And as if by magic another round-up post covering the latest travel diary entries and other posts on the website you’ve almost certainly missed recently makes an appearance! But wait! There’s more! There are some thoughts about social media again (“Oh God, Mark! Why!? Nobody wants to hear you moan that people aren’t doing things the way you think they should and aren’t falling into the specific categories you’d like!” “Shut up, you! My site, my rules!”) and, of course, what’s been catching my eye recently online.
Nicaragua Cruise
Cruise diary entries from our Star Princess cruise covering the country of Nicaragua are now on the site.
We absolutely loved our day in Nicaragua, helped no doubt by picking a superb excursion to take a hike around the cloud forest atop Mombacho Volcano overlooking Lake Nicaragua. Just writing that down makes it sound awesome and it really was. I mean, my wife almost died and that’s the sort of thing that makes a trip more memorable than most, but even had she not had a brush with death at the time or been mentioned in an extremely hyperbolic manner in this paragraph this would still have rated as one of the top trips we’ve taken when we’ve gone on cruise excursions around the world. I’m sure there are people who just get off the ship in a port and head to a Starbucks who’ve had similar awe-inspiring emotional responses but you can’t rule out that just being a reaction to caffeine.
From hiking around a volcano’s crater we headed back down to Earth in a very literal sense because having lunch in Granada followed by departing Nicaragua at San Juan del Sur is just not something that’s possible to do 1300+ metres above sea level. This is where Scotty would interrupt and scream “Ye cannae change the laws of altitude!” if there were any such laws or he was coked to the eyeballs. When I was researching the history of Granada for that post I fell into the Wikipedia rabbit hole which is why what should be lunch in a restaurant includes references to slavery proponents, mercenaries, 18th century legal acts, business magnates, and British naval commanders. It’s always nice to know that somewhere out there on the wide, wide web of the information superhighway there’s not a single person who will care for that effort.
New Website Content
There have been a couple of other posts too, both from different portfolio categories as well. I’m spoiling you!
Another Photo Rework post has gone up, this being a reprocessing of the Els Pilons Sculpture in Salou, Spain. This was from a group holiday we took with my dad, my brother, and my brother’s family not too long after my mum had died. I used a technique for sharpening without creating halos I learnt from the excellent PiXimperfect YouTube channel which, if you’re someone who uses Lightroom or Photoshop, I cannot recommend highly enough.
I’ve also finished off a non-cruise-related (what!?) travel portfolio with coverage of our day visiting Baltimore, Maryland during the second of our trips together to the United States many, many moons ago. I was reminded that I hadn’t posted all the photos and details of that trip because of a recent social media tantrum relating to the city of Baltimore by the world’s least favourite Donald. There’s an interesting comment on that post from a friend of ours.
Celebrity Apex Preview Cruise
Celebrity Cruises announced a short preview cruise aboard their newest ship, Apex, for early next year and I saw a lot of buzz about it on Twitter and Facebook with some people we know already booking a spot.
But it’s not for us. No new ports and with a cruise line we’d had a mixed experience with this year could have been offset with a good price but the cost for a balcony rocks in at over £250 per person per night. That’s approaching luxury cruising range and Celebrity aren’t that. Yes, there are gratuities and parking included and also onboard spend but the basic drinks package that’s included would need to be supplemented to accommodate any sensible drinking and it’s just simply too much money to spend on the tiny fraction of annual holiday allowance we’ve got left for next year when all’s said and done.
What Is A Cruise Blogger?
Just a question that popped into my head recently after becoming bored with yet another slew of photos from a ship visit by prominent cruise bloggers. Are they really cruise bloggers, I thought, or are they cruise ship bloggers?
I took a look at the sites and social posts of a lot of people who regularly post about cruising and it was surprising just how little of the content covered the ports, the excursions, the meetings with locals, the experiencing of different cultures. I like to cover the ships too when I’m posting content from cruises but that’s as part of the whole package of the cruise. I looked at some of these cruise bloggers and tried to picture them as travel bloggers in general; I can imagine some of them doing a seaside resort tour of the south coast of England and only posting updates from the hotels.
