Shore Excursions

Everyone who has taken a cruise knows about shore excursions. The ship pulls into a port, you get off the ship and either go off on your own to do something, or you take an organized tour while the ship is in port. You return to the ship later, and it leaves that port.

There is an added dimension to the shore excursions on our cruise. Because of the length of the cruise, and because you get to so many distant locations, it is often attractive to book a tour that leaves the ship from one port, fly somewhere else, stay in a hotel for one night or more, visit something in that location, catch another flight later to a different port, and rejoin the ship.

This introduces some interesting possibilities. On the one hand you think, "I already paid for room and board and transportation for the ship, so why do I want to pay for additional room, board and transportation and not use those days on the ship?" (The cruise line does not refund anything because you are skipping lodging and meals for those days away from the ship.) But, of course, one needs to think instead that you've got to take advantage of all the places that are going to be so much easier to reach that if you tried to do so as a separate trip from the US. But some of these excursions can cost as much on their own as many of the vacations one takes as a stand-alone trip.

Kathleen has probably spent 20-30 hours so far booking trips for us. She has 28 or so excursions bookings already. Some of the more interesting ones are:

-Galapogos Island: This involved a choice. You can go to Machu Picchu during the Equador-to-Peru period, or you can go to Galapogos. You cannot do both. We had originally signed up for Machu Picchu, but have since discovered we can do that some time in the future as an 8-day stand-alone trip out of Miami and pay less than the 3-day tour was from the ship. So we are picking to do Galapogos during the cruise.

-Great Wall and Beijing: We leave the ship in Shanghi, fly to Beijing, spend 4 days and 3 nights seeing the Forbidden City, Tienamen Square, the Great Wall and others. Fly to Hong Kong to rejoin the ship.

-AnkorWat: Leave the ship in Saigon. Fly to AnkorWat, Camboia for 3 days, 2 nights. Fly to Phnom Penh to rejoin the ship at the closest port.

-Taj Mahal: A flight out and back from one port in a single, long day.

-Normandy: The 119-day cruise is really a 109-day tour and a 10-day tour spliced together. Most people will embark or disembark in Dover (the port nearest to London) on "day 108" from our itinerary. The "day 107" port is near Paris for the first cruise piece, as is "day 109" for the second cruise piece. We are leaving the ship on day 107, thus missing all the confusion on the ship for the passenger exchange in Dover, and taking two long days to get a WWII tour of Normandy. We rejoin the ship when in comes back two days later.

Dave