Tell me about cruises, especially more laid-back, "educational" ones

In My Humble Opinion
21

Two years ago, we went to the Antarctic on a Princess cruise. Because it’s a big ship, it wasn’t permitted to let passengers go ashore on the continent, but the cruise around the peninsula was impressive. Plus on all the at-sea days, we’d have 2 or 3 presentations by very knowledgeable folks on the explorers, the geology, and the history of Antarctica. We attended quite a few of them and they were really interesting and well-done. And being in the January/February timeframe, there were very few children aboard. No craziness that we noticed.

Last year, we did an Arctic cruise on Holland American (one of our stewards referred to it as the old folks’ cruise line, and that’s not a joke.) Most of the presentations on that ship were about the ports we were about to visit, but rather than focusing on shopping (like when we did a Caribbean cruise) they talked about the history, economy, and the life of the locals - that was especially interesting for the stops in Greenland and Iceland.

We’ve had some interesting excursions/bus tours and some that were less than impressive. On one tour in Rotterdam, our guide as a student of architecture, so that’s all she talked about, with a few tidbits of history thrown in - not what we’d signed up for. So some of those trips are hit-or-miss.

This coming January, we’re doing the Panama Canal from west to east. It starts in San Diego and hops down the coast of Mexico and Costa Rica, and the only stop in the Caribbean is Aruba before ending in Fort Lauderdale. I expect there will be at least one presentation on the history of the canal.

I’d say to avoid party-like cruises, avoid Carnival and some Royal Caribbean cruises - they’re the bargain companies and they attract younger crowds and families with kids. The pricier lines are more to my liking.

22

I’m an alumna of UCLA, and they’re always sending me flyers of university-affiliated cruises which are primarily for educational purposes. They go just about everywhere, and I’ve always been really tempted by that type of cruise.

Has anyone gone on a cruise that was essentially designed as an educational cruise university-affiliated or not?

23

Speaking specifically to Viking ocean cruises, we’ve taken two:

Empires of the Mediterranean, Venice to Athens, 10 days, 5 countries: Italy, Slovenia, Croatia, Montenegro, and Greece.

In Search of Northern Lights, 13 days, 3 countries: Norway, Netherlands, UK. However, we disembarked in Amsterdam, and didn’t go on to London. Also, as you’ll see in the link, the current version of this cruise is London to Edinburgh and then several Norwegian ports.

We were completely enthralled by our first cruise, which we extended on both ends: four extra days in Florence and Venice on our own before boarding, and a four-day Viking extension in Athens. Despite broiling heat in August (the only time my wife could go before she retired), virtually everything about the trip was fantastic.

The on-board experience is lovely. Unlike other cruise lines, all Viking ocean ships are essentially identical. Their interior decor is typically Scandinavian: simple, clean, and elegant. Fewer than 1,000 passengers, no one under 18 years old, and no casinos. The cabins are spacious, even the smaller ones. (Our NCL cabin was quite cramped in comparison.)

The food is fantastic in all the restaurants. Dining in the main restaurants is open, although you need reservations in the two specialty restaurants, Manfredi’s and Chef’s Table. Your cabin level grants you a certain number of meals in the specialty restaurants.

The ship has live music throughout the day: string ensembles, guitarists, piano, and offers a nice tea service at 4 pm in the Wintergarden, adjacent to the Main Pool. “Decadent finger sandwiches, scones and desserts are accompanied by international teas, tea ceremony demonstrations and relaxing classical music from the Viking Resident Musicians.” This was one of my wife’s favorite things!

The enrichment I spoke of in the other thread consisted primarily of port talks and lectures by experts. The port talks covered the history of the port city and surrounding area, as well as descriptions of the various excursions the ship offered. The lectures usually covered the history of the areas we were visiting or other subjects of interest. For example, on the Northern Lights cruise, we had a lecture on how best to photograph the aurorae.

The lecturers were noted experts in their fields. I recognized the historian on the Mediterranean cruise as someone I had seen on PBS or BBC documentaries. All were quite approachable and friendly. One of the highlights of that cruise was sitting with that historian at breakfast one morning and discussing aspects of the talk he had given the night before.

Of course, Viking also offers educational shore excursions to historic sites, museums, etc., in addition to more touristy sight-seeing trips, but as others have mentioned above, you can usually book similar excursions with local tour guides for much lower cost.

The only exceptions are when the ship has bought out a particular option. For instance, on the Northern Lights trip, if you wanted to stay overnight in the ice hotel, all the rooms had been booked by the ship, so you had to pay their marked-up rates. Likewise, there was a train excursion that the ship had bought out. (As it happened, we didn’t get to those ports, so the issue was moot.)

One aspect of Viking that we particularly appreciated was that on every Friday night of our cruises, the ship offered a meeting place for Jewish guests to celebrate Shabbat, and provided wine and challah. No charge. (I didn’t even bother to find out whether NCL did the same.)

