So we had another sea day effectively, and there had already been a fair few of them which doesn’t make for the most thrilling of updates here. What was new and exciting to share? Not a lot. There was an event right at the end of the night that raised eyebrows (and tempers) so scroll to the bottom for details of that, but otherwise prepare yourself mostly for some photos of the top deck of Ruby Princess.

The morning view from our balcony reminded us of departing Singapore on our very first cruise and being mesmerised by the huge numbers of oil and cargo containers just lined up at anchor. Here at the entrance to the Panama Canal (which we’d be heading through the following day) was a similar sight.

The day’s weather was one of intense periods of rain followed by searing heat that almost immediately dried everything out but surrounded the ship in an invisible cloud of dense humidity, none of which were things my wife wanted to be out in so I left her in the air conditioned interior of the cruise ship after breakfast while I took a quick look around the top deck.

The miniature golf course on Ruby Princess was a huge upgrade to the equivalent spaces we’d seen on other Princess Cruises ships over the years, with those areas more-or-less accurately described as green surfaces with holes in them. Here there were actual obstacles and proper layouts, and if it hadn’t been quite so hot and my wife had been there while I was shooting the photos then I might even have persuaded her to join me for a round.

The sports court area looked like it had also benefitted from the dry dock changes on Ruby Princess that had immediately preceded our cruise.

The afternoon was spent back in our cabin when we needed to cool down or out on the balcony when we wanted to brave the heat and humidity. We make it a point to always try to book these deck 10 balcony cabins on Grand-class ships because of these double-depth, half-covered balconies. The deck below has equally large balconies but the rooms are larger so the balconies there are fully exposed to the elements and have no privacy (not that that’s really an issue), whereas our deck’s balconies offer protection from the sun, rain, and anyone looking down from above (again, not an issue, and I pity anyone looking down on us) while also giving better night views of stars. If the people around turn their balcony lights off, that is. Many don’t. A big annoyance.

In the early evening Ruby Princess started to move away from her anchorage spot near Panama City to a more distant location and the reason for this was so limit the city’s exposure to any noise from the deck party that had suddenly been arranged to make up for the change in cruise plans.

The Ruby Princess deck party featured the resident party band belting out tracks people could sing along and dance to, the staff dancing and encouraging others to join them, everyone having a generally good time, and us loving the ambience but keeping out of the way of most it. It was wonderful to have it all take place in cooler evening temperatures and the almost exclusive use of blue and purple lighting gave the occasion a pleasing look to accompany the happy atmosphere.

For the rest of the evening on the ship it was mostly business as usual with some pre-dinner cocktails, then food in the main dining room – it was Italian Night on Ruby Princess and the dinner menu is below for you to look at – then a little lounge-hopping until hitting the nightclub.

In Skywalkers it was nice to see some of the ship’s officers make an appearance to dance for a few tracks. They were, of course, treated to the DJ’s standard, small selection of music, but as they’d not heard them every night of the cruise they seemed to enjoy themselves before leaving.

Now to that incident I mentioned at the start of this write-up.

A couple of people we’d not seen before were standing by the dance floor when we decided we’d had enough and were going to head off to bed. Just as we were passing them there was a lull in the music volume enough for me to hear the man tell his wife “I wish he’d play some Led Zeppelin.”

“Good luck with that,” I felt compelled to say to him. “He won’t play anything anyone asks for. We’ve tried.”

“Oh, we’ll see about that!” he said, and headed off to the booth. We stood there and spoke to his wife for a couple of minutes on the off-chance that he’d have some success where we hadn’t, then glanced back. What we could see was the man who’d gone to talk to the DJ leaning across and jabbing his finger towards the dick with the discs. The next second the music stopped, the lights came up, and the DJ shouted into his microphone “No, no that’s it! No more! Security!”

The man returned to us. “That guy is a fucking prick!” he said, gestured to his wife, then left.

