We have returned from our longest time away on a cruise yet, totalling 21 days overall, and it was our first time cruising with Norwegian Cruise Line with chances to hit four new countries plus revisit some old favourites in a part of the world we really enjoy visiting: South and Central America.
Tradition on this website dictates that I must now summarise the cruise experience while the details are still fresh in the jet-lagged mind because any regular readers of this site’s content will know that the actual write-ups and proper photos are anywhere up to two years away. This gives me a chance to have travel content that includes immediate reactions and feelings plus those more contemplative and verbose look-back-with-rose-tinted-eyeballs ones much later.
I’m going to break this down into sensible sections covering the ship and cruise line first – because that’s what I think most people will be interested in hearing about – then elements of the pre-cruise stay in Peru and itinerary afterwards. For us, when we book cruises, it’s the itinerary that generally sells the cruise to us. We like if we can add in new experiences such as new cruise lines or ships, but that is very definitely secondary.
- Norwegian Jade
- Norwegian Cruise Line
- Embarkation & Disembarkation
- NCL Comparisons & Conclusions
- The Cruise Itinerary
And, of course, always remember that this covers our experience aboard and our thoughts about elements of the time. Your experiences and thoughts may differ, and they certainly should differ since we’re not clones.
Norwegian Jade
Give us a choice between a big, new ship with all the features or a smaller, older ship with all the character and we’ll opt for the latter option every time, and when you’re looking for itineraries that hit interesting ports then you will typically find that older and smaller trumps flashy, new behemoths every time. Jade was launched in 2006 and typically carries about two and half thousand passengers. A great size for us.
The ship had some interesting decor in places. An area containing a champagne bar, a Martini bar, and a beer and whisky bar all next to each other and close to the second, smaller dining room was a good example. The first two bars were quite stylish with Art Deco touches in places (Art Deco featured in the main dining room too). The beer and whiskey bar and the smaller dining room, Alizar, though, had an aesthetic familiar to anyone who remembers (or still has near them) flat-roofed pubs in Britain from the 1970s and 1980s. Lettering, colours… just lacking thick clouds of cigarette smoke and outright racist conversations. Thankfully. However, she was a very clean ship, all the fixtures and fittings were decent quality, not showing any real signs of age (little bits of absolutely expected rust on sea-exposed areas, notwithstanding). No complaints here.
The layout of the ship took some getting used to. Jade has a very asymmetrical feel to her in places where picking the port or starboard way of approaching a venue made more of a difference than we were expecting. We’ve been on ships before where to approach one dining room you have to come at it from a deck above and that was true of the main dining room, Grand Pacific, where we ate most evening meals. Port embarkation threw us a few times because you’d enter on deck four on the starboard side, for instance, and scan cards, but would need to walk a little way snaking through barriers for the important security (i.e. bottle confiscation) check, and by the time you’d completed that you’d be on the port side without really realising it and sometimes without any clue as to which way was now forward and which was aft. We got lost a couple of times, and we never usually get lost on a ship.
Our cabin was large and spacious and had plenty of charging sockets and USB ports but we immediately realised there was an issue with bedside tables as only one side of the bed had any. The other had a small sofa which could hold certain items on it, but not a glass of water, for instance, with any degree of confidence it wouldn’t get knocked over and spill everywhere. The bed was too soft for our liking but that could just be an older mattress issue. The bathroom on first entering looked decent with a good-sized shower with sliding door, a central section with a sink, and the toilet in its own section to the left that also had a sliding door to it. However, in practice this space didn’t really work. The sliding door to the toilet was more of an encumbrance than of any real use and most frequently was the cause of banged elbows in the middle of the night when trying to use the loo quietly without waking your other half. The sink was oval shaped, projecting out from the main vanity unit and this ate up real estate space in front to the extent that drying yourself after a shower was easier done still in the shower cubicle or out in the room.
We found it difficult to find a quiet spot during the day because the various lounges and bars always seemed to have something going on in them. That might not be the case on a large NCL ship, but we were very glad to have our balcony to escape to. The top deck was quite large and had plenty of loungers around, but we were surprised that the full-wraparound promenade deck which was very wide in places had no places to sit on at all.
The staff were excellent, the service was generally very good, our room steward was superb, the food quality was above average, not excelling, but nothing being bad. The speciality dining experiences were a bit of a letdown to be honest, with specifics when I write the full accounts, so we’re glad we had those included for free as part of the cruise rather than paying for them.
Norwegian Cruise Line
There was a lot to like about the pre-cruise booking experience and the app both ahead of the cruise and while on board, all of which had tons of information and access to all the things you’d need such as daily plans, excursion details, if you had dining booked, etc. One of the best apps from our experience.
Our booking included the Free At Sea unlimited open bar (for drinks up to $15) and, given the length of the cruise, this also included five speciality dining meals. There was also a cruise excursion credit worth $50 per port, weirdly only applied to the lead booking rather than $25 each, but that helped to make the NCL trips comparable price-wise with port-side offerings from the likes of Viator or GetYourGuide. But we discovered one horrible little gotcha that related to excursions booked ahead of the cruise. We booked all our trips with the cruise line and they all went well, had sensible meeting times (for us; we did arrive at the theatre on a couple of occasions where they were calling people for trips that should have met an hour earlier so not sure what happened there), and we had no real issues at all. But one port was cancelled on which we’d had a trip booked and paid for ahead of the cruise on our credit card. Our expectation was that we would be refunded to our credit card but instead we saw a credit applied to our onboard account. Okay, we thought, but at the end of the cruise we’ll get that money refunded if we’ve not spent it. Yeah, not the case at all. In fact, if we’d not checked with someone on the last sea day then it’s likely (unless the staff were wrong, and that’s an issue in itself) that Norwegian would have simply taken our money. We were told by two members of staff that we needed to go to a desk to get our owed money back, not on our card, not in British pounds, but in cash, and in dollars. What use are dollars to people who don’t live in America, are about to fly out from America, and have no plans to visit America again? And exchanging them would lose money. Yeah, we were not happy about this at all.
I’ve mentioned food quality for the ship already because that’s down to the chefs aboard, but for food variety and portion sizes this feels more a line-related thing, likely imposed fleet-wide. The variety was poor, particularly for breakfast in the buffet and evening meals in the main dining rooms. The appetisers barely changed and the featured main courses often were variations on the same theme night after night. The portion sizes were stupidly large, and this was both for general dining and speciality dining. We found ourselves stuffed before dessert most nights, even when trying to leave some room.
The musicians in lounges were of a decent quality and with a reasonable and varied range of styles. We don’t do shows so can’t comment on them from direct experience but others on the cruise reported that they weren’t that impressed.
One thing we’d heard was that Norwegian liked to push sales on everything, hard. Our experience is a bit mixed on this. We were not pressured to buy anything, and if we were to compare our time on Norwegian Jade to other cruises we’ve had then I’d have to say this was the least sales-push-based cruise we’ve ever had. No urgings to visit the spa or pay for tasting experiences or sign up for the higher tier drinks package, or anything at all. However, what we noticed was that daytime activities in particular lacked free options and were completely devoid of staples of other cruises such as talks or interviews. There were no port lectures, no guest speakers. There were lots of wine-tastings, Martini-tastings, art classes, etc., and all with a charge. You could attend dance classes and art talks for free, but that was about the limit of it.
Embarkation And Disembarkation
Embarkation for this cruise was a mixed bag, but there were some logistical considerations here. Lima is not a port from which many ships cruise. Ships may visit – not many, though – but as a turnaround port you might only get half a dozen ships embarking passengers in a year. As such there’s no cruise terminal. We’d expected that we would need to get to a temporary checking-in location near the commercial port of Callao on embarkation day because that’s what other cruises do but there were no details forthcoming on this until just a few weeks before the cruise. What NCL decided to do was have everyone check in at a hotel in the Miraflores district (a tourist-friendly area of Lima) and then get taken by coach to the port (about 30-40 minutes away). This was perfect for us because we had decided to stay in Lima for four days before the cruise and not only were we already booked into a hotel in Miraflores, but we were two minutes’ walk from the check-in location. I know that a lot of people who’d booked hotels near the airport or even the cruise port changed their bookings late on to go to Miraflores instead. There was no access to the cruise port except via the Miraflores hotel.