We will be taking our first Viking river cruise in December: Pharaohs & Pyramids, 12 days with a four-day pre-cruise visit to Istanbul. Even before the war in Iran, I was concerned about the issue of security when visiting Egypt, but the war seems not to have changed the safety of tourism in Egypt. Hopefully, nothing will change between now and December.

My attitude about going to Egypt changed when I learned that on this cruise Viking basically keeps you in its own security bubble. All excursions are included and handled by Viking. You don’t need to venture out into potentially dangerous place on your own. It’s one of my wife’s bucket-list trips. We’re looking forward to it.

24

Our recent NCL trip to Hawaii started out as a Road Scholar tour. That is, my wife, who wanted to cruise around the Hawaiian islands, got a RS brochure that listed a Hawaii trip. Looking into it, I found that they were booking a block of cabins on NCL’s ship and conducting their own tours from it.

I looked further and realized we could book directly with NCL and arrange our own versions of the same tours and save about $4,000, IIRC. So that’s what we did.

Looking back on it, I’m sure the RS tour guides would have been more consistently good than the ones we got, which were a mixed bag. A couple were really good, and a couple were pretty bad. But we also have friends who live on Kaua’i, and we stayed overnight with them one night and let them show us around.

To be clear, I have nothing against RS, and am just saying that, for our purposes in this particular case, going our own way worked best.

25

Places that I’ve visited on (MSC) cruises that I would consider educational:

  • Le Strade Nuove and the system of the Palazzi dei Rolli, UNESCO World Heritage Site, Genoa
  • Pompeii, UNESCO World Heritage Site, Naples
  • Saint John’s Co-Cathedral, Malta
  • Paphos Archaeological Park, UNESCO World Heritage Site, Cyprus
  • Medieval City of Rhodes, UNESCO World Heritage Site
  • Ephesus, UNESCO World Heritage Site, Turkiye
  • Schwerin Castle, UNESCO World Heritage Site, Germany (took a train from the cruise port Warnemunde)
  • Rosenborg Castle, Copenhagen
  • Preikestolen (Pulpit Rock), Norway
  • Christ the Redeemer and Sugarloaf Mountain, Rio de Janeiro

That’s not counting the cities we’ve explored at the beginning and end of our cruises (e.g. Barcelona, Stockholm, Oslo, Sao Paulo). We were also scheduled to visit Delos and Jerusalem, but our plans were interrupted by the Israel-Hamas war.

26

Our Meditteranian cruise took us to Egypt just after the 2011 revolt. The ship docked at Port Said overnight, and the ship then moved to Alexandria. There were concerns over security in Cairo, and some people decided to give it a miss. The cruise line offered a tour, and we saw the buses being escorted by armed police. We, and some other Brits, chose private tours, with an overnight in Cairo, and rejoined the ship in Alexandria.

A very memorable trip with an excellent guide.

27

Having done a couple, I’ll suggest that “laid back” is not at all the right adjective for “educational” cruises.

They aren’t a pool party; they aren’t a dance party. So in that, yes they’re different than the mainstream party cruise lines.

But what they are is get up early, spend all day exploring & learning, get back aboard, attend the “training” for tomorrow’s activity, eat dinner, and go to bed. If you’re doing it right, it contains very little leisure other than eating meals. So to me, that’s not even remotely “laid back”.

IMO cruising is a terrible way to visit cities. It’s a great way to say you’ve been there, and to slightly taste whether you’d like to come back to that city / region for a couple weeks by land to truly experience the place. I recently set up the shore excursions for a 12-day Mediterranean cruise I’m doing in August. Finding any shore activity where under 50% of the elapsed time was spent just riding a bus to get someplace was hard.

If what you want is to lounge about for a week without unpacking and be pampered with food and drink & incidental entertainment, do not pay the much higher prices for “educational” cruises. Find an ordinary cruise at your price point = SES and do that instead. Or simply go to a land-based all-inclusive in your favored climate and price point. That’s my definition of a “laid back” kind of vacation.

28

The clear drawback to cruises or group tours is the limited time you can spend in any one place. But there are many (mostly smaller) places that I have enjoyed visiting that I have no interest in spending two weeks in. If I would be doing a day trip anyway, I’m just as happy doing it by ship rather than by train.

I compare it to a buffet meal vs. a 5 course meal: there are times and places for both, IMO.

29

Excellent metaphor.

30

Depends a lot on the ship- not all ships have a library, some have digital libraries but the largest library with physical books is on the QM 2 which has around 10,000 books. The couple I’ve actually been in seem more like the couple of bookshelves you might see at an inexpensive resort. where people leave the books they have finished behind.

31

I was on Cunard’s Queen Elizabeth last November and it has a beautiful library that was very popular.

32

Holland America does. I’ve been on two of their ships and saw the same books in both libraries. And the range of books in a Cunard library is the equivalent to a library on land.

33

Seconding Holland America. Perfectly organized, more like a bookstore. Very appealing.

34

I’ve never taken a cruise or a passage but I think I would not want to spend the time reading a book. I would want to make sure that I am getting my money’s worth.

35

That generally involves a lot of eating unless the entertainment is decent.