I headed to the DJ with the intention of smoothing things over. “Hey, I don’t know what was said and I hope you’re okay but I’m sure whatever was said was just in the heat of the moment,” I said. “I won’t take that from anyone,” the DJ said to me. “Someone else threatened me and yesterday someone punched me and they’re being kicked off the ship so I won’t be told what to do!”

I told the DJ I was sorry to hear that, explained what had happened to some bar staff who’d come across by now to see what was happening, then nodded to my wife and we left.

People who say that violence is never the answer haven’t paid attention to history where it’s been shown many times that it’s precisely the answer and is often very effective. No, I don’t advocate passengers hitting staff members, of course, but it was not difficult to guess what had probably led to someone else doing it given the experiences we’d had with this godawful DJ to this point too.

Who says sea days can’t be exciting!?

In the next post in this cruise travelogue series Ruby Princess, with us aboard, will make a full transit of the Panama Canal.

When we awoke in the morning we had just passed under the Bridge of the Americas (so we missed that) and were on the slow approach to the Cocoli Locks, part of the Panama Canal expansion project undertaken in the 2010s to double transit capacity between the Pacific and Atlantic sides of the Americas. These locks, like those we’d be exiting on the Atlantic side later in the day, comprised three chambers with basins and rolling gates, filled and emptied by gravity, and making use of tugboats to position ships rather than trains (called mules) as used in the older lock systems.

I’d describe the process of passing through the locks and being raised or lowered as technically interesting but not that fascinating overall, and that’s mainly because it just happens so slowly that you don’t really get a sense that anything is really happening. You can look ahead from the balcony (if you’re on one) and spot the gates closing or opening, but it’s mostly a case of simply waiting until you start to move again. It took a little over ninety minutes for us to get through the Cocoli Locks and enter the canal.

We then cruised quietly and slowly along the waterway for about two and half hours passing close to verdant landscapes either side all under close, cloudy skies and in hot, humid conditions.

We’d already cruised under the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco at the start of this cruise and we got to cruise under another three bridges during this Panama Canal transit. We’d got up just too late to see our passage beneath the Bridge of the Americas at the entrance to the canal locks but we were wide awake as we made our way past the Centennial Bridge. The bridge is named for Panama’s centennial which occurred in 2003 and it was officially opened in August 2004.

Gatun Lake was formed in 1913 by damming the Chagres River and at the time it was the largest artificial lake in the world. It was here that Ruby Princess and several other vessels waited for a time slot to open in which to pass through the second set of locks. During this four-hour period the rain came in and with the small islands and reduced visibility we were reminded a little of our approach to Ha Long Bay a few years earlier.

Eventually, though, the tug boats started coming alongside once more to guide our cruise ship into the Agua Clara Locks. The process here was identical to that of the locks we’d passed through at the start of the day although it took a bit longer than the morning’s transit at around two and a quarter hours.

By the time we completed our Panama Canal full transit the sun had set. This did mean that we had the additional enjoyment of seeing the Atlantic Bridge showing off a light display as we cruised underneath. The Atlantic Bridge is the third permanent crossing over the Panama Canal waterway and was only completed in 2019.

If I were to compare our experiences cruising between the two most famous canals in the world then I’d probably say that our time cruising through the Suez Canal provided us with more interesting sights, and that may simply be because the desert landscape was far more unfamiliar to us. That said, we completely missed any lock activity when doing the Suez transit so this trip through the Panama Canal was technically more interesting.

In the next post in this travelogue series we’ll be visiting the only new country for us on this cruise when we arrive at Cartagena, Colombia.

We would be heading off for a full day’s excursion while in Cartagena but this first post from the cruise ship’s visit to this city will focus on photos of some of the skyline as Ruby Princess came into dock. It’s fairly unusual for us to see a sail-in to any port as we tend to be late night drinkers and occasional dancers, and the ships often are alongside quite early in the mornings. However, on this occasion, because the ship was arriving at a more reasonable hour and we had an excursion booked that we needed to meet in a lounge for, we were up early enough to grab breakfast and step out onto the top deck for a look around at this Colombian port first.

