Island Princess is one of the older vessels in the fleet (launched in 2002), and one of the smallest. She is one of only two Panamax ships (that’s ships that meet the requirements to pass through the older locks of the Panama Canal) owned by Princess Cruises, the other being Coral Princess, and the pair of them being Coral-class vessels.

When we cruise, for us it’s the itinerary that is the primary driver, coupled with value for money next. The ship is less important than the cruise line because not all cruise lines suit all types of people – for instance, I really don’t see us hopping on Carnival at any time soon; although, to be fair, I did say the same about Virgin Voyages – and only then does the ship potentially play a part, with us preferring to try ships that we haven’t over those that we have.

Hence, in September 2022 we boarded Island Princess. This would be a cruise visiting three new ports including one new country (that’s the itinerary part checked off), with Princess Cruises (and we know we like them), on Island Princess (a ship we’d not cruised on before). The price per person per night (which is how we determine value) was at the high end of our typical spend but we decided to go for it anyway. Naturally, we opted for the drinks package, knowing we’d get our money’s worth there, and hunted around for big balconies, because we are fond of a nice big balcony.

A very easy embarkation process had us aboard Island Princess at Southampton in no time where we discovered our balcony was enormous. As you can tell below. Newer ships are just terrible in this respect. However, newer ships do tend to have somewhat larger shower units. The shower on Island was a tight fit. And yes, the oft-talked-about clingy shower curtain was there.

The photographs below of the room and balcony are for cabin C317.

It wasn’t just our balcony that surprised us with its space. In fact, we’d find out on this cruise very quickly that far from feeling small and cramped, Island Princess often felt cavernous. The venues were larger and laid out in a way to be longer along the ship’s length given its narrower profile. Additionally, entertainments lounges were located on two decks rather than the one more typical on Princess ships, further spreading out passengers. Finally, add in the slightly older demographic attracted to a smaller, older ship – the overwhelming majority of passengers were Americans who’d come across to see jolly old Europe – and you ended up with a quieter, emptier-feeling ship for this cruise, although not in a bad way.

Embarkation day activities on a cruise ship are fairly limited and the ship can be a little chaotic as people are boarding throughout the day so we went for a small wander to orient ourselves, enjoying the differences in familiar locations such as the Wheelhouse snug areas with lots of old P&O memorabilia.

We grabbed a drink in Crooners – starting with a not-a-cocktail each because it was fairly early (I know; that’s a terrible reason; I feel bad even admitting it and writing it) – above the Piazza stretched strangely over four decks on this class of ship, and waited until close to sail away to see what it was like from the top deck for once.

It was grey and drizzly and there was nobody about so we headed back to our cabin instead to see Island Princess leave Southampton behind and start her European cruise. We’ve had far more pleasant sail aways but let’s be honest: who actually cares what the sail away is like? The important point is that you’re sailing away and you’re about to begin a cruise.

To finish up the barebones account of our first day aboard Island Princess here are some photos of more drinks in Crooners and food in the main dining room. You might notice that there’s nothing from general entertainment venues; no dancing, late-night music, that sort of thing. What we would discover on this cruise is that entertainment was rather poor, finishing far earlier than we were used to. It wasn’t a big deal for us and it was likely limited to the type of cruise, high proportion of older Americans aboard, and perhaps just the cruise director at the time.

While our embarkation day experience for Island Princess had been fine but grey and damp and cool, the following day at sea before the first of our port stops took place with gorgeous weather to accompany us. The North Sea often conjures up images of rolling grey waves, views of oil rigs, lots of container ships and car ferries, but it was warm and bright and calm enough to have been somewhere in the Pacific.

We spent the day doing very little indeed. Trivia was undertaken, unsuccessfully, and there was a little bit of a wander around. We would have had a swim if the pool had been filled but it wasn’t for reasons not shared with us. So, instead, once our room had been freshened up by the steward we returned to it and made use of that large balcony, reading, enjoying the sunshine and sea views, and ordering the odd drink and snacks just because we could.

We booked speciality dining for the evening. One thing we had been keen to try was the Bayou Café, one of the additional charge restaurants on Island Princess, and not something we’d seen on any other Princess Cruises ship on any of our travels.

It’s been a very minor gripe of ours with cruising over the years that there are often overlooked opportunities to make ships stand out in the fleet, and perhaps encourage people to try different vessels and itineraries. If you’ve cruised a lot with Princess – and we have – then you know that the two main speciality dining venues they have on board are the Crown Grill and Sabatini’s, catering for steak fans and Italian food fans respectively. They’re very good, and yes, it is nice to have something familiar, to look forward to treating yourself with something you know is good. But we’ve often talked about maybe mixing it up a bit and putting something else in place, perhaps specific to an itinerary or a ship based on its name, just to add a little variety. I know that ships will theme offerings in the buffet, but that’s the buffet.

