A series of articles about our Mediterranean Explorer cruise onboard the Island Star, 25 August - 1 September 2007. Our itinerary is Palma, Majorca > Day at Sea > Livorno, Italy for Pisa > Genoa, Italy > Marseilles, France for Cassis > Barcelona, Spain > Valencia, Spain for Sagunto and the San Jose Caves > Palma< Majorca.
Clicking or tapping the photos below will take you to the articles for each day. A link on each page will bring you back here.
Thursday 30 August 2007. The Island Star reaches Spain and Barcelona is our port of call today. On last year's cruise we opted to do a tour on mountain bikes. That's been well and truly crossed off the bucket list so we'll just hop off the ship and use our legs as nature intended today!
We wanted to see one of the famous Gaudi houses and after perusing the map, we head out confidently up Las Ramblas. If you look at Barcelona close up on Google Maps it is called "La Rambla", so why do we give it the plural form as though there were more than one? For the obvious reason actually - the street is a series of shorter streets, five in total: Rambla de Canaletes, Rambla dels Estudis, Rambla de les Flors (site of a flower market), Rambla dels Caputxins, and Rambla de Santa Mònica. We were warned to keep an eye out for pickpockets, but we saw no untoward behaviour at all.
Well... we did come across a few naked ladies in a park, but they were all stony-faced.
What a feast for the eyes Barcelona is if, like me, you love architecture and beautiful street furniture. Set the buildings against a deep blue sky and some stunning iron street lamp standards and I'm quite happy clicking away!
The sky was cloudless and I always have a polarising filter on my camera which makes the most of a blue sky. Look at the number of statues on this corner building. Even if finding the Gaudi building eludes us, I can't complain that the day has been a disaster!
But then, here it is anyway. This is Casa Batlló. There are virtually no horizontal straight lines whatsoever.
The Catalan artist and architect Antoni Gaudi (1852-1926) has works all over Barcelona, the most famous being the as yet unfinished cathedral La Sagrada Familia, the most-visited monument in all of Spain. Casa Batlló is known locally as the House of Bones as it does look a little as though some of the shaping has been modelled on various skeleton parts. It was built in 1877 and is just one of Gaudi's creations to be granted a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
It is an extremely hot morning. Gasping for a drink we make it back to the coast and find a stall selling fruit juice that is a very welcome sight on our way back towards the ship.
By the port, at the foot of Las Ramblas there is a statue of Christopher Colombus. He is portrayed as though pointing towards the New World, though actually he is pointing south south east, to somewhere in Algeria... Or perhaps, judging from the colour of his head, he is pointing accusingly at a pigeon...
Tuesday 28 August 2007. The Island Star arrives at Geoa, Italy. It sails past the industrial area of the port and right into the city waterfront where there are moorings for cruise ships and ferries.
It is an old city, spoiled a little by an elevated roadway running right across the waterfront. Some of the buildings look a little tired and run down.
A huge quayside building, the Stazione Marittima leads from the wharf to a pleasantly spectacular piazza, the front of the building telling of past glories. It was well maintained and truly impressive. Excursions were being offered to Milan and Portofino amongst other places. We had opted for doing our own thing today and hopped innocently onto a free city shuttle bus. This took us on a very roundabout journey, passing through a couple of tunnels before dropping us off in the middle of the city. I had no idea at all in which direction the port was or how far away it was!
Well, we have a good choice of directions to go in, so we just set off. You never know - we might find our way back to the ship... This cafe looked familiar. Our favourite Blackpool cafe (we live there) has this same Elvis figure sitting in its window! I saw a sign for a Tourist Information office and we were able to get a street map and sort out where we were.
We were on a hill. Going up led to the medieval part of the city and going down led back towards the waterfront and through a maze of alleyways. We headed uphill, coming to this magnificent gateway through the old city wall. Then a few steps down and we came to a small piazza to our right, almost every inch of which was covered with parked scooters, Lambrettas, Vespas - the Italians like their scooters. I don't think there was a single motorbike amongst them!
On our left side was this wonderful ruin about which I know nothing whatsoever. I could go off searching on Google, but then I know that a few of my readers like these little challenges, so if you know what this is called, how old it is, who built it, whether it was used for worship, games or sacrificing grasshoppers - please leave a comment or get in touch!
And now we have a look at the small building next door... This was labelled quite clearly and proudly as Christopher Colombus's house. He was born here in fact, although when we called he had gone out... I don't know what it is with us and Italy, we are just unlucky in this way. We went to see Vesuvius one year and that had gone out too...
We left the birthplace of Christopher Colombus and passed once more through the medieval gate, heading eventually into the dark and slightly seedy alleyways leading to the waterfront.
Some of them are well lit and filled with shops and neon light. Some are alleys in the truer sense of the word, dark with six-storey buildings on either side, concealed doorways and smoking men looking at you suspiciously. A chap walking alone in front of us was accosted by a prostitute. He waved her away irritably. She didn't take offence.
I even found a guitar shop in one of the alleys, though I thought perhaps I might have problems getting it on the flight home. We were looking for a tobacconist as Fran had some cards to post. I haven't a clue what stamps is in Italian and when we eventually found a tobbaconist we went in warily and I said a tentative "poste?" The tobacconist tutted (in Italian) and said in perfect English: "Post office - next door!" Ah...! Well, for Heaven's sake - it's yellow! Red! That's the colour post offices should be! We have some more wandering to do before we return to the ship, but once we were back we got into a conversation with a couple who said "We were walking through some alleys and ran into some Carabinerie police. They said it was too dangerous for tourists to be in the alleys and they escorted us back to the waterfront!"
