Shore excursions

All the cruise companies organise shore excursions at the ports of call. In the case of Costa Cruises, since they passengers come from many countries, they have an additional challenge of organising excursions in the various languages.

There is information on the website on the excursions available for each port of call and they encourage passengers to pre-book excursions via the Internet. I did this but, in retrospect, it’s not a great idea. Pre-booked excursions cannot be changed after the first evening of the cruise and there’s no problem booking the excursions on board, best the day before. That way you can decide whether you really want to take an organised excursion, go off on your own or even(in the case of the elders) have a rest day and stay on the ship.

I haven’t taken organised tours anywhere for years preferring to tour independently but that, of course, requires more work and time to plan. I happen to enjoy that (and be quite good at it) but it doesn’t suit every one.

I went on a tour in Casablanca and Lanzarote and although each had their good points (in Casblanca the guide and the Hassan II mosque and in Lanzarote the camel ride and the volcanic park) that was enough for me. In Funchal (Madeira) Costa made the decision easier for us by cancelling the tour in English because too few people had signed up for it. They offered us some other tours, none of which seemed attractive so I suggested that we hire a car for one day in Madeira and do our own tour. This however was not trivial compared to my usual planning.

So where does a man go when he knows virtually nothing about Madeira? To the library of course, except that the modest Costa Romantica library was already closed for the day. But my predicament was dire, the Costa staff was understanding and a librarian on emergency duty arrived and photocopied some pages from a guide on Madeira in German for me. But booking a car was going to be tougher. It was already Saturday evening and we needed the car for this morning. Fortunately the ship has a satellite connection and I succeeded in theory in booking a car but I was rather doubtful that it would work.

I downloaded and printed a list of phone numbers of car rental agencies at started calling them early in the morning. I was the first off the ship at 08:00 and walked in the direction of the centre of town. The staff at the first car rental agency I found explained nicely that to have a car I should have booked 2 months before. I kept looking and finally got a cabriolet at an exorbitant price and headed back to ship to collect my group and we had a fun 6-hour self tour (including an excellent fish lunch) for less than the tours would have cost us.

On future cruises I’d probably make the effort in most places to bone up ahead of time, order a rental car and do our own excursion.

Two kinds of diet

I have learnt a lot about two kinds of diet on this cruise – one that I’m on and one that I’m not. The diet I’m on is an Internet diet. At home (where like most middle-class folks in the developed world) I have an ADSL (broadband) connection which provides me with all the Internet I can eat for a very reasonable monthly fee. While on ship I have several (all not ideal )alternatives:

- the Costa Internet terminals – cost $5 for 10 minutes for speeds reminding one of 33600 bps modems (if anyone can remember that far back) and neutered access that doesn’t enable copy/paste or multiple windows

- access from my laptop with a Thuraya satellite phone I have – cost $5 for each megabyte (I discovered that just loading a few Gmail pages already ate my first megabyte….) . Also the connection is very spotty to say the least, and I have to be up on deck in the wind for it to work at all

- access via GPRS from my mobile phone PDA (only in port or close to land) . Through my Israeli cellular provider, Orange, this would cost almost $10 /megabyte – with a Spanish SIM I got, it’s cheaper. But the screen is small and text entry and access are slow.

So I have to ration myself and suddenly I realize that I am on mailing lists I never read but never bothered to cancel. One becomes more selective and conscious of priorities. This can not be said for the diet that I’m not on on the cruise, namely food. You may have heard that on cruises they provide you with more food than even the greatest gluttons could eat and at this at almost every waking hour. I calculated that between 07:00 and 01:00 there are only 3 hours when you do not have free access to all the food you can stuff. This is a tragedy. Although some us can no longer eat the quantities we once could and most of us are aware (at least theoretically) of the health implications of unhealthy eating, we all (and I speak for all 1300 passengers on board) overeat.

Any economist will tell you that any resource which is not differentially priced (i.e. is “ free” or all included) will not be consumed optimally. So here we are all consuming suboptimally and then wondering about our waistlines when we get home. It is a long tradition that cruises provide all-you-can-eat as-many meals-as-you-can-manage included in the cruise price, but I, for one, would be happy if they changed that. I’m not necessarily suggesting that we should have to pay (money) for every meal but they should think up a way of making us aware of the ‘price’ of what we eat, even if it’s only the ‘price’ in calories.

Now if they would reverse priorities – providing unlimited high-speed Internet and priced food, that would be a thing. Costa, take note.

Overall impressions

We only have 3 days more of our cruise to go before we disembark at our originating port of Savona, so it’s time for some overall impressions of our cruise.

 

1)       It’s an incredible experience – not only to be travelling all kinds of places with my 95-year old father and an intimate family group but also for a beautiful ship to become our home for 12 days and to participate in an amazing operation like this.

2)       11 days is too long (for us) – at least in relation to the amount of visual stimulation we’ve had on this cruise – in retrospect I’d have preferred a cruise with more interesting ports of call and more scenery en route. I found what we saw of Morocco disappointing and I wasn’t bowled over by the Canary Islands either….but then we are spoilt. I’m no great fan of organised shore excursions (see separate item) but they are fairly classic touristic fare.  There are passengers of many nationalities (the somewhat noisy Italians are the biggest group) and there are 5 official languages on board. English speakers are definitely the minority.

3)       The service is excellent – efficient, pleasant and courteous. Most of the client service personnel (waiters, chambermaids…) are from South and South East Asia and all speak English well.

4)       The food is good – not gourmet but good with a lot of variety and unlimited quantities. This includes pizza and pasta as you’d expect on an Italian line.