The area with the impressive skyscrapers as you approach Cartagena is called Bocagrande. We would get to admire the views of it as the sun set later in the day too.

We popped back to our room to pick up the essentials for the day: Factor 50 sun lotion and plenty of water because although it was quite cloudy in the morning you could feel the high heat and humidity already and knew without looking at the forecast that the clouds would likely get burned off by the sun in fairly short order. We could see the queue of tour buses all ready to escort us ashore from our balcony.

We headed down to the Explorers Lounge at the time we were due to meet for our excursion. There’s never any point arriving early for a Princess Cruises tour unless you’re a huge fan of sitting in packed, cramped spaces for far longer than ever seems necessary whilst fellow passengers who should know better try to persuade everyone around them that no, they’ve never heard of this “queueing” thing before and that really, since they’re paying then they should be allowed to disregard any instructions that might mean they don’t to get onto the bus first and the prime chairs right at the front where they can hold everyone up as they remember they’re carrying a ton of clothing and bags they absolutely must put above their seats before anyone else boards.

The disembarkation process was running a little behind schedule so we were forced to wait for a while. To entertain everyone during this pause I proceeded to the stage and presented my talk on the eventual heat death of the universe and why nothing anyone does really matters.

Of course that didn’t happen. Are you mental?

In the next post in this cruise travelogue series we’ll head ashore in Cartagena and start with a visit to the seventeenth century fortress of Castillo San Felipe de Barajas.

“We’ll probably be very glad later that we’re doing this at the start of the day,” I told my wife while looking up at the long sloping paths and the people already walking up them to get to the top of the castle.

“It won’t feel like it at the time, though,” she replied. We would both turn out to be right.

While we were waiting for our guide to return to our group and trying not to think about the rivulets of sweat already starting to run down various parts of the body we also had to engage in numerous head shakes, hand waves, and abuses of Spanish pronunciation with our frequent “No, gracias” replies as purveyors of general tat descended upon us obvious tourists from all angles. There did at least seem to be some official vendor t-shirt that they all wore which lent the operations more of a sense that you weren’t going to get completely ripped off if you bought anything, and it also made it slightly easier to spot them approach from out of the corners of your eyes so you could veer away, or attempt to.

Our guide returned with tickets in hand and ushered us all through to start heading up the zig-zag slopes outside the walls of Castillo San Felipe de Barajas. It wasn’t a fast walk, thankfully, and it had a few stops along the way for the guide to point out distant sights of Cartagena or mention some of the history of this castle, but that didn’t stop it being incredibly uncomfortable for us. We really don’t cope with heat and humidity very well at all and we’re not natural hikers so quite why we often pick excursions that involve lots of walking upwards when we’re in hot climates must surely be evidence that all life is just a simulation and whoever’s configured us toggled the Brain Parasite setting to “on” just for a laugh.

Castillo San Felipe de Barajas stands over forty metres above sea level. The castle itself is triangular with its walls, parapets, and batteries designed to overlap and protect one another, making the taking of the fortress complex a difficult task to do without overwhelming force. The walls were noticeably wider at the base, tapering inwards as they reached the parapets, and this gave the defenders more range of fire down on any attacking force. The heavy slope on all the walls of this seventeenth century defensive structure was distinctly different from most of the other castles we’ve visited around the world.

The fortress fell to the French during the Nine Years War and attempts by the British to take it during the hilariously-named War of Jenkins’ Ear were repelled, but it has otherwise been a place either in local or Spanish hands for most of its history.

One interesting aspect of Castillo San Felipe de Barajas is its maze-like system of tunnels, some of which we were able to walk through and, of course, we did, but if we thought that this might give us some relief from the heat and humidity then we were mistaken as the fortress was a very popular location for many groups and individuals to visit on this day. It was crowded, it was noisy, it was dark, and the wind – which was admittedly only blowing warm air around – was suppressed completely. We couldn’t wait to get out and back into the unrelenting heat and humidity of the outside of the castle which tells you how unpleasant it was. You’ve still got to do it, though.

