We could have spent the night in Bruges, or Ghent, or even Brussels if we’d felt like it (all at our own cost, of course), as Valiant Lady stayed overnight docked at Belgium on this Mermaiden cruise. However, those were pretty much the only options because the port of Zeebrugge itself offered nothing in the way of interest to keep the passengers ashore and spending money. Marking ports as “overnight stops” can look appealing when you first read it in the itinerary but not if they’re industrial ports nowhere close to nightlife, and to date our only overnighters have been in Amsterdam – and we took advantage of that!, – here at Zeebrugge – kilometres of containers and cranes, – and at Lima (or Callao, to be more precise), where we were told that the couple of kilometres outside the port were a high-stabbing and high-shooting-risk area, nobody could leave or return without using one of the ship’s shuttles, and those wouldn’t be running overnight. A mixed bag of experiences on offer there, and with us having visited Belgium a few times now, and with Zeebrugge being our most-visited port after Southampton (of course), we suppressed any desire to wander the industrial zone ashore and spent the night on the ship. But you know all this already. You read this in the previous post: Valiant Lady Cruise: Bruges Brewery Tour.
Our final day on Valiant Lady, therefore, was one that saw us open up the curtains to a view of a somewhat overcast, dreary-looking port, and because we’d stayed up perhaps a smidge later than we might normally do, we woke up late enough to skip breakfast and get to the point where the cruise ship was getting ready to leave Continental Europe. Doesn’t that make it sound glamorous? Doesn’t that completely not fit the photos below?
Departing from Zeebrugge was mostly only interesting in respect of the view afforded from our balcony of the local dock workers removing the gangway from the ship. A crane operator was lifting and swinging the metal walkway around while a man and woman were trying to line up the unwieldy mass onto the back of a truck’s flatbed. It took forever. It was almost comical. This group made The Chuckle Brothers or Laurel and Hardy look like professionals. The amusement was only tempered by the occasional ducking under of the swinging frame by the female worker to the rear which caused my inner Health and Safety Demon to start screaming maniacally. I kept expecting to see her head get hit, to hear the sound of steel on skull, and to see a scarlet river spread out across the concrete.
Anyway, she survived, and Valiant Lady headed slowly out to sea, observed by and waved off by nobody that I could see.
Razzle Dazzle Brunch
We missed breakfast, as I’ve mentioned, but food is almost always available on cruise ships, and there were plenty of options available for brunch. We checked our app and saw that it would be possible to get into Razzle Dazzle, so booked up. When we’d sailed on Scarlet Lady the year earlier, Razzle Dazzle was one of the dining venues we didn’t get around to trying, but we had visited this spot on our first night aboard for dinner for this cruise – you can read that here if you’ve not done so: Valiant Lady Mermaiden – and figured we’d give it another try since the experience had been… just okay. That’s down to my wife’s very low tolerance for chefs thinking that extreme heat and inducing sweat and numbing the sensations of the lips is the exact same thing as seasoning things and making them taste nice.
Our Razzle Dazzle brunch was pretty similar. I tolerated without massively enjoying what I had, and my wife spent a while interrogating our server for any food option without chili sauce or peppers in it, was assured that one choice would be fine, and cursed constantly when this turned out not to be the case. We both tried the Unicorn Toast, which was incredibly sweet and incredibly messy to eat. I don’t know that I’d try that again, and I don’t know that I would be able to persuade my wife to visit Razzle Dazzle again; we gave it a fair go, but it’s just not to our taste.
Therein lies a small problem with Virgin Voyages as a whole, and their approach to dining: across two cruises now we’ve tried most of the restaurants, and have now eliminated two from likely trying again (the other being the Test Kitchen); Razzle Dazzle isn’t for us, and the Test Kitchen offers nothing new once you’ve done it one time. The lack of a venue with a more traditional Main Dining Room-style of daily, changing dishes limits the long-term appeal of Virgin to us. We don’t want to be stuck in the buffet (I know it’s not called that, but…) or alternating between the two places we kinda like with their static menus, and certainly not on a cruise of more than about three or four nights.
Always remember, though: for every person who says “I have some concerns about this thing” there will always be one who will counter with a “Well, I thought everything was amazing!” Your experience is yours, and yours alone.
Valiant Lady Cruise Ship Photographs
Guess what this next section is going to feature! Go on! Guess!