5)       The cabins are above average in size, very roomy and well appointed.  Décor and furnishing throughout are modern European and pleasing.

6)       Costa is a family cruise line – there are lots of activities for children of all ages and prices for children are very attractive so accordingly many European families (especially Italians) came with children. We liked the atmosphere but it might not suit an older, more couple-oriented cruising clientele.

7)       The entertainment and activities for adults are adequate – probably deficient by the standards of American cruisers.

 

Overall, I’d give it 4/5 which is more than the Fodor’s cruise guide gave the Costa line. We’ll have to try one of the good American cruise lines to compare.

 

Suggestions to Costa for improvement:

• The library (although or maybe because it has books in 5 languages) is rather poor.  The cost of getting a wider selection of books would be peanuts
• Internet on board should be cheaper, faster and more accessible (e.g. Wifi or LAN cable access for laptop users – I was not the only one….)
• Films!  I was surprised that there were no movies shown on board.  There is an almost unused conference room that would serve well. Alternatively install DVD players in the cabins and set up a DVD library.

Communications on board

I am a communications freak so for other communications freaks here’s a rundown of my experiences aboard the cruise ship Costa Romantica:

Phone calls

Cellular coverage: In principle only on or near land but Costa has an arrangement with TIM, Italy’s largest mobile operator, where they have TIM cellphone coverage on board at a cost of 2 Euro /min for incoming and outgoing calls. In addition Costa satellite phone service from one’s cabin at the bargain price of $5/minute. I don’t pay prices like that….

I had bought a small Thuraya phone in Dubai last December and thought that this cruise would be the perfect opportunity to test it out. Call costs are reasonable by satellite standards ($1.50 /minute – comparable to the roaming costs of the Israeli mobile operators) but coverage turned out to be spotty at best.

Internet

As reported in a separate item, Internet access on the ship was very basic so I got used to doing the minimum necessary on board and waiting for port stops for the heavier stuff (uploading photos, uploading and downloading email). On ship I checked out the places in the next port where I could get free WiFi (wireless internet) access and, once in port, I would go hunting for my fix.

Once or twice I managed while at sea to connect my laptop to the Internet through the Thuraya GmPRS satellite service but the connection was not very reliable and very slow.

GPS

It’s not really communications but I want to brag a bit….Ever since almost getting lost after dark in the Negev (desert in Israel) a few years ago I promised myself to have GPS (Global Positioning System) device whenever I don’t know exactly where I am. But coordinates without maps aren’t very helpful so I turned to my mate Admiral (retired) Shabtai who supplied me with some marine navigation software with maps. In the beginning it was quite fun tracking where we were but since I came to the conclusion that the ship’s captain knew where to go, I gradually desisted and went over to other games. Oh well…

Schwer zu seien a Yid (oder Israeli)

There’s a well known Yiddish saying “It’s hard to be a Jew”.  These days it’s maybe not great being Israeli either, what with academic boycotts and the like in the air. Here’s our story:

 

We are Israelis, living in Israel. Six of our group of seven on this cruise have double nationality (German or British). Lilly does too but she neglected to renew her European passport in time for the cruise. Our cruise includes two stops in Morocco which gives free entry to Europeans but requires visas for Israelis. Since there is no Moroccan embassy in Israel the procedure is that a visa waits at the (air)port of entry. It is unusual for Israelis to come by ship so this procedure is not known to the cruise lines (at least not to Costa). They have a simple rule that Israelis are not allowed to leave the ship while in Morocco.

 

When we registered for the cruise we put down our Israeli home addresses and this resulted in us being told by the Costa immigration officer on board that none of us (including the European passport holders) would be allowed to disembark in Morocco. It required considerable explanation to sort this out and we were left with the case of Lilly for whom a visa was supposed to be waiting in Casablanca port. Unfortunately the visa logistics didn’t work and Lilly had to stay on board ship while the rest of us went on excursions.

 

It felt very uncomfortable to be considered like lepers. We don’t think that being Israeli is a crime.

An incredible operation

If one thinks about it, running a cruise ship like the one we’re on right now is a pretty incredible operation. 1400 passengers who have be fed, watered and entertained 18 hours a day while keeping this 20,000 ton floating hotel afloat and sailing in the right direction, 600 crew to do all that and they have to be maintained too. The crew that serves the passengers has at least 4 types of uniform and they are all impeccably clean, groomed and attired. Just think of the laundry they must have somewhere inside the ship, not to say carpenters, plumbers, computer engineers and more. How many kilos of white shoe polish do they consume every year? And we are on one of Costa’s smaller ships – the bigger ones take up to 2800 passengers!

 

The ship is kept spotlessly clean – I see the cleaning crews at night – to the extent of hosing and scrubbing down the decks and outside of the cabins every day. All food is freshly prepared – there are over 100 cooks and Costa claims to have been awarded the RINA “Green Star” award for environmental correctness in disposing of the ships’ waste.

 

There's no place like (Costa) home

We’ve now been on the Costa Romantica for four whole days and it’s become like home. It’s amazing how adaptable we humans are, and how much we need a “home” as a safe place, a frame of reference. We have stopped so far at 3 ports and there’s always a sense of relief when we see the ship again as we approach the port from an excursion. It’s like home, it will be tough getting used to real home again , including not having one’s room tidied twice a day.

An American diplomat who was posted to the Philippines explained to his family when they arrived in Manila that they would have servants , something unknown in America. He said “It takes only minutes to get used to the good life. It may take half a lifetime to get used to afterwards to normal life at home”.