[IMPORTANT UPDATE! Since writing this, it’s come to our attention that Princess have decided to turn the Bayou on Island Princess into a generic steakhouse experience instead now. Hugely disappointing to see, but a likely sign of cost-cutting to simplify things across the fleet and satisfy both shareholders and the old traditionalists who can’t bear to embrace the differences. Ho hum.]

So, we were looking forward to what we’d eat in Bayou Café because it did exactly what we’d always wanted: provide something close to unique amongst the ships in the fleet. We had some pre-dinner drinks for that is the law of the sea, then headed to the restaurant to be greeted by a small queue of people. It transpired that we all had bookings for around the same time and there weren’t seats available according to someone ahead of us. This isn’t good, we thought. We were all ushered into the small music and bar area next to the restaurant to wait, and our expectation given the number of people apparently in the same situation as us was that this would take a while. Not a great start. However, we’d been there barely a minute before we were called to our table. Why did we jump ahead of everyone else? Who knows? Perhaps they all turned up stupidly early whereas we were there pretty much on the dot of our booked table. Perhaps we just had those don’t-mess-with-them faces. Perhaps both.

What was the food like in the Bayou Café on Island Princess? That’s a tricky one to answer. It might have been excellent and it might have been terrible and it might have been just okay. We had nothing to compare it against because we don’t eat Cajun-spiced food. We wanted to try something in that style to see if we liked it, and it was okay, but ultimately not to either of our tastes. Was it cooked the right way? Haven’t a clue. Was it too spicy or not spicy enough? How would we know? What we did like was that it was different, and new experiences are always good. But we’d have to see if the menu changed significantly before we’d visit again, I suspect. [EDIT: Given that it’s now a generic steakhouse with nothing to distinguish it from any other in the Princess fleet, we probably wouldn’t bother.]

We finished off the evening with a slow walk around the wonderfully wide promenade deck of Island Princess.

In the next post in this cruise travelogue series we’ll be docking at Hamburg, a first time in this port for either of us and also the first time in Germany for either of us.

The first stop on our Island Princess Western Europe cruise was the port of Hamburg. When we visit countries and ports for the first time we almost always book an excursion to get a feel for the place, check off some obvious highlights, or, to mix it up, look for something a little out of the ordinary so that we’re not simply doing the same old tourist things that other cruisers and general travellers do. For Hamburg our options were of the city tour variety or the very long travel to Berlin variety. The latter didn’t appeal for this first German visit, and with the amount of time we had in port and the proximity of the port to the centre of the city we figured we’d be able to explore on foot just as easily. That also meant we didn’t have to set a stupidly early alarm call, and we like not having to do that.

The views of Hamburg from our balcony and from the top of Island Princess weren’t particularly lovely or even mildly interesting, but working port areas in cities often aren’t. Our docking location in the city was at the Altona terminal.

Our original plan was to walk towards the city centre from the port, which we estimated would take a little over an hour when allowing for photo stops, but Princess Cruises had laid on a free shuttle bus service into the town hall square. On a previous cruise with Princess the buses had not been complimentary so we’d not factored this into our reckoning, but now realised that while this might mean we’d miss a few sights on the walk, by taking the bus we could be certain where it was located should we decide that might be the best way to return to the ship later in the day. This would prove to be sensible thinking.

The town hall (well, city hall really, but whatever) is a late nineteenth century building leaning heavily on the considerably earlier Italian renaissance design. The extravagant look was the result of wealth and prestige celebrating the defeat of France by Prussia and the formation of the German empire. The copper roofing, popular at the time as you’ll find in lots of places around Europe when you travel, has now turned green with oxidisation.

The square in front of the hall was largely empty, but the decorations around the bases of the flag poles and the Heinrich Heine Monument by Waldemar Otto attracted a moment’s attention from me.

Our plan to start the day in Hamburg was to head broadly south-southwest from the town hall square towards the former Hanseatic Trade Centre in Speicherstadt, the largest warehouse district in the world built on timber-pile foundations, and a UNESCO World Heritage Site as a result. Our fairly short walk took us to some of the waterways that cross the city of Hamburg and facilitated a lot of the trade for which the warehouses and associated businesses were needed.

The red brick buildings of Speicherstadt were very impressive if you like bold displays of industrialisation. We do.

We crossed over the final canal – Zollkanal (or Customs Canal) which formed the customs barrier of the city and its freeport until 2003 – via the Brooksbrücke Bridge. You’ll never have to look for long if you’re looking for a bridge in Hamburg as it has the highest number of bridges in Europe (around two and a half thousand, if you want to visit them all). Brooksbrücke in its current form was completed in 1887, although a bridge had crossed the water here for centuries before, and one feature of its arched steel framework worth noting is the four different statues at the end of each span; two on the northern side, and two on the southern. Sadly, these are recent replacements for ones that had been present prior to World War II, but they’re still interesting, representing the historical figures of Frederick Barbarossa, Hammonia (or Hamburg), Europe, and St Ansgar.

