the dining room against the back walls it got pretty warm. So ask to get your table moved if you get one of those back corners if it heats up too much. Not much ventilation in the bathroom so it can steam up and keep the room a bit moister for a while but somehow we worked around that. It is a slightly noisy system but very shortly we did not even notice it and kept it on full all the time.

 

But it was noticeably cooler onboard when we returned from outside in the areas we traveled so it was cranking out a lot of cool air, but it is an older ship and I have had similar problems on other ones too around the equator. We were in the Equator-Southern hemisphere in Jan-March so a lot of this depends on your outside temperature .I think the time of year and where you will be sailing will be a lot more temperate.

 

Therefore if you have time to do any shopping after arriving in Cairo, I would try to add:

 

1. Small room fan ( 220 okay, be sure to check where it can plug in with what plug adaptor

2. Small drawer organizers

3. Small baskets for desk and table tops if you have collections of things you want to keep together

4. Some of those removable wall hooks - we left one up in our bathroom but there are some that are pretty sturdy and attach to a mirror or wall surface and can be removed without damaging the wall - you can get these at home and are easy to pack.

5. A small drying rack is best or stretchy clothes line set up to attach some where in the room or the bathroom.

6. Hanging "shoe bag" for more over the door storage space

 

 

Okay, keep the questions coming because it is fun to relive all this. We were lucky in getting one of the larger rooms on the Coral Deck which was really quite huge compared to most others, right by the infirmary so we did have a little more room to have all these extras and make it work for us, including a whole additional portable clothes rack which is also in the picture. So that pile of stuff as our collection we added that made it work better for our 42 days. Someone from the pursers office was quite happy to inherit our collection so hopefully it is still doing some good somewhere on the ship.

[evyfueloil]

Quite informative but did you not find the Seven Continents Restaurant too hot and humid at night with its low ceiling, when full of passengers, as we did last Feb when sailing from Singapore through Sri Lanka, Maldives, Seychelles to Mauritius, so experienced the heat crossing the equator. It was so opressive and the ship could not cope with its inefficient airconditioning, it was always too hot in our cabin too. Only the theatre was cool. I think this ship is more suited to cooler climates, like Norway or the Baltic! :confused:

[SwissMyst]

Quite informative but did you not find the Seven Continents Restaurant too hot and humid at night with its low ceiling, when full of passengers, as we did last Feb when sailing from Singapore through Sri Lanka, Maldives, Seychelles to Mauritius, so experienced the heat crossing the equator. It was so opressive and the ship could not cope with its inefficient airconditioning, it was always too hot in our cabin too. Only the theatre was cool. I think this ship is more suited to cooler climates, like Norway or the Baltic! :confused:

 

Hello, so we were on the same trip, Yes, the A/C was very inadequate when traversing the equator. We quite died in our way back corner table in the main dining room. We should have asked to be moved because our complaints about it to the maitre d' only got us a reservation at the Yatch Club one evening and explanations about being in port and having all the A/C get sucked out the open gangways, etc. And then in the next segment, once away from the equator finally, and a new table closer to the front we did fine again.

 

On another ship many decades ago I also remember it being terrible when crossing the equator and the Italian crew came in and went through the motions of banging around the A/C outlets and said it would soon be fine .... and lo and behold in a few days it was ...... as we moved past the equator. I learned my lesson about ships, A/C and offer to help fix then on that cruise.

 

I felt more sorry for the waiters than even for us as they had to keep working and smiling in their formal garb while we at least could sit and fan ourselves. It is funny to talk about this now because I had forgotten how really wilted we were for a large part of that trip. Too hot to be outdoors unless in the shade, but it was the equator - what should we have expected? It was hot. Period. And we probably did as best we could. And the memories are sublime.

 

However it made me realize the poor, but beautiful Seychelles had to live with that relentless heat 24/7/365 being so much closer to the equator than Mauritius and Reunion -- I feel so travel sophisticated now to know the difference between Indian Ocean Islands .... and why. What a wonderful trip that was!

[walkersmith]

Thanks again for all the wonderful information:D. I have purchased some of the items you recommended and I'm sure the suitcases will be brimming with stuff. Were there any items you packed and never used? Can you tell me a little about the hair dryer, I know you said you took your own but I'd rather leave mine out if I could and use theirs unless of course it is awful. Got my final papers today so getting a bit excited. Of course there is a problem they left my middle name off the documents, hope this can get sorted.

[SwissMyst]

.....Were there any items you packed and never used? Can you tell me a little about the hair dryer, I know you said you took your own but I'd rather leave mine out if I could and use theirs unless of course it is awful. ....

 

The only thing I did not use was the number of changes of daytime casual wear that I took. Way too many extra tops, but that was all.

 

Hair dryer: the in room one runs off 220 and is powerful enough - like 1200- 1500 or so watts. Terrible for me are the 800 watts ones that only have cool air and take forever to dry. This one was speedy and heated up nicely. I have a travel one that I always take and with hair dryers (if they are a necessity which they are for me) burning out or going kaput, I always carry a back up 1500 - 1850 watt dual voltage that is somewhat silent, just in case even the hotel one stops working or shorts out. I don't have time to have another one sent to my room which is why I always myself travel with a back up.

 

It may be my imagination, but there are some of the newer "ionizing" hair dryers that I just don't like the end result and I felt that was the effect I got from the ship hair dryer --- that perhaps it was an ionizing one which is supposedly "better" and kinder to the hair, but for this very subtle and perhaps imaginary difference I stuck to my own regular travel hair dryer.

