If you’re at all interested in the sorts of things that will take place on a cruise ship on a sea day then the following scans of Horizon, P&O‘s daily programme delivered to the room each evening beforehand, may enlighten you. These sorts of activities are fairly standard not just on P&O but on most lines, and enough people obviously take part in enough of them for the cruise lines to vary them very little. We enjoy the quizzes but very little else, and that’s fine by us because a day at sea on our balcony, catching some sun if there’s any around, reading our books, listening to the sound of the ship breaking through the waves, sipping the odd drink or two, is the perfect counterpoint to those days ashore engaging in more cultural, social, or physically-demanding activities.

We decided to eat at The Glass House for this last night, a casual dining venue on P&O ships that does a small selection of usually very high quality food for not much money. I’ve written about this particular experience before (see: P&O Azura Fly-Cruise To Malta: The Good And The Bad) but I’ll go over it again because I know you well enough by now to know you’ve no intention of clicking that link.

We were seated fairly quickly in a little, tucked away section of the restaurant, and there were two other couples sat nearby. Nods, small smiles, that sort of thing. And we waited. And waited. Waiters rushing around everywhere but nobody in our little section. Twenty minutes passed before one member of one of the other couples got up to find a waiter and soon after someone came along to take a drinks order. Wine is good value on P&O ships so we ordered a bottle and started to drink while we waited for someone to take our food order. A starter arrived for one of the other couples but we’d almost finished the bottle of wine by the time anyone asked what food we wanted so we ordered a second bottle and decided we’d skip the starters and just go straight for a mains and dessert.

One hour and forty minutes after sitting down, and well into our second bottle of wine, food turned up for our three tables. My wife’s was lovely, mine had clearly been prepared too early and left out under a heat lamp but I ate the plate of disappointment anyway, and at least it wasn’t as bad as one of the other couples whose medium rare steak was burnt to a crisp. They summoned the head waiter and gave him a piece of their minds then left. The other couple also left after eating their mains and I jokingly asked why they weren’t staying for dessert; by this point they’d been there two hours.

We were pretty hammered, quite amused by the whole dining debacle on Azura, and decided we’d stick around for dessert just for the hell of it and that at least was very nice.

However, yeah, this Glass House experience was just hilariously awful.

We dropped off into Malabar to finish this final evening and got to listen to Andrew Browning performing as George Michael. He had the look and the voice and was nice enough to hang around and pose for photographs.

One final sight on the way back to our room was that of a fellow passenger who’d clearly been married or renewed vows on the ship. She was happy enough to pose for a photograph too.

And so to the following morning, back in Valletta where it all started a week before, and the only time on any cruise where we’re up around the same time as the sun. We’re very much night owls.

That brings this 2023 Adriatic cruise on Azura to an end. Food and service on the ship were not the best but unlike a lot of our fellow cruise bloggers we are experiences and destination-first cruisers so we can overlook this to some extent; these things can and do happen and you just have to be in the wrong venue at the wrong time on the wrong ship. So, for us, I’d have to say that this cruise that allowed us to visit Malta, Croatia, and Slovenia, all for the first time, was fabulous.

If you’ve read the previous post in this series then you’ll know that we’d had a walk along the shoreline of Valletta, appreciating the sixteenth century architecture of this largely designed city and its impressive defensive fortifications. We’d been able to do this because we’d been on an early flight to Malta that had allowed us to spend a little time in the morning on Azura before we could drop off luggage.

That early flight and time in the sun, plus the drinks before we’d had a short look around Valletta and the drink in Valletta itself, was all starting to take its toll on us so we decided to rest for a bit mostly in our room on the ship ahead of its departure from the port, where we’d be able to sort out our luggage that had now been delivered to the cabin and watch the world go by from our balcony.

These Grand-class ships used by P&O (UK and Australia) and Princess Cruises have great balcony cabins on deck 10 that are double the (already decent) depth of the decks above, and half-covered unlike the deck with larger cabins below. We always try to book for this deck on these ships just for that additional space. The point about cruising for us is that the travelling itself is relaxing and you’ve got access to the sea air and great views. More often these days cruise lines are reducing that personal outside space for their passengers to squeeze in more additional charge locations as the balance between providing an attractive service and giving profits to shareholders swings inevitably in favour of general enshittification.

One weird sight we saw from our balcony in Valletta harbour was a boat towing a circle. We didn’t know what it was at the time but this is apparently a tuna cage net. There are, it seems, tuna farming areas in this part of the world.

We knew we weren’t going to have a late first night on the ship so we headed for a pre-dinner drink then to the main dining room for dinner a lot earlier than we normally would when we cruise. You can also take a look at the drinks menu and dinner menu below.