This brought us to the first place we wanted to visit in the city, and in the next post in this cruise travelogue series we’ll start to look around one of the absolute best things to do in Hamburg (in my opinion), and a place we ended up spending way more time in than we’d expected (and that still wasn’t enough), Miniatur Wunderland.

Why, then, did we visit Miniatur Wunderland in the first place? Well, as I’ve said, it was one of the top-rated things to do in Hamburg, and it wasn’t too far from where the cruise ship would be docked or where the shuttle bus would drop us off. It was either that or churches or museums, mostly, and this just felt like it might be different enough to be interesting, and we’d still have time to do the churches and museums that we typically visit when travelling.

Miniatur Wunderland proved to be more than interesting. It was enchanting. It was stunning. It was far more than we were expecting. We anticipated that we might spend half an hour there, perhaps. Maybe. We actually spent the entire morning in Hamburg in the former warehouse building, and we could easily have taken more time, had a break for lunch in the café there, and eaten up a whole chunk of the afternoon too. To emphasise this further: we love doing new things when we visit places for the second or third time, but if we go back to Hamburg then there’s a very strong chance we might just hit Miniatur Wunderland again. It was that good.

So, what can you expect from a visit to Miniatur Wunderland? It’s going to be rammed with people. If you don’t like crowds then perhaps this isn’t for you. Use of face masks is optional, so consider this too. True to its name, though, your eyes will light up in wonder once you first set foot in the building.

The model railway layouts are roughly grouped geographically so you can wander amongst European cities and landscapes from Italy then Scandinavia then Germany and several others before finding yourself looking down on miniature places in the USA or South America. And since Miniatur Wunderland is always expanding and making changes then don’t be surprised to find Antarctica and Asia appearing in years to come.

Some models are accurate representations of real places, and some are somewhat fictionalised amalgamations of place-types, but the attention to detail is what will mesmerise you and why you’ll spend so long loving every moment here; the figurines of people doing everyday (and sometimes rather odd) activities; decorations inside buildings seen through windows. And through them all, of course, trains or cars or trucks or even other transport types such as balloons and rockets and planes will move around. Some of the vehicles even have cameras in them and there are TV screens allowing you to see what the passengers in those vehicles can see. Words cannot convey the utter joy that is Miniatur Wunderland.

And since words can’t convey it I’ll try to let some of the pictures mostly do the job instead now but you really need to visit to truly appreciate how fantastic this place is.

One interesting aspect was the daily cycle that took place across exhibits. Some areas periodically dimmed the surrounding light level and the scenes took on their night time views, complete with twinkling lights in windows, street lights illuminating, and any related nocturnal activities, including associated sounds.

In the photo below you can get a little sense of the scale of Miniatur Wunderland where some exhibits extend over two floors of the building. It’s both small and massive.

The airport was a fun but noisy area. Stand around near the runway and every minute or two another plane will land or taxi and take off. Lots of different aircraft, lots of different flight operators to spot and say “Ooh, we’ve flown with them!” You’ll be able to see a model plane taking off in the video at the end of this post.

It was nice to see a cruise ship represented in model form at Miniatur Wunderland and, naturally, it had to be a German cruise operator. In this case it was AIDAblu operated by AIDA cruises.

One of the more fictionalised areas – well, we hope – was the series of underground lairs in a cutaway section between rooms with aliens conducting experiments on humans and reinforcing the views of conspiracy theorists with cans of chemtrail mix and filming against moonscape backdrops. A lot of fun.

There were a few interactive areas throughout the Miniatur Wunderland exhibits. You could trigger the start of a Space Shuttle launch, for instance. In the Venice area you could set off an earthquake to shake the scenery, make some of the buildings topple over or lose parts of their façades, and, if you looked carefully, catch a glimpse of some bedroom activity taking place in one of the houses. That wasn’t the only bit of risqué imagery on view, but I wouldn’t want to spoil the surprise of discovering things for yourself.

It was nice to spot a familiar-looking skyline in one part where a town was clearly modelled with thoughts of San Gimignano, a nice trip for us on a previous Princess cruise in Europe.

The final section we passed through was a walkway connecting the main building to another housing the areas they were starting to add to extend the range of exhibits on show, along the length of which a train track sent trains back and forth along a changing landscape from shanty towns to the sea and fields of lavender.

We were hours in Miniatur Wunderland and, as I’ve said before, we could have spent hours more. It’s noisy, crowded, but absolutely should be visited if you’re ever in Hamburg, Germany. It has a café and a large gift shop area too.

In the next post in this cruise travelogue series we’ll make our way to St Michael’s Church in order to see the city of Hamburg from its tower and to see what lay below ground too.

First, though, we had to stroll through some of Hamburg’s streets and over some of the very many bridges spanning the canals running through the city. The water level in areas was incredibly low, exposing mud and beached boats, but we could easily see similarities between Hamburg and other canal-heavy cities with medieval trading connections such as Ghent even if the general overcast conditions didn’t lend the German scenes quite the pretty look of their Belgian counterparts.

