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Oceania Marina – High Class on the High Seas
Tahiti, French Polynesia |
Tahiti, French Polynesia
I have lost count of the amount of times in the past Tim & I have slated the concept of cruising. Being cooped up in a ship with the same people for weeks at a time seemed like hell on earth, but when the option was to pay a small fortune for one flight and miss the entire of French Polynesia or eat our words and hop aboard, guess which option we chose…. There was really no competition with LAN airlines having a monopoly on flights from New Zealand to Chile and our tendency to only book a few days, weeks or at best months ahead, we had an almighty surprise to discover that it was going to cost thousands to get to South America. So after stressing, freaking out and actually lying on the floor having a full blown tantrum we decided to spend the same amount of money on a cruise. This meant 17 days of free food, free accommodation, visits to 4 islands in French Polynesia, Pitcairn Island, Easter Island and then finally Lima in Peru. There was only one cruise doing this route in April which was when our New Zealand visa was expiring and it happened to be Oceania. We had absolutely no idea what this meant but we read reviews and it seemed pretty nice, but website and brochures always seem to have the ability to make places look better so we just assumed to worst and hoped for the best. We had our kindles full of books and laptops full of movies to get us through the long 17 days at sea so were fully prepared for any eventuality.
So we found ourselves at the dock staring up at the beautiful, beautiful Oceania Marina. It was amazing, not a mark on the pure white paintwork, branded marquees led us down a path to the, hoards of staff all trying to relieve us of our luggage, we found ourselves at the stairs of the boat where after signing a declaration that we probably didn’t have ebola we were welcomed aboard.
Walking into the lobby we were instantly blown away, it was like walking into the nicest hotel lobby you have ever seen, with chandelliers, spiral staircases, marble floors, famous works of art and smiling happy crew directing us to the theatre to get registered.
To say we were like fish out of water was an understatement. We genuinely had no idea what we were doing and just hid in a corner in the shade on the pool deck and watched as more and more people arrived. We eventually got brave enough to have an explore and soon discovered the terrace restaurant which was one of the nicest buffets we have ever seen, it had lumps of meat the size of small buffalos, salads, desserts, sushi…. You name it, it was here and we were soon to discover that this was the most basic of all the restaurants the boat had to offer. We discovered the library and borrowed one of the many Easter Island and Peru Lonely Planet books to keep us entertained during the long sea days and even became acquainted with the shuffle board. Every deck we explored just blew our minds that bit more. After a few hours of exploring, eating and relaxing we got the notification that our stateroom was ready for us. OMG, is all we had to say. We knew that we had booked a room with a balcony but it was beyond our every expectation, it was by our standards amazeballs! We had a 2 seater sofa, a desk & chair, a huge comfy bed with the most luxurious pure white cotton bedding we had seen in years. The bathroom had a walk in shower and a bath, luxurious Bvlgari toiletries and 12 huge white fluffy towels, seriously 12!
We were like children in a sweetshop, we didn’t know what to do first, we sat on the balcony, we showered, we drank the free soft drinks in our mini bar, we read the room service menu at least 6 times, we unpacked and hung up our newly purchased cruise clothes and even visited the laundry room to iron our best togs for our first dinner in one of the specialty restaurants.
The Oceania Marina is the biggest of Oceanias fleet and it has 4 specialty restaurants and you can make a reservation for each restaurant once per cruise, Jacques, which is a French restaurant with the menu created especially by the famous Jacques Pepin, Polo, which was a high class steak restaurant, Toscana, a luxury Italian, and our favourite Red Ginger, an Asian fusion experience. Thankfully we had booked ahead and already had a reservation for a private table in each of these restaurants which were mind blowingly amazing. Back in old lives we occasional treated ourselves to dinner in Bohemia, one of Jersey’s only Michelin star restaurants and the food in these restaurants was absolutely up there at the same standard and on some levels it was even better. It was the small touches that really made all the difference, the tea menu in Red Ginger which served the most luxurious delicious herbal tea we have ever tasted and in Toscana we received a welcome bread basket on our table and then arrived the waiter with a menu containing a list of different balsamic vinegars and olive oils so we could each choose which combination of them we wanted, seriously I didn’t even know that there were so many different combinations!
Our first night we had booked into Jacques, so we put on our finery and headed down for dinner, it was stunning and the service was beyond anything we ever expected. I was even given a black napkin as I was wearing a black dress??!! If anything the service was a little too good as the young French waiter seemed to not notice that I was having dinner with Tim and spent every minute at our table flirting with me and ignoring Tim, it was hysterical! After dinner we walked through the main reception to be greeted by the most amazing smell of chocolate and hugest edible Easter display I have ever seen. Thankfully we had a little Easter chocolate box awaiting us on our bed else I may have had to sneek out in the night for a treat.