We had time to take part in trivia on Azura so made our way to a packed Brodie’s and ended up finishing second. We stayed to listen to the busker for a while before calling it a night.

In the next post in this Azura cruise travelogue series we’ll have a day at sea heading north from Malta across the Mediterranean and up the Adriatic towards Croatia.

We didn’t have any real plans at all because we’d not been entirely sure whether we’d even be able to do this, but a quick look at the map and a familiarity with the weather already plus our love of being beside the sea suggested we could do a lot worse than simply walking along the shoreline of Valletta and admiring the contrasting views of water and sand-coloured stone fortifications under the piercing blue sky.

Valletta is a UNESCO World Heritage Site and it’s not hard to see why with its predominately sixteenth century buildings constructed on a grid pattern that nevertheless follows the contours of the hilly terrain, all within bastioned walls and high, thick fortifications. Our coastal walk took us around the lowest elevation of the capital city at first although we’d get to experience a little of those narrow, planned roads full of character a little later on.

Part of Valletta’s big appeal is that even when it’s suffered damage – as it did in the wars – or even when it’s approved new building work, all the construction or restoration has been done with a sympathetic eye towards the city’s history, using similar materials and similar architectural styles. If you see an arched window or arched doorway – and you’ll see loads of them – then they’ll almost inevitably be Romanesque. If you see a balcony then typically Mediterranean-flavoured Baroque elements will be prominent. Roofs are almost all flat.

Driving from the airport to the cruise port had given us a feel for how busy and congested this part of Malta could be but our walk along the shoreline felt far calmer and quieter with the majority of vehicles we saw simply parked up. There was a thin, historical veil smothering everything and it was impossible to know whether any particular building was in use or abandoned. As it was that post-noon period of the afternoon it’s entirely possible that everyone had embraced the Mediterranean siesta attitude instead, of course. Not us, though. Mad dogs and Englishmen, and all that.

Just before we reached the large customs house building through which a low tunnel had been made and through which cars could pass we passed the entrance way to the Barrakka Lift which provides a alternative to walking the longer, hilly route into the city centre. A lift had operated at this location from 1905 to 1973 and a replacement was built in 2012 to assist the increasing number of visitors from cruise ships in particular. As we weren’t walking into the middle of Valletta we didn’t use it, but it’s worth noting – at time of writing – that it cost one Euro in cash; no card payments.

When you walk along the Valletta waterfront you’ll see all the former warehouses with their coloured, arched doors. The colours were so that sailors arriving in the city would know which warehouses dealt with which types of cargo even if they couldn’t read. If they couldn’t read and were also colour blind then, well, that’s another matter entirely.

We walked as far as St Christopher Bastion, on the top of which we could see attractive stonework with those Romanesque arches, looking even older than the city itself. Just beyond those was the Lower Barrakka Gardens, a smaller counterpart to the Upper Barrakka Gardens we would have come out into had we taken the lift earlier in the shoreline walk.

The thing we’d decided we wanted to come and look at when we’d peered at the map earlier in the day was the Siege Bell War Memorial. We knew we wouldn’t really have enough time to do any museums any justice so this looked a point of interest a reasonable walking distance from the ship with the potential for some nice views out to the open sea past the harbour entrance.

The memorial was opened in 1992 to commemorate fifty years since Malta’s award of the George Cross for holding out against attacks by the Axis powers in World War II.

The memorial was popular with visitors when we turned up and, as expected, did provide a good place for just looking out to sea. In addition to the small belfry and colonnaded structure there was a catafalque with a statue to the Unknown Soldier. I waited patiently – and obviously – for a couple of minutes while a group of Russian tourists posed for selfies and Instagrammable shots around the statue before getting pissed off enough to walk right through the middle of their umpteenth pose for pictures and take some of my own pictures. Self-absorbed, selfish pricks like that annoy me so, so much.

We decided to duck into some of the streets of Valletta away from the shoreline next, primarily because we still hadn’t had a chance to apply any sun protection after arriving in Malta and we’d been out in the sun both on the ship and in the city for longer than either of us could really cope with. The narrow roads and tall buildings gave us lots of opportunity to hug the shade.

I offered my wife a couple of choices: we could make for the centre of Valletta, see what was around there, then try to work out a route back to the ship from there – she wasn’t keen on that idea – or we could hunt down a bar that was actually open somewhere nearby and see if it was possible to have a locally-made beer of some description. The photo below will tell you what we ended up doing.

Cisk lager was the best we could manage to find. We’re not lager drinkers by choice but when you’re really hot then it can be just what you need, and in that respect this was a good call. In another respect we probably might have been better off finding some other bar as we had a friendly-enough chat with a local in the bar right up until they started complaining about the prices of everything and blaming all the immigrants. Wonderful. Sunshine, beer, and a frothing xenophobe: I’m sure it’s a combination that will appeal to many people but we could’ve done without the latter part.

