Well, we’re back from our first ever cruise with Marella Cruises and a short break to the city of Chester and since it will be a while yet before I can get around to writing up the full details of those trips owing to not having completed the previous cruise’s posts yet (first world problem) I can still give a quick rundown of our opinion of this short break.
Marella Discovery Journey To Jordan
This was a repositioning cruise on the back of a short wet dock refresh for the ship Marella Discovery, formerly a Royal Caribbean ship, Splendour of the Seas. We’d never cruised with Marella or RC before so the ship and experiences aboard would all be new but, of course, there are plenty of reviews and guides online so we had a rough idea what to expect.
As you can probably tell from looking at the cruise sections on this site we’re big fans of Princess so we knew that we’d have to set expectations lower than that in terms of quality of food, service, just in general, etc. We also knew we’d have to cope with a full contingent of Brits aboard and a British experience when we tend to prefer the feel that comes from a more international mix on a ship. Across the board, though, I’m happy to say that Marella blew all those expectations out of the water; it was a far, far better experience than we’d anticipated.
It wasn’t perfect by any means, but what cruise or trip ever is? Moans would be the bathroom (impossible to shower without flooding the room, and the positioning of the loo roll holder was bizarre), the general lack of enough seating in the entertainment lounges during the day, steaks in the speciality dining room not cooked as requested, inconsistent delivery of daily programmes, water, and chocolates, and – the main one – a total lack of pre-cruise information and slow communication.
Counter to that are the positives: the staff, the service, good quality (if not range) of food, good range of drinks, fantastic included drinks package and extremely good upgrade option (which we took, naturally), entertainment, decent speciality venues, gratuities, flights and transfers included, and taxing quizzes.
This was a chance for us to have a cruise with very little to do – all but one day at sea – and the opportunity for that amount of relaxation was perfect. We slept well, ate well, drank well, read loads, saw some incredible sights, and had the pleasure of meeting up with Paul and Carole with whom we probably ended up spending a lot more time than either set of couples might have guessed beforehand. Drinking was involved.
Suez Canal and Petra
The reason for choosing Marella Cruises for this trip was to check off a couple of experiences for us, those being to see the Suez Canal and to visit Petra.
The northern portion of the canal saw us travelling through dense fog which was a disappointment but an interesting experience: occasional fog horns sounding from the ship but otherwise almost deafeningly silent with visibility of a few metres into a featureless white cloud. The fog disappeared by about halfway through and it was strange to see the difference in the two sides of the canal. To the east the land was barren and mostly flat; to the west there was greenery and towns or walls.
At the port of Aqaba in Jordan a couple of days later we took an excursion to visit Petra, about two hours travel distance away. Most excursion groups from the cruise ship headed into the main site at Petra where the key point of interest was The Treasury (that’s the famous part seen in many movies) but while we had some time there we then continued through the site then started the ascent to The Monastery. This was located another 200 metres up into the hills, accessed by 800 steps, and took around an hour as the going was tough and required a lot of stops for those of us in the less-fit-than-ideal bracket (some people didn’t make it but we persevered and weren’t quite the last to arrive). The steps were unevenly spaced and of differing heights, often little more than sloped areas in the rock with the barest of footholds, and covered with sand that caused several people to go crashing to the ground both up and down (including my wife). On top of that there were donkeys thundering past that had to be avoided as they had little tendency to stop. We had worried that our slow trek might mean we’d need to turn back before the top but the excursion actually allowed plenty of time to recover and cool down, buy some more water, and take it slow descending too.
The Monastery itself was as impressive as The Treasury, as you can see below.
So, a fantastic cruise aboard Marella Discovery and some bucket list items of the Suez Canal and seeing the very impressive Petra checked off too. As already mentioned, the full accounts and the many, many photos of the experience will appear in due course in the travel portfolio section of this site.
Chester
With a late evening arrival back in Manchester (actually 45 minutes ahead of schedule and after we’d been allocated premium class seats on the flight!) I didn’t fancy the long drive back to Portsmouth so we’d booked a couple of nights in Chester for something to do to finish off the holiday.
A review of our time in Chester will appear on the site in due course too but it’s fair to say that the time there was a huge contrast to the cruise before it. It was 31 degrees when we left Aqaba and it was 2 degrees when we arrived at our hotel about seven hours later. Chester itself falls firmly in that It’s Okay category of cities. We liked the cathedral (pictured above) and we certainly couldn’t find fault with its density of pubs but everything else was either average or good but not as good as some other example we’d seen elsewhere.
The persistent rain during our full day in the city didn’t help but we came away thinking Chester’s not that high on the list of places to return to even if it were sunny.
Hopefully, once the clamour to catch up with working for a living eases off I can get back to completing the travel updates from our September cruise before making a start on documenting this trip. It may be some time coming, though.