We were meant to set sail the first night, but there seemed to be a problem with many flights being delayed so we spent the night moored in Papeete and set sail the next morning back to Moorea. Having already been here for 4 days we decided to stay on board where we watched dolphins playing around the boat, relaxed around the pool and generally get our bearings. With our Easter chocolates we had received at evening turn down we also got our first copy of Currents, the evening paper which laid out all the restaurant times, events and special offers on board for the following day. This soon became our cruise bible and each night we would sit and highlight our days plans, sad but true!! So our first day we set about getting involved in the activities. Shuffle Board, Trivia and Bag-o-bean were soon to become part of our daily routine.
Far from spending hours relaxing on the pool deck or in our room reading books or watching movies we soon discovered that cruising for us was about as far from relaxing as it was possible to get. We literally had plans from 9am to 9pm which largely included eating, drinking and earing Big O points. Initially we started to play shuffleboard for fun and before we knew it we were like crack *****s doing anything and everything we could to earn elusive Big O points which at the end of the cruise we could exchange for Oceania t-shirts, caps and bags.
One thing that quickly became apparent on our cruise was that we were by far some of the youngest onboard and possibly the ones with the strangest story, before we knew it our reputation proceeded us and we were like D list celebrities. There were one of two other youngsters but funnily enough none of us socialised with each other, however socialising became our second largest hobby (after collecting Big O Points and before eating). Being on a ship is pretty odd as it is completely normal just to say hello to every single person that you walk past, ever. You start conversations in lifts, unheard of in the outside world, you play table roulette and share tables in the Grand Dining room just for fun to see who you end up meeting, you join complete strangers and form Trivia teams which after one day become unbreakable bonds, you speak to other people floating in the pool and queuing at
the smoothie bar or coffee shop and before you know it you are friends with 50% of the entire population aboard the ship. From chatting to one couple on a tour we discovered that there were 2 other Jersey Islanders on the cruise and lo and behold one day whilst making small talk in the smoothie queue I found myself talking to them, small world. We had the added bonus that we spent so long playing Big O Point games that we also became friends with the entertainment crew and despite not stepping foot in any of the boutiques we became friends with the Boutique manager and his assistant and left the cruise with a whole load advice about working in boutiques on cruises.
On one of our many days exploring we found ourselves signing up for the onboard art class and got chatting to the artist in residence who happened to be chatting to the Boutique manager. The Boutique Manager asked us if we would like to be hosted for dinner. As cruise virgins we had no idea what this meant but we agreed and the next day received a shiny invite in our cabin postbox inviting us to dinner in the Grand Dining Room. It turns out that the staff can host tables which gives them the opportunity to eat in the nice dining rooms with guests and the benefit to us is that they get free wine, woo hoo, win-win. Before we knew it we were being overwhelmed with invites and were struggling to fit everything into our day. We had another hosted dinner with the lovely Millie and Fran from the entertainment team and soon we were mixing with the real VIP’s and were getting invited to suite parties. Yet another thing that was totally unknown to us, if you are a real bigwig and have booked a suite, not only do you have a phenomenal room, with a Jacuzzi and TV on the balcony, an in room, gym, Picasso on the walls and a butler. You also have an allowance of booze and can request canapés to have parties in your suite.
Considering alcohol was the only thing that we didn’t pay to have on the cruise we drank our fair share of wine, cocktails and champagne thanks to some pretty awesome friends.
I will detail our daytrips from the cruise in different blogs as they are all deserving of their own, so don’t think that we didn’t get off the boat, because we did, when we absolutely had to!
After we had spent a few days cruising around Polynesia it was time for our first At Sea days, we were pretty scared about these, not because we worried we would get bored, no we were already needing an extra 12 hours each day to fit in everything we needed to do, but because we were worried about getting sea sick. Tim in particular was still not quite over his psychological sea sickness he experienced enroute to Japan and so just out of caution we decided to try the magic sea sick patches that you just stick behind your ear and they release the chemicals that stop you feeling sick. It turns out that far from leaving us feeling good and relaxed and not sea sick, these patches sent us mad. I had the driest mouth that I have ever had ever, like the worst hangover in the world and Tim was basically turned into a dribbling wreck who just couldn’t stay awake or function. We quickly reached the decision that sea sickness would actually be a more pleasurable experience and the patches were removed. Thankfully the seas were calm and after recovering from our hit of opiates we were back to normal. Sadly whilst Tim was in his patch induced coma we had attended the first of our art classes which involved painting glass plates. I tried to tell Tim that he was not doing it right but I may as well have been talking to the plate for what good it did, the whole idea of painting glass was to layer the plate on the back so you could see the pattern on the front, Tim had fully decorated the back of his instead, retard. Amazingly when we returned for the next phase of painting Tim’s looked significantly better than anticipated. We made some lovely new friends in our art class, Maggie and Rick were amongst the younger crowd on the boat and were holidaying with Ricks parents, we instantly hit it off and had a lovely meal with them in the Grand Dining Room.
