8 days on the Carnival Splendor: Sydney – Noumea – Lifou Isle – Noumea – Sydney.
This one isn’t going to have a day-by-day report because it wasn’t that sort of cruise.
We didn’t do this cruise because we wanted to see New Caledonia – we’ve been there before and it’s pretty underwhelming for people who aren’t really ‘beach and sun’ people. This was basically an attempt by me (Sandy) to avoid being home at Christmas time, because I still can’t really face that without Adam being with us.
The main reason I picked this ship over a P&O one is because I cruised on it last year (very much the same cruise in September 2023) and I thought Paul would prefer it over P&O. As it turns out, not so much – he didn’t see it as much better than P&O anyway.
Start of rant
I am actually still really angry with Carnival over this cruise. They – like all cruise lines – claim over and over that the safety of their passengers and crew is of paramount importance. So, when I booked this cruise in July 2024, I did it knowing that cruises weren’t currently going to New Caledonia because of the ongoing civil unrest there. At that time, cruise lines including Carnival were changing their New Caledonia cruises usually around a month before sailing time; sometimes they’d go to Port Vila or Santo in Vanuatu instead, or sometimes a complete change and going to Cairns for example.
I knew that it would be difficult to change this cruise, because all the ports in Vanuatu already had cruise ships booked in, and they don’t usually take more than one ship at a time (and of course as it happened, there was a huge earthquake there just before our cruise left and so we wouldn’t have been going there anyway). Just the same, I was quite sure that we would only go to New Caledonia if the civil unrest was over, and equally sure that they would take the formal government advice on this issue. So, imagine my annoyance in mid-November 2024 when cruise lines started going to New Caledonia even though the official government advice on Smart Traveller was still a Level 3 warning – reconsider your need to travel / essential travel only. And similar web sites for other countries such as New Zealand, Canada, USA, UK etc had the same sorts of notifications. And BTW this is still the warning level as of the end of December 2024.
This was a pain financially as we have an annual travel insurance policy which would have covered this cruise, except that it clearly says that they will not cover travel to any country with a Level3 or Level4 warning in place. And it’s not as simple as just saying that we wouldn’t get off the ship in New Caledonia because sometimes it’s not your choice – for example, the day before we were due to arrive in Noumea, a lady slipped and fell on the Lido deck. She both broke and dislocated her knee (ouch!) and was taken off the ship for treatment in hospital in Noumea; you just don’t get the choice about this sort of thing.
So, I ended up buying a new separate policy for this trip with a different company – more than $700 for an eight-day cruise when the entire annual policy was only $2100.
I was even more annoyed by the fact that Carnival did not ever openly admit that they were doing this. There was a really active Facebook group for this cruise and heaps of people kept discovering that their policy wasn’t going to cover them. And to be honest, I’m still not sure that the new policy I bought would have completely covered us either, but fortunately we didn’t need to find out. Still, I’m still really annoyed with Carnival, and I plan to explain my annoyance in detail when I give them an ‘I will never recommend you to friends’ rating on the cruise review.
End of rant
Anyway, overall, the cruise went pretty much as expected.
I deliberately picked a cabin quite close to the Lido deck buffet. On most cruise ships you can’t do this without the risk of the cabin being really noisy but on this ship the buffet is on deck 9, rather than the more usual ‘top of the ship’ location. This made it easier to just pick up food and take it back to the cabin if the buffet was too crowded – although in the end we only need to do this a couple of times.
A couple of times we were caught out by signage that could have been better. For example, there are sort of ‘twin’ coffee shops on Deck 5, same name, only a few steps apart, but only one of them also does fresh squeezed fruit juice. The app and all the signs say that they’re open all day, but in fact the one that does juice closes for a few hours in the afternoon. Not a problem unless you want juice in the afternoon. Similarly, the pizza shop outside the Lido which does really nice pizza and is open from before lunch until midnight every day advertises a couple of ‘pay for’ pizzas as well as the free ones. No idea why their advertisement doesn’t advise that you can only get them at dinner time. Only minor annoyances but things they could fix really easily.
The ship of course was full of families with kids. There were heaps of special Christmas things for kids to do and from the Facebook group it looked like they were all having the time of their lives!
We didn’t get off the ship at the first stop in Noumea, or at Lifou. For the return trip to Noumea, we had booked a little shore excursion – to the World War 2 museum and the Maritime Museum. Really, we could have walked to both places except that you know, Level3 safety warning! And, having a tour guide who did some explanations in both places before letting us loose to look around was a good thing, because of course this is effectively France and the French aren’t really keen on admitting that English is a language, so a lot of the information signs were only in French - even though they are so dependent on tourism and the vast majority of their tourists are English speaking. Anyway, a nice little tour.
I had a bit of a problem with sea-sickness on the way back to Sydney. My plan for cruises is always to take sea-sickness tablets on the first night, and then sometimes the next morning if I feel the need, and then I’m usually okay for the rest of the cruise unless the waves get bad again – which happened this time; the waves weren’t outrageously high but we were sailing sort of diagonally across them, and I needed the help of my Quells again. I wasn’t alone either – a number of people were asking on the Facebook group if anyone had any more tablets (because of course you can go to the medical centre but the prices there are outrageous).
As I said, not a bad cruise but I won’t be going out of my way to book with Carnival again – although in fact Paul’s 70th birthday cruise next year which is currently still technically a P&O cruise will morph into a Carnival cruise in March next year when P&O Cruises merge into the Carnival Cruise Line.
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