And so we reach the final part of this 2023 Norwegian Fjords cruise on Britannia series. Typically on this site I’d put up separate posts for the departure from the last port of call and a sea day that followed but the North Sea on an overcast day didn’t particularly warrant a write-up all on its own, and the sail away from Haugesund wasn’t a particularly long one either.
Haugesund is very much more an industrial port than one for cargo, fishing, or tourism, and we could see lots of buildings and dockside equipment to facilitate the manufacture and maintenance of ships large and small as Britannia pushed away from the town.
An obvious item that caught our eyes in Haugesund as Britannia departed was the Penguins FPSO. Quite what the name meant, we had no idea, and just looking at the huge structure didn’t provide any further clues.
“FPSO. First Prussian Stationery Office?”
“That seems over-the-top for lever-arch binders and coloured card supplies even for the Prussians, and I’m not sure there are any Prussians any more.”
“There was a Franco-Prussian war in the nineteenth century. This might be the place where the captured troops were interred to be never heard from again.”
“The Franco-Prussian Soldier Oubliette, you mean? It’s plausible when put alongside a stationery office, but less so on its own, and since when did you become an expert – if that is the word – on nineteenth century European conflicts?”
Thanks to the internet we’ve since discovered that FPSO is a Floating Production, Storage, and Offloading unit, and Penguins is a field in the North Sea that Shell UK will extract non-renewable resources from in order to please its shareholders. Okay, all of us who aren’t sociopathic aren’t pleased by that, but from an engineering perspective it’s an impressive piece of manufacturing, and when you further consider that it was built in China and shipped to Haugesund on the back of a vessel designed to carry things like this weighing well over 30000 tons, that vessel then semi-sinking itself to slide out from under it, and remember that the F stands for “Floating” once more, it’s quite mind-boggling.
You didn’t visit this page to look at extraordinary lumps of red metal bedecked by cranes, though, so on with the views from our balcony on Britannia as our cruise ship sailed away from Norway.
Haugesund features on lots of cruise itineraries that will market themselves as “Norwegian fjords” cruises but it’s not located along or at the end of a fjord itself so the majestic sight of sheer rock faces gliding past and nearby snow-capped mountains is not one you will experience on a ship while approaching or departing Haugesund. But, once you’re just away from the port area there are lots of low-lying islands with aesthetically-pleasing rocky coasts and an abundance of trees and grass on some, and these are lovely to see. If you’ve spent the day ashore in town, as we had, then the rocky islets make a great natural contrast to being surrounded by houses and other types of buildings for the most part.
As our ship lost the sheltered protection of some of the larger islands nearer Haugesund, so those smaller land masses we now started to pass lost the short grass, bushes, and trees. The wind, especially with the ship now able to increase speed, became more biting and it wasn’t too long before we headed in from the balcony and into the warmth of our room.
On this penultimate evening aboard P&O Cruises Britannia we’d made a reservation at one of her speciality dining venues, Epicurean. We’d had overall good experiences at this particular venue on other ships in the P&O fleet (no, not you Iona) and with this being our first cruise on Britannia it made sense to compare.
The restaurant itself was very nice and there were no complaints from us about the service or location or menu, but my notes from the day simply state “good, but not great” and that’s been a growing feeling with successive Epicurean visits on different ships. There was a sense that the food was good enough to warrant the speciality tag, but not as clearly so as it had been when we’d first tried this dining location on a P&O ship. That may be partly us, becoming older and more jaded, but looking at the menu and photos now there’s not enough difference and innovation from the main dining options to me. I do believe these speciality dining rooms on ships should maintain a core identity but they also need to evolve a little more faster.
I’m being picky to some extent, and if you’ve never cruised with P&O before or you’ve never had an Epicurean meal on a P&O ship then it’s definitely worth doing as we all have different expectations and tastes, but we’re more likely as time goes on to become more selective in choosing to pay extra for these places if they can’t entice us in with something new.
So now we reach the final day on board Britannia and as I’ve already mentioned, it was grey, cool, and not particularly inviting outside – although the pools still attracted some hardy swimmers – and there wasn’t a whole lot to interest us inside either, although there’s nothing unusual in that. We like to relax in quiet places, do quizzes, read books, and have a few drinks, and the delights of free foot assessments, seminars on the benefits of sleeping with pink quartz under your pillow, and bingo (for which the jackpot still hasn’t been won!) don’t excite us.
A few photos from the top deck during our post-breakfast wander, and the view from our balcony a little later in the day after we’d given our room steward enough time to clean our cabin.
To finish this final sea day, some cocktails – we didn’t drink many because we weren’t on the drinks package (never worth it for us with P&O) – and the last evening’s meal in the main dining room.
We ended up chatting for some of the evening with a couple consisting of a Danish husband and German wife which I only mention as it’s fairly unusual to have non-Brits cruising on a P&O ship. A lot of these more regional cruise lines mostly appeal to and are patronised by their home nations’ travellers so P&O is almost exclusively British, AIDA is German, and Costa is Italian, but there’s nothing to stop anyone else from booking a cruise if they’re prepared to jump through a few hoops to do so. We may even try something like that ourselves one day.
And that brings this cruise on Britannia to a close.
We weren’t sure we’d like Britannia ahead of this holiday for a number of reasons. Being a Royal-class derivative we knew she’d have small balconies, the lack of an affordable drinks package for cocktail drinkers is not in P&O’s favour, and cruising on ships with fellow Brits is never our first choice for getting away from it all. We also didn’t know where she’d lie on the scale that has the older, smaller, better ships (for us) at one end and the larger, more modern, awful ships (for us) at the other. As it was, closer to the better ships by far. We liked Britannia and we’d be happy to cruise on her again with the right itinerary and pricing.
We were very happy with this itinerary too, giving us a chance to head back to some ports we’d not seen for a decade on what had been at the time the cruise that really instilled the cruising bug into us, and we got to new places too; not as many as planned, but that’s the weather for you, and if you’re going to have a cruise affected by the weather then you could do a lot worse than have it happen in the stunning surroundings of the Norwegian fjords.