Fletcher

Very pleased to see you made landfall @highplanesdrifters on Rapa Nui. Unless you fly in (the very fact you can do that means Easter Island isn't remote) it is always a tricky prospect. I remember we had the roughest seas ever between Ducie Island and here. Passengers were doing cartwheels in the restaurant, outside decks were closed, coffee urns thrown to the floor, eggs self-scrambled. And when we got to Easter Island it looked unlikely but the zodiacs coped well and when you turn left into the little landing area the waters calmed down. For disembarking and embarking passengers they loaded the zodiacs with luggage and never lost a single bag.

My best snorkel ever was at Ducie, chilly but so incredibly clear, stepping over birds on the island, inner lagoon was positively teeming with baby sharks.

Well, there are lots of climate charts on the internet. I think Nov better than Jan. But these days, as we all know, anything can happen.

I'd advise against the Singapore-Cairns routing in January because it is seriously wet. Bali and the rest of the Lesser Sundas at that time of year are notoriously humid and wet while Northern Territory in Australia suffers the same climate pattern. January in Cairns is tropical cyclone season. Take an umbrella.

It is very easy for us who live in the west, in big advanced and diverse societies, to impose our values on different parts of the world. Yes, the Pitcairners - or Pitkerners as they say - speak English (or a hybrid, 18th century version of it), yes they are a British Overseas Territory, yes they are governed by New Zealand, but they are also a Polynesian society, living in virtual isolation, a gene-depleted society, the descendants of a race war and of sexual violence that killed almost everyone on the island, then contaminated by Christian (that word!) religious dogma, and so on and so on. For me, this is far from black-and-white, holier-than-thou.

I hate spelchekers. And computrs that think thy are smatter than you, Good luck at Pitcairn tomorrow. Zodiacs are a tough bunch.

@highplanesdrifters thanks for thinking of me. Rest assured, barely a day passes when I don't think about doing just that. I'm also hugely impressed with some of Hapag-Lloyd's South Pacific itineraries. I do hanker for one last hurrah down there. It's the best place in the world.

Interesting . . . I would have thought the next leg to Pitcairn, Easter Island and onwards would have been sold out. What a lot of swarthy beards on your team.

I did one Saga trip, on the old Sapphire. It was a 30-odd day job from Southampton to the Caribbean and back. Because our cabin rattled like hell due to a tumultuous storm on the previous voyage, they gave us a quiet cabin on the deck below and gave us quite a large refund while on board. When we complained about one shore excursion they immediately refunded us the money. We had some onboard credit left over at the end and they gave us that, too. . There was a dress code strictly enforced - I bought a suit just for this cruise. It was a fun trip with an interesting crowd of people - entirely Brits I think. One thing, though. We were docked at Antigua alongside a big ship with a load of young Americans on board. On the pier, one of them came up to me and asked what sort of ship we were on. I said it was a cruise ship, just like yours. "Oh," he said, "I thought it was some sort of hospital ship."

Still following this with interest and enjoyment but I wish Seabourn would be a little more ambitious with their South Pacific itineraries - the Marshall Islands, Tuvalu for example and Wallis & Futuna which has some simply mind-boggling churches (one of them straight out of Bavaria) and awesome beaches. And then across to places like Tokelau while it still exists. But they tend to stick to the more conventional routes and that's OK I guess but means I won't be aboard. I'm also beginning to suspect that these new ships, Pursuit and Venture, as brilliant as they are in most respects, might be a bit too big for some places. I went to most of these Pacific islands and atolls on ships with only about 50 cabins.

@Silver Spectre on a parallel thread aboard the Moon is reporting a speed of 0.75mb, a third of what he experienced only a few months ago on another Silversea ship. It does appear they have quite deliberately dialled down, or slowed down, the wifi and they have done so quite malevolently and secretly. Surely there must be some heated exchanges at the reception desk. At the very least I would have expected some sort of official notification or email. My Personal Cruise Consultant in London claims to know nothing about it. Such shabby conduct.

I have taken screenshots of all the included excursions on my next cruise so can prove it was if there's a disagreement. I'm afraid I have lost all trust and faith in Silversea right now - the internet issue, excursions are all sore points with me.

A great shame to miss out on Henderson, a seriously remote World Heritage Site, known for a unique bird (the Henderson rail) and massive amounts of plastic rubbish washed up on the beach. It's a very tricky place to land, with deep clefts in the coral rock, and not many actually make it.

That's a fab itinerary. Nice tucker, too.

Loads of chatter on the FB page about changes to the wifi - downgraded speed, stuff blocked, all intended to force people to buy the premium service at £29 per day. Also, people are saying those included excursions you booked in advance turn out to be not included at all. All reports from fhe front line welcome.

It does sometimes mean that, say, the first group get ashore, commune with the penguins, get covered in poo, return to the ship, the wind suddenly rips up, and no one else gets off. Tough titty for groups two and three. This didn't bother me because I prefer ogling the landscape with a hot chocolate in my hand but some people were a little vexed.

The US war memorial near Honiara is fantastic.

My deepest thanks to @highplanesdrifters for visiting Nan Madol for me, a place I have long hankered after. Well, I hanker no more. How disappointing to see the site in such a state of neglect. May I ask, was it not an option for the Pursuit to anchor offshore and zodiac guests in or maybe just offer a zodiac cruise? Looking at the photos on Flickr people are there in boats and even kayaks. I'm excited by this thread and look forward to more from its intrepid author.

The ships are new and look fine but are too big with 1000pax. And are the excursions included these days?

Well, that's encouraging. Might I ask what device you used and what browser. I use a MacBook and Safari. Someone once suggested Google Chrome and that didn't work. Nice to know about another Fletcher. I chose Fletcher for this site because of the famous mutineer. Some people assumed it was from the Ronnie Barker TV comedy series.

You have three options as to file size, ranging from 16 megapixels to 60 mp. As to Flickr on the ships, no, I have never been able to get Flickr, not even on my iPhone. Some people said it's bandwidth and that premium wifi would be the solution. But reception had premium wifi and they couldn't get it either. It's a mystery and a frustrating one at that.

I've just switched from a big heavy Canon set-up to a fixed lens Leica Q3, currently I think the most wanted and most hated camera in the world. Does anyone here have a Flickr account and find it blocked on Silversea ships? Is there a solution?

Norway had announced a ban on cruise ships in Gerainger Fjord from 2026 unless they had zero-emissions. They have now pushed this back to 2032.

Is that the laughable rip-off joint where you spend around $700 per person and after the last microscopic course you leave and ask, 'Right, I'm bloody starving, where shall we go for dinner?'

Methinks, alas, that you both get on where we get off - Honkers.