The at sea days which we had dreaded initially were some of the most fun and busy days, we went to lectures about astronomy and the history of Pitcairn and the Mutiny on the Bounty and Easter Island. In addition to the usual O Point games, we had one afternoon when the captain and all the officers came to the pool deck and challenged us at the games, then there was the country fair where each staff section on the boat set up their own game to challenge us, the house keeping had us racing each other to put a pillow in its case, the kitchen crew had us sniffing and identifying spices, the boutique team were in the pool letting us pelt them with toy penguins and my favourite game was the spa teams blindfold make-up challenge which left Tim looking like Aunt Sally from Worzel Gummage. We laughed and laughed and laughed and collected handfuls of raffle tickets for the many prizes to be awarded and surprise surprise we won nothing! We even sat through a presentation about future Oceania cruises in the hope of earning some onboard credit and the winning ticket was handed to the two people who walked in behind us.
Trivia somewhat took over our routine on the boat, we had a team for afternoon trivia at 4pm, another team for evening trivia at 8pm and a mix of those teams for the occasional music trivia which we usually managed to stay up past 10pm to attend. Our teams were interesting to say the least. Our evening team was by far the best, with some pretty knowledgeable and easy going people, our afternoon team on the other hand was slightly less easy going and we spent so long arguing over answers that we rarely managed to write the correct one down, despite it usually being the first decision we made. In between this we also had the paper trivia which was released each morning and had me trawling encyclopedia’s in the library for answers, all in the name of Big O Points. We even got to the stage that friends we had made around the boat were giving us their O points to boost our chances of getting what we wanted from the Oceania bootie.
When it came time to exchange our O Points, it was like a scene from an apocalypse, the oldies moaning in the queue that they were not far ahead enough to get the t-shirt of their dreams and everyone was bickering and pushing, the poor entertainment crew looked afraid, very afraid. I had my little list of what I wanted and one of our lovely afternoon quiz team girls, laurie (who Tim had named Hollywood due to her incredible Hollywood knowledge) came and found me in the queue to tell me that the bag I wanted wasn’t on the prize table but she had one that came with her suite that I could have. Seriously, people were just so nice to us. We returned to our suite with our Oceania caps, hats and t-shirts and found that Hollywood had delivered me a lovely bag containing a bottle of champers! What a treat!
To say that Oceania was a luxury experience would be the understatement of the year, there were 1200 guests and 800 staff all falling over themselves to bring you whatever you needed yet when we walked around the boat more often than not there was not another person to be seen. I am pretty sure that there were at least 16 comfortable chairs to every person on the cruise and we did our best to sit in every single one of them. Virtually every day Tim ate steak or escargot, I ate lobster just to ensure I was getting absolute value for money. We ordered room service at every opportunity and it got to the stage that they were almost just delivering a cheese platter each night without me asking. We saw some incredible places, met some fantastic people and made some truly dear friends. Our only regret was that we had to get off the cruise after 17 perfectly wonderful days.
Knowing that our return to backpacking was going to be a massive reality check we had reserved a transfer from the cruise to our hostel to make our life a little bi
t easier. What we didn’t realise was that we needed to get a bus from the boat to the harbour entrance to pick up our transfer, so like fools we stood as every single other passenger got on the bus ahead of us. Amazingly despite being over an hour late the transfer was still waiting for us. Oh dear life after Oceania was going to be tough!!
From relaxing on our balcony, to sunbathing around the pool, drinking the coffee shop out of coffee, eating in each and every restaurant, drinking the daily smoothie, ordering an evening cheese platter on room service, attending every O Point game or quiz, eating our way through afternoon gala tea, drinking champagne at suite parties, attending every lecture or art class we could, watching every show and making as many friends as possible. I think that it is safe to say that we made the most of every second aboard our cruise and really did get our money’s worth.
Beans Around The World 