So, a very quick summary of the final 36 hours or so aboard Ventura now and then a few more cruising conclusions to, er, conclude.

We had just departed the final port of Vigo in Spain so the penultimate evening promised a drink or two, some food, and some entertainment, as they always do. In fact, we started with some entertainment and with someone who I’ve mentioned a number of times in this travelogue series: Nikki Jayne. Funny, glamorous, and a gorgeous voice with great taste in music.

Not long after we returned from this cruise I posted a video online and tagged Nikki on her Instagram profile. We talked, and I ended up making all the videos and photos I’d taken of her available privately so that she could use them to make a showreel in order to try to secure better jobs within the cruising and general entertainments industry. Not long after that she had been transferred to Iona as the compère and singer at the Limelights Club, and at the time of writing this she’s now on Seabourn Odyssey. Perhaps I helped, but it’s probably all down to her.

To the actual final sea day on Ventura as promised by the title of this post now. If you’d like to see the daily programme of activities aboard the ship then photos are provided below for your eyeballs. Sea days on cruise ships don’t tend to vary very much and after you’ve cruised a few times then you can pretty much guess what’s going on where at any point in the day without the need for one of these guides but you will discover some occasional gems. Not this time, though.

Calm seas accompanied our cruise back to the UK but not a great deal of sunshine. It was November, to be fair.

One thing we did need to do that we’d only previously had to do on one other ship – and that was Iona – was to convert our trivia-winning stamps to actual prizes. This is one area of cruising where P&O is far superior to Princess, our otherwise favourite cruise line. Trivia prizes on Princess are garbage, and they do make fun of them themselves, but it would be nice if they’d raise their game a little there. In the pictures below you can see the list of prizes you could claim and you can see what we got for our stamps.

Picking up our prizes took place earlier on this final sea day than the last trivia and, of course, there was no point collecting stamps for winning that – and win that, we did – so the prize was instead some P&O Cruises-branded wine. You might be wondering what P&O Cruises wine tastes like but I can’t answer that because this bottle is white wine and we have standards regardless of what you might have heard. We offered the bottle to our regular cruise quiz partners who also didn’t drink white wine, but they did have relatives who did so we suggested they take it as a gift for them.

The final dinner, photographed. Food on Ventura was generally good. Nothing outstanding but nothing to complain about either, although our experiences in the speciality dining venues had been great and, again, a marked improvement over the horrible Iona incident.

And, of course, we had to finish the evening listening to some cheesy disco music. When a holiday is good you have to find some way to stretch out every moment of enjoyment for as long as possible, knowing there’s a real world waiting for you back home ready to crush your soul.

The morning saw Southampton welcoming us back to port with a thick blanket of fog. That’s so Southampton.

This Canary Islands cruise on Ventura restored our faith in P&O Cruises. Iona had been such a let-down, but Ventura was back to what we wanted. A familiar feel, a decent-sized ship but not too large, a ship with character rather than something bland, corporate, and soulless. She might not have had the range of drinks and food or the most modern of decor, but she had comfort and proper balconies and swimming pools you could use and friendly staff and enough space for everyone to dine in the dining rooms.

The cruise itinerary was great too. We’d not been to the Canary Islands or Portugal before, and our final port in Spain was a new one for us too. We didn’t get to see our sun observatory thanks to a volcano becoming active and we didn’t get to see Madeira thanks to a medical emergency, but we explored tunnels and visited an aqueduct and reservoirs, and we saw volcanic landscapes, and we had a bloody lovely time.

On the back of this cruise and with a small amount of future cruise credit in our hands still thanks to pandemic cancellations we decided we would cruise with P&O again and booked a week on Ventura’s sister ship Azura in 2023 to tick Croatia off our travel list; we’ll also be popping across the border in Italy to see a bit of Slovenia while we’re there. We can’t wait.

