2025 Caribbean cruise

This year our Christmas present to us was a 65-night Caribbean cruise on P&O’s MV Aurora.

The Ship

Launched in 2000, MV Aurora is P&O’s oldest and smallest ship weighing in at just over 76,000 tons and can carry roughly 1900 passengers and crew. She has three main restaurants, a cinema, a theatre and an art gallery, plus assorted specialty restaurants, meeting rooms, bars and cafés.

Onboard you can join a choir, learn to dance, learn a craft, attend guest lectures and concerts or just relax and do nothing if you feel like it. Simply put, Aurora is a tourist ship so there is always something to do, if you want to do something.

Internet
Aurora uses the Starlink internet service, so internet access is very good but also very expensive. P&O charges £14 per day for a basic plan for one device that allows email and internet browsing, or £20 per day for a comprehensive plan that includes downloading movies. The charge is for the entire cruise so £14 per day for a 65 day cruise would have worked out at £910 just for one device. Before you buy, do your maths and ask yourself “do I really need it?”. We said no, instead opting to visit a café in each port and use the café’s Wi-Fi to access our emails over a coffee and cake.

If you need internet access for one day, P&O will charge you £30 for a basic plan for 24 hours of access on one device. But they will give you a one hour sampler for free.

Tip: If you need to access the internet with more than one device, enable the Wi-Fi hotspot on your mobile phone (settings > connections > hotspot) and connect your mobile phone to the ship’s Wi-Fi. Your phone connects to the internet via the ship’s Wi-Fi and your other devices connect to the internet via your phone.

Dining
Aside from specialty restaurants, Aurora has three main restaurants; one with two dinner sittings where you share your table with the same people each night; one with flexible dining that caters for breakfast, lunch and dinner, with no fixed sittings so you can share your table with different guests each visit; and a buffet restaurant where, as the name suggests, you select your meal from a buffet of dishes.

Be warned, special diets can be a problem. Although P&O’s literature says “Dishes from the main menu can be adapted to suit your needs in any of our restaurants including the Horizon. Please speak to our Headwaiters, Waiting Staff or Chefs (Tall Hats) for assistance.“, it is not true; in fact, it is completely misleading! There was a time when the P&O kitchens made everything from scratch and were rightly proud that, given enough notice, they could adapt almost any dish to almost any diet. Not so now!

Despite P&O’s official rhetoric, P&O buys in many ingredients and even whole dishes readymade. The result is that some dishes cannot be adapted to a restricted diet. For example, if you are gluten sensitive (as I am), you cannot order a gluten free trifle because trifles are brought in readymade and the kitchen cannot remove the sponge layer without destroying the dish. Similarly, you cannot order a gluten free pie because even though the kitchen makes the pie, they use readymade pastry. That said, the catering staff will try to adapt a dish to a special diet if they can. Unfortunately, sometimes they don’t appear to understand what a restricted diet entails. For example, they served a “gluten free” haggis on Burns Night that contained barley and “adapting a dish to gluten-free” meant cutting most (but not all) of the cake base away before serving it. Eater beware.

Although the staff are doing their best, the real problem is that P&O management (or is it Carnival management) have allowed standards to slip. They are the ones who failed to ensure that their staff are adequately trained. They are the ones who decided to buy readymade ingredients, and they are the ones who failed to take into account restricted diets when they introduced readymade ingredients. It really is not good enough.

In the past, if you were celebrating an occasion on board, the staff would sing “Happy Birthday” or “Happy Anniversary” or “Happy whatever” at your table. Not anymore! One evening a member of our group was having a birthday so we asked a senior member of the catering staff if he could ask some staff to join us in singing Happy Birthday. He said that cruise ships are no longer allowed to sing Happy Birthday to guests due to complaints about noise pollution. Seriously?? Has anyone heard about this “policy”? What are your thoughts?

The cruise

Gran Canaria
After leaving Southampton our first port of call was Las Palmas in Gran Canaria in the Canary Islands, off northwestern Africa. Grand Canaria’s southern beaches include bustling Playa del Inglés and Puerto Rico as well as quieter Puerto de Mogán and San Agustín. In the north, Las Palmas is a major stop for cruise ships and duty-free shopping.

With only one day in Las Palmas, we opted for the hop-on hop-off bus tour so that we could quickly see what was worth seeing. After doing a circuit, we stayed on the bus until we returned to the Catedral Metropolitana de Santa Ana de Canarias to explore that area and found lunch in a very nice seafood restaurant just around the corner from the cathedral.

Antigua
After six seadays crossing the Atlantic, we arrived in the port of St. John in Antigua. The cruise terminal is about five minutes easy walk from the main town, which is very tourist oriented with lots of bars, cafés and souvenir shops.

