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Wanderung 16

Holts Hawaiian Hula Holiday.

January 2008

Epilog

Bob:

So what did we learn during our two weeks in Hawaii? Well, it's a great break from the winter weather, at least if you are as lucky with the weather as we were, and it is certainly better than having surgery in a hospital! We had mostly sunshine and clear to partly cloudy skies. Even the occasional sprinkle was, as they say, a warm rain and really just made the photography difficult. The pleasant weather was a big factor in making a wonderful vacation.

Also, there were a lot of interesting places to visit in Hawaii, and we certainly did not have time to visit them all even on a two week trip. I would dearly love to spend some more time at the Polynesian Cultural Center on Oahu, walk the volcanoes Volksmarch on Hawaii, and drive a motorscooter around Kauai and Maui so that I could just stop and visit anyplace interesting I ran across. Maybe next time.

But spending a lot of time in Hawaii is difficult because we learned that both food and lodging are quite expensive. We were spending more like 8-10 dollars apiece on meals at fast food places like Burger King or McDonalds compared to the 4-6 dollars we usually spend on the mainland. Milk was more like $8 a gallon, which is far more than double the price we pay back at home and bread was similarly dear. Gasoline, however, was a relative bargain because it cost only around $3.50 to $3.90 compared to the usual $2.90 it cost back in Virginia right before and after our trip. After extensive searching on the Internet, we chose a medium-low grade hotel in Waikiki and paid about $500 for 4 nights, but many hotels were charging very high prices per night.

Given the high prices of lodging and food, the cruise ship was actually not an outrageously expensive way to see several of the islands. The base cost for 11 days on the Pride of Aloha was around $1600, but taxes added a couple of hundred to that. All our shore excursions added a bit over $1,000, so we were spending around $250 per day. We met several people who were taking the alternative shore excursions offered by Roberts of Hawaii, and that would be one way to cut the costs because the Roberts tours were typically 1/2 to 1/3 the price of the tours offered by Norwegian Cruise Lines.

After spending over a week in the Pride of Aloha, we both felt it was similar in some ways to previous cruise ships we have experienced and yet quite different in others. Physically, the Pride of Aloha is 77,000 tons or so, and is noticeably smaller than the approximately 90,000 ton displacement of the Zuiderdam, Brilliance, and Jewel although all four ships carry right around 2,000 passengers max. Our impression is that the Pride is narrower in the beam than the others, and in particular the central atrium and elevator shaft area is smaller. Externally, Deck 6, the promenade deck, had a nice, wide, continuous loop for walking but did not have deck chairs for lounging as on the promenade decks of the other ships. They even had separate walking and jogging lanes at the fore and aft ends of the loop that kept the traffic flowing and provided a very nice experience of walking while sailing the high seas.

The arrangement of the interior space was also different in that the Pride had the main theatre all the way in back (aft) rather than in the front of the bow as on the other ships. The theater definitely felt more cramped than on the other ships, and I'm fairly certain the backstage area was smaller and the lighting and sound systems were less capable than on the larger and newer ships. In my view the quality of the entertainment does not really depend on the facility but rather on the quality of the performers engaged by the cruise line. The headliner shows and the ship's ensemble performance engaged by Norwegian Cruise Line were roughly on a par with the offerings from Holland America, Royal Caribbean, and Princess. However, we had one "amateur night" where the entertainment was our hula dance class final performance plus the crew show, and on the next night they just showed a movie which was clearly a cost-saving alternative to a live performance. But the coup de gras was one night when they wanted to charge us $25 to see the evening show, which we of course skipped.

Another major difference was the complete lack of any casino or gambling area on the Pride whereas a considerable space was dedicated to gambling on all the other ships. I certainly didn't miss the odd ambience of a casino during our trip, but the lack of casino profits may be part of the reason that NCL seemed to skimp on other aspects of the cruise.

All the ships we were similar in that there was a buffet type of food service on the uppermost deck aft, but the Pride of Aloha had that area arranged into four separate cafeteria style food service lines. The other ships, in contrast, had food service "islands" in a single large self-service area. The service lines on the Pride of Aloha continually choked up with slowpokes lost in indecision or dawdling over exactly which offerings to take, so the net effect was a lot more waiting for the buffet style of food service.

The Pride of Aloha also had two regular "sit-down" restaurants on Deck 5, but even combined they were smaller in size than the large, two-story sit-down restaurants in Zuiderdam, Brilliance, and Jewel. The Pride of Aloha used an open seating approach which was essentially a first-come, first-served system (except you could make reservations, apparently). The service was, unfortunately, rather hit-or-miss; sometimes we had excellent service and sometimes we waited an inordinately long time for service. We have been blessed with very nice, personable wait staff on all our other cruise ships, so we noticed that a disadvantage of the open seating method is that you get a different waiter or waitress each night. We couldn't get to know them, and they couldn't get to know our characteristic preferences like having ice water or wine with the meal and so forth.

The Pride of Aloha's cabins in the same basic "outside view" category (i.e., large porthole) that we usually choose were slightly smaller than on the other ships. However, the space was efficiently utilized and we did not really feel any more cramped. The bed pointed inward from underneath our porthole, and I rather liked that arrangement. The porthole gave me very good over-the-shoulder lighting for reading during the day, and the starboard to port orientation of the bed was much better for sleeping during heavy waves than the fore-and-aft orientation of our beds on the other ships.

The most curious difference, however, was the slightly sloppy way the Pride of Aloha was run. Holland America, Princess, and Royal Caribbean all carefully announced the docking and undocking times plus the location of the gangway at each port of call. Generally they held to those times unless something like a medical emergency intervened. In contrast, the Pride of Aloha used the public address system only to announce the repeated art sales that occurred every other day or so, but never to inform the passengers of the times or procedures to be followed at a port of call. That lack of effective dissemination of basic information resulted in a lot of confused and frustrated passengers. The times and procedures given in our daily printout turned out to be very approximate. I don't believe the Pride of Aloha ever arrived or departed at the times actually specified on the printout, which was in contrast to the general punctuality of the other lines we have traveled on.

Our cruise was, however, made special by the hula and lei-making classes of Cultural Ambassador June. The hula classes were a hoot, and my back stopped hurting once I learned to really keep my knees bent. We made leis out of orchids, kukui nuts, and woven ribbons, all of which turned out well, and June's patience in teaching all her classes was simply amazing. All things considered, we had a wonderful time in Hawaii and are definitely planning on going back, but we just are not sure when or how we would do it next time.

Copyright 2008 by R. W. Holt and E. M. Holt
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