Check-in at the cruise line’s hotel was easy and quick because we had all the documentation to hand (passports, boarding pass, and ESTAs) and we were given a bus number. 23 as it happens. They were calling bus number 17 while we sat down and about five minutes later they called bus 18. We had a bit of wait ahead of us but no worries, we thought, until an NCL person wandered around then walked up to us. “What bus number are you?” “23,” we said. “No, I think you’re 18,” she replied, and swapped our bus numbers over. Lovely, and we saw a few other couples suddenly see this and come hurrying to her to see if they could get the same treatment.
That part of embarkation was great. At Callao, though, we stood in line waiting to board the ship for over an hour, a large part of that in full sunshine. Jade only has two entries and one was being used to load luggage. The buses were turning up every five minutes and disgorging 50-60 people and for some reason it was taking an age to get on the ship. Not even sure why as when it was our turn it was a matter of seconds to scan our card, push our carry-on items through the scanner, then hand over our passports and receive a receipt for them, although we did hear some people complaining and demanding to know why they had to hand passports over and there were a lot of different nationalities of cruisers aboard so that may have been the cause of the delays. The elevators were being sensibly controlled by a member of staff only allowing people to move up a few levels where they could find more elevators in order to keep the travel times between floors flowing.
Disembarkation was a nightmare. A perfect storm of problems hit here and it started with San Diego insisting on on-board immigration rather than doing this ashore in a terminal. That caused a delay in setting things up on the ship and getting clearance to start the process.
The next problem was entirely of NCL’s doing because they’d sent around conflicting information about the disembarkation process and exacerbated that with announcements on the morning of departure that they then had to clarify as they were equally open to interpretation. Effectively, half the ship thought we could all pass through immigration at any time then wait for our luggage tag to be called to exit (and they were likely the correct half, as it turns out, and we wish we’d done that) while the other half thought they had to wait for their luggage tag to be called then pass through immigration and leave (which is how we and others read it). Then you had some people thinking they didn’t need to pass through immigration at all because the announcements started by saying that those with walk-off colour tags could leave immediately via deck 4, only for a follow-up announcement to then say “well, when we say leave, we mean after you’ve passed through immigration, so sorry, back up several decks for you lot.” It was chaos. We were supposed to be called to leave at 08:00. When we joined the queue – half an hour after that point having still not heard our tag being called but feeling we needed to consider the time now for our upcoming flight – the queue for immigration started midship on deck 6, stretched to the front, went up a flight of stairs to deck 7, stretched the entire length of the ship on deck 7 then doubled back on itself to midship deck 7. It took us over 90 minutes to get off the ship, and this was already 30 minutes later than we’d been due to leave.
And the third part of the perfect storm of the disembarkation debacle was that by this time all the roads around the port had now been closed off for a No Kings protest march (the reason for which we agree with, but oh, the timing couldn’t have been worse). The queue for the transfer buses was about three hundred people deep but nobody was going anywhere as the police had sealed off all the entrances and exits. Taxis couldn’t drive in and out either so even calling an Uber first required us to traipse our luggage outside the port, then several blocks over to find somewhere we could get picked up from. Easy to find as it was where everyone else was now congregating and looking at phones. It was about another 40 minutes before our driver got through all the traffic and arrived and yes, we made it to the airport and through the check-in, bag drop, security, and to boarding with just five minutes to spare for our flight. Stress levels through the roof.
NCL Comparisons And Conclusions
So, there were things we liked about our first NCL cruise experience and things we didn’t. As you’d probably expect.
If you’re a glutton then the food is a plus point as the quality and the quantity were definitely in the better half of food experiences we’ve had on cruises, although if you prefer a bit of refinement then the quantity and variety let it down a little. There were a decent number of varied speciality venues, especially given the small size of the ship – a steakhouse, Italian, French, sushi, teppanyaki, and a Brazilian churrascaria – but had we paid for any of these then we’d have been disappointed with the only barely elevated dining experiences from the main dining room. Comparing the food with what we’ve had on other ships then we’d say that NCL was far superior to Celebrity (sorry, they’ve been dreadful for us) and just edged out P&O, Marella, Ambassador, and MSC overall. Princess, HAL, and Virgin are better, though.
Drinks range and quality, plus the service in bars and the staff everywhere in general were all excellent.
We liked the more casual attitude on Norwegian Jade with regards to what people wore, and not having to pack a tuxedo for a long flight was a big bonus.
Daytime activities and entertainment weren’t great but we’ve always made our own entertainment anyway so this wasn’t a deal-breaker for us, although we know people for whom this is important.
