Tasmania Cruise - Sun Princess - Day 4 Wednesday 19 December - Port Arthur

And here we see the problem with cruising from Australia - there really are only so many ports that ships can stop at.  We have been here a few times already, and have already done tours of the historic site as well as a couple of other tours in the area.  The historic area is beautifully preserved and looked after but it is such a sad place (for the obvious reasons) that I can't keep going back there.  Add to this the fact that cruise ships can't actually dock at Port Arthur, so you need to go through the drama of tender transfers on and off this ship, and this time we decided to simply stay on board the ship and have a quiet day.
It was a lovely day and people seemed to have had a good time on shore.  However, the last tender wasn't back until almost an hour later than expected, and the captain says that we will be "going like the clappers" to get to Burnie tomorrow.

During the day today, I got an email from Princess telling me that they're changing both the time and the itinerary for our cruise in 2020 - the start of the cruise has been delayed from 18 October to 6 November, and two ports have been dropped and an extra one added.  We still have time to change to a different cruise if we want to, so we'll just have to see. 

• Upside: The two ports that were most important - Valletta and Kusadasi - are still included.
• Downside: This was already quite late in the season for a Mediterranean cruise; it's likely to be quite cool and possibly also rainy. 
• Upside: However, we're accustomed to the cold, and it also means that there will be far fewer tourists in ports.  
• Downside: Some places we might want to see may have closed down for the winter.  This happened to us in England a couple of years ago and we were there in October, not November.

All in all, this will require some serious thought