Chilean Cruise, Processed Photos, And Travel News And Views

It’s time for another of the regular summary posts covering what’s been published recently on this site that you might have missed.

South American Cruise

The first posts have now appeared from our March cruise aboard Star Princess from San Antonio, Chile to Los Angeles, USA. These posts cover the Chile section of the cruise from arrival to the sea days that marked its end and the eve of our first ever visit to Peru.

• In Flight Issues, Luggage Issues, And Stress To Start A Cruise you might not be surprised to discover that our South American cruise did not start off in the best possible way. If you’d like to see what using Princess Cruises‘ EZAir service is like, what you need to do when your luggage doesn’t make the same flight as you, how the cruise ship takes over when you arrive, or just take a nose at the new Crooners bar menu then that’s the post to read.
• After an overnight cruise from San Antonio we docked at Coquimbo the next day where we had booked a Coquimbo Cruise Excursion To The Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory. This was an excellent trip for us as we’re firmly at the science nerd end of the average cruiser demographic. Expect gorgeous photos and videos both outside and inside the telescope domes on the Chilean mountain plus scans of the new Wheelhouse Bar menu too.
• The next two days were spent at sea and are covered in Sea Days And Sabatini’s On Star Princess which also includes a review of the new menu in the ship’s Sabatini’s speciality Italian restaurant (as you might have guessed). The food was stunningly good and this dining experience came courtesy of a perk of us booking during one of Princess’s 3-For-Free cruise promotions. Just to continue the trend there’s another of the new drinks menus from Princess scanned in that post too.

Photo Processing Feature

This site (since it changed format a few years ago) was designed to showcase and document both general photography and travel photography but it has heavily leant on the latter because we do enough of it and it takes me long enough to go through it that it almost suffocates the former.

I’m trying now to adjust that balance a little more – although I don’t want to reduce taking holidays abroad for obvious reasons – and will try to break up the recent travelling blogging posts with more archive material of general trips or photo themes. One feature I’ve decided upon is revisiting old photographs and using experience gained since they were taken as well as advances in software to process them in a new way. The first two photos to feature this way are now on the site.

• Photo: Cruising Along Geirangerfjord – A photo taken aboard Crown Princess in 2013 cruising along the Norwegian fjords and which had previously been little more than silhouetted figures against a blown out sky background.
• Photo: Beijing Hutongs Salute – A snapshot from a pedicab in the Chinese capital back in 2008 that I’ve always liked because of the symmetry of the people in it.

Writing Style

I’ve made a conscious effort to alter (or, more accurately, uncage) my writing style recently and part of that decision means I’ve also started going back through older posts, giving them a little refresh and padding out in terms of content but also changing the tone in places too.

I’d noticed for a while that the word count in what I was writing was creeping up and up, and when I’d looked back at earlier travel content posts there was a marked difference in how I went about documenting our experiences back then; limited detail, not enough capture of thoughts and feelings. That’s only to be expected, of course. However, it wasn’t just the amount I was writing that had increased but a little bit more of the real me (well, the real internet me) was coming through.

My background thanks to many, many, many years on the net and early adoption of e/n culture has been in (admittedly subjective) humorous writing, sometimes bordering on the surreal, quite often fanciful. That all went out of the window when I switched this site to focus on travel and photography because I thought a professional approach would have broader appeal (some hope) but over time some of my style has crept back in and recently I’ve decided to let it loose completely.

I’d like to thank the writing of Prof. Cruise at this point for making me remember I could just write like myself once more.

In Print

If you’re in the UK and you’ve signed up to receive advertising blurb from cruise lines then keep an eye out over the next month or so and you might just spot something from me. You might not.

Social News And Views

Social media as it relates to travel and cruise people has been pretty quiet recently. A lot of people have remarked on it and it’s something I’ve noticed too. I’m not sure if it’s the time of the year because last year and the one before didn’t seem to be so obviously afflicted so it might be general social media fatigue and it might be that the bubbles of communication in which I inhabit are finally shrinking as they inevitably must. There’s an article about the eradication of the fundamental principles of the web and the continuing slow death of social media forming in my head but I’ll save it for another unread post.

Still, I have been reading or watching some new travel-related content published by other people recently.

You should know by now that we like cruising and we like being on the water but river cruising… no. Nothing I’ve seen from reviews of river cruising has tempted me because the elements that I crave on a cruise between ports – the vast and empty oceans, the pitching and rolling of the ship – aren’t there, and the thing we’ve come to love – sitting on our balcony – comes at such a premium. All that said, this Cruising the Canal du Midi Aboard the Athos Luxury Barge was fascinating to read, packed with loads of useful, not stereotypical information, and really managed to capture life aboard in a way I’ve not seen in other river-based cruising write-ups or videos. It’s a review written so well it’s almost got me to change my mind about considering cruising away from the ocean.

In Highlights of Jordan: A 7 Day Jordan Itinerary for First Time Visitors Flo describes a fabulous itinerary for a country we’ve not yet visited but will be doing so briefly later in the year. The scale and quality of the Roman archaeological sites in and around Amman was something I’d not known about Jordan as, like most people, we’ll be concentrating on the popular tourist destination of Petra instead.

I was amused to read Man Kicked Off Cruise, Says He Couldn’t Fight Captain’s Decision because any seasoned cruiser – which this man was – will already know that at sea there is no law other than the captain’s law so to get upset because of a booking mishap is understandable but to threaten crew is just plain stupid.

As for these people – Sick passengers tell of nightmare holiday on the newest ship to join TUI’s Marella Cruises – I simply hope that no cruise line or hotel will ever accept a booking from them again. Grow up you pathetic children. People get sick all over the world all the time. First time cruisers with a sense of entitlement are just the worst.

Things were so bad that I saw staff occasionally spooning out food to people and handling the glasses, as well as asking people if they had washed their hands and using tissues to open toilet doors.

Yes, that’s pretty much standard on cruise ships. It’s done because some of the thousands of other people you’re cruising with are filthy buggers. Not you, of course. You definitely didn’t cough into your hand.

Linda, who is retired, said she went to see her GP when she got home on May 16 and was diagnosed with norovirus […] I noticed that food was not served hot enough and it was left uncovered for periods of time.

That place with uncovered food is called a buffet. They’re pretty common. It’s a wonder you’ve never seen one before. Cooler temperatures than you like is not the mechanism by which norovirus spreads. Being around people who can’t follow basic hygiene rules like adults and just plain bad luck is how norovirus spreads.

People, eh?

Finally, the almost traditional videos of interest. These two cruise videos mostly follow along with my own philosophy of travel writing in that they are clearly done for the love of the subject and sprinkle useful information in a diary-style approach of events rather than a polished, pretty standard review or list of tips. I don’t mind those types of reviews if they’re done well but they can tend to be much of a muchness after a while and it’s far more interesting to see real life unfolding and documented in a way that might more accurately represent a genuine traveller’s experience.

First up is Gavin and Luke aboard the MSC Bellissima. This is part 2 and is included because it’s got a nice filet mignon at one point but do take a nose at the first in the series too. We haven’t cruised with MSC and have no plans to do so in the near future but there are certainly some features of the line we like the look of.

A different style of cruise video to finish, thanks to David and Jarell of BoosCruize, who prefer a mostly unedited fly-on-the-wall (or in the hand) way of recording what they see and what they think. This is from their first Princess cruise last year and it’s great to see just how impressed they are when comparing it to other cruises across their playlist. Emerald Princess, which features, will be the next ship we cruise on, hence its appearance here.