What does it take to plan a trip of this length? Here's a recap of the process we went through.
Now that we’ve decided that we’re REALLY DOING THIS, it’s time to start the work. Because you don’t just book a trip that will take you out of the country for a month and a half and then sit back and wait for that ship to sail.
First, a little bit more detail about our trip. We will be visiting 17 different countries with 24 ports of call. That leaves us with about 20 days of At Sea days. The ship we will be on is the Vasco da Gama, which was just bought by Cruise and Maritime (CMV), making this its maiden voyage for that cruise line. CMV is based out of the UK, but with this itinerary, I expect there will be a lot of Aussies on board. It’s not a really big ship (about 1200 passengers), and it’s not new, so I don’t expect it to be five star accommodations. We booked a porthole twin room because the price for a balcony room was about double and definitely out of my price range. I don’t expect we’ll spend a lot of time in the room anyway, so I think it will be fine.
Now you might be thinking, “Damn, that’s a lot of sea days.” True, but we are covering some real estate on this trip and I suspect at least some of those days will be very welcome. Getting up early, touring all day, and then having a late dinner can be down-right exhausting, and if you do a few of those in a row, a day or two to just relax is kind of nice. Plus, I have plans for those At Sea days. I’m going to download a whole bunch of books onto my Kindle before I leave and take a serious crack at one of my Bucket List items: Reading 50 books in a year. I also plan on spending time by the pool, working out in the fitness center, playing games with Lynda (yes, she also loves games!), and reviewing the thousands of pictures I know I will be taking on this trip. Oh, and keeping up with my travel journal. And since I suspect Lynda and I will be close to the youngest people on this cruise, I’m pretty sure we’ll be able to kick some serious butt at pickle ball and table tennis.
But before any table tennis or Kindle reading, there is the planning, and on a trip this big, it becomes almost a fulltime job in itself. The biggest, and most time-consuming part of our preparations is deciding what we are going to do in each port. Of course, the ship has excursions that we can book, and that’s where we started. The excursion booklet came out online about 3 months prior to sail, and we were excited to see what the options would be.
“Upon closer reading, we saw the tour was limited to only 60 people!”
For most ports, there were 4 or 5 excursion options offered by the ship and the prices looked reasonable (although they were in euros, so I had to do some calculations to determine that). There was one that really stood out though. Instead of the usual 45 to 85 euros, this one was 1299! I had to do a double take. Who would book a $1450 excursion?! Us, that’s who! As it turns out, the excursion is to the Taj Mahal in India and actually takes 3 days. It includes 2 nights’ hotel along with planes, trains, and automobiles. Since the Taj Mahal was one of the places we were super excited about and it was a factor in our decision to even go on this trip, it was a pretty easy no-brainer. We didn’t want to take the risk of thinking we could see it another time on another trip to India and then not ever get back there. So we were in immediate agreement, we were going suck it up and do it. Upon closer reading, we saw the tour was limited to only 60 people! We signed up right away, along with a few of the other “can’t miss” sites: Petra in Jordan, the Valley of the Kings in Luxor, Egypt, and Marrakech, Morocco. We could cancel up to 5 days before the cruise, so we weren’t worried about booking early but we would have really hated missing any of those places. (I’m sooooo glad we did. The Taj Mahal trip filled up super fast. They did, however, end up adding a second group, but that also filled up.)
So, I would like to say we finished booking our excursions in a week. Or two. No, we were still working on our itinerary up to 2 weeks before the trip. At some of the stops we weren’t crazy about the ship’s options and we booked our own tour through private operators. For our day in Israel, there was a small group from our ship that arranged an excursion to Jerusalem and the Dead Sea and we decided to join them on that. There are a couple of cities we’ve both already been to (Rome and Barcelona) and we already knew what we wanted to see there so we will do those on our own. And then there are the ports where the ship’s excursion ends 4 to 6 hours before we’re scheduled to set sail again. Plenty of time for us to plan something else.
Anyway, lots of options which means lots of planning. There were many days when we would spend 2-3 hours on the phone looking at choices and making decisions. Where to eat, what tour company to take, how do we get to the meet place? Of course, all of this would have been virtually impossible without the internet. Not only did it help us to find the tours and read their reviews, but we were able to print maps for our “on our own” days, look up train times, research local foods, and determine what we absolutely couldn’t miss. We also pre-booked some skip-the-line tours and a couple of Hop-On Hop-Off bus tickets.
I want to back track just a smidge. I mentioned that we joined some other people on a tour in Israel. You might wonder how we hooked up with them, and it was through Cruise Critic. If you haven’t used Cruise Critic before, it’s a great tool for planning your trip. For each cruise, there is a dedicated forum board called a “Roll Call” for passengers of just that sailing. There you can virtually meet other passengers, ask and answer questions, and plan small private tours amongst yourselves. Many ships even offer a meet and greet near the start of a sailing for the Cruise Critic group. Other really good sites we used are TripAdvisor, Viator, Tours by Locals, and The Crazy Tourist.
So, there are really 3 things that we needed to do 2 to 3 months before the trip started. Obviously, excursions is one. Second was getting all the necessary vaccines. The cruise company recommended typhoid and hepatitis A. I also got tetanus, flu, and shingles. (That last one had nothing to do with the cruise, I just wanted to get that vaccine.) All of that only cost me my $20 co-pay. Lynda also added measles, malaria, and cholera. I opted out of those. I don’t think either of us is right or wrong, just personal choices. (Word to the wise: Do not go to one of those fancy travel vaccine places as they will charge you LOTS of money.)
The third thing we had to do was start looking into what visas we would need for the trip. This was a little complicated for some reason. Usually, the ship or the tour group will tell you exactly what you need for visas and where to get them. CMV did this too: We needed visas for India and Sri Lanka. Sri Lanka was easy. We could get an e-visa online. However, India soon became very confusing. Even on our Cruise Critic roll call, people were calling consulates and double checking with CMV. What happened is CMV was saying we needed the full-on multi-entry visa which cost around $300 and you had to send in your passport to get it. There was also an e-visa option for India. It was good for 2 entries, but only at some ports, and there was some confusion if Mumbai was one of the ports, etc., etc. Then there was a policy change from India, and it would appear that U.S. citizens could get just the e-visa now. If this was just any other port, it wouldn’t have been that big of a deal. But remember what I said earlier about our $1450 excursion??? We could NOT get this wrong. In the end, we got the e-visas and I think (hope) we’re good. We’ll see.
So that’s a wrap for 2-3 months out from our trip. We got everything done on our list, with the exception of a few tours, and we’re really looking forward to the next phase of our planning: Shopping.
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