'Mode': TO
Category: Ship/Boat
Getting TO/AROUND: We cruised roundtrip to Baja Mexico from San Francisco on the NCL Sun in October/November of 2008. This was a rather long 11 night trip with stops in Mazatlan, Acapulco, Zihuatanejo/Xtapa, Puerto Vallarta, and Cabo San Lucas. The ship was in very good conditon and appeared to have been refitted fairly recently. This is a comfortable if not very exciting ship. Subdued decor, rather bland main dining rooms, even the pool deck was very 'plain brown wrapper' for a cruise ship. It has no pizzazz, no eye popping common areas, no 'Wow' factor to be found anywhere, not even in the Atrium. I would call this the blue collar cruise ship for the working class man but that seems a rather harsh way of defining it. The ship was basically very nice, very clean and comfortable, just uninspiring. At 79,000 tons though, it is a bit on the small side for it's 2,000 passenger capacity. Patty felt many of the common areas were on the small side and that the 11 restaurants on board were a bit too many, the Specialty restaurants were all too large for the amount of patronage they drew. It seemed NCL could have made better use of some of that space.
We paid about $635 total/each for this 11 night cruise, a great bargain.
Embarkation: We arrived to board shortly after noon. Lines were long but moved swiftly and we were on board within 30 minutes, a hassle free embarkation.
Cabin: We had booked a guaranted inside cabin on a lower deck but were upgraded to a much larger cabin on the Viking deck, deck 8. It was much, much nicer and significantly larger than anticipated and was the largest inside cabin we have ever had on any cruise ship. It was very clean and well kept during our entire cruise. The bath was also larger than anticipated.
Dining: NCL only had freestyle or unassigned dining on this cruise. The main dining rooms, Seven Seas and Four Seasons, at the very aft of the ship and midship on the 5th deck were nice but rather uninspiring in looks. The food, presentation and service was very good to excellent. The only real compaint we had in the Dining room was the OJ at breakfast, always Tang-like. One nice aspect of dining in the Norwegian Cruise Lines' main dining rooms is the free esspressos, lattes and caps offered. Unfortunately they are not very good and often take a long time to show up, even though they come from super automatic machines. Still, it's better than paying $2 -3 for the same disappointment on a Princess ship.
We ate at the Pacific Heights restaurant twice. It is a free 'Cooking Lite' restaurant on the 11th deck opened only in the evenings. A reservation is required. Everything was excellent there and it is nice to see such an effort at healthy dining on a cruise ship. Incidently, there was always at least one each 'Cooking Lite' appetizer, entree, and desert on the Seven Seas and Four Seasons' menus each meal.
The buffet style food on the Lido deck appeared ok with the exception of the pizza, it certainly was not appetizing to look at. . We ate in the buffet very little. We ended up referring to it as "Denny's Grand Slam Breakfast goes to Sea" due to the overwhelmingly large platters of greasy foods that many fellow passengers were downing, seemingly non-stop at times. There particularly seemed to be an obssession for bacon in the mornings. If you find such blatant overindulgence disturbing, you should perhaps eat in the main dining rooms as we did. There was a wide assortment of foods including many vegetarian Indian dishes. We did stop by there late in the evening a few times just to sample the curries.The daily curries we sampled were excellent, deserts were ok to very good, none were excellent, almost all seemed on the liter side, perhaps less sugars and butter, not overly decadent.
For the first time ever we paid to dine at one of the "Specialty restaurants", as the cruise lines like to refer to them. Dining at the il Adagio cost $10/ea. Portions were very large, quite good but everything was overloaded with much too much cheese for our tastes. Service was excellant but not noticeably better than in the main dining rooms. We really couldnt see the point in paying extra to dine there.
Entertainment: All of the evening shows were very good to excellent, especially Cirque Pan.
Spa/Gym: The gym was very good, we used it daily. Patty actually rated it excellent due to the various excercise classes offered daily for free, including Aerobics and Step classes. Most cruise ships charge $10-15/ec for these classes. We used the saunas and steam rooms and both of us enjoyed them.
Ports: Please see our sections on Mazatlan, Acapulco, Puerto Vallarta, Cabo San Lucas, and Zihuatanejo
Disembarkation: We carried our own luggage off and had no problems, We were off the ship within 5 minutes of leaving our cabin.
Overall, we had a great time, glitch-free and, surprisingly, one of our best cruises ever. We thought this cruise was a fantastic bargain. We would cruise on NCL again.
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on Mar 13, 2007
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