The evening aboard Ventura, subsequently, was filled with a few glum faces because of the news about the removed Portuguese island from the itinerary, and there was some speculation about the state of the passengers who couldn’t be left on Lanzarote and couldn’t be taken by helicopter or ferry or dinghy or fired out of a cannon to Gran Canaria while the rest of us headed off as per the original plan. The consensus was Covid, but we’ll never know for sure.

We picked ourselves up from the bad cruise news with some time in The Tamarind Club as the ship’s stand-out singer, Nikki Jayne, was performing again. Seriously good vocal range, great song selection, and some funny asides to the audience that you seem to get a lot from northern entertainers. You can follow Nikki on Instagram if you’d like to see where she is in the world when you’re reading this.

Dinner was decent once more, although nothing in the main dining room on this Canary Islands cruise was ever spectacular. Cocktails were, of course, consumed as well.

And so for some unexpected photos of Gran Canaria, and certainly not the sort of photos of this island that most people would normally take if cruising in this part of the world. There’s not a lot to say about these pictures because they’re all just lights along the shoreline of the industrial port into which we cruised. We never got to see the passengers being disembarked from Ventura but it was nice to see just how many passengers on the ship were out on their balconies as we made this unscheduled diversion.

In the next part of this cruise travelogue series there will be a couple of quiet, relaxing sea days to suffer through and a meal at the Epicurean to endure.

Ventura wasn’t the only ship visiting the island of Lanzarote on this day. The German cruise ship Mein Schiff 4 (let’s not talk about the unimaginative naming system) was on Ventura’s port side. Not a cruise line we’ve cruised with, and probably unlikely to given the additional hurdles of the language barrier and potential embarrassment and spontaneous combustion from wandering into the nudist section of the vessels that have one.

Ahead of Ventura was Sea Cloud Spirit, a luxury, three-mast, full-rigged ship that we’re also unlikely to sail with unless the lottery fairy pays us a visit. She looks gorgeous.

Taking those photos from the front of the ship involved leaning into the wind and bracing myself against anything nearby. An older passenger had been up on the top deck with us with his camera in hand and had given up. My wife and I returned to our balcony, enjoying how much the sea around the dock was being churned up by the wind, expecting an imminent departure.

However, the time for sailing away came and went, and we could still see staff down on the dock. Our initial thoughts that either an excursion was late coming back or that we might get to see pier runners (in that wind!) turned out not to be true as the captain made an announcement over the ship’s system. Two passengers had taken ill and, for reasons that weren’t explained but which led to a lot of speculation aboard Ventura, Lanzarote couldn’t (or wouldn’t) take them. As a result, the ship would need to make a detour to the island of Gran Canaria overnight and the planned stop at Madeira had been cancelled. Everyone was disappointed, of course. Us too, naturally, since we’d never been to any of these parts of the world before, including the Portuguese island. Worth remembering when you’re saving a little bit of money by doing things yourself during cruise planning, is that for those with trips booked through independent companies there likely was a flood of frantic communications at this point to get refunds, if possible.

Somewhat later than planned, Ventura backed away from Arrecife on Lanzarote. We passed one more cruise ship as we departed. La Belle Des Oceans is small enough to be classed as a yacht. You won’t be surprised to learn that she’s another cruising vessel we’re highly unlikely to ever experience.

The last thing to watch out for was the disembarking of the pilot onto the pilot boat. We didn’t quite get to see that as it occurred out of view of us, but it must have been a fun experience based on just how much the little vessel was bouncing up and down on the waves and getting drenched with spray in every trough it hit.

There then followed a long sail past Lanzarote’s south-eastern and southern coastline, and a very attractive coastline it was too, with plenty of coastal towns and rugged, barren shore backed by the pretty peaks of the volcanoes and mountains of the island. As the slow cruise progressed so the sun dipped towards the horizon and the colours of the sky and across the land changed from moment to moment. Late evening cruising with mostly clear skies and just enough cloud cover to reflect and refract sunlight is a wonderfully calming experience.