Sunday 26 August 2007. It's our first full day on our cruise and we have a day at sea whilst we sail from Majorca to Livorno in Italy.
I'm not grumpy - I'm just reading my book, ok? We spent some time reading and more time exploring the ship. Then we used up a few more hours talking to two older ladies we met out on the pool deck. I'm going to call them Cissie and Ada, because they reminded me so much of Les Dawson and Roy Barraclough's wonderful creations. On a day at sea, the ship is always full to capacity. There's nowhere else to go. So we sat with these two ladies, one of whom, it transpired, lived on a well-remembered street only a mile or so from my teenage home. "Oh, I used to really fancy a girl who lived down there!" I said unthinkingly. She only lived next door, didn't she...
A ship's shop, No matter how quick you say it, they won't serve fish and chips... Anyway, I digress... Sitting on the deck in front of us were another elderly couple, taking up a huge amount of space. They had placed their sun loungers with a full three feet at least between them and a family from Northern Ireland had arrived looking for somewhere to sit. There was room for three other sun loungers but there were four of them. They politely asked the couple to move up a little so they could get the other sun lounger in. "No!" came the brief answer. I thought they were joking at first but then the chap started snarling and shouting that they had got there early and weren't going to give up either the space between them or the space to either side. It was ridiculous. The father of the family put a sun lounger down next to the old woman anyway and she started pushing it and shoving it away and the old chap announced he was going to report them to the captain for "manhandling his wife". They had done no such thing. He actually did storm off and came back with a ship's officer, though we soon put the officer right about who was being unreasonable and who had done what. Meanwhile the old woman's breast had flopped out of her costume. "Bloody Hell!" yelled Cissie at the top of her voice, "She wants bloody ironing!" The ship's officer told the couple to move up and respect other peoples' rights to some space. They weren't happy...
The ship's library and games room. Anyway we sat with Cissie and Ada every day after that. They were hilarious. They soon found that certain drinks were on special offer so Cissie's voice would boom out at passing waiters, "Heineken Light - two for one!"
It was the formal night and a chance to meet the captain. Look at that - Fran, did you not bring my high heels???
Saturday 25 August 2007. We are joining the cruise ship Island Star for their Mediterranean Explorer cruise. Eagle-eyed readers will perhaps spot that we did this exact same cruise in 2006. Ah yes - but this time we'll do different excursions!
We drove off to Manchester Airport and left the hire car (as mine was having dents removed) and Fran suggested checking in the bags before dropping the key off at the hire desk. So we parked in the hire car drop off place and checked our luggage and ourselves on the plane and we then found that the hire car desk was back outside in the car park instead of in the check-in area... Warning bells rang, but thankfully only in my head. "You realise we've just checked two suitcases onto an aeroplane and now we are walking back to the car park?" I said, picturing large uniformed people with guns wondering why we were taking this course of action. Either thankfully or worryingly the security didn't notice this...
Skip forward to Palma, Majorca. We got a coach from the airport to the ship and checked into our cabin on Deck 6 without any worries that we might decide to to anything faintly suspicious on the dockside. Then it was out onto the Pool Deck to grab something to eat and have a look at Palma.
We spent the rest of the afternoon lazing about, watching boat sail in and out of the harbour and watching planes flying down the mountain range and into the airport, adding to the compliment of passengers aboard the Island Star. Flights were delayed. Therefore so were we. We ate in the Beachcomber Restaurant which was the self-service eatery onboard. It was starting to go dark once we got back to the open deck.
The magnificent cathedral is way across the bay, but I was playing with my telephoto lens, resting the camera on top of my camera bag on the ship's rail to steady it for a quite long exposure.
The drool-worthy yacht apparently belonged to the King of Spain. We were sitting at the blunt end of the ship or "aft" as the ship's officers prefer to call it. There's a grill restaurant there and also people can take out meals from the main Beachcomber Restaurant, to sit and eat al fresco on the deck. This is our only glimpse of a port after dark. All other nights during the holiday we will be at sea before it goes dark.
Back on the main Pool Deck they were starting to think about their Welcome Aboard Party. We decided we'd have a listen to the band and join in the fun!
By the time we joined the party there was already a full compliment so we stood by the rail on the upper deck above the pool and along with a few score of others, swayed, danced, and waved from there! The band were quite good but the blokes doing the mixing didn't quite understand that voices were supposed to be heard over the instruments and the guitarist may as well have packed up and gone home. He may have been a bit uncertain of his prowess - when there was any sort of guitar solo it was played by the bass player, high up on the neck of his 5-string bass. Once this was done with and one or two people had fallen over each other, we were divided into two teams - port and starboard - and had a singing contest to see if starboard (that's us!) could remember more words to 1970s hits than the port side could remember to 1980s hits! By now we were at sea and the terrible caterwauling didn't disturb any sensitive Spanish ears... After YMCA we gave up and staggered down to our cabin... I mean... how do you top that???
A series of articles covering our first holiday on the Island Star cruise ship. We'll be calling at Palma de Mallorca > Day at Sea > Villefrance, France > Monte Carlo, Monaco > Livorno, Italy > Florence, Italy > Marseilles, France > Barcelona, Spain > Ibiza.