The church we visited was St Michael’s Church but you knew that already what with you being a smart person who reads post titles.

The 132-metres high church has long been an important landmark in the city with vessels using it as an aid for navigation but its architecture and history are important too and make it one of the city’s most famous churches (and Hamburg has a few churches) and also its largest. St Michael’s was originally built in the latter half of the seventeenth century and it was the first church to be built specifically for the Protestants rather than simply appropriating formerly Catholic places of worship. The style is baroque and it has a prominent copper-covered spire.

You’ll have noticed the phrase originally built in the previous paragraph and you’ll probably know that old buildings have a tendency to suffer damage, often of the burning kind. In 1750 the church was struck by lightning and was destroyed. The second church suffered destruction again following a fire started during construction work in 1906. The third church was heavily damaged during World War II, as you’d expect, but wasn’t completely destroyed for a change so what you see nowadays is the restored version of that building, and it’s very nice indeed.

That particular feature about St Michael’s Church that attracted us was the fact that we could get up the tower and see over the cityscape of Hamburg. The ticket that grants you access to the tower allows you to choose between climbing the steps or taking the elevator. It’s a hundred metres up and there are no views along the way so we sensibly used the small but very modern elevator, and unless there’s a queue waiting to use it and you’re in a rush or unless you’re a masochist then I’d recommend you do too.

At the top of the St Michael’s Church tower we took in the great views we’d expected. On a sunny day it would probably look even more impressive but even with a thick cover of rain-threatening cloud we weren’t disappointed at the sight of Hamburg from high altitude. Naturally, we tried to locate our ship and the area from which we’d just come.

We finished our visit to St Michael’s Church with a look around the crypt. In more modern times it served as a shelter during Allied bombing on Hamburg in the war but, obviously, its main function was to house the dead and nearly two and a half thousand bodies are interred there. The grave chambers along the floor are up to four metres deep and built to hold up to four graves bodies stacked atop one another. Anyone with enough money could be buried below the church and the funds were used to finance the building of it. Amongst some notable final resting places is one of the sons of J.S. Bach. Within the surprisingly large space you can also see exhibits extracted from less well-preserved coffins during an opening and documentation of some in the twenty-first century.

No, I don’t have a clue why there’s a flashing child statue in the crypt of St Michael’s either.

St Michael’s Church interior is very typical of Lutheran style, being somewhat plain with lots of white surfaces, so it won’t win you over with wonder inside, but ascending to the tower and descending to the crypt make a visit to the church very worthwhile and we came away happy to have made a stop here.

In the next post in this Island Princess cruise travelogue series the weather will play a part in curtailing our tourist intentions so we’ll finish our time in Germany with a visit to a couple of bars because we absolutely couldn’t leave without saying we’d had some drinks in Hamburg.

Rain was due, and if we opted for the museum we were interested in then we would be fairly isolated after that, nowhere really close to the bar we really had our eyes set on, and a decent distance from Island Princess too, meaning we’d potentially be soaked by the time we got back aboard. However, the bar was not open yet and in the opposite direction to the ship. Our plan became: head towards the bar anyway, wandering the streets around the area for anything interesting architecturally, hoping the rain would hold off, then make for the town hall square to get a free shuttle bus back to the ship instead of walking.

This plan lasted just long enough to pass a little bit of Hamburg street art.

The rain started to come down and we needed to re-evaluate quickly so out came the phones and a look at maps. We needed somewhere inside, open, close by, quick, and that led us to a small pub called Vielharmonie. It was a place on a street corner with a few tables and a bar lined with locals; definitely not a tourist’s spot. However, super friendly. We ended up staying for two drinks because there was a bit of chat between the locals and us, and between the barmaid and us. So, yes, if someone asked me if I’d recommend this pub – and I don’t usually like recommending things because personal experiences and expectations come into play – then I’d say yes…

…with a couple of caveats.

Firstly, pretty much everyone at the bar was smoking. This is such an odd thing to see indoors in Europe these days and for us as non-smokers the smell is really off-putting, even before the associated health implications. I mean, we were there drinking beer in the afternoon so I can’t push too much on the health implications but you know there’s still a difference between something that only affects you and something that affects everyone around you. Okay, enough of being on that high horse.

Secondly, cash only. Now, this was something we’d read about before we travelled to Germany so we were half-expecting it but it still took us by surprise. Apparently, allegedly, whatever, Germans haven’t really embraced contactless or even card payments with quite the zeal of the rest of Europe because of a general paranoid fear of government tracking or something, with a large chunk of the country sticking to cash either primarily or, as in this pub at this time, exclusively. We might have stayed for another drink as it was friendly there but the two rounds wiped out the limited amount of Euros we’d brought with us and we ended up stopping at an ATM after this pub visit to get some more in case we’d need it in the next bar.

