With our visit to Dubrovnik concluded it just remained for us to board Azura one last time, experience one last sail away, and get ready for one last sea day before this fabulous week cruising in the Adriatic for the first time would come to an end.
We’d not left it until the very last shuttle bus to return back to the cruise port on account of us not being insane but that didn’t stop it being a very packed bus arriving back alongside the ship at around the same time that a number of tour buses were also returning to drop off more passengers. Boarding was therefore not swift – not bad, but a bit more shuffling than you’d like – and the likelihood of getting into a lift to rise the five floors to our room in any short time was poor. We therefore did what we like to do a lot in this sort of situation: we walked a few floors, then stopped for a drink to break up the climb. Actually, if the gangway had been towards the centre of the ship instead then we’d have walked forward and used the forward bank of elevators to get to nearer our room but that wasn’t the case this time around so a drink in Brodie’s was the answer, followed by another one to then take up to our room.
The sail away from Dubrovnik wasn’t the most impressive by a long shot but we got to see a decent view of the Franjo Tuđman Bridge, named after Croatia’s first president, and of the USNS Carson City, an aluminium, catamaran-design, fast expeditionary vessel. We like bridges and we like ships so this was pleasant even if neither were fabulous examples of design in their respective fields.
It was hard not to be reminded of leaving Montenegro many years before when looking at steep and rocky hills dotted with pale buildings with orange roofs along the Croatian coastline out of Dubrovnik, although the former was far prettier and we had far better weather for it. A light but solid cover of cloud had come in just as the day started to cool down.
The waterway approach to Dubrovnik clearly wasn’t particularly dangerous or tricky for ships to navigate as our pilot wasn’t aboard Azura for very long at all before re-boarding his boat and zooming off back to land.
We didn’t have a lot of Croatian coastline to enjoy before the cruise ship made the turn to the south that left us with a more simple view of nothing but the Adriatic Sea but we spent all that time out on our balcony because it’s one of the reasons we book a balcony cabin on cruise ships for.
After we’d got ourselves showered and dressed for the evening but before we headed out for some food and drink and entertainment we were treated to a sunset, the colours of which reminded us a little of cruising past Argentina many years before, but only a little bit. Nothing will ever truly compare to that particular experience.
To finish, dinner then for this penultimate night aboard Azura, and because P&O Cruises are still a bit old-fashioned in this respect this meant reluctantly donning the tuxedo and formal dress for the pair of us so as to not be severely limited in venues we’d be graciously allowed to attend. We don’t mind the odd formal night and we quite enjoy them when everyone is free to dress as much or as little as they like, but throwing in restrictions is a dated concept in cruising that’s trying to appeal to a younger demographic and it needs to be thrown overboard.
Anyway, it was a celebration night meal, and it was at least nice to see some effort made from the cruise line to reward those who’d made the somewhat enforced effort to dress for the occasion.
There will be one more post to come in this Adriatic cruise travelogue series and that will cover the final day at sea on the way back to Malta and some final thoughts about the week-long cruise as a whole, because that’s the traditional way to wrap these travel writings up around here.