So, not a huge amount of history to report regarding Castillo San Felipe de Barajas but a very interesting design (built with slave labour from Africa, naturally) and despite our issues with comfort in the conditions it was a place we were very glad to visit. As we gathered to head down there was time to point out one other interesting defensive measure in the castle: gaps in the external walkways that were usually covered by boards that could be broken, removed, or burnt in the event of an attack to produce a deep drop that needed to be overcome. Nice.

In the next post in this cruise travelogue series we’ll continue our excursion in Colombia with a visit to the historic centre and walled city of Cartagena. The colour yellow will feature heavily.

Our first stop was at Las Bóvedas. This attractive eighteenth century construction has been used as storage vaults, garrisons, and cells for prisoners, but these days it’s a popular destination for tourists looking for souvenirs and that’s why we were taken there.

We bought some gifts then had a little walk around the area away from the crowds of people while we waited for the time to head back to the bus to come around. As we started back we encountered two palenqueras. These are the women in bright, colourful dresses with fruit on their heads and if you want to take a photo of them then you will be expected to pay a dollar or two to each of them for the privilege.

The history of the palenqueras is an interesting one. During Spanish colonisation of this part of the world some slaves would sometimes escape and form defensive communities far from any oppressive rule while maintaining African traditions and language. These places were called palenques and over time, while the men were protecting their towns – such as Palenque de San Basilio, the first free town in the Americas – the women would engage in trade with nearby cities, including Cartagena.

We hopped back on the bus for a short drive that soon became snarled up in traffic. After a bit of a conversation between the driver and tour guide the decision was made to get off a little earlier than planned and walk to the next destination. It would be hot, of course, but the narrow roads and tall colonial buildings within Cartagena’s walled city offered lots of shady routes.

Door knockers on some of the buildings we passed were pointed out to us. The different types gave some indication as to who had lived there in the past; fish, for instance, would mean sailors or fish merchants had lived there, while the lion was indicative of a former military person’s residence.

We soon passed by the Convento de Santo Domingo, the oldest church in Cartagena, established in the sixteenth century to bring Catholicism to Colombia whether it wanted it or not.

Beside the church was a public square, the Plaza Santo Domingo, once a site for executions during the Inquisition but now home to a sculpture by celebrated Colombian artist, Fernando Botero. If you’ve not seen his art before then it’s well worth a look as he has a very distinctive style that always produces curvy figures and La Gorda Gertrudis is typical of this. Naturally, there are parts of the bronze artwork that are supposed to bring luck to you if you rub them, and naturally it’s not the knees.

Our walk through the fabulously colourful buildings with their various colonial styles shortly brought us to Museo Histórico de Cartagena de Indias, a museum largely focusing on torture and persecutions during Spanish rule. A very nice building with a couple of courtyard spaces and associated shade from the sun but the Inquisition torture equipment was perhaps not as interesting to us as to passengers from the USA, for example, as we had visited a few torture museums in Europe before with arguably far more information and better examples of pain devices.

We had one more brief stop before getting some free time to explore Cartagena, and that was to an emerald jewellery shop. We’re familiar with Colombian emeralds because my wife’s engagement ring has one in it, a fact we mentioned and demonstrated when asked if we wanted to buy one while we were there, and a fact that still didn’t put off the salesperson who tried to insist that every woman should have two at the very least. We did not buy a second one.

We had about half an hour to ourselves at this point so headed off on an aimless wander up and down the attractive roads largely arranged in a grid pattern. We passed by the house in which Sir Francis Drake briefly stayed after his attack on the port and destruction of so many buildings that precipitated the subsequent building of the walls of the city and I was happy to take lots of pictures of the bright, colourful architecture that heavily favoured the colour yellow.

We had a few street vendors approach us but a simple “No, gracias” seemed to work well enough in fending them off. However, there was one interesting moment when a young man, probably in his mid-twenties, came over.

“Are you American?” he asked.

“No, English.”

“Oh, England!” he replied and talked for a moment about football before suddenly asking “Hey, then, do you want some coffee?”