 

Since there are so many good travel hair dryers out there, this always goes in my carry on with me. But you may find the ship one is fine if what you need to know is wattage- it is powerful enough and has a good temperature range.

[Scotswoman]

Hi,

I was pleased - and a bit surprised! - to find a thread about the Discovery. Thanks SwissMyst for all the great information.

We´ll be joining the ship at Barbados on 6th December and leaving in Cuba. It should be a "different" Caribbean experience.

[SwissMyst]

Hi,

I was pleased - and a bit surprised! - to find a thread about the Discovery. Thanks SwissMyst for all the great information.

We´ll be joining the ship at Barbados on 6th December and leaving in Cuba. It should be a "different" Caribbean experience.

 

Before our trip we could find almost no information about the Discovery so I wrote several other threads with as much detail as I could put together. Hope you also can find the other MV Discovery threads that describe the dining, the ship layout and onboard activities.

 

Yes, it will be different than a mainline cruise in the Caribbean but you will come back with a far deeper historical perspective about this area, than its current malaise as a crime-riddled, over-bloated day tripper generic shopping center. :cool:

 

The Caribbean should be so much more than what it currently is and if any ship will get you behind the scenes and give you a sense of context and richer possibilities in this area, you picked the right ship and the right people to share this experience with. Enjoy and hope you come back and write up your report too.

[Scotswoman]

Thanks, Swiss Myst, I have now had a look at your other postings and found them very helpful. I´ll let you know how we fare - we have done one "typical" Caribbean cruise before and were not really enamoured, so we are hoping for a deeper insight into the area and its history and peoples from our upcoming cruise. We are also taking along my almost 90-year old (and super fit!) mother, who is very excited at the prospect of visiting the places she heard about in her school geography lessons as a child in pre-war Britain. She was also an avid philatelist in her youth and has many old stamps from the area. I´m sure she´s going to love the lectures on board.

Anyone else out there doing this cruise??? It is being offered at an extremely attractive price in the US just now - disembarking at Jamaica, of course, before the Discovery goes on to Cuba - but with flights included.

[SwissMyst]

Thanks, Swiss Myst, I have now had a look at your other postings and found them very helpful. I´ll let you know how we fare - we have done one "typical" Caribbean cruise before and were not really enamoured, so we are hoping for a deeper insight into the area and its history and peoples from our upcoming cruise. We are also taking along my almost 90-year old (and super fit!) mother, who is very excited at the prospect of visiting the places she heard about in her school geography lessons as a child in pre-war Britain. She was also an avid philatelist in her youth and has many old stamps from the area. I´m sure she´s going to love the lectures on board.

Anyone else out there doing this cruise??? It is being offered at an extremely attractive price in the US just now - disembarking at Jamaica, of course, before the Discovery goes on to Cuba - but with flights included.

 

Tell your mother one of the treats of our Discovery Asia to Africa crusie was our stop in Mauritius to see the famous Blue Penny stamp in a very wonderful, modern museum built just for this one stamp! (And a few other enriching items of interest).

 

Sorry, I don't know your itinerary on the Discovery but

we tracked Alexander Hamilton (as Americans) around the Southern Caribbean which gave it a particularly interesting and intimate historical twist from Nevis (really great for important history) to Christensted, St Croix.

 

And Lord Nelson in Antigua on the shore excursion to Nelson's harbor was a very good historical journey as well. (Do not do anything on Antigua on your own - unsafe) Plus sailing these same waters and seeing what Christopher Columbus actually saw over 400 years ago was also haunting. The British and rum on Barbados is also important history to follow.

 

Looking forward to your report when you get back so we can build a forum file here for the Discovery for those that like this cruising and educational enrichment aspect they do so well. They took out the ship casino a few years ago and put in bridge tables. It is that kind of a ship.

[Scotswoman]

Thanks, Swiss Myst, for your input once more.

Fyi we shall be visiting Bridgetown, Barbados; Grenada; Tobago; Trinidad; La Guaira (for Caracas), Venezuela; Curacao; Aruba; Montego Bay, Jamaica; Santiago de Cuba and Havana, from where we fly back to London, and thence to Frankfurt. We live in beautiful Bavaria!:) We are "world travellers" - and we have found that one is liable to meet Scots and hear about influential Scots and Brits of yesteryear literally "all over the place" in every corner of the world".

You are most generous and loyal to keep looking up and contributing to this thread long after your own trip. I do appreciate such willingness to help fellow travellers! Thank you!

[SwissMyst]

Thanks, Swiss Myst, for your input once more.

Fyi we shall be visiting Bridgetown, Barbados; Grenada; Tobago; Trinidad; La Guaira (for Caracas), Venezuela; Curacao; Aruba; Montego Bay, Jamaica; Santiago de Cuba and Havana, from where we fly back to London, and thence to Frankfurt. We live in beautiful Bavaria!:) We are "world travellers" - and we have found that one is liable to meet Scots and hear about influential Scots and Brits of yesteryear literally "all over the place" in every corner of the world".

You are most generous and loyal to keep looking up and contributing to this thread long after your own trip. I do appreciate such willingness to help fellow travellers! Thank you!

 

 

What an incredible itinerary for the Caribbean. I know of no main line cruise ship that covers so many unique places and Cuba too!. Good old MVDiscovery delivers again. We had Scots on board who treated us to their kilts on formal night and my own family roots started at Callendar House outside Edinburgh. ( Uhhh.... more a few years ago ;)) Love Bavaria and had a wonderful tour of Christmas markets based from Munich a few years ago. Lucky you.