After our unexpected chance to have a look around Trieste on the back of our day’s excursion just over the border in Slovenia we made our way back to Azura in the Italian port, keen to get off our feet after a lot more climbing up hills than we’d planned on doing.
We’d planned on doing none.
It was great to get back into our air-conditioned cabin, hit the shower, freshen up, get into clean gear for the evening, stick devices onto charge, make a cup of tea, and sit out on the balcony, admiring the views we had of Trieste while the sun started to set.
Naturally, it would’ve been even nicer to have something stronger than tea but P&O lag a long, long, long way behind Princess when it comes to cruising niceties like enjoying cocktails delivered to your room, preferring to stick to the old system of “Go get it yourself. What do you think we’re doing here!? Providing a service!?” that they’re now also introducing in some of their venues on board. We were feeling lazier than normal after our exertions and full day ashore so decided we’d make do and treat our taste buds to that special type of foul tea you only get from shipboard water and UHT semi-skinned milk.
The time for departure came, and the time for departure went, and still the ropes kept Azura connected to the port and the gangway remained open. From the arms-crossed stances of the bridge crew we could tell that they were waiting for people to return. Ships will wait if tours organised through them run late, if they can, and it’s touted as one of the reasons to book through the cruise line, but it does come at a premium cost, and more experienced cruisers will be able to make informed decisions on a port-by-port and tour-by-tour basis there. We spent the time enjoying the darkening sky, the interesting cloud formations, and how the light was bringing different aspects of Trieste’s skyline into view.
As it turned out, however, there was no tour group late back to the ship, but rather three passengers. Their cocky walk back and waves to people booing from the balconies suggested they were well aware they were late, they’d possibly just been drinking ashore somewhere, and they couldn’t have given less of a toss that they’d held the ship up or that they’d risked being left behind. Don’t be like these pricks. They got lucky that they were with P&O and possibly that there were no penalty fees for the ship had it not left on time; certain other lines with less-forgiving captains would have departed on schedule and left the selfish gits to make their own way to the next port, and we’re generally supportive of that approach.
So, a little later in the evening than planned, Azura finally cruised away from Trieste.
One of the reasons I stayed out on the balcony in the cooling evening air was to see how close Azura would pass to an interesting-looking vessel I’d spotted earlier in the day. It had looked like a sailing vessel but with a hull shape that seemed to suggest it was built for stealth. Naturally, that’s the sort of thing I wanted to get a better look at but with the sun having set my view was considerably dimmer than I’d hoped. The vessel turned out to be the Sailing Yacht A, formerly a Russian billionaire’s toy (with masts built in Portsmouth) but at the time, and still at the time of writing, seized by Italian authorities as part of international sanctions against cunty regimes that launch wars to hide their own failings from their populations. She looked lovely against the twilight and knowing that some Russian had lost her makes the image even more attractive now.
To finish this travelogue from Trieste, the traditional look at what we had for dinner on the cruise ship that night. It was all rather uninspiring and we ended up following this up with the purchase of a bottle of wine to take back to the room in order to read, watch TV, and pop out onto the balcony to look out for stars.
In the next post in this series we’ll be making another port call in Croatia when we explore Zadar.