“No, thanks,” I replied.

“No,” he said, then looked around slyly and leaned in to slowly ask again. “Do you want some coffee?”

He was not asking if we wanted some coffee. We still didn’t want the not-coffee he was offering, though, and with a smile we parted company.

We had hoped towards the end of our free time that we’d be able to get into the Plaza de Bolívar as it was close to where we needed to meet up and looked nice and shady under the trees. There was a fountain and sculptures within to photograph too, but the entrance was blocked for repairs for something or the other. Fortunately, though, we got some respite from the heat because a street vendor selling beer and soft drinks from a wheeled fridge passed by at this point and we availed ourselves of two local lagers. Lagers aren’t our first choice when it comes to beers but sometimes when it’s baking hot – and it was baking hot in Cartagena – they’re absolutely perfect.

In the next post from this Ruby Princess cruise travelogue series we’ll conclude our day’s excursion in Cartagena with a short walk before a visit to a church, some traditional dancing, and a museum.

We started off with a short walk of no more than a hundred metres from where we’d all met up, heading more-or-less due south towards the Plaza de San Pedro Claver. Naturally, more of that gorgeous colonial architecture came into view and there were more signs of the huge downpours that had preceded our visit to Cartagena, which still hadn’t drained away in places, and which had been the cause of some of the traffic problems our bus had encountered earlier in the day.

The first place we visited was the Church of San Pedro Claver (sometimes called a cathedral, sometimes a sanctuary, but I’ll stick to church). The building itself was one that had been constructed prior to Sir Francis Drake (you can see his house in Cartagena in the previous post) turning up in 1586 and raining down destruction on the city where it suffered damage and needed to be rebuilt.

Its original name was supplanted by that of San Pedro Claver, a Jesuit priest who arrived in Cartagena in 1610 and concentrated heavily on tending to the newly-arrived African slaves with just a little bit of encouragement to ditch their beliefs and convert to Christianity thrown in for good measure. It’s claimed that he personally baptised over 300,000 slaves and worked hard to have them treated more humanely, but he also owned slaves and wasn’t above punishing them so, you know, not all good. He was, nevertheless, canonised in 1888 and is the patron saint of slaves.

We began with a visit to the church’s courtyard, a very pleasant, relatively cool spot given the general levels of heat and humidity in Cartagena.

Next we entered the church itself. It was a fairly minimalist building, not given over to gaudy decorations. If you look just below the altar in one of the photos below then you can see where the bones of San Pedro Claver are located.

With our short visit to the church complete we stepped back out into the plaza, admired the sculpture of San Pedro Claver by Colombian artist Enrique Grau, avoided the temptation of some fresh fruit or other items from some of the stallholders in the area, and headed off around the corner to the next couple of stops on this tour.

First up was a traditional dance and music performance featuring acrobatic dancing, some singing, and plenty of drumming. I won’t pretend that this sort of thing interests us because it generally doesn’t. None of that takes away from the dancers or musicians because they’re all very talented but it’s not the sort of thing that sits well with me in particular and it’s not easy to say why.

The traditional dancing and music only lasted about ten minutes and from there we headed through a small courtyard into the Naval Museum next door. There were some interesting items in there but it was a small museum and overall not a particularly good example of one. Indeed, when combined with the historical museum we’d visited earlier on our walk through the city I think I’d have to say that museums are an area of cultural awareness and tourism that perhaps need a little look into improving. We very much liked Cartagena, though.

And that brought our cruise excursion in Cartagena to an end. All that remained was a short walk to where the bus was waiting for us, a little bit of battling traffic that may or may not have still been affected by localised flooding, and a drive back to the port that was slow enough for me to consider taking a few photos from on the bus (not something I generally do).

The end of the excursion, yes, but not quite the end of activities in Cartagena. In the final post from this final port on our cruise we’ll arrive at the port and discover a park filled with tropical birds only viewable by cruise passengers, plus there’s a sunset sail away and another deck party to enjoy.