Enjoy the gorgeous landscape of Lanzarote from the sea with these photos from our balcony on Ventura.

In the next post in this cruise travelogue series from the Canary Islands I’ll go through the evening meal and activities aboard Ventura along with the unexpected views of Gran Canaria at midnight as we cruised into a very industrial port.

First up was the Aloe Vera Museum, located in the small town of Yaiza on the southern edge of Timanfaya National Park. I won’t lie; we weren’t expecting much other than a sales pitch here, but the museum – which is free to enter – put on a demonstration of cutting the plants and showing off the natural aloe vera goo (I think that’s the technical term) as well as rubbing it into arms of anyone who showed an interest in having goo on their arms. As I mentioned, fairly interesting, and surprisingly so, and enough that we did take a look to see what sort of aloe vera products they might have for sale. The answer was a lot, but nothing caught our eyes enough to part with money. That’s not true for others on our tour who ended up wandering back to the bus with bags of stuff. It’s always nice to see cruise groups contributing to the economy of places they visit.

Of more interest to us was the vineyard, or the Lanzarote equivalent of a vineyard, of Bodega La Geria. Circular depression in the volcanic ash and soil, or areas surrounded by low, circular walls protect the vines of a number of varieties of local grapes, the most prevalent of which is the Malvasía Volcánica. The elevation, underground heat, protection from the worst of the wind, and the cool Atlantic breeze make for a versatile and unique grape, and for some sweet wines. A little too sweet for our tastes, if I’m being honest, and we’re red fans rather than white anyway, but it was lovely to see how the wine was made here.

These two short visits concluded our half-day excursion on Lanzarote so that all that remained would be to head back to Arrecife where Ventura was docked and to head off to the next island, due to be Madeira. That was the plan, but the plan was about to get torn up and scattered, and you can read about that in the next post in this series.

Before we headed to Timanfaya, though, there was the matter of waking up in the port of Arrecife, on the eastern side of Lanzarote, and about fifteen kilometres from where we needed to be. The weather was warm when it wasn’t windy, but it was rarely anything other than incredibly windy. A day of sunshine and cloud cover to come.

Our bus ride from Ventura to the national park was accompanied by a very similar bit of information about the history of Lanzarote to that we’d had on Tenerife when we visited Teide National Park. Understandable.

Timanfaya is the result of volcanic eruptions in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Over a hundred volcanoes ejected out over two billion cubic metres of lava across the island’s previously fertile landscape, burying it under the sort of landscape you might expect to see on Mars today. No deaths were recorded but nearly half of Lanzarote’s population emigrated as a result.

Geothermal heat emerges in certain places, and the main visitor area at Montañas del Fuego – where our bus initially dropped us – showcases this in a number of ways. Firstly, a restaurant on the site uses the heat from thermal vents to cook food, as you can see below.

Other demonstrations of how hot the ground underneath our feet was came through first being given some buried stones to hold (yeah, very warm), then watching some straw held over a hole until it caught fire, and finally watching one of the guides at Timanfaya pour water into a hole only for the steam to shoot out seconds later.

We had a little bit of time to simply admire the landscape before we’d take our bus on a ride through it. What struck us was the variety of colours of the volcanic vista.

A big surprise about Timanfaya National Park on Lanzarote was comparing it to Teide National Park on Tenerife. We’d imagined that both would be pretty similar, but that truly wasn’t the case, and we’re glad that we decided to take volcanic landscape tours on both islands just to see how very different they were.

Timanfaya only formed the first part of our day’s cruise excursion on this particular Canary Island. Following on from the national park we would be seeing how Aloe Vera is extracted (oddly fascinating), then paying a visit to (and sampling the wares of) a vineyard with a difference, with grapes grown in circular depressions in the volcanic soil, making use of the minerals and heat for a unique style of wine. You’ll be able to see photos and read about all of that in the next post in this travelogue series: Aloe Vera And Wine On Lanzarote.

