Planning to Get the Most out of 30 Ports

Day 11, Grand Asia 2017

Thursday, Oct. 12, 2017 – At Sea

After all these lazy sea days, we are in high anticipation of our first port tomorrow. Kushira is the one of seven Japanese ports we will visit. I will be exploring it independently (not on a tour) with my friend Joyce.

There are many ways to explore ports. The easiest is to join a Holland America excursion, branded as EXC tours. I’ve found ship tours to be well organized and designed to cover the highlights of a port. Depending on the port size, there could be a dozen different offerings, ranging from three to eight hours in length. Each has an activity level rating, and the shore excursion staff is very helpful in providing personalized information on the tours.

One big advantage to ship tours is the peace of mind from the guarantee that the ship will not leave without you. You can find lots of YouTube videos of passengers running down the pier toward a departing ship. They will have to find their own way to catch up at the next port. But when I was in Casablanca a few years ago, we held our departure two hours to wait for a traffic-delayed ship excursion to arrive from Marrakesh.

On the other hand, I have generally found ship excursions to be notably more expensive than similar private tours. When I was on a Royal Caribbean cruise, I took a private overnight tour to Cairo that was identical to the ship tour, but $200 less. Private tours also can be more flexible. In Aqaba, Jordan, the ship offered tours to either Petra or Wadi Rum, but our private tour took us to both. In Spain, our small group was enjoying a lunch stop so much that we rearranged the afternoon. Ship excursions usually pack their buses, but some private tour organizers plan for more room and comfort.

Holland America posted the shore excursions for this tour online at least six months ago, and I booked two – one in Japan and on Komodo Island, where you must be on a tour to go ashore. Some of the popular tours sell out, so if there is one you want, best to book early. Once the cruise starts, the shore excursion staff offers talks on each port with more information about the tours, and I might book more.

One Day 5 I wrote about our cruisecritic.com roll-call community, with more than 200 passengers on this ship. Several people in the group planned private tours, and I signed up for them in Tokyo, Yokohama, Kyoto (from our Osaka stop), Beijing overnight, Vietnam, Bali, Cairns (to the Great Barrier Reef), Rotorua (NZ) and American Samoa.

I am taking two tours organized by my travel agency, Cruise Specialists. They are one of Holland America’s largest booking agencies and have more than 150 passengers on this ship. One of the highlights of this cruise will be their four-day overland trip in China. We will leave the ship on our second day in Shanghai, fly to Guilin for multiple sites and a Li River cruise. Then we fly to Xian to see the famous terra cotta warriors and rejoin the ship in Hong Kong.

That leaves the ports where I will explore on my own with Joyce or other passengers. In Sydney I plan to spend the day with two women from there whom I met on my Galveston/Dubai cruise. I might rent a car on Maui. I’ll try to find that balance between planning and spontaneity. I have met passengers with fully tabbed loose-leaf binders containing research on every port. I kept printing to a minimum and downloaded a lot of port information.

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Day 11: Just another sea day — breakfast, watercolor, blogging, acupuncture lecture. At lunch I met a woman who lives about five miles from where I lived in New Jersey and who will be on my China overland tour. My travel agency hosted a nice reception, and I ate dinner with two couples with whom I had dined before. We set our clocks back one last time to finally be on Japanese time for the next week.