We stepped through the security checkpoint at the exterior of the port and found ourselves face-to-face (well, if we crouched) with a peacock. You could see everyone from our tour group immediately whipping out phones and cameras for this because generally speaking you don’t often find peacocks inside cruise port security zones.

The single peacock, though, was nothing compared to what we saw when we rounded the corner and found ourselves in what we later learned was called the Port Oasis Eco Park. I’ve described it as an aviary in the title of this post but it actually contains more than just birds; it’s simply that we didn’t see anything else during our short but very pleasant walk through the grounds. The park was part of the land given over to the port authority when they were tasked with building cruise ship infrastructure, using this buffer zone for security but also as a wildlife habitat. Falling within the security zone of the port it’s a place that’s therefore only accessible to cruise visitors to Cartagena. In addition to more-than-seventy different species of animals there, you will also find a gift shop, somewhere to eat, and toilets.

A lovely surprising end to our time in Colombia but it really was approaching all-aboard time about now so we didn’t dawdle long and headed through to where Ruby Princess was tied up.

Our usual routine when we get back on board a Princess Cruises ship, thanks to the Ocean Medallion system, is to head to our room then order some drinks and maybe snacks to be delivered so that we can cool off, freshen up, and take advantage of our balcony for some last views of wherever we happen to be or to see the sail away. This was no exception.

The sun, getting lower on the horizon, was both producing some lovely colour changes in the sky and bringing with it a drop in overall temperature, and you could see heavy clouds starting to form in the distance as that humidity in the atmosphere started to to condense. We had a feeling that Cartagena might be in for another night of rain and flooding such as that we’d been told had preceded our visit earlier in the day at the start of our tour.

The skyline of the Bocagrande area of Cartagena looked absolutely stunning in silhouette against the darkening sky. As Ruby Princess slowly made her way out and away from the final port of call on our cruise the quiet of the late evening was occasionally punctuated by small party boats heading out on sunset cruises, music thumping across the still water. We couldn’t complain: the ship’s daily activities had us down to do something similar a little later in the day.

But first, dinner, and a drink or several. The Ruby Princess main dining room menu and the food we selected for the evening are below for your perusal if that’s the sort of thing you’re interested in.

The Ruby Princess equivalent of a sunset party boat cruise was an 80s Deck Party, quite some time after the sun had actually set. Not the first deck party we’d had on this cruise, and only really differentiated from the others by the selection of music performed by the house band and the neon outfits worn by the entertainments crew, but still enjoyable to get out, get some air, and think how much more preferable all of this was to being at home.

The next post in this Ruby Princess 2023 cruise travelogues series will be the penultimate one and the last spent aboard the ship herself as we relax for two sea days on the way to the departure point at Fort Lauderdale, Florida.

Cruises of this sort of duration are all about the port stops and experiences, not about the ship, so for these final two days it was mostly just a chance for us to sit out on the balcony, read our books, have the odd drink or two (maybe more), and enjoy those moments when there’d be not another thing on the horizon in any direction, feeling like you’re the only people on a world of water, rocking from side-to-side and bobbing gently up and down.

Actually, there was far more of that rocking from side-to-side and bobbing up and down than a lot of people aboard liked – not us; we love the motion of the ocean – and that extended to putting the nets across the swimming pools for safety reasons. It’s the only annoyance when the ship hits nice swells like this because we love being in pools when in these conditions but the cruise lines increasingly stop people like us from enjoying it.

For this penultimate post from this Ruby Princess cruise travelogue series I’ll simply post some photos of a couple of events we did actually attend and the meals we had for the final two nights on the ship. People like looking at pictures of cruise ship food.

First up was the ship’s Tug of War competition contested between different teams of crew members aboard the ship. There were deck staff, dining room staff, bridge staff, room stewards, reception staff, bar staff, and others, and due to a little bit of rain and the need to not injure or disadvantage any team members this all took place on an area of the top deck where there was some artificial turf down in place.

