A Short Tour

The Marina at rest in the bay at Castro, Chile

General

The Marina is one of three ships of this type in the Oceania fleet. It is very well appointed and comfortable with quite a few luxury touches. Although a very nice ship, it just did not seem to have the personality or friendly feeling as the Windstar yachts we have cruised on.

Statistics

The Marina is considered a mid-size ship at 785 feet long. The passenger capacity is 1250 people and we had a almost full ship on our cruise, probably around 1200 passengers. This full ship did cause some crowding problems, especially in the restaurants when poor weather made the outside dining areas unusable.

Our cabin

Our cabin was what was termed a “PentHouse Cabin” on deck 11, about 4 or 5 cabins from front of the ship.

Our cabin on the Marina

The Penthouse cabins are about 450 square feet, or about 50% larger than the Veranda Stateroom we had on our last Marina voyage. The Penthouse cabins do include the services of a butler, but we never found a meaningful use for ours. The additional space does make it significantly more “livable”, with much larger and nicer bathroom and shower, a walk-in closet, and much more storage space. For the first time on a ship, we had much more storage space than we needed. The cabin included free laundry for three bags of clothes, but the three day turnaround for laundry made it somewhat inconvenient and we found that it was more convenient to just use the free guest laundry that was located a short distance from our cabin. When we arrived, there was a bottle of Prosecco on ice and a bottle of “Cyclo”, a Cab Sauv from the Maipo Valley of Chile, on the table. We took the Cyclo to dinner one evening and it was very nice, but we never did get around to drinking the Prosecco. Since many of the activities and restaurants were on deck 12, we could easily go up one flight of stairs and be in the middle of many activities. The main (forward) elevator bank was only a short distance from our cabin when we needed to go further than one deck.

There was a reasonable number of electrical outlets, both 110V (US type), 220V (European), and USB recharging outlets. I had brought a couple of converter plugs which we did make use of. The only outlet suitable for the 220V hair dryer was at the on the countertop where the two (yes, 2) phones were located, both requiring an electrical outlet. In order to plug in the hair dryer, we had to unplug the secondary (wireless handset) phone. After a couple of days of not using the phone, we just left it unplugged but then one night we started hearing a strange “boing” type noise that we eventually traced to a discharged battery in that phone. We went back to plugging/unplugging the hair dryer. The bathroom still only had one sink, but there was room for two people to stand there and the shower was a nice size (no, not really room for two in the shower). We never heard any noise, either from adjoining cabins or from above or below us. The veranda was a useable size, with two nice chairs and a table but, because of the cold weather, we never spent more than a couple of minutes out there, mainly for taking photos. Overall, I was very happy with the cabin itself and the location.

Food/Dining

The Marina has plenty of dining opportunities. In addition to the main restaurant (The Grand Dining Room or GDR), there is a buffet restaurant (The Terrace Café) that is the primary restaurant for breakfast and lunch and is also open for dinner, the Waves Grill, an open-air casual restaurant on the pool deck, four specialty restaurants, one “healthy foods” restaurant and a coffee bar.

The Grand Dining Room as we seldom saw it… in daylight!

The GDR (Grand Dining Room) is also open for breakfast and lunch most days, but has somewhat limited hours: If you have a morning excursion, the GDR probably will not work. Waves Grill is handy for late lunches, like returning from a long excursion after 2:00 PM when the Terrace Café closes, but is not comfortable on very cold or rainy days. The Terrace Café also has outside seating, but that area is rather exposed and is closed in rough or cold/wet weather. In bad weather, Waves is not very comfortable and the Terrace Café exterior seating is unusable, making the remaining interior spaces very limited and empty tables hard to find during busy times. People were frequently wandering around looking for an empty table or a table with a friendly looking person and empty seats. At these times, there really was not enough staff on duty and tables often sat “dirty” for extended periods while people with full plates looked for a place to sit.

Specialty Restaurants

The four specialty restaurants do not cost anything additional, but reservations are required. Everyone has a “quota” for how many times they can visit a specialty restaurant on a cruise and good reservations times can be difficult to get. We had eight reservations to use, one at each of the specialty restaurants. Since we were in a Penthouse cabin, we had an early shot at making reservations in advance and pretty well had our choice of times and whether we wanted a table for just the two of us or were willing to share a table.

Polo Grill A traditional steakhouse, with menu and furnishings to match. I always went for the 16 oz prime rib.

Toscana Italian cuisine with a Tuscany flair. Say “Hello” to Paulo, the guy with the Olive oil and Balsamic vinegar for the breads

Jacques French dining, but perhaps a little lighter on the French emphasis

Red Ginger A very definite Asian flair, not too far out, but a bit “under-spiced”

We managed to get to all four of the specialty restaurants and I’ll be discussing our visits in the main part of my report. The one consistent characteristic of all the restaurants seemed to be a scarcity of seasonings: very few dishes had distinct and definite flavors. Even the Asian dishes in Red Ginger were very tame and I did not think it was possible to make a bland “Jamaican Jerk Chicken”, but the cooks in the Terrace Café managed it. The food was all top “quality”, but the staff is apparently afraid to offend someone with reasonably highly seasoned dishes.

Other dining venues

Aquamar This is a small restaurant just outside the Terrace Café and the focus is healthy eating. Fruits, veggies, whole wheat, with offerings like banana pancakes (in which I did not detect any bananas), avocado toasts, energy bowls, and yellowfin tacos. The only time I would see many people in Aquamar is when the Terrace Café was overcrowded.

Baristas As the name suggests, this is a coffee bar with made to order specialty drinks. We found that ordering an Americno coffee with two shots of espresso (instead of the normal one) produced just the kind of coffee we like. They also have a selection of cookies, small cupcakes, and other munchies. Because of the relatively cold weather on most of this cruise, combined with the need to be outside to watch the passing landscape, Baristas was very busy, often a bit hectic, but the staff always managed to provide good service with a smile. We visited Baristas at least once a day almost every day for either a “double shot Americano” or some hot tea.

Looking past the Internet Café toward Barista’s

Lounges & Entertainment

As on many ships, there is a large lounge area toward the front of the ship on an upper (15^th) deck called the Horizon Lounge. There was full bar service (although it sometimes had some problems) and entertainment at several times in the evening. Typically, there would be some form of music, like one of the ship’s bands or the string quartet, prior to dinner, and then the ship’s “Deuces” dance band would entertain after the primary entertainment for the evening was over. We spent quite a few late nights here listening to the band, although our illness (to be discussed later) reduced our late-night hours significantly.

The Main Lounge or theater (Deck 5, forward) is where the primary evening entertainment took place. I’ll describe the actual entertainment more fully in the daily log part of this report. The main lounge was also used for organizing the daily excursions, the daily trivia contest, and other such group events.

Martinis Bar is a popular bar (midship, deck 6) with comfortable seating, a piano (complete with a “Piano Man”), and good drinks. It was a popular place for some of us to gather before and/or after dinner for drinks.

The Marina String Quartet played at various times at different places around the ship and occasionally joined in with one of the other bands.

The “Deuces” four-person band (vocalist and three musicians) provided “dance music” when needed. They sometimes performed around the pool or in Horizