Sandy's South Pacific Cruise

 Just as for the eclipse cruise, I didn't bother to do a daily report for my South Pacific cruise.  But, here are some highlights - and a couple of lowlights.  Overall though, it was pretty good - better than I expected actually: I was expecting P&O and got more like Royal Caribbean!

This was a 9 day South Pacific cruise on the Carnival Splendor.  Paul and I have only sailed with Carnival once before, but that was 10 years ago, on a very different ship - the Carnival Spirit which is much older and smaller.

Anyway, on with the story - or more accurately, on with the random dot points....

• Itinerary was rescheduled the day before the cruise.  
• Originally we had two stops in Noumea and one in Lifou; the new itinerary had only one stop in each place.  
• Main issue this caused was for people who had booked private shore excursions, as the new itinerary had us in both places on different days from the original plan.  I had a shore excursion booked through the cruise line for one of the days in Noumea - initially it was still going to go ahead, but in the end they said the tour company couldn't do the tour on the new day, so I got a refund.  In the end I just got the shuttle from the port in Noumea (the ship has to dock at the cargo port as it's too big for their cruise port so you cannot walk off the dock and they provide free shuttle buses instead) and wandered around for a while.  
• Noumea is not really an exciting place to visit, specially once you've been there before and extra specially if you're not a beach person.
  
• I was never planning to leave the ship at Lifou, and I still didn't.  
• The reason for the reschedule was so that we could first go to Bundaberg - not allowed off the ship though, it was to allow divers to scrape the hull in order to make sure that the New Zealand authorities will let the ship into their waters when it goes there later this year.  
• Food and drinks.  
• Ate at the main dining room most nights - because I was solo was at a table with a number of other single people.  All good. 
• Went to their specialty steakhouse - Fahrenheit 555 - one night.  Wow.  Everyone without exception raves about how good it is, and they're correct.  I understand why some people go there multiple times on a cruise - even at $65 it's an excellent meal.
  
• Buffet - ate breakfast there most days.  Not overwhelmingly great but not bad either.  In the buffet they also have some specialty foods that you pay for - for example an Indian takeaway, and a deli, and a Seafood Shack.  I'm told the Indian is really good (and the queues support this), I had one sandwich from the deli which was okay, one lobster roll from the seafood shack which was not nice at all (weird greasy bread roll, almost no lobster, and $22!!)
  
• Pizza - they have a pizza bar where you wait while they cook it fresh.  It's open for most of the day and night, and the pizza is really quite good.
  
• Fresh squeezed orange juice was available at their Juice & Java bar - always good when I can get fresh orange juice on a cruise (although I hardly ever drink it at home)
• Coffee was poor, as you expect on a cruise ship, but definitely far from the worst I've had onboard.
  
• Cabin - had a balcony cabin on deck 8.
• Good points - lots of room, including a large sofa. Great location - out the door and up one flight of stairs to the buffet, or down three flights of stairs to the shops, coffee and juice, and casino. Balcony chairs were quite comfortable for reading - I got through 13 books in the 9 days onboard.
  
• Not so good points - the location being so convenient also meant it was sometimes noisy, some dickhead was smoking on a balcony nearby (despite the $500 fine and despite the fact that fire is incredibly dangerous on cruise ships), and the TV in the room was rubbish - at least 15 years old, tiny, blurry, and crap content.  Good thing I wasn't planning to watch TV!
  
• Casino.  
• Pretty standard cruise ship casino, although there were a lot more people actually playing at the gambling tables than you'd usually see on an Australian cruise (it's usually the poker machines that are most popular).  I think this is because there were quite a few Americans onboard - the current USD-AUD exchange rate plus deals that Carnival are offering make Carnival Australia cruises quite attractive to Americans at the moment.
• Good range of poker machines.
• Also one of those physical coin drop machines which was a total rip-off as usual, but which I couldn't resist on occasion.  At least this one was using 10 cent pieces, not the quarters that the Royal Caribbean ships use.  Supposedly there was a $100 jackpot that you could get by collecting gambling chips that they "randomly" put into the machine.  Except that you needed to collect all the letters in the word BONUS, and I only ever saw two chips with the letter S in the whole 9 days!
  
• Entertainment
• I don't often go to shows on cruises, but I did go to their "88 Keys" musical which was basically singing and dancing with piano music.  I can only presume that they pay proper royalties to the originating artists, and honestly this cannot have been cheap because the songs were from artists like Billy Joel and Neil Diamond.  All pretty good.
• Lots of trivia sessions - like, two or three a day, and all different.  Adam would have slayed the Simpsons one.
  
• Cruise Director.  I've never been able to understand why people are always so keen to know whose going to be the Cruise Director on their cruise, but the way this guy did his job made it a bit clearer to me.  The Cruise Director organises pretty much all the entertainment and activities on board - or organises the people who organise them.  This guy was called Marty and basically, he really did a great job.  Great a dealing with people, even when they complained at him, great at explaining what's going on. 
• Photos.  If you've been on a cruise you'll know that there are plenty of photo "opportunities", but I've never seen quite so many as on this ship.  I mean, walking from my room down to the restaurant, I would walk past five different photographers every night.  However, I really don't like having my photo taken so their unfortunate habit of ignoring me because I was alone played right into my hands.  Didn't have one single offer of a photo.
• Internet - the ships internet was pretty good, although disappointingly even though I had paid for their premium package, they had completely locked down Kayo or any other way to watch the football finals.  
• Passengers - about 3,300 passengers on board but to be honest I never felt crowded and rarely had to queue for anything.  Some people were whining on social media about the number of noisy kids but all I can say is they must have been somewhere else!
  

And one final point.  Cruise ships tend to be built to a pattern which they call a 'class' - basically the same ship built over and over again. And the class name is usually the name of the first ship built to that particular pattern. The Carnival Splendor is one of Carnival's 27 ships, but as far as its design goes it is a one-off, which they always advertise as "Splendor" class.  Truth is though, it was originally ordered for Costa Cruises, and was going to be called the Costa Splendor.  And, its actual class is "Concordia Class" - there are still four other Concordia Class ships sailing for Costa, but obviously, not the namesake one!