Arcoarena

easyCruise

September 26, 2006 on 9:01 am | In Travel | No Comments

Well I’ve just got back from holiday. Yes thanks, it was good, very relaxing.
As you might have guessed I spent my holiday on a big orange boat, in a cabin with no windows. To be fair the cabins aren’t that small, but they are very very orange. [thumb:11:l]They’re ok for sleeping in and that’s pretty much all you’d want to do (as long as the weather holds out).

They way it works is this….. the booking is very similar to easyJet as is the business model. No drinks or food are included (not even breakfast). You turn up and the take your passport and give you an easyCruise card. This works as your room key, a way of them working out whether you’re on-board or not (you sign out when you go ashore and back in again) and an account for drinks/food (no cash is used on board)

The ship doesn’t leave port until early the next morning so effectively you’ve got an afternoon and evening in every destination. When you awake you’ll be on the way to the next port of call. The fact that you’re at sea until around 1pm each day is quite nice as it forces you to relax, so take a book and sit on the deck reading (or just sit in the Jacuzzi if you so wish). There is also a gym on-board (which is free), it was empty the one time I went but there wasn’t an amazing choice of equipment.

The one drawback of being on-board all morning is you have to eat the food. As one could have predicted the food wasn’t that good, and along with the drink prices it’s what you would expect to pay in the UK (in fact the prices are in Stirling, I suspect that this makes everything seem cheaper than it is as you keep having to swap between euros and pounds)

We set off from Monaco (not as pretty a city as you’d think but we did get to see bits of the F1 circuit) and went to Genoa (pretty in places but you end up walking down a side street past a gaggle of prostitutes if you’re not careful (not quite sure ‘gaggle’ is the correct collective noun for prostitutes but anyway….)), on to Portofino [thumb:5:l] (which is very, very pretty), via Imperia (we didn’t get off the boat as it didn’t sound very interesting and it rained that day) and finally back to Nice (which is …..errr…nice).

In general (provided it doesn’t rain) you don’t spend much time in the cabin so the lack of windows and orangeness doesn’t matter. Time on deck is quite pleasant in good weather and the drinks might be more expensive that the local shops but they aren’t extortionate. Some of the cities are quite nice. Portofino is definitely worth a visit. If the boat based element doesn’t particularly appeal you’d be better off getting a hotel in Nice and taking the train to Monaco, St Tropez etc.

Anyway, we had fun and it was nice and relaxing. I’d think about doing it again but I wouldn’t go back on that area purely because I don’t have much of a desire to go back the the ports we visited.
Pictures to follow