Brunch over with, we headed out onto The Dock, Valiant Lady’s lower aft seating area, because we wanted to give our room steward a chance to clean our suite in peace. The Dock is a pleasant spot if the sky isn’t grey and the wind isn’t occasionally gusting across your arms and face. Actually, it’s quite pleasant at any time. We liked this location, although it wasn’t warm enough to stay there long, admiring the ship’s wake and the various plant arrangements.
Now, on the basis that I’m not going to promote this post on social media, as a calculated reward for being one of the microscopically small number of people reading this far or skimming past the pretty pictures until this paragraph, I’m going to let you in on a little secret. We don’t appear in photos or videos by choice. It’s because we’re hideously ugly and we care about you, or it’s because we know what we look like and don’t need to see ourselves in every shot, or it’s because we’re both very introverted. I can never remember which. Maybe it’s a bit of all three. Anyway, the problem with cruising with other people is that you just can’t help getting caught on camera sometimes despite your best efforts to avoid it. Look at the first photo from The Dock area above; the one looking up to the netting on the top of the ship. There’s somebody on the netting, but ignore them. Look two balconies down and you can make out an arm. That’s one limb of one half of David and Graham (Cruise Show UK), and if you take a look at their Sweet Aft Suite Review you can see that not only did we catch a glimpse of them, but they caught some footage of us too. Don’t tell anyone.
We spent a bit of time inside, playing in the games arcade before figuring it was safe to return to our room. From there we grabbed our books (okay, Kindle in my wife’s case; she’s embraced modernity while I’m still old school when it comes to reading) and found a quiet spot with relatively comfortable seats to just relax and read for a bit. That lasted as long as it took me to realise that outside sight of Belgium we’d encountered what can only be described as “a bit of blue sky.” That’s photographing weather.
My wife’s accompanied me on more cruise ship photography walkabouts than I care to remember, and with Valiant Lady being as near to identical to Scarlet Lady as makes no difference she decided to stay put while I headed off with camera in hand.
The melted sculptures by Dan Lam were a welcome improvement over the artwork that had been on Scarlet Lady; those I’d found rather plain and unexciting, unbefitting a ship with Virgin’s branding behind it. The touch of colour in these pieces of artwork was the bright and fun sort of the thing the ship needed. It’s a shame that they spelt the artist’s name wrong, though.
As I approached Richard’s Rooftop – the private area at the front and top of the ship for VIP and Rock Star Suite owners only – I spotted a guy peering over the glass partitions with a look that said “So that’s where the other half relax, eh?”
“Do you want to take a look inside?” I asked him, because I’m friendly like that.
“Can I actually get in there?” he asked.
“I can,” I replied, waving my Rock Star bracelet thingy at him.
And that’s how I let one of the riff-raff into the VIP area. And how I let his wife in when she suddenly spotted him having a nose around the spot too. I gave the pair of them a bit of a tour, reported that I wasn’t the ship’s official photographer, explained about the suite perks, and showed them photos of our suite. They said they were planning on booking another cruise with Virgin and that they’d choose a suite next time. And maybe they will.
Inside the ship, on the hunt for my wife who’d moved from where I’d left her, I could see indications of preparations for the final night aboard Valiant Lady’s festivities.
Making A Scene
Access to the VIP rooftop area isn’t the only perk that comes with choosing to cruise with Virgin Voyages as a Rock Star. Very close to what Virgin refer to as their swimming pool is a private room – not large, but with plenty of low, soft seating and some floor-to-ceiling windows offering views out to sea – called The Scene. The Scene is reserved for VIPs and Rock Stars and it’s a place where champagne can be drunk and you can chat with your agent about any issues you have, or just to talk.
“Oh, it’ll be just like the Elite Lounge on a Princess ship,” we thought.
It’s nothing like the Elite Lounge on a Princess ship.
You get complimentary champagne. Complimentary Moët & Chandon, as it turns out. And as much of it as you can manage or that they have. We might have only stayed for a few glasses and made our excuses except it turned out that we were sitting next to David and Graham (I mentioned them earlier) and we got to having a natter about cruises, ships we’ve been on, ships we’ve mutually disliked (Iona, I’m talking about you), gossiping about bloggers (no names mentioned), etc. All the usual stuff. And every time our glasses got nearly empty there would magically appear a member of staff with a bottle in hand to top us up. And top us up. And top us up.