We headed up onto the top deck to grab some lunch from the buffet and some obligatory shots of Santa Cruz from Ventura. I did think that the buildings of the port city against the backdrop of the mountainous landscape of Tenerife through patchy clouds of sun and shadow looked very attractive.

We decided to take a wander around the top deck. Views out to sea and the AIDA ships at anchor, as well as a higher viewpoint down to the steamship docked nearby greeted us

In the last of the pictures in the set of photos below there are two interesting pieces of architecture on display: a dark brick building and a curved white structure behind it. The building is the Palacio Insular council headquarters, constructed in 1940 and designed by the architect José Enrique Marrero with a fair dose of Art Deco there as influence. The clock on its tower was commissioned in 1950. The curved white structure beyond that is part of the gorgeous Auditorio de Tenerife, a venue for the arts designed by Santiago Calatrava and inaugurated in 2003. These two structures would be very prominent on the Tenerife coastline when Ventura eventually sailed out later in the day.

We caught some trivia – we didn’t win – then spent some time back in our room, on the balcony with a drink and our books, awaiting Ventura’s departure. Occasional ferries and catamarans popped in and out of the port as the clouds billowed over and the sun began to set. There was a delay in us leaving Tenerife but it either wasn’t announced or we missed the announcement because we were on the balcony. We might have had time to explore ashore after all. There’s always a next time.

Eventually, though, in full darkness, our cruise ship finally pulled away from Santa Cruz de Tenerife, shadowed by the pilot boat and granting us some pretty views back to the council building and the auditorium reminding us of Razer, one of the robots from Robot Wars. The low clouds over the hills and mountains behind the city reflected its orange-hued lights, lending the dusk landscape an ominous, suffocating blanket.

Once Ventura had cleared the port area the combination of night and a bit of a sea breeze made it too chilly to remain outside. Besides, there was eating and drinking to be done.

First up was a visit to the Tamarind Club for a couple of cocktails while listening to Nikki Jayne singing. She was fabulous, and since this cruise she’s gone onto hosting the Limelight Club on Iona, so a step up for her. Edit: and since then she’s become a cruise director with Princess Cruises!

We’d eaten more in the buffet than we’d planned to when we got back aboard Ventura so decided we’d try something a little smaller than a main dining room meal for dinner, opting to eat in the Glass House instead. A lighter meal was the plan, but somehow we probably ended up eating more than if we’d just stuck to the complimentary food option instead. It was all very good, though.

We treated ourselves to a nightcap before heading back to our room reasonably early as we’d have a fairly early start the following morning on an excursion on the second of the Canary Islands we’d be visiting, Lanzarote.

The first of the Canary Islands we approached will come as no surprise to you because the likelihood of you landing on this paragraph of text without knowing the title of this page is so ridiculously small I’m just not going to entertain the possibility. We opened the curtains to our cabin to see we were on the final approach to Santa Cruz de Tenerife, the capital of the island of Tenerife. Directly across from us on the sail into the port we could see a couple of AIDA cruise ships seemingly at anchor just off the coast and assumed that we might be joining them with potentially tender boat operations to follow but it was to the main cruise terminal we headed instead.

We will often take excursions when we travel, and especially on the first visit to any destination, because we like to get to know a place before wondering if there are things we’d prefer to see on our own, and thus it was at Tenerife too. In fact, we’d seen an excursion we really liked the look of because it would include two of our favourite things: an observatory and a volcano. We’d previously visited an observatory in Chile – the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Coquimbo – and we love spotting volcanoes when we travel. The trip to the Teide Observatory would be right up our street…

… only the Cumbre Vieja volcanic ridge was erupting on the island of La Palma during our visit and scientists wanted to monitor it using the solar telescopes we had been due to visit. Shakes fists at scientists.

The result of all this was that our excursion was changed. No more observatory, and instead a more general visit to Teide National Park. Oh well.

After a reasonable drive up winding roads climbing up hills, and with a running commentary on the island’s geology and history we stopped at an observation point that not only afforded some views across to the volcano that gives this national park its name, but also the observatory that we should have been visiting – thanks for that – and exposed geological formations showing how layers of different minerals were laid down over time and then pushed up by tectonic shifts and volcanic eruptions on the island.

Ah, what could have been.

Our viewpoint was to the east of Teide. In addition to being a volcano, Teide is both the highest point in Spain and the highest point of any island in the Atlantic. If you look at the photo below then you should be able to make out cable car pylons along the left edge so it is possible to ride to close to the summit, and if you’re keen on walking then a limited number of permits to walk to the top of Teide – at 3715 metres above sea level – are issued each day. Cruise excursions did include the option of taking the cable car up the volcano but you would have needed to have booked those fairly early as they’re popular, and if you’ve had the misfortune to have your actual excursion cancelled at the last minute and swapped for something else like a certain person writing this sentence you might be loosely acquainted with, then you’re shit out of luck. We weren’t that bitter though, as we’ve ridden a chairlift up a volcano before, don’t you know? Yeah, we’re a bit fancy.

The next stop on our drive through Teide National Park was at Portillo Alto. This small hamlet mostly consisted of a restaurant, some government-run lodgings, a small shop, and some parking spots. The primary reason for stopping, though, was because it had public toilets. We do understand that as people get older they can’t go quite as long without needing a pee, but it still puzzles us when we see some make a rush for the toilets during an excursion stop, then immediately grab themselves a coffee afterwards. Do you people have no comprehension of biology and chemistry at all? As for us, we simply stretched our legs and admired a little of the Tenerife landscape until our group started to climb back aboard the bus.

Continuing with the theme of Not Quite What Was Intended that formed this cruise excursion on Tenerife, our next stop was supposed to be to La Ruleta Vista Point. In fact, we did drive there, but the area consists of a road with a roundabout at the end of it for turning, and with parking all along the road for buses, cars being expected to go elsewhere. Well, they may have been expected to go elsewhere but they didn’t, which meant the road was a chaotic mess of cars blocking the buses, buses queueing and struggling to turn around, and us being sat on the bus for over ten minutes before the guide decided we’d try what should have been the last stop first then come back to this spot.

Off we set for Zapato de La Reina, also known as The Queen’s Shoe. You can immediately see why from the photos below as the erosion of this particular rock formation has left a natural arch resembling a high-heeled piece of footwear. If you’ve ever fantasised about being a tiny human trapped on a planet full of giant women – and statistically-speaking, around fifty percent of the sorts of people who read this will have – then this is the place to visit.

Ten minutes of admiring the landscape – and it is surprising just how attractive mostly dry and rocky, undulating hills dotted with tough-looking bushes and grasses is – followed by another ten minutes of our bus trying to reverse out of the car park because some car had thoughtlessly parked where it fancied instead of where it should have been – again; I’m sensing a theme here – which then caused tailbacks along the road by the viewpoint.

Seriously, people, tourists hiring cars, whatever: just, please, have just the slightest bit of consideration for others when you’re travelling, and especially if you’re travelling to somewhere popular. If it’s a spot you’re not supposed to park in then here’s a crazy idea: don’t park in that spot. There’s probably a reason for it even if you’re too lacking in imagination to think what that might be. I know nobody who’s actually the sort of complete arsehole who thinks rules apply to other people and God forbid that you should have to walk a little further or maybe wait a little longer for something! will ever read this, and I know I’m just shouting into the void here, but there’s a therapy in that action. I’m trying to reduce the blood pressure that’s been raised just recalling how infuriating it was on this trip to lose a solid 20-30 minutes of our paid excursion because of other people’s selfishness. Some people don’t have websites like this and they can’t vent in the same way I am. Those people might die. Every time you park like a prick you might kill someone. Murderer.

