Before the cruise, I booked and paid for an "All Access Ship's Tour". I've done a similar thing on a Princess ship - they take you behind the scenes to see areas like the food storage, galley, laundry, bridge, engine control room. It was originally scheduled for the first Sunday of the cruise, but then they cancelled it for "Health and Safety reasons", and they said that they might be able to reschedule it for a later time. However, on the Monday, I saw on the cruise Facebook group that people in the "Diamond and above" loyalty group - i.e., not me - had been advised that *all* such tours had been cancelled for the entire cruise, and I assumed that this really was the case, because not long afterwards they refunded my payment.
Imagine my surprise then when they contacted me and said they have rescheduled for today. Of course, we should have been in Perth today but because of the medical detour we were still a long way short of Perth.
Overall, it was interesting, but I don't think I'd do it again; not on a cruise ship full of Australians anyway. Most of the people were fine but I was embarrassed by some of them - "joking" with the crew members who were explaining things to us but actually insulting them, trying to force the particular crew members to answer questions that clearly weren't in their area of expertise; claiming that they understand how the ship's engines work because they know about car engines; claiming to know how the whole ship works because "we're from a boating family", refusing to follow the instructions from the tour leader even though they were clearly designed to keep us and the crew safe (because we were in areas where passengers would never normally be allowed), and at least two people (not me) clearly didn't meet the physical criteria for doing the tour but came along anyway....
Looking at that it sounds like I had a terrible time - I didn't, but overall it wasn't organised well enough to overcome those irritations.
We finally got to Fremantle, but it was around 5:30 before people could leave the ship. After that, they kept announcing that "unless you need to leave the ship straight away it would be best to wait a while". Paul and I thought that we had "waited a while", but as it turned out, not long enough. When we joined the queue it started almost as far forward as you can go on deck 5. And, it went past the midships area where you could leave the ship, right down to almost as far aft as you can go, then turned around and back to the middle of the ship to exit. It only took about half an hour and most people were quite polite about it - although of course there was the usual person of a different culture who doesn't believe in queuing and just cut in wherever, but there doesn't seem to be anything you can do about that. It was always going to be busy - it's a huge ship and if we had arrived on time people would have had tours and excursions planned and the departure from the ship would have been staggered a little, but as it was, everyone wanted to get off the ship asap.
One interesting thing we realised is that when you're leaving a Princess ship, they're constantly telling you when you need to be back. I didn't hear or see anything about the expected return time today. It will be fascinating to see if we get away on time......
We achieved all we wanted to in Fremantle which was mostly boring stuff like getting some prescriptions filled at a chemist and picking up some stuff from Coles. Both the chemist and Coles were doing a roaring trade from cruise ship passengers. We also found a restaurant called Gypsy Tapas House which I would not usually consider even trying, but there wasn't a lot of choice. And, as it turned out, the food was delicious.
No comments:
Post a Comment