It was all good fun and we were pleased to see that the bar staff who’d largely been in Crooner’s throughout this cruise and who we’d got to know very well during this time were ultimately victorious. Even better, a year later on Caribbean Princess we’d run into a lot of the same guys again and it was great to share photos and videos with them and say hello once more.

The second of the events took place on the final night and it was a Flag Parade featuring someone from each of the nations represented on board walking through the piazza to wave their flags and receive applause from the passengers aboard for doing such sterling work. Not the DJ, of course; he was a dick. But everyone else. At the end of the parade everyone was encouraged to come down and have a dance with some of the entertainments staff and no, no we didn’t.

Time to show the dinners we ate across these last two days. As I mentioned, people do like to see pictures of the food and menus on cruise ships and we like taking photos of the food because they add completeness to the cruise memories. People like what they like and those who sneer at these sorts of things are beneath contempt. And just think, if I never took photos of food then I wouldn’t have a picture of oil and vinegar that looks like a Japanese cartoon character.

On the first of the two sea days we dined in Sabatini’s for the second time on this Ruby Princess cruise, having already had a lovely meal on the first of four sea days in a row after our visit to Mexico. We mostly went for different courses this time around and all the food was equally lovely for this return visit to Princess Cruises‘ Italian speciality restaurant. We typically order the same food every time if we hit Crown Grill but there are more options to choose between at Sabatini’s so if we do visit a speciality restaurant on Princess ship twice then it’s most like to be the Italian.

And the final meal on Ruby Princess was the Farewell Dinner. There was nothing particularly special about it but everything was to a high standard as it had generally been throughout the cruise. It’s always sad to know that it’s the last meal aboard the ship, though.

So, a few events to round off this cruise but mostly lazing about for a couple of days, reading and drinking in the sunshine, and catching another American Football game on the Movies Under The Stars big screen out on deck too.

The final post in this series will see us arrive at Fort Lauderdale, Florida – a first visit to this American state for us – where the airboat ride disembarkation tour doesn’t quite go as advertised and there are some not-very-happy passengers around us.

After two days crossing the Caribbean Sea we sadly awoke to the fact that we’d reached Florida. Sad because it was the end of the cruise, and sad because it was Florida which is right down the bottom of the list of US states we ever wanted to actually visit, although since neither of us had before it was at least handy to say that we had, even if thankfully briefly.

Ends of cruises are never good but this one stands out as being worse than most we’ve experienced.

With an early evening flight from Miami airport we’d arranged to take an excursion first before being dropped off at the airport, and of the couple of choices available we opted for the airboat ride on the Florida Everglades, home to alligators. The first issue came immediately after getting off the ship, picking up our luggage, and heading to where we needed to meet the bus that would be taking us on our debark tour. The meeting spot was exposed and it was very hot and sunny this early in the morning. Not a problem if there’s a bus to get on but there wasn’t, and ours didn’t turn up for close to half an hour.

Upon arriving at Everglades Holiday Park we then discovered that for one of our tour group’s passengers the bus was completely unsuitable for him. He’d had assistance to get on the bus by officials at the port, but getting him off and into his wheelchair at the park required several of us fellow passengers helping to carry and support him. Undignified for him, legally shaky for everyone else involved. This was a tour advertised as suitable for wheelchairs, and that will get another mention soon.

We were there for the two experiences of riding on an airboat and seeing alligators, and we weren’t the only ones with plenty of other groups present. Our guide assured us that we were in the queued slots and when a boat became available we’d be called forward but in the meantime we had some opportunity to try to hunt down any bit of shade we could and look out for the famed wildlife of the area. Birds, there were plenty, and we spotted a turtle while another passenger had an encounter with a dragonfly that looked a little the worse for wear, but no alligators yet, and time kept ticking while other groups set off on their noisy boat rides then school children turned up and were bumped ahead of everyone into the next set of boats and people started muttering about just how long this was all taking. The plan had been for an airboat ride then a show where alligators and other animals were shown off so someone asked if we could do the show first since it was taking so long. “No, don’t worry, there will still be time afterwards,” our guide assured us all.