Anyhoo…

Back to La Ruleta Vista Point we went, and after what looked like another fruitless attempt to find a space, but seemingly with the approval of a person wearing a police uniform or other uniform indicating officialdom in some capacity at the location, our bus driver said “Fuck it! Everyone off, and I’ll wait here in the middle of the road!” He said that silently, in his head, and in Spanish, which I don’t speak, but sometimes you just know from the slump of a pair of shoulders and the smallest shake of a head.

La Ruleta is situated almost directly due south of Mount Teide on Tenerife and so it provides good views of the volcano if that’s what you’re looking for. But the real reason that this area of the relatively flat basin beneath Teide is so popular with tourists is not so much the mountain, but rather the rock formations. These are the Roques de García.

Rocks in distinctive shapes acquire names over time, and the rocks in this part of the national park were no exception. People with cameras and with tinnitus who are easily distracted tend to not pay a lot of attention to what’s being said by guides about those rocks and names, and this was also an occasion where no exception was to be found. I have a vague recollection of having one of the rocks pointed out and a name attached to it along with a description like “And these are the two mythical lovers who are holding one another and gazing into each other’s eyes” and thinking “Ha! Yeah, no, it’s just a pointy stone but I can see that intense dehydration out here might affect a person.”

In the photos below you can see some of the flat landscape between Teide (which would be to the right of these pictures) and Pico Viejo, another high peak and part of the chain of mountains visible. This is the Las Cañadas caldera and the different colouration of the ground you can see illustrates the split in the caldera caused by tectonic and volcanic activity of the two mountains either side of it. It’s this which also led to the formation of the rocks.

In a shocking example of me having a bit of a search online I have found the names of two of the rock formations in Roques de García that I managed to take photos of during our Teide National Park tour. In the foreground below you can see El Torrotito which Google helpfully translates as “el torrotito” so many thanks for that, giant technological behemoth. The rock behind it with the narrow base supporting the bulk above is called Roque Cinchado or “Stone Tree” and it’s considered a symbol of Tenerife, having previously appeared on banknotes.

We’ve never been to the Vasquez rocks in southern California, but based on its many appearances in TV, and most notably Star Trek as far as I’m concerned, the rock formations at La Ruleta felt a lot like a European version of them. I could easily see a Spanish Captain Kirk fighting a Spanish Gorn amongst the arid, appealing, attractive landscape. Perhaps over the Gorn’s terrible car parking that had forced the Enterprise to circle around for a while looking for a spot to stop.

Our Teide National Park excursion on Tenerife came to an end and we headed back across the island towards the port and our waiting cruise ship, with just one more stop at Portillo Alto for those whose coffees they’d had last time at the hamlet had now worked their way through their systems and who were in desperate need to relieve themselves.

So, what did we think about this excursion? We got to see impressive landscapes and a volcano from a distance. And we like those things. We also got to see some lovely rock formations in a caldera. And it turned out that we like that too. The biggest disappointment would be that we didn’t visit the observatory, of course, but that’s not in the hands of the tour organisers or the cruise line so I probably shouldn’t have mentioned it at all. There was a fair bit of driving but we knew this anyway. It’s the small price you have to pay to get to see some interesting things sometimes, and the commentary on the bus took us through a range of topics relating to the island including its economy, some weird Scottish immigrants connection, and numerous other things, so it was educational and enjoyable. Issues with “other people” and their parking is again not the fault of the tour guide or driver, but it felt like it was something that was to some extent predictable given just how horrible and selfish people generally are so it would’ve been nice for a quicker alternative plan to have been enacted in order to give us extra time at the photo stops. But then again, all the plans in the world can’t account for people being dicks.

In the next part of this Ventura travelogue series we’ll be back aboard the ship for the late afternoon and early evening ahead of our sail away to the second of the Canary Islands on this cruise.