A series of articles about our holiday onboard the Sun Cruises ship, Carousel, 15-22 March 2005. We are cruising the Canary Islands and will visit Tenerife, Lanzarote, Madeira, La Palma and Gran Canaria. We also stopped off for a day in Morocco but stayed on the ship all day.
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.
Monday 21 March 2005. We dock into Gran Canaria for our last day of cruising and take a coach excursion out for the morning.
Mogan is a gorgeous colourful village set around a harbour. Buildings are whitewashed but with touches of colour, there is lots of purple bougainvillea draped over alleyways and buildings and plenty of palm trees.
In the harbour are colourful boats and tropical fish of various colours whilst every now and then you catch sight of a razor-toothed barracuda. It was hot and the signs for fresh strawberries with cream and ice cream along with a tall glass of something cold and refreshing was just too much and we succumbed thankfully, sinking into seats at a table and letting ourselves be pampered.
The afternoon was spent lazing on the Pool Deck with waiters waiting and more temptations to tempt us. Ah, it's a hard life, but someone has to do it... Once we had had afternoon tea, more ice creams and an evening meal though, I stirred myself, shook myself, added a twist of lemon and trotted back off the ship to take a few photos after dark.
Although dark, it was still very warm and we walked all the way back to the entrance to the port and the small shopping precinct. Admittedly we weren't rushing but it took us a good five or ten minutes good hard strolling...
This would be our last night onboard the Carousel. She had been built as the Nordic Prince in 1971 for Royal Caribbean Cruise Lines, sold to Sun Cruises and renamed Carousel in 1995 and spent ten years with them. Although she had been sold to Louis Cruise Lines in 2004, she had been chartered back to Sun Cruises, her last cruise for them being in the May of 2005. She underwent another five name changes until, as the Pacific, she was decommissioned in 2014 and sent to India for ship breaking in 2015.
She was our introduction to cruising and this was our second trip on her. At time of writing (March 2023) we have taken 27 cruise holidays and loved every single one. With a new place to see and explore every day, it's an experience hard to beat.
The pool deck is practically deserted at night apart from the odd person walking off their meal. It's around 10:00pm.
Miss Franny wants a final go on the slot machines in the casino. I buy a fiver's worth of tokens and mainly watch as she gets through them. She gives me a handful and I wait for a machine to become empty and almost immediately win 70 pounds causing the woman who had just vacated it to stare venomously at me as tokens tinkle down into the tray. I cash them in smartish...
Saturday 19 March 2005. We have gone up a mountain on a coach and come down halfway on a toboggan with gondoliers. As you do.
We are now on the way back to the ship on the coach, but wanting to stretch our legs we ask the courier to drop us off in town and from there we will walk back to the ship.
As we arrive at Funchal, it starts to rain... Just our luck! However, we are made of hardy stuff (and soggy stuff too...) so we get off anyway and trust that it's just a passing shower.
It is. But unfortunately it doesn't pass until we are back at the ship... Funchal is quite beautiful. Marble pavements, close-cobbled streets. Around this time in the UK town centres were also being repaved with coloured brick, but within months - weeks sometimes - they were sinking or standing proud, or were dug up entirely for utility firms to do something that should have been done beforehand and then left with unsightly tarmac patches.
Our walk brings us to the harbour. In front of our ship, the Carousel, is this Costa ship: Costa Fortuna. A name guaranteed to make any English speaker chuckle for a moment.
Our ship is the modest little ship behind. Carousel has just six decks, but it introduced us to the world of cruising opportunities and was in its last year of operation for Sun Cruises as it was being sold off or leased to a French cruise line the following year. We met up with staff we recognised in later years on both Thomson and Ocean Village ships.
We had some lunch and probably a bit of afternoon tea also and the weather brightened up a bit and this replica of Christopher Colombus's ship, the Santa Maria, chugged past once or twice with a crowd of happy passengers. I'm not sure how accurate a replica it was, as I'm fairly sure the original Santa Maria didn't "chug" all that much...
Every night we sat at the same table with the same group of people and it was always a happy gathering. Today was my birthday and the waiters added to the hilarity of the table by bringing a cream cake, and insisting on feeding me a spoonful, which somehow went more into my nose than my mouth...
Saturday 19 March 2005. Another day, another place. We are up in time to see as we sail into Funchal Harbour on Madeira.
When we were here a year ago it was a very foggy day, caused by sand and dust blown from the Sahara Desert. Today looks like being a bit better weather.
We have booked a morning's excursion and are taken high up into the island's mountains. This is Curral das Freiras - the Nun's Refuge, named after the nuns of the capital Funchal's Santa Clara convent, who fled here during a pirate attack in 1566. The view from above is stunning. Madeira had been attacked by pirates several times. No wonder the nuns wanted to make it as hard as possible for pirates to reach them.
We arrive at a village called Monte. We have come for a toboggan ride down the mountain back towards Funchal. Toboggan? But where's the snow...?
There is no need for snow. The toboggans are made of wickerwork and are pulled, pushed and/or scooted by two gondoliers down the [GULP] public roads of the locality, dodging cars, shoppers and sleeping dogs as they go. The more religious are praying at the roadside shrine and lighting candles to appeal for a safe descent...
"Should we buy some tea towels as a souvenir?" wonders Miss Franny. But there's no point - let's get the toboggan down and if we survive then we can think about souvenirs!
We got near the front of the queue and watched as our fellow passengers eagerly or otherwise disappear down the steep road and around a corner. Despite keeping our ears open we don't hear any car horns blaring or squeals of brakes. So far, so good!
OMG as we zoom down the hill at one point a road crosses our path and the road we are careering down levels off with time for just a swift glance (pick your side, there isn't time to look both ways and certainly no time to stop should anything be coming...) At one point a chap came out of a shop doorway and took our photo. I played up to the occasion and hear the photographer say "Doh..." in Portuguese. Then we got to the bottom some time later to find the guides from all the excursion coaches killing themselves laughing at this - the photographer had been an official souvenir photographer! "I've never seen a photo so funny!" says our coach's courier.
Before we set off down into Funchal, there's time for a photo stop at this viewpoint. Our ship, Sun Cruises, Carousel is the middle of the three cruise ships. The plants in the foreground are banana trees. They grow a smaller strain of banana on Madeira and locally there is much consternation at a rumoured European ruling that bananas are going to be banned under a certain size. The sort of idiotic and baseless decision that ignorant morons in power make at every level of government.
We get down to Funchal and decide not to go straight back to the ship. Having been onboard for two days - a day at sea and then in Morocco - we are wanting to stretch our legs a bit. Typically it starts to rain just as we get off the coach...
Tuesday 15 March 2005. We fly from Manchester to Santa Cruz, on Tenerife to join the cruise ship MS Carousel for a week on their tour: Atlantic Islands Cruise.
If this sounds slightly familiar, we did the same cruise on the same ship in 2004 and I have already blogged about that. However this is a different time if not a different place and who knows... we may do different things!
For starters, the weather is a whole lot nicer than it was when we arrived a year ago, when we were celebrating my 50th birthday. This year it will be Miss Franny who hits a milestone but it will be me that has a birthday actually onboard. We'll see what that leads to a few articles hence...
Meanwhile we can relax as lorries bearing luggage, hopefully including ours, arrive at the ship for delivery to our cabin.
Should we take a stroll along the quayside? No, it's almost time for lunch, or afternoon tea... or a snack...