A little rehydrated, we more-or-less retraced our steps back along the waterfront area of Valletta after that because the hilly terrain just back from the shoreline gave us a little cause for concern that we might knacker ourselves out trying to reach the ship.

There was one final memorial sculpture to catch our eyes before we re-boarded Azura and that was in the form of a large folded paper boat in stone. This was the Child Migrants’ Memorial and it was sculpted in 2008 to commemorate the 310 Maltese children, mostly very young boys, who, with the consent of parents or guardians, were sent away from their families to Australia between 1950 and 1965 with the intention of giving them the opportunity for a better life. Some did, but many others worked for no pay, gained no education, and even suffered physical and sexual abuse on top of the sense of abandonment they’d experienced.

Always finish an article on a happy, positive note, Mark. That’s what I always tell myself.

In the next post in this cruise travelogue series I’ll cover the rest of the day aboard P&O Cruises Azura before the ship sets sail with a day at sea ahead of her and stops in Croatia and Italy to follow.

It was a little more confusing at the port where we had to loop around a street and into a room to check our documentation, then had a barcode printed out for us – because P&O still really haven’t embraced that whole phone thing yet and claimed they’d not be able to scan the image on our devices (sure, Jan) – and followed some more signs before we finally boarded the ship.

We were told that we were free to come and go as we pleased up until last boarding time, and we were told that the little slip of paper with the barcode would allow us to order drinks on board, but we were also told that the rooms weren’t ready yet so that left us in the position of either leaving our hand luggage somewhere on board – and we didn’t want to do that – or taking our hand luggage around the streets of Valletta – and we didn’t want to do that – or waiting on the ship until such time as we could drop our bags off in our room. So that’s what we decided to do.

We’d had a bit of a feel for Malta on the reasonably short bus ride from the airport to the cruise port. Narrow, twisting, busy roads with elevations up and down, often penned in either side by high, thick-walled buildings all in light-coloured sandstone blackened with age and pollution from the traffic. The walls got thicker and higher as we neared the Maltese capital and the fortifications of the port, and from Azura‘s top deck we had some fabulous views of these defences and some indication of events in Malta’s past.

We were familiar with Azura, having cruised on her twice before in 2017 to first Belgium and then the Netherlands, and she’s our favourite class of cruise ship – the Grand-class – which is used by older ships in the P&O and Princess fleets and was the first type of ship we ever cruised on, so exploration of the ship wasn’t necessary and we took the time instead to admire more of those views of Valletta with a circuit of the top deck. The fortifications along the harbour entrance looked particularly impressive in the Mediterranean sunshine.

Across the harbour in Valletta from us we could see a dry dock area. One of the docks had a curved roof apparatus that could be moved along to cover whatever was inside. In another the MSC Seaview was undergoing some maintenance. We’ve still not cruised with MSC and every time we get close to considering them we read something else from other cruise bloggers who’ve encountered some often appalling service aboard, bordering on abuse. They feel like a cruise line with some training and attitude issues to address and it just seems that booking an MSC cruise would come with an added gamble that your trip might be ruined in some way, which is a shame right now as many of their ships look lovely and they cruise some interesting itineraries.

One other thing you might spot in the photo of MSC Seaview in the dry dock is that one of the cranes is painted like a giraffe. There’s an argument that they all should be and that we should change the names of them from cranes accordingly.

We made our way past the main pool areas and headed towards the aft of the top deck where we planned to sit and wait with a drink until we heard that the rooms were ready for us.

We had a couple of drinks, first in the sunshine then in the shade when we realised that we were in danger of getting sunburnt before the ship had even left the port. Our sun cream was in our main luggage and that was somewhere on the ship but not with us.

The announcement was finally made that the rooms on Azura were ready for us so we made our way to cabin C235 which is a room number that we’ve had on a lot of these Grand-class ships. It’s become a bit of a running joke with us now that we always try to book it if we can (unless there’s a good reason to book elsewhere on the ship). Part of the reason is familiarity, but it’s also a great location with a couple of great features we both like: it’s close enough to the front to see and hear the waves splitting on the bow of the ship as it cruises; it’s got a double-sized balcony with half of it covered.

Our hold luggage still hadn’t made it to the room in the few hours we’d been aboard but that wasn’t a major issue. We dropped our hand luggage off, freshened up a little anyway, then disembarked Azura in order to have a walk along the harbour shoreline, have a look at the fortifications up close, and see if we could get a feel for whether we’d want to return to Malta at some point for more exploration.

In the next post in this series of cruise travelogues I’ll cover some of the sights as we take a walk along the shoreline of Valletta.