The trip in general did exactly what it said on the tin. The ship arrived in port every morning, getting on and off was very efficient with no queues (other than the lifts) so that was a very good experience.

It was good to get off the ship each day, the Norwegian ports were quaint, but much of a muchness. The trips are important because there isn’t a lot to do in the towns and they are expensive, especially the bars. If you want to get to see the waterfalls and mountains you need to do the excursions.

Stavangar

The general view of cruise ship excursions is that you can buy them cheaper locally, through something like Tripadvisor or Trustpilot. This may work in the Med or the Caribbean but it wasn’t the case with Norway as there wasn’t much competition amongst the providers, presumably due to a lack of cruise ships, so you might as well buy it through P&O or whoever you go with.

Once of the problem with the excursions is there are so many  options in the brochure it is difficult so work out what you want to do, part of the problem is the tours in each town are quite similar, boat trip, trek, kayaking or coach ride so here is a quick summary of what we did:

Stavanger, we did the cruise up the Fjords to Pulpit Rock, it was a very pleasant afternoon out but take some sarnies, there is nothing on the boat. The trip went up close and personal with the edges of the fjords and ticked that box really well. There was a trek up to Pulpit Rock that would have been spectacular but was expensive and 9 hour return trip.

Aalesund

We climbed Sugar Lump Mountain, which included a coach transfer. The mountain was actually only about 10 minutes away, so a group could walk there, or 4 people might be better off getting a cab. The walk was quite tough and would have been a lot tougher in the rain.

There wasn’t much else to do in the town, so we spent £38 on the hop on hop off bus, which provided the proof that there was nothing else to do and we fell asleep on the exciting tour!

Olden

This is a special cruise liner terminal built in a remote Fjord and is the most spectacular part of the cruise. We did the cable car up the mountain and trekked around the top in the morning and it was spectacular with views of the fjords, especially if you don’t do winter sports and haven’t been on the top of mountains.  In the afternoon we did another coach trip and trek to the glacier, this was also very spectacular and set us up for a few beers later !

Haugesund

Is the final stop and to be honest we were wondering what else there was to do. The only thing we hadn’t done was kayaking and it felt like we were doing it for the sake of it, but we were saved by a bad weather forecast out to sea, so our  stop was curtailed which was just enough time for a wander around, have a Costa coffee, meet out chums and have a very expensive pint in the sun.

Then back to Southampton, in a cold grey North Sea mist, which meant that everyone sat inside and filled up all the chairs, or in many cases, took the opportunity to eat more in the buffet or drink more in the pub.

Summary

So, in summary, the cruise was exactly what we expected, the bad bits were what we expected, and the good bits were also what we expected. It was a great way to see Norway and we chose a standard low cost option, and we got what we paid for, so no complaints.

We need to age another 10 years before we do the next one, but there is also the possibility that there wont be a next one anytime soon !

The first few hours were good, but then the other people started to arrive, and getting about became more difficult as the queues for the lifts grew, it also became quite obvious that the gym wasn’t going to be the “go to” place for many of them, which was good in many respects, but bad for queues at buffets and bars.

I had the pleasure of the company of Mr Blowey who has become an expert in cruising in his latter years.

Queues

In general, queues were the issue. My companions were experienced cruisers, and they assured us that this was the worst ship they had been on, and it wasn’t common to have problems getting into restaurants and getting drinks at the bar.   

It was a real shame, because the restaurants had a good mix of food themes and were well decked out. Generally the food was good, but too often we ended up in the 24 hour buffet because there was less hassle getting served there.

Over time we realised that the cruise was under resourced, there simply weren’t enough staff to cope with the level of customers. Within the restaurants it was common for the tables not to be cleared while there were people waiting for a table.

By booking the restaurants in advance we could have avoided some of these queues, it is a lesson for everyone else, but we don’t like being that organised!

In the bars, they had a strange process where bar staff only dealt with orders from the waiters, who were inundated with queues of people trying to place orders, especially out on the deck bars where they were overwhelmed with 20 or 30 people trying to give orders. This hardly made for a happy workforce, and they seemed a pretty miserable bunch on the whole.

Entertainment seemed to be targeted at people in their dotage, if you like piano music and cabaret then it is fine, it was what we expected and we accept we are the outsiders on this type of thing.

The cinema seemed to be running for 24 hours a day and the films were a couple of years old that you will have seen on Netflix or somewhere, but it does offer an option, the only films I really noticed was Alvin and Chipmunks and Riders, as they came around pretty regularly on the schedule.

The shopping was good if you were looking for a tax free Rolex or diamond ring, but not too helpful if you needed toothpaste, but as we went to a new port every day it wasn’t really a problem.

One of my reflections on the whole onboard experience was that it wasn’t “Fun”. It felt like hard work all the time, getting from A to B was always a challenge, from deck 10 everything was either 6 floors above us or 4 floors below. We worked out the lifts in the end, basically don’t bother OR use the lifts at front which were quieter.

No communications

One of the problems is that you can’t communicate with friends unless you pay £20 a day for internet access. So mobile phones don’t work and the only way of contact each other is the phone in the bedroom, which we have all forgotten how to use.

So we had to resort to historic skills like organising where we meet and making sure we turned up on time. It wasn’t a skill that came easily to us and you can imagine what it is like trying to bump into friends in a giant shopping mall, but somehow we did manage it but it was mostly by accident.

We were lucky that we went with a couple of experienced cruisers as without them it would have been much more challenging and I doubt we would have had much company either, they weren’t really “our people”.