An uneventful flight had us landing in Malta early in the morning where a fairly long security line meant we got to the luggage carousel just as our cases came around. Grabbing those, we followed the various P&O Cruises people directing us to the waiting buses, boarded one, and probably only had to sit for a couple of minutes before it left. Nice and easy is just how we like these things.
It was a little more confusing at the port where we had to loop around a street and into a room to check our documentation, then had a barcode printed out for us – because P&O still really haven’t embraced that whole phone thing yet and claimed they’d not be able to scan the image on our devices (sure, Jan) – and followed some more signs before we finally boarded the ship.
We were told that we were free to come and go as we pleased up until last boarding time, and we were told that the little slip of paper with the barcode would allow us to order drinks on board, but we were also told that the rooms weren’t ready yet so that left us in the position of either leaving our hand luggage somewhere on board – and we didn’t want to do that – or taking our hand luggage around the streets of Valletta – and we didn’t want to do that – or waiting on the ship until such time as we could drop our bags off in our room. So that’s what we decided to do.
We’d had a bit of a feel for Malta on the reasonably short bus ride from the airport to the cruise port. Narrow, twisting, busy roads with elevations up and down, often penned in either side by high, thick-walled buildings all in light-coloured sandstone blackened with age and pollution from the traffic. The walls got thicker and higher as we neared the Maltese capital and the fortifications of the port, and from Azura‘s top deck we had some fabulous views of these defences and some indication of events in Malta’s past.
We were familiar with Azura, having cruised on her twice before in 2017 to first Belgium and then the Netherlands, and she’s our favourite class of cruise ship – the Grand-class – which is used by older ships in the P&O and Princess fleets and was the first type of ship we ever cruised on, so exploration of the ship wasn’t necessary and we took the time instead to admire more of those views of Valletta with a circuit of the top deck. The fortifications along the harbour entrance looked particularly impressive in the Mediterranean sunshine.
Across the harbour in Valletta from us we could see a dry dock area. One of the docks had a curved roof apparatus that could be moved along to cover whatever was inside. In another the MSC Seaview was undergoing some maintenance. We’ve still not cruised with MSC and every time we get close to considering them we read something else from other cruise bloggers who’ve encountered some often appalling service aboard, bordering on abuse. They feel like a cruise line with some training and attitude issues to address and it just seems that booking an MSC cruise would come with an added gamble that your trip might be ruined in some way, which is a shame right now as many of their ships look lovely and they cruise some interesting itineraries.
One other thing you might spot in the photo of MSC Seaview in the dry dock is that one of the cranes is painted like a giraffe. There’s an argument that they all should be and that we should change the names of them from cranes accordingly.
We made our way past the main pool areas and headed towards the aft of the top deck where we planned to sit and wait with a drink until we heard that the rooms were ready for us.
We had a couple of drinks, first in the sunshine then in the shade when we realised that we were in danger of getting sunburnt before the ship had even left the port. Our sun cream was in our main luggage and that was somewhere on the ship but not with us.
The announcement was finally made that the rooms on Azura were ready for us so we made our way to cabin C235 which is a room number that we’ve had on a lot of these Grand-class ships. It’s become a bit of a running joke with us now that we always try to book it if we can (unless there’s a good reason to book elsewhere on the ship). Part of the reason is familiarity, but it’s also a great location with a couple of great features we both like: it’s close enough to the front to see and hear the waves splitting on the bow of the ship as it cruises; it’s got a double-sized balcony with half of it covered.
Our hold luggage still hadn’t made it to the room in the few hours we’d been aboard but that wasn’t a major issue. We dropped our hand luggage off, freshened up a little anyway, then disembarked Azura in order to have a walk along the harbour shoreline, have a look at the fortifications up close, and see if we could get a feel for whether we’d want to return to Malta at some point for more exploration.
In the next post in this series of cruise travelogues I’ll cover some of the sights as we take a walk along the shoreline of Valletta.