Fletcher

Our neighbour's dog is called Fudge.

Good heavens, I wonder where that was . . .

Many thanks for that Wes. We have also been eyeing up your CapeTown-Mahe trip. Since independence from France many years back, The Comoros are very rarely visited by cruise ships, apart from Ponant I think. Aldabra is a special place which we visited on our very first oceanic cruise, on a small ship called Island Sky. It changed our lives forever. In fact, if Silversea linked your cruise directly to ours to Saudi I might well have gone for it. But the Cloud sails empty from Mahe to Muscat. Thanks for the link to the Silversea exec. My cruise consultant is working on it but if she comes up empty I'll go for the nuclear option.

This will not happen in Saudi Arabia!!!

Surely not everyone books their cruise a year or so in advance. We very rarely do that. But current experience shows that Silversea want you to do just that. Otherwise you might book a cruise, pay a deposit, go on to MySilversea and then find that all the excursions you fancy are already sold out. So you cancel your cruise. This is nuts. Surely Silversea can find a way so that you can assess the situation before you make a booking.

Thanks for the replies. It's an overnighter in Al Ula in Saudi Arabia. There are others on the trip I really want to see but this one seems very special.

I am intending to book a Silver Cloud expedition cruise mainly for one reason - to visit a specific site on an excursion. It is remote and otherwise difficult to get to. That excursion is showing as Waitlist on MySilversea. What exactly does this mean? Has the excursion sold out four months in advance and that I can only add my name to the Waitlist and hope someone drops out? My personal cruise consultant says not to worry but I do worry about spending lots of money and missing the one thing I really want to see. Any comments and help will be gratefully received.

@hoya68 Sad to hear this. South Georgia coming up tomorrow . . . terrible if you are confined to barracks. Great scenery though from the ship.

We were on the Sojourn recently - in the Med, so it was quite warm, the ship was full and, yes, the pool deck was crowded. We avoided it for the entire cruise. The Sky Bar was our favourite in the evenings, never crowded. The Observation Lounge could get crowded, with sometimes slow service, and very noisy.

I haven't done this and if I was on a ship that offered this I would probably just stay on the ship because I've read how gruelling and rushed it is and at the Luxor end you just run into constant hassle from hawker, guides, beggars and so on. I will be on a ship next year calling at Alexandria and won't be taking the trip to the pyramids. Egypt is always a land or river-based destination in my view.

It most certainly does. We did a land-based tour back in the 1980s, specifically to see the extensive Roman ruins at Djemila, Timgad etc. Further south, fantastic desert scenery. It was all very dirty, however, and rundown, like an Eastern Europe state, with little tourist infrastructure and I'm sure that still applies today after years of political unrest. Good to see the country emerging again. Can I ask, overall what was your experience of the Cloud? Recent reviews have described it as looking rather old etc. Would appreciate your opinion as we are seriously considering a Cloud trip next April which visits Djibouti and many ports in Saudi Arabia. @wren2 might care to chip in also.

If anyone's interested, Part One of my photos from this Sojourn trip are now up on my Flickr account, covering Barcelona to Corsica. https://www.flickr.com/photos/up70mm/albums/72177720302843050

Sir Lew Grade did and I seem to recall there was once a guy called Sir Winston Churchill. And Fidel too. Veritable chimneys one and all.

Are you suggesting that because the Captain has decided against ordering this passenger to follow the rules on smoking that same Captain might not cope if the Wind hit an iceberg?

I think that link is a scam. It's not the official address.

Sometimes in life you have to take the bitter with the sour. (Billy Wilder)

What a shame you can't post a photo of the sewage smell. Maybe you can!

UK or Canadian passengers on the 20 December sailing from Bombay to Singapore could in theory fly to Colombo and pick up the Spirit there. And as Madras has been dropped from the itinerary they would not be entering Indian waters or have to stay on the ship while Americans went ashore for their fun day. This would reduce the cruise by 3 days so I wonder if Silversea would credit them with the saving, perhaps £2000 pp? I am reverting to using previous names for Indian cities as I want to punish the Indian authorities for wasting my time and causing me and my wife considerable stress.

xxxx

I called Regent about India and mentioned the visa issue for UK citizens. She was fully up to speed and said UK passengers without visas could stay on board the ship which I think is a concession from the Indian authorities. Of course this only applies to transit passengers who get on the ship in, say, Athens or Dubai and go further east to Singapore and beyond. Anyone flying into India to board a ship MUST have a visa. It's uncertain if a cruise line could negotiate some form of transit waiver for passengers disembarking in India and heading straight to the airport.

@calm down dear Silversea seem to hold their Ephesus dinner and concert in the area immediately in front of the restored Celsus Library building. Tables and chairs are laid out there. By the way, Ephesus has an enormous theatre, not an amphitheatre. Totally agree with you about the water, though we are probably not as particular as you. We disliked the bottles more than the contents.

You go on a small ship to get to seriously remote places - atolls like Aldabra, islands like Pitcairn or Wallis & Futuna, Tristan da Cunha etc or seriously immersive wildlife expeditions. That's what small ships are all about so the lack of entertainment or multiple dining options or a huge variety of food doesn't matter. So forget all the chatter here about Crystal or Oceania. They have nothing to offer people wanting to go on expedition cruises.

Fiji is not remotely typical so don't pay too much attention to the OP's complaint. There isn't a Hilton everywhere.

Chennai only made sense if they went to Colombo and Trincomalee in Sri Lanka. I can't see them circumnavigating Sri Lanka simply to go to Chennai. I still think they will drop India altogether.

We have bailed out of the Mumbai-Singapore cruise. The loss of Sri Lanka was one factor. Another is the problems in obtaining a visa for India. We had planned on getting a visa specialist to arrange this for us as we live far from London but now the Indians insist that everyone attend one of their three High Commissions (London, Birmingham, Edinburgh). Our visa specialist advised us to still use them as they would meet us at the Indian office and take us through the complicated process. We would have to be finger-printed and possibly have our eyes photographed. Our visa specialist said the passports would be posted back within a month but that was not guaranteed because of a vast backlog. The price has also gone up to over £300. It is easier to obtain a visa for Iran. (This only applies to UK and I think Canadian citizens. US citizens simply get an e-visa.) Personally I think Silversea will ultimately cancel all Indian ports as well as Sri Lanka. Seabourn have done this for a similar Encore voyage in December and will sail from Male, Maldives. I can see that Siilversea has a major headache here, not only for our cruise but the preceding one which ends in Mumbai. And then of course is the issue of Hong Kong further down the Spirit's schedule. It's a big mess.