Eight Hours in Villefranche - Cruise Port Profile

The iconic image of Nice is the Promenade des Anglais - the wide sweeping bay, backed by palm trees and imposing hotels, but cruise ships actually dock away to the east of the town. The smallest ships (under 190 metres) may dock in the old port Lympia where there is a tiny cruise terminal, within walking distance of the old town and seafront. However most ships anchor in the next bay, Villefranche-sur-Mer, where passengers come ashore by tender at Porte de la Sante. Most cruise excursions from here will see you onto a bus and out of town to Monaco, Cannes, or Grasse but, because there are so many things to see and do in the immediate area, I think that Nice is a perfect port for an independently planned day ashore. The largest ships expected in 2020 were ‘Anthem of the Seas’ and ‘Celebrity Apex’, so although there are never more than two ships in port it can get quite busy and it is worth doing a bit of planning before you arrive to get ahead of the crowd.

Pointe a Pitre, Guadeloupe - Cruise Port Profile

Although we had a plan for each port,  it wasn’t as detailed as we would normally expect to have! So on this particular morning our plan was simple… leave ship, get taxi to the fictional Honoré, in reality a pretty village called Deshaies on the north coast of Basse-Terre, a forty kilometre, one hour drive to the north coast of the island. Sorted!

Eight Hours Ashore in Kerala…

Back at the start of the year - when the world looked very, very different and we had no idea how lucky we were - we took cruise on a Dubai - Singapore route onboard Celebrity Constellation. As we were travelling to some completely unfamiliar countries and ports we decided to change our usual DIY approach to going ashore for a couple of ports partly also because we had some very short days in port. A recommendation in talkExplore Facebook group led us to take a look at the excursions from the Viator Company.

Six Lessons Learnt on my Worst Ever Shore Excursion...

I wanted to share my thoughts on our ‘worst ever’ port excursion as we learnt some important lessons from it, both about the questions you should ask when booking a shore excursion and also about what we took ashore with us that day. We were visiting Laem Chabang in Thailand on a Princess Cruise, which is what we call a ‘FOR’ port - a large industrial port ‘FOR’ Bangkok which is actually 125km away…

Venice - birthplace of portExplore...

On Valentines day I was thinking about the title of ‘Most Romantic City in the World’ in relation to cruise destinations and for me the most romantic destination for cruisers it just HAS to be Venice! I know the title is meant for Paris, but much as I like Le Havre it doesn’t seem a very Romantic cruise destination!! So I’m voting for Venice (for as long as they’ll have us!) and it was while I was looking for some pictures from my various visits that I thought that I should tell you the story of how PortExplore was born in Venice…

Six things that surprised me aboard MSC Virtuosa

Cruise is Back in the UK!

May 29

Six things that surprised me aboard MSC Virtuosa

MSC Cruises, UK Cruising, Wellness on board, New to Cruise, Cruise Basics, Covid 19

We were welcomed aboard by this Union Flag blowing in the breeze!

I’ve just come back from the first UK Cruise to sail in 15 months!

I sailed from Southampton aboard MSC Virtuosa on a short 4 night itinerary and had a fantastic time!

I knew that things would be different but there were six things that particularly surprised me that I wanted to share with you…