By this time the bar we’d really wanted to visit was now open so we headed the relatively short distance to Bar Oorlam. We are keen craft ale drinkers so we’d already researched this place and knew it would give us a good opportunity to have some local ales.

Bar Oorlam couldn’t have been more different from the pub we’d just vacated, with a bright, modern feel in pastel colours (which I personally find a little cold and not as welcoming, but then I’m old), a large range of drinks to try, and actual card payments. We were the first people in there, very shortly after it opened, and had a quick chat with the barman before settling in to enjoy some drinks in odd, modern glassware. The look and feel of the place reminded us a fair bit of Microbar Reykjavík from our cruise earlier in the year to Iceland.

We ended up staying for four over the space of a few hours as the bar slowly started to fill up with locals, before deciding we had better head through the streets of Hamburg for our shuttle bus back to the ship.

Back on Island Princess then, and after showering and changing we headed to the dining room for dinner, and it was very good, as usual, and did a decent job at soaking up some of the alcohol content from our day ashore in Germany.

Of course, there was more drinking in the evening, and we enjoyed a little bit of the sail away along the Elbe from our balcony late in the evening, but only a little bit as that rain was still there.

In the next post in this series we’ll enjoy a day at sea on Island Princess with a look around the ship and a first chance to swim in the indoor pool on the ship.

The bulk of this post will be photographs taken around the outside spaces of the Island Princess cruise ship since we occupied our post-breakfast time with a decent explore of the ship’s top deck and promenade. When you’ve been on a few cruises – and we’ve been on a few cruises – and especially if you cruise with the same line a lot, then there’s not a lot to surprise you even when you hop aboard a new ship but there were a few things that did make us say “Huh! That’s different.”

The first thing we really noticed, especially given that the ship was small relative to the rest of the fleet, was how spacious Island Princess felt. Admittedly, there was next to nobody about on the decks for these pictures so it looks quiet, and if you ever view the videos by other cruise bloggers or watch the TV adverts for cruising then you might think this is normal. This is not normal. Cruise bloggers tend to take a lot of their video at stupid hours of the day so they can avoid people appearing, and advertising companies work in a similar way and have a lot of control regarding who can go where and when in order to present a serene scene. Lovely, but very atypical for an actual cruise and I really wish they’d all stop doing it because it gives a false impression to would-be cruisers that may then put them off for life. For our cruise on Island Princess, though, it simply never got crowded at all, and that was at full capacity. Itinerary and date and slightly elevated pricing for the smaller ship may have played a part in dissuading the younger crowd here.

In our many years of cruising I’ve still not managed to persuade my wife to join me for a game of chess on a ship. It’s not like I’d beat her; I’m terrible at chess too.

Island Princess has an indoor pool called the Lotus Pool and this was the second thing about this particular class of ship that gave us a moment’s pause; we absolutely loved the look of this. The retractable roof can be opened if the weather warrants it but late in the year on the North Sea did not warrant it even though it felt surprisingly warm outside to us.

You can tell the pool is from an older ship because of those straw hut coverings over the small pavilion at one end of the swimming pool and the hot tubs either side. You could argue that they’re dated, especially if you’re more familiar with modern ships, and I wouldn’t argue with you (although I might point at the ship’s name with a condescending look on my face) but I would ask “So what?” Dated doesn’t mean bad. They’re just different, and different is good. Different is why Island Princess factored high in our cruise-planning in the first place.

We knew we’d be swimming in that pool later in the day, and more on that a bit further down.

We concluded our exterior exploration of Island Princess with a walk along its promenade deck. Island Princess has a wide promenade deck for more genteel strolling without getting in the way of speed walkers and it’s nice to see them returning on the larger, newer ships, but it would be really nice if they covered them over so that the light pollution and noise pollution from the newer ships doesn’t completely ruin the point of having a balcony cabin in the first place. I know, I’ve moaned about this problem with promenade decks before. On Island Princess, however, the promenade deck is a great place to appreciate the sea views without bothering anyone else.

With our walk around Island Princess complete and breakfast now long-consumed we checked that our room had been serviced – it had – then changed into swimming gear so that we could try out that Lotus Pool.

Oh boy.

The Lotus Pool was not heated. The Lotus Pool was freezing cold. It wasn’t the coldest swimming pool on a cruise ship we’ve ever been in; that record is currently held by Diamond Princess when we felt in danger of cardiac arrest with shock. No, this swimming pool wasn’t quite that bad but it took a very, very, very large amount of inching down and trying to dab water on exposed flesh to acclimatise ourselves to the temperature before we could start swimming, and it never really seemed to get any warmer. We rarely use hot tubs on ships but with there being hardly anyone around we treated ourselves to some warming-up time after the swim to get the circulation going again.

Despite the cold temperature of the swimming pool it was still a lovely location and we like swimming so we subjected ourselves to more torture during the rest of the cruise too.

The afternoon found us in Crooners with some Prosecco and our books, overlooking the piazza where speed painting was taking place. I keep telling my wife that we should take part in more ship activities and she keeps agreeing with me and we keep not doing it.

As the afternoon turned into the evening we returned to our cabin to change for the night – sea days are often formal nights on cruise ships and that was the case here – and we enjoyed some lovely dusk views from our balcony.

We were back in Crooners before dinner in order to uphold a cruising tradition for me in the form of a Vodka Martini on formal night. If I’m going to go to all the effort of putting a tuxedo and bow tie on (real, not a clip-on!), then I’m going to go the full James Bond route.

We could see the champagne waterfall being set up below us. We don’t attend these; it’s not something we’ve seen being done since the earliest cruises when drinks packages didn’t exist and loyalty hadn’t been built up and the desperate urge to get a free glass of questionable fizz was overwhelming. But a lot of people seem to enjoy the spectacle and it’s good to see the return of them as a thing because they went away around the pandemic, for obvious reasons.

As for the remainder of this sea day on Island Princess, there was simply dinner to get through, and that was lovely, then a few drinks in the Wheelhouse Bar to round the night off.

In the next post in this Island Princess cruise travelogue series we’ll be visiting a country we’d visited once before – Sweden – but a new port this time when we dock at Gothenburg.

However, unlike when we’d visited Hamburg and taken the shuttle bus out of convenience but not because we’d planned to, with this cruise port stop at Gothenburg the shuttle bus for some free time exploration was a necessity as the actual port for ships was nearly nine kilometres away from the city centre as the crow flies, and considerably more by road.

The morning view from our balcony in the morning was a cool, overcast, but dry one.

Our shuttle bus for this visit to Gothenburg dropped us off at Gustav Adolfs Torg, a town square distinguished by a statue to Gustavus Adolphus, king of Sweden between 1611 and 1632. Gustavus became highly respected for his military leadership during the Thirty Years War, allying Sweden with the Protestants trying to defend themselves from Catholic forces looking to expand the Holy Roman Empire into the Baltic. His use of deploying well-trained mobile and infantry units to complement one another helped win decisive victories and the tactics were soon copied by other armies. Gustavus is credited with turning Sweden into a major European power during this period and for centuries after.

We’d come to Gothenburg on Island Princess with a couple of places we’d decided might be worth walking to, so headed off in the direction of the first, eastwards. This took us over the main canal of the city, then through Brunnsparken, a small spot where trams passed by frequently, a fountain flowed, and people sat at the bars and cafés dotted around.

A brief introduction to Gothenburg, this. In the next post in this 2022 Island Princess cruise travelogue series we’ll be looking around a nineteenth century park, the Garden Society of Gothenburg and the Palm House in it.

One small word of warning or advice, though: Gothenburg has two notable gardens pandering to the likes of those with botanical leanings and the Garden Society is the smaller of the two and the closer to the city centre (and therefore more easily-walkable-to which is why we headed there). The Gothenburg Botanical Garden is significantly larger but a little further south in Gothenburg. If you’re super-keen about flowers and plants then you’ll likely want to visit both.

Our walk through and look around the Garden Society of Gothenburg wasn’t born from a love of flora but rather it was something that was clearly other than just streets roughly on the way to another destination in the city we had in mind to visit. My personal knowledge of plant-life is small enough to write on the petal of a daisy and wouldn’t extend to much more than “I think this is the petal of a daisy” but parks and gardens are pleasing to wander around no matter what.

If you visit the Garden Society of Gothenburg you’ll find it impossible to miss the Palm House. Dating from 1878 and inspired by London’s Crystal Palace but to a slightly less grand scale, it still remains a gorgeous sight and is clearly a product of the industrial revolution, utilising large frames of iron and thousands of panes of glass.

The interior of the Palm House is split into five sections, each with different climates, but tropical heat and humidity is what greets you first. And in addition to greeting you it greets your camera which has been outside in the cool air of the Swedish city, and so your camera lens keeps misting up. Which means you keep having to wipe the lens and take a photo and hope that you’ve wiped without smearing too much and not given the lens surface enough time to fog over again.

Obviously, yes, you could simply be patient and wait until your equipment warms to the same as the ambient temperature in the greenhouse. But who has time for that? Anyway, that’s why some of the photos look a little smudgy. In fact I had better pictures from my phone in here (although I used it less often) simply because the phone was already effectively warmed up by being in my pocket.

There were some nice, exotic flowers on display but other than recognising pitcher plants, I couldn’t tell you what anything was.

In the largest section of the Palm House it was possible to climb steps to an upper platform where some tables and chairs were set out and locals were sitting around with food and drinks, chatting, and generally appreciating being inside.

Back outside, we continued our walk through the Garden Society of Gothenburg towards its south western exit because it was roughly to the south that we wanted to head next.

There’s not a lot to do in the Garden Society of Gothenburg other than enjoy the gardens and plants and flowers, but if enjoying gardens and plants and flowers is something you like then with its close proximity to the main part of Gothenburg it’s a free activity that’s clearly going to be worth your while.