The app was excellent, and one of the best, if not the best, that we’ve used on a cruise.
Lack of information on the ship (not related to details of your own cruise on the app), and lack of clarity on occasions was bad. That said, I can’t remember the last time I got off a ship and thought that the information presented was good. This seems to be an area where cruise lines really need to improve.
The basic internet was a dreadful throwback to ye olden tymes. For our cruise package we received 300 minutes of internet, so we had to monitor how long we were on and make sure to log out after a quick look around. There was, of course, a paid option for fast, unlimited internet, but we had 300 minutes each and didn’t want to pay needlessly. This would have been okay (ish) were it not for certain throttling limits on the package. Browsing was fine, using social media was fine, and that’s all we really wanted to do, but I ran into an issue with Instagram trying to continually upload a reel and fail, even after removing the video file. The only solution was to delete the app and reinstall it, which I thought would take a couple of minutes. No. Downloading the app from the store used up almost a sixth of my whole cruise’s allocated time on the net as the speed from the store was apparently living its best life in a retro land of dial-up internet. So, if you pay for the fast net then I’m sure it’s fine, but the included option has some horrible restrictions that can make for anything but a relaxed cruising experience.
The situation where money you owe the cruise line is taken from your credit card automatically at the end (as you’d expect) but money the cruise line owes you requires you to queue and be handed that money physically in a useless currency format or risk losing it completely is appalling if that is truly the way it works fleet-wide. We had and still have our doubts about the legality or veracity of that, but this is what we were told twice on board by staff members. Hated that.
The itinerary was excellent and gave us plenty of chances to do the things we love to do when we travel. We enjoyed loads of architecture and street art, craft ale in most of the countries, bought soaps, bookmarks, and shot glasses nearly everywhere (it’s what we do), visited several museums, and got to see historical ruins from tribes associated broadly within the Inca, Maya, and Aztec (Mexica, really) peoples. It had all the things that make travelling worthwhile for us.
Would we cruise with Norwegian Cruise Line again? They wouldn’t be our first choice, but as I’ve already mentioned that it’s the itinerary that drives us then they’re certainly in the reckoning and particularly so since they do run some interesting trips that other lines don’t. Our Lima to San Diego via a host of countries we’d not visited before is a prime example. We shall definitely be keeping an eye out for NCL cruises in the future.
The Cruise Itinerary
With the cruise starting from Lima on a Wednesday and flights from the UK being the way that they are we would have had to book the Tuesday before off anyway for travel time just to get to the airport, so for one extra day of annual leave allowance taken off – the Monday – we could actually fly in to Peru’s capital on the Saturday instead and have more time to explore. And that’s what we did.
We stayed at the El Pardo Lima in Miraflores and it was a great choice for location and overall quality, featuring a shallow swimming pool on the tenth floor and handy restaurants and bars attached to it as well as no shortage of locations in very close proximity.
During our time in Lima we spent the first full day visiting the historic centre, and this happened to be International Women’s Day too so there were lots of activities going on. We visited the catacombs and had a great experience not shared by many other people there with our guide that I’ll write up about in the main articles much later. We also found a great bar for cocktails there and in the evening walked past groups of dancing people to get to the fountain show that we’d seen once before many years ago but lost all the video footage to.
On the second day we walked to an archaeological site near the hotel for a fantastic guided wander around it, then took an Uber to the Larco museum for a great time there too. Ubers are a fantastic way to get around Lima and ridiculously cheap. You could pay as little as three or four quid for a drive that takes 30 minutes through the traffic and we made sure to always tip the maximum amount after any drive because it was seriously too cheap for us to feel comfortable with.
Our final full day in Lima involved a walk to the nearby Barranco district – still a fairly decent walk away, but along the clifftops from Miraflores – and there we enjoyed the street art and architecture for which the area is famous and which are things we enjoy everywhere that we go.
Salaverry, Peru
This was the only cancelled port on the cruise. The cruise as a whole featured an absolutely calm Pacific Ocean, except for Salaverry which had a very shallow port that turned the flat sea into rolling waves. We were rolling about in bed ourselves in the early part of the morning as the ship was approaching the port and we could tell that it was never going to get in to dock safely.
Manta, Ecuador
We didn’t like the look of any excursions here so just decided to go for a walk along the shoreline and to make sure that I bought a proper Panama hat. They come from Ecuador, not Panama, in case you didn’t know. I don’t really wear hats as brims tend to get in the way of using my camera but figured I’d regret it if I didn’t.