36

Yeah, what is “my money’s worth” to you (any you)? Eating fancy? Eating massed quantities of food? Drinking to excess at no extra charge? Laying around a pool? Laying on a beach? Shopping tourist stores until you drop? Seeing the local sights in various cities? Doing “adventures” like snorkeling, jet boat rides, ziplines, nature hikes? No judging; each of does “you do you”.

There are people whose home life is one of constant demands to fulfill other’s needs. For them, a cruise spent reading books is a guiltless way to simply indulge in doing nothing all day without the critters, kids, or spouses asking (read “demanding”) they do something for them.

I find it interesting that when I was cruising as a single unattached man interested in meeting single unattached women, the vast majority of unaccompanied women I found on cruises were part of a group of 2 to 6 lady friends who’d all abandoned their kids and husbands back home to come out and just be themselves. Which did not include extramarital activities. But largely did include self-indulgent nothing all day. With the friends they brought; not any they’d meet on the ship.

37

We took the Pride of America between the largest four Hawaiian islands a few years ago.

I wouldn’t recommend it. I think part of the problem is that the general pattern was that we’d push off the dock/set sail about 8 pm and head to the next island overnight, and be there when we woke up. So we’d get up, go on our shore excursions which mostly ended 5-6 pm, then spend the evenings on the ship or in one case at a luau (cheesy, but fun), and wake up again in a new place.

It was too crowded, expensive, and the food was kind of an issue. We had four broad options- the you-pay fine dining restaurants, the free semi-formal dining rooms with waitstaff, the various burger bars/pool food places, and the cafeteria at the stern of the ship. We felt like we’d already paid for food, so we limited ourselves to the last three. The semi-formal dining rooms had good service, nice atmosphere, and lackluster food. It wasn’t bad, just not in line with the rest of the experience. The burger bars were all pretty good, but you can’t eat burgers, nachos, and hot dogs for a week straight. The cafeteria was pretty good for what it was, but it was a complete ZOO. Way too many people all at once, and just hectic and crazy. Hard to find tables, food would be out, etc… I realize that preparing meals for so many people all at once is a pretty Herculean task, and it is impressive that it was as good as it was, all things considered. But it wasn’t good either.

Which kind of leads me into the main criticism I have with the whole cruise idea. It didn’t really allow us to scratch our explorationary itch that we go on vacations/travel to satisfy. Part of the fun for us is finding new/off beat places to eat and visit, and the “on-rails” aspect of the cruise didn’t fit our approach to vacationing. We vastly preferred the three days on Oahu before, and the four days on the Big Island after, where we had our own cars and freedom to do what we wanted, where we wanted, when we wanted. Being on the cruise gave up most of that- we ate on the ship, or where the excursion had lunch, we went where the excursion went, for as long as it went there, and so forth.

The funny thing is that I’ve been on a few bus tours before, and they have just enough additional leeway involved that it didn’t give me the same feeling of being constrained that the cruise did. I think it was because the lodgings and food were different every night on those and we had the run of each place every night, while on the cruise, we were on the same boat and eating at the same place each night.

I think cruises and tours appeal to people who want a more hands-off experience than my wife and I do. For us, having someone transport us, then do a canned tour experience, then go back to the same place overnight every night for a week wasn’t our thing. But I can see how some people might like that “turn the brain off & let someone else handle it” approach, while laying around the pool drinking Blue Hawaiians and watching the shows and eating a bunch of ok food. It’s just not our thing.

38

There is no substitute for a rental car if you ever want to actually learn what a place is actually like. There is just no way to escape the tourism bubble on a cruise ship and the places you can get to from a cruise ship terminal on your own in a day are already contaminated.

39

I don’t know about “contaminated”, but there’s just a lack of freedom involved. You can’t go find the off beat local breakfast spot, you can’t go find some quirky thing that only you want to see, because your cruise-mates want to go to the beach and shop, and so forth.

It’s not so much in avoiding the touristy, it’s about doing it on your own terms.

40

There are certainly elements of each. Touristing is a mass market business conducted at scale. With predictable consequences.

There’s a good sidebar on this general topic (mass tourism destroying the thing people are wanting to come and see) starting here:


As to this bit treated narrowly …

IMO this correlates a lot with the kinds of people on a driving trip across neighboring states who stop at McD’s versus the people who stop at random Mom’n’Pop eateries.

Lotta people want their “adventure” very safe and diluted and 99% familiar. The 1% unfamiliar is plenty for their tastes. Others want something far more out of their own ordinary. No matter how ordinary it may be to the locals there.

A yearish ago I wandered at random into a small eatery at a wide spot in the road in the middle of rural Costa Rica. Probably the first gringo in there that month. Most of the customers knew the staff, everybody knew the musicians. Everybody but me lived nearby. To them this was every Tuesday at karaoke at their local cantina. To me it’s a night I’ll remember for decades. The non-adventurous sorts of gringos would not be within 200 miles of that village, nor would they stop at a random ramshackle roadside if they happened somehow to be traveling past.

That’s the difference. It takes all kinds.