I think with some of them there’s definitely been a shift away from covering what I think they used to love in a more broad sense to now focussing on the ships because they’re getting more ship visits. I’m sure they still love it but what percentage of actual cruisers (not ship fanatics) choose a ship without an itinerary? If you’re not covering the cruise as a whole then are you a cruise blogger? If you’re just rewriting press releases then are you a cruise blogger? If you’re taking part in a coordinated campaign to ask people what their favourite cruise destination is on Twitter but the last time you even gave more than a paragraph’s worth of commentary to one of the ports of call you visited was six ships ago then are you a cruise blogger?
Cruising isn’t just the ship. Cruise blogging shouldn’t just be about the ship. I want to feel I’m there, experiencing the trip in some capacity and there is a core of bloggers who do that very well (or, at least, to my liking) but there are so many who don’t. Being informed that a ship has a glass door in the shower is not the same as being interested in that fact.
So, yeah, just me getting bored and musing to myself. That is, after all, what a blog is for.
I’ve generally taken a step back from interacting with some of those sorts of people because they’re not posting things I find interesting and I’d hate to be the sort of person who encourages dullness. In others. In myself, well that’s a different matter and the sky’s the limit. We all have different tastes and this is not a personal attack on anyone in particular, and I’m sure they doubtless feel the same way about what I write, or would if they ever read it. And it’s not as if any of them have noticed or even very often initiated engagement unless I was mentioning something very specific to something they were doing too (or seemingly wanted to do (and as a freebie if I was a deeply cynical soul)) so probably a net gain for everyone in that respect.
New Travel Discoveries
So, what’s caught my eye online since I last posted one of these updates mostly used to ensnare WordPress readers? Let’s take a look and see…
We’ve seen the Aurora Borealis several times now but we’ve not even been close to spotting its southern hemisphere neighbour. Shelly did, though, and from a plane too. In Aurora Australis From A Plane you can take a look at the video she captured from over 100 photos, the technique she used, and the surprising invite from the pilots at the end. Awesome stuff.
In 16 Things To Do on Your First Trip to Vietnam Kieren documents some activities he’s gotten up to while backpacking solo through probably our favourite country in southeast Asia. From his list the only one we can check off is visiting the Cu Chi Tunnels but that’s to be expected as he’s young and adventurous and we’re, well, not those things. The abandoned water park is something I’d love to see, though.
A tweet from Azamara of all people caught my attention this week – it’s this one: https://twitter.com/AzamaraJourney/status/1158823474665857025 – as it showed one of their ships docked on the Neva in St Petersburg as part of a 3-day visit to the Russian city. We loved our Baltic cruise that included a stop there and have said on more than a few occasions we’d need to go back and visit some of the bits we hadn’t seen the first time; it’s a city that deserves multiple visits. Docking in the heart of the city and with an extra day to explore has certainly raised Azamara in our reckoning for when we eventually do schedule that part of Europe for a return cruise.
Interesting thoughts on the ‘What is a cruise blogger’ section. Think it’s easy for us to get caught up with the hype of a press release or visits, but also think they may not always be the best things for our followers.
We get loads of press releases and rarely publish them anymore, we’re selective and will publish IF we think they are of interest to our followers or they float our boat. We publish far less of them now than we did a year ago as looking at stats they generated hardly any traffic other than the initial flurry when shared. Think there are enough sites already out there doing that and I think people probably appreciate our own stuff more anyhow.
Trust me, you’re firmly in the core of cruise bloggers I really enjoy reading and watching; a good mix of ships and experiences in the destinations which is what I like to see. Certainly couldn’t claim we didn’t feel like we were there with you in part as you and Luke slur your way around Europe. As I said, it’s not singling anyone out in particular, just a general thing with several people whom I used to follow along and read but do a lot less now as they’ve become a bit samey, and with the CLIA coordination that keeps kicking in, not even just samey with their own content, samey with a load of other people at the same time.
Hahaha, thank you! We’re always trying to create stuff that’s us, so if anyone met us they’d know what to expect (drunks!). We’re always conscious about being too corporate. Travel bloggers we’ve followed have gone too corporate at which point you tend to switch off from them (not that they care as by then they are too big to care or notice)
I’ve come across several “cruise blogs” that spoke mainly about the ships and it’s boring indeed. Your post, on the contrary, inspires me to try cruise experience. That’s a shame but I’ve never been on a cruise in my 40s.