Amador, Panama
We were docked at Amador for this but took an excursion that brought us to the Chagres National Park to visit the Emberá people at Emberá Purú. This involved an exhilarating dugout canoe ride to their village then some entertainment in terms of talks and songs and dances with food laid on from the tribe. After, we had time to buy some crafts from them, and overall it was a fabulous trip with some unforgettable singing. We were particularly pleased because we’d tried to do this trip back on our 2023 Ruby Princess cruise but we’d not been allowed to dock then due to civil unrest in the country.
Puntarenas, Costa Rica
Our third time visiting this port in Costa Rica and we split it between an excursion followed by time in the port. The excursion included some folk dancing by kids (and the youngest girl was having the best time of her life doing this so was an utter joy to watch), then a boat ride to see lots of different birds and loads of crocodiles, including one 6 metres in length just a few metres from the boat edge.
Acajutla, El Salvador
Our excursion here took us first to Joya de Cerén, a Mayan site of a town buried in volcanic ash around 600 CE. It’s referred to as “the Pompeii of the Americas”. We then went to another archaeological site, this being San Andrés.
Puerto Quetzal, Guatemala
We booked a “free time in Antigua Guatemala” trip here as the old capital of the country was quite some distance away. Antigua Guatemala was a beautiful place, nestled between three volcanoes, subject to earthquakes (hence some ruins and no buildings over two storeys in height), and full of colour and character. We hit a few ruins of buildings then went to see the main square and the arch that everyone takes photos of before being surprised by finding two craft ale microbreweries that we were obliged to visit, drink in, and buy merchandise from.
Huatulco, Mexico
No excursions interested us here so we braved the heat and humidity for a walk to the nearby town of La Crucetita before returning to the port area, mostly for a bit of a bimble about, but also to grab a nice large margarita at a beach bar. When in Mexico, and all that.
Acapulco, Mexico
We headed off on a tour to see Tehuacalco, a huge archaeological site of the Yope people known for their strong warrior prowess who while being surrounded by the broader Aztec empire were never conquered by them. The site included pyramid temples and a Mesoamerican ball court, and our tour group had the entire place to ourselves (except for the dozen armed guards) as it was technically closed for the day. Fabulous place.
Manzanillo, Mexico
Our tour here was described as a visit to see colonial architecture and have lunch. It started with a visit to Colima where there were some colonial buildings and a good museum visit. We then had a stop at La Campana archaeological site which our guide had described as fairly modest but which we discovered was quite vast. Low, pyramidal structures, but loads of them and spread out over a huge area. In fact it was the largest pre-hispanic population centre in western Mexico. A short ride from there brought us to the pretty town of Comala for a lovely if chaotic lunch. Less colonial than we’d expected but the ruins were far better than we’d been led to believe.
Mazatlán, Mexico
This ended up being my favourite Mexican port city. We walked – despite seemingly never-ending offers of taxi rides near the port – and hit a lovely public square near the cathedral before making our way to the beach on the western side of the city. We’d not expected to love the beach area this much but it had lots of sculptures, a wonderfully cooling breeze, and we even saw a cliff top diver performing. We visited a small but very interesting museum after that then planned to visit three microbreweries we could see in a line on the route back to the ship. In fact we simply stopped at the first one because we had the rooftop garden to ourselves, the beers were great, and there was a cat. We just couldn’t leave.
Cabo San Lucas, Mexico
We’d been here once before when we’d taken an excursion inland to see another town entirely so we decided to walk around the place this time around. We’re not sure what the big appeal of Cabo is, to be honest. I think we’d probably book a boat trip next time as there wasn’t a lot to see that wasn’t bars or restaurants or souvenir shops, but we did eventually find Baja Brewing to satisfy more craft ale desires.
Aside from the high stress involved on the final day just getting home it was a wonderful holiday with enough relaxation between the numerous, sometimes a little strenuous, always very hot port stops of interest for us. The pre-cruise stay in Lima was excellent and we’ll have to do that sort of thing more often if annual leave from work allows it. The cruise line and ship weren’t the greatest but they were absolutely good enough, and the itinerary and all it allowed us to do and see were just superb. Full details of everything to come somewhen in the distant future.