In the next post in this 2022 Island Princess cruise travelogue series we’ll visit the Universeum in Gothenburg because we’d seen it combined science, zoo, and aquarium all in one place, and we like all those things.

After our walk through the The Garden Society Of Gothenburg And The Palm House we continued in a roughly southerly direction. Architecture in Gothenburg was fairly mixed so elements stood out as a result. Immediately outside the park we spotted a nineteenth century theatre, then one road over something that could have had a history as a church or fire station but was now a table tennis facility.

As we approached the Universeum there was a lot of building work taking place; excavations, demolitions, and construction were in evidence in every direction. With plenty of boards up to protect the roads and passers-by from any debris or to prevent trespassing there were also a lot of canvasses on which street artists could work. Actually getting any photos of any of it was incredibly difficult, though, as the pedestrianised areas to walk along were very narrow, squeezed between the busy main roads and hoardings. We thought we might be able to find more advantageous photography positions after our visit to the museum but that would not prove to be possible.

The Universeum itself was a very impressive building with a multistorey jungle setting inside one side accessed along bridges and up and down steps, but also capable of being visited by elevators on each level. Airlock-style entrances prevented any of the wildlife from escaping because some of the birds were free-flying. It was a great environment but warm, busy, and with lots of ups and downs requiring a fair bit of exertion – and we’re no spring chickens – that we soon realised that our tactic of entering at the lowest level was a mistake.

We abandoned our look low down and took the elevator to the top with the intention to explore from there downwards instead. Happily, we also saw that it was possible to head out onto a balcony area so it gave us a chance to get some fresh air and see Gothenburg from high altitude. The metallic-looking towers we immediately saw belonged to a hotel. The nearby dinosaur sculpture looked like it might have emerged from the excavation work taking place in all directions.

While one side of the Universeum held the tropical zoo-like environment, on the other side on each of the floors there were other rooms and that gave us the chance to look around the aquarium. Clean, large tanks, lots of varieties of fish and coral and sea urchins, and we’re rarely if ever disappointed with just stopping for a moment or two to watch fish swim effortlessly around.

Back to the other animals then before we decided to leave, and that took us past numerous reptiles, and, like the fish, they’re creatures that just make me relax. A lovely variety of snakes and lizards to admire curled up in various desert or jungle settings, and exotic flowers to ooh and aah over as well.

We spent less time in the Universeum than we’d expected, despite its large size and arguably good attractions that should have suited us perfectly. In truth, this was more a place for families with kids, so if you’re visiting Gothenburg with children then there’s a lot to recommend here, especially given the large amusements area next to the Universeum that we weren’t interested in checking out.

We mostly enjoyed the building and things in the Universeum although we encountered some behaviour from locals – visitors and staff – that we wouldn’t quite describe as rude, but would definitely put down as just over the border there in Unfriendlyland. It affected the experience. You know the stereotype about Londoners on tube trains being sullen and unapproachable? This was like that, but colder. We’d interacted with a couple of people while walking around the Palm House before this, too, with similar results; holding a door open for someone and smiling but being met with an icy stare and not even a nod of acknowledgement; that sort of thing. Something about the people of Gothenburg did not endear us to their city.

And that’s part of the reason that we decided that we’d cut short our walk around the city at this point. There was another area we’d considered taking a look at on this day in Gothenburg: Haga, the old town. This would have meant the almost-circular route we’d planned before returning to the shuttle bus pick-up point, but the general downbeat feeling at this point coupled with light rain that had started helped us to decide to head back early instead. In the next post in this cruise travelogue series we’ll do just that when we say goodbye to Gothenburg.

“You can’t really appreciate a country and its people and its culture until you’ve been begging for money to get the bus out of the isolated village where everyone pees in the street and the dogs won’t leave you alone,” is the sort of thing I imagine they might say. Or: “Two weeks on a cruise ship can’t possibly compare with really getting to know everything there is to know about this tree and the bush nearby I’ve been sleeping rough in.”

We like to see things differently. Cruising for us allows us to quickly get a feel for historical aspects and architectural aspects, and enjoy local food and drink, all admittedly within a reasonable distance of the coast of a country. That short visit that coincides with a hefty injection of money into the local economy (sly dig!) gives us a chance to decide if we do want to see more of the place. Call me cynical, but I suspect the only reason a lot of “real” travellers return to a place time after time isn’t to learn more about it and see new things but because it’s cheap and they’re seeking revenge on the guy who stole their wallet last time.

Hey, we’ve all got our prejudices against anyone who doesn’t travel in exactly the same way as us. It’s fun to denigrate an entire class of people.

“Mark, really appreciating you telling me this, really helping me get to know you more, but what does it actually have to do with Gothenburg?”

Good point, narrative device. I’ll get to that now.