Finally, we got the nod that we could head down to the boarding area and we all did so. You can see the sort of airboats that are used for these cruise debark tours below; large, flat, with benches spread across. It would turn out that getting reasonable views was fine because the boat wasn’t overfilled with passengers, instead spreading them out so a couple could sit on one side of a bench and a couple could sit on another.

Well, most couples. To get into the airboat you had to step off the wooden jetty and down into the space between the benches, ducking your head to avoid the scaffolding framework around. You need to have some mobility to do this and people in wheelchairs who’ve needed to be carried off a bus don’t have enough. Not only that, but the cramped conditions and just common sense levels of safety stopped any of us from being able to help the poor guy in. For him, this wheelchair-accessible debark tour was a complete waste of time and money. A terrible situation for Princess Cruises to allow to happen.

Our boat driver introduced himself to muted replies from a group of passengers increasingly disappointed with how the tour was going and then explained that since he’d been told he needed to get us back by a certain time he’d have to change the planned hour-long airboat ride and give us the express version at less than half that duration. The groans were loud.

We started to move out slowly and during this I took some photos, including one of this building you see in the picture below. I like industrial buildings. What I hadn’t realised at the time was that on the grass in front of the building, above the cormorant with its wings spread out, there is an alligator enjoying the sunshine in very much the same way we weren’t.

That alligator would turn out to be the only alligator we saw on this tour and we hadn’t even realised it at the time. The express excursion involved a few examples of several minutes of rapid airboat-thundering across long stretches of water – which was actually very nice, particularly because the cooling breeze was very welcome – followed by several drifting periods around known alligator hang-out areas. The sort of areas that alligators could usually be found during the cooler parts of the early part of the day or a bit later but not, as it turned out, right at this particular, quite hot time we were out on the water, it being close to an hour and a half later than we’d initially expected.

The plant-life in the Everglades was fairly interesting and there were some nice reflections around groups of trees, as you can see below, but this tour had not really been advertised as “See grass up close” and all attempts by our airboat driver to get some group interactions going fell on disappointed ears.

You can’t guarantee wildlife sightings, of course, but it was impossible not to think that better organisation, a bus on time, and no wasted time and effort helping someone when this should all have been catered for by the tour group, and we might have got on the ride earlier, had the full time allotted to us, and increased our chances of seeing alligators in the wild. We’d have had longer out in the Florida Everglades on the water and not standing around in the searing sunshine at the very least. Most of us, anyway.

At least we had the show to watch now. Only we didn’t because the current show was in progress and full and we didn’t have time to wait around for the next one. At this point there were some angry comments from some passengers demanding their money back (that wasn’t going to happen) and saying they’d be complaining to Princess about it (and I hope they did because we certainly did afterwards, albeit to no effect). Princess Cruises are usually quite good at responding to issues like this but on this occasion they completely dropped the ball.

Our guide took us around the back of the show and we briefly glimpsed an alligator, some rabbits, and some tortoises, but that was it.

To hammer the final nail into this coffin containing an absolute shambles of a cruise debark tour we came within a whisker of not being dropped off at our airport terminal because our hapless guide decided to stop using the microphone to announce where the bus was. It was only when I spotted what looked like the Virgin Atlantic logo near where we were briefly stopped that I had to shout down the bus to find out why we were where we were and realised that we needed to get off.

The airport and flight home were, thankfully, unremarkable, although we were treated to a lovely sunset from our seat window as we bid a very fond farewell to Florida.

And that concludes the travelogues for this cruise.

The DJ aboard the ship was appalling and we hope he never works for a cruise line again, and this debark tour was remarkable just in how bad it was, but those are really the only low points to mention. Managers and bar staff on the ship were otherwise superb and we’d meet many of them again a year later on another cruise, and it was lovely to tick off another of the Grand-class ships operated by Princess. Highlights of experiences off the ship were, of course, transiting the Panama Canal, having a great time on our excursion in Cabo San Lucas, flying in a day early for the first time, and getting to visit Colombia for the first time too.