“Oh, Marie, I’ve drank so very much champagne,” said David, grabbing hold of my wife’s arm for support as we left. Yeah. I think we each polished off a couple of bottles there.
Duel Reality
We had a booking to see the Duel Reality show immediately after our champagne session and were planning to meet a couple of friends there, but it turned out that David and Graham were also booked for that so the six of us ended up watching it together, with four of us ever-so-slightly the worse for wear.
Duel Reality is an acrobatic take on the West Side Story-style reimagining of Romeo and Juliet. Two gangs dancing and competing in leaping, climbing, spinning, and bouncing activities while squaring up and acting tough. It was fabulous and I can safely say that it was the best show we’ve seen on a cruise ship but, to be fair, you could count the number of shows we’ve seen on cruise ships on one hand with a couple of fingers lost at sea in a propeller accident.
Dinner And Dancing
Discovering that our dinner booking at the ship’s Italian restaurant, Extra Virgin, was just 15 minutes different from our other friends, Paul and Carole, we headed to the venue together and asked if we could shift from two bookings for two to a single booking for four. No problem. We ordered drinks from the bar then enjoyed the best meal of our short cruise aboard Valiant Lady, although it’s hard to disappoint us with Italian-style offerings.
Entertainment during the meal came in the form of two women – who’d possibly also been indulging in some alcoholic beverages during the day – sitting next to us, one of whom, I swear despite all that earlier champagne I’d knocked back, was flirting with me. I’d knocked her phone when being seated because our tables were very close to one another; she’d mentioned my backside; I’d commented that everything gets bigger and in the way with age; she’d made some double-entendre remarks during the meal; when she went to leave I theatrically moved glasses away from the table’s edge so she wouldn’t knock them as well; she leaned down and offered to knock them off with her breasts; I declined the nice offer; she then remarked “Why are all the good ones gay?”
“There’s a first time for everything,” I told my wife.
“Indeed,” she replied. “Nobody’s ever called you a good one before.”
Post-dinner events on the ship were happening but it perhaps wasn’t as lively as it could have been given that this was the final evening and a fair number of people would be getting off the ship early in the morning and in many cases driving home. That was true of most of the people we were with so we chatted and had a few drinks but didn’t go crazy.
Once everyone else had called it a night we took advantage of the fact that we merely had to walk off the ship home and popped along to The Manor Nightclub for a nightcap, a bit of people watching, and a bit of wondering just what the hell was that music they were playing and asking why did it have to be so loud. We’re at that age where it’s our duty to behave like this. Don’t judge.
Valiant Lady Cruise Conclusion
That brings write-ups of our time aboard Valiant Lady on her Mermaiden cruise out of Portsmouth to an end. We clanked off the ship in the morning with all the bottles from our mini-bar and our excursion in Bruges.
We really like what Virgin Voyages have done in the cruising world, bringing some welcome differences to cruising that aren’t so different they’ll put regular cruisers off, but fresh enough to inject some new love into this form of travelling for old hands.
We knew we’d like Valiant Lady because we liked Scarlet Lady, but, truth be told, we were hoping for more individuality in the ships. We’ve sailed on identical class ships in the P&O fleet and in the Princess fleet, and they all have their personalities; layouts a little different, venues moved around or different, decor changed subtly or more noticeably. Valiant and Scarlet felt as close to carbon copies as it’s possible to be, with just the barest changes in artwork and nothing else. More importantly, with all the restaurants being the same and the menus not changing, there’s nothing to truly differentiate the ships at all. We are destination-first cruisers, but we know a lot of people who like to check off ships in a fleet. I question the long-term enjoyment of the ships themselves if they aren’t going to try to attract those people with something unique to the vessels. I know, though, that in the short-to-medium term it will be Virgin’s crew who keep that loyalty going because the crew, whether serving or entertaining or joining us on our excursion, have been among the very best we’ve sailed with.
If Virgin do more short cruises out of Portsmouth then we’d cruise with them again. As things stand, though, given the pricing of their cruises and the lack of variety aboard, it’s going to take a spectacular itinerary to get us back on one of their ships. We hope that happens, because we really enjoyed our time cruising with them, and Virgin have got some cracking vessels and people here. And, please put in a proper pool.