A single day, I must admit, may not be quite enough time to know everything about a place but it’s enough time to form an opinion, and sometimes you just get a strong feeling for somewhere. And we didn’t enjoy this day in Gothenburg very much.

We concluded our time in Gothenburg by making our way as quickly as possible from the Universeum to where the shuttle bus could take us back to Island Princess docked a decidedly inconvenient nine kilometres away from the city.

We may not have visited Gothenburg on its best of days. We may have picked the wrong direction and wrong things to see. The weather wasn’t particularly pleasant so that didn’t help. But the people were the thing that put us off Gothenburg the most. Aren’t the people the “real” part of a country? We didn’t meet a single happy or polite person at all. I fully accept that the common element in all this was us, but we actually get on pretty well with most people even if we’re not the most forthcoming, and I only generate an air of menace when someone upsets me.

When we travel somewhere we almost always think “Yeah, lots more to see, we could definitely come back here and explore more, maybe stay and experience more.” But after just a few hours ashore, Gothenburg left us with more of a “Well, we’ve been here now, I suppose.” Perhaps it takes the “real” travellers two weeks to get that feeling about pee-ridden villages and the mystery of their missing passport, so whose form of travelling is truly the best?

Ours, obviously. Duh. We get cocktails at the end of every night.

We headed back towards the city centre, accompanied by light drizzle in the air and grey clouds in our heads. You want to know how unimpressed we were with it all? We didn’t even try to find a bar to see if it could persuade us the city had had any saving grace.

Gothenburg still has some nice if not exactly exceptional architecture, and with a few canals here and there it certainly felt like it could look considerably more appealing on a sunny day.

The statue of King Karl IX we passed by has an interesting history attached to it. The king himself only ruled for seven years and they were spent almost entirely at war partly due to siding with the Protestants during the Reformation and Counter-Reformation conflicts, but he was seen as forming an historical bridge between his own father and that of his more respected son, Gustavus Adolphus, whose statue we’d seen when we’d been dropped off at the town square in Gothenburg. The original statue was supposed to be of the king on foot but the instigator of the plan to erect a statue raised enough funding to put up the equestrian statue of Karl IX instead.

The statue was erected in 1904 but in 1935 it became necessary to move it out of the way of increasing traffic. This wasn’t without protest by the people and some council members but the move eventually took place, shifting the statue ten metres and turning it to face west.

The king’s sword was stolen in 1977 and a new one was commissioned to replace it. In 1998 the original sword was found in someone’s house and can now be seen on display in the Museum of Gothenburg.

Continuing with our theme of grumpy Swedes, as we approached a fountain we’d passed earlier in the day we saw some people demonstrating for or against something. They were being filmed. They had a loudspeaker. Some were holding up photos of women in lingerie. Absolutely no idea what was going on, but I do know that as soon as they saw me with my camera we had their attention and whatever it was that they were declaring loudly (and in an unfriendly tone, naturally, since, you know, when in Gothenburg and all that) was directed at me now. Accusations or general statements or questions, we didn’t know. We were able to play the roles of Tourists Who Don’t Know What The Hell You’re Saying So We’re Going To Ignore You And Hope This Doesn’t Escalate so well it’s a wonder we didn’t get nominated at the Oscars.

The centre of the granite fountain near where the loud locals were congregated hosted a bronze statue of a woman, the first statue of a woman to be erected in Gothenburg. Dating from 1883 and officially known as The Sowing Woman, it’s more colloquially known as Johanna in Brunnsparken for one of two competing theories: either that was the name of the ballet dancer model who posed for the sculpture, or the statue’s opening day coincided with Johanna’s name day in Sweden.

That concluded our somewhat disappointing time in the city of Gothenburg as we made it to the square at the perfect time to board a shuttle bus and take us back to Island Princess docked at the not-so-nearby port.

Back on the ship we grabbed a snack and a drink, headed to our room, and did all the usual things such as showering, charging batteries, and backing up photos ahead of the sail away from Sweden.

Gothenburg’s port has a number of little islands dotted around and, probably like the city itself, could look very nice on a day with better weather. It was a little flat and grey for our cruise away but I still enjoyed the views of low-lying rocky land with small lighthouses, though, and as you can see, I took plenty of photographs of the departure on the ship.

Of course we’d like to go back to Gothenburg at some point, despite everything I’ve said, and give it a second chance. We are people who are prepared to change our minds in the face of new evidence or the introduction of some happy drug in the city’s water supply just before we arrive. But for this cruise, that was Sweden completed.

The evening aboard Island Princess was more of an “Ah, that’s better” time. That’s the joy of cruising, after all; no matter what happens ashore you can always get back and have a nice meal with drinks before, during, and afterwards. And that’s exactly what we did.

In the next post in this cruise travelogue series we’ll be visiting Copenhagen for the second time in a year and our third visit overall. Spoiler: we like Copenhagen a lot. Not so much of a spoiler: we like Copenhagen more than Gothenburg.