We were warned to only use taxis where the driver wears a yellow shirt. The yellow shirt means that the driver is officially accredited so you can safely negotiate the return price for all passengers before you leave and you can be sure that if they take you there, they will bring you back.

We took a taxi to the world heritage listed Nelson’s Dockyard, which is about an hour’s drive from St. John, on the other side of the island. Unfortunately, we had to skip the dockyard because time constraints around having lunch and getting back to the ship on time meant that we wouldn’t be able to spend much time at the dockyard and the US$15 per person admission was more than we were willing to spend.

Tortola

The tours are reasonably priced and show you some spectacular views of the island from the top of the island. Prices are cash only, in US dollars, and you pay at the end of the tour.

An oddity of Tortola is that they drive on the left side of the road, the same as in the UK, but most of the vehicles are lefthand drive, the same as in the US.

Saint Lucia and Barbados
After Tortola we visited St. Lucia followed by Barbados.

In St. Lucia we took a tour of some of the rum distilleries on the island and tried several (lots) of different aged rums and spiced rums. We bought a several bottles of different spiced rums all of which we drank on the ship.

Brazil
The ship next sailed to Brazil where we spent two days sailing up the Amazon River to Manaus, followed by Santarem.

We spent two days in Manaus. On the first day we went on a city tour including a visit to the opera house, which is undergoing renovation, an Indian museum and a market. On the second day we explored the city on our own.

Manaus is working hard to cast off its former reputation and be reborn as a modern 21st century city. Although there is still a lot of poverty, there is also industry providing employment, new apartment blocks are being built so that the slums can be cleared and there is a conspicuous police presence making the streets feel a lot safer. You still have to use common sense when getting around so you don’t “flash the cash”, wear expensive jewellery (including diamond rings) or expensive clothing or carry an expensive handbag unless you want to invite trouble.

We did have a small incident while in Manaus; The ship was docked at a floating wharf which was linked to the shore by a bridge. An afternoon storm caused the ship to bump the wharf, which pushed the bridge, which partially collapsed into the Amazon River. Oops. That was the end of being able to walk from the ship to the shore. For the rest of our stay, we had to get to and from the shore by tender.

After Manaus the ship sailed to Santarem, about 560 miles inland, on the Amazon River at the confluence of the Tapajós and Amazon Rivers. Aurora provided a shuttle bus service to get from the port into the town so we got the shuttle into the town and went exploring. We didn’t stay long in Santarem; we found it to be very run down, hot and humid with a lot of poverty and run down streets and shops so we only stayed for a couple of hours before returning to the ship.

The Caribbean
Other than Cartagena in Columbia, Panama City and Belize, most of the rest of the cruise was visiting tourist ports across the Caribbean which, after a while, started to look the same. They all had small shops selling tourist trinkets and clothing and almost all of the shops had the same trinkets and clothing.

Next to Cartagena’s port area is a zoo for endangered birds and animals that have been rescued from smugglers. The zoo has quite a large collection of rescued birds and animals making it well worth a visit. Unfortunately, we witnessed a shameful act while in the zoo; we saw a group of tourists poking at a sloth with sticks to get a better photo until a park attendant moved them on and rescued the sloth. Some people should be ashamed of themselves.

After Cartagena the ship stopped in Colon, Panama, so we took a coach tour to the old Panama City, on the Pacific Coast.

Colon was originally established for building Panama’s east-west railway. Other than a large duty-free area near the ship terminal and some casinos, Colon doesn’t have much to offer so we opted for a coach trip to Panama City which is just over an hour from Colon, on the Pacific Coast. We visited the ruins of the original city destroyed by Henry Morgan in 1671 and then did some souvenir shopping in the old city before returning to Colon to rejoin the ship.

In Belize we took a coach trip to see the Xunantunich Mayan Ruins. They are well worth seeing but are showing clear signs of damage caused by tourists climbing on the ruins.

Back to reality
Overall, we enjoyed the cruise despite the number of consecutive sea days. Admittedly, the ship did cross the Atlantic, which can take several days and the visit to Bermuda was cancelled due to stormy weather, which resulted in eight consecutive sea days until we reached Praia DA Vitoria in the Azores, then another three sea days before docking in Southampton.

One final comment; P&O makes a point of telling you not to bring your own alcohol onto the ship. They say that if you do, it will be confiscated and returned to you at the end of the cruise. The reality is that so long as you are discrete you are unlikely to have a problem. We bought several bottles on shore at different ports and brought them on board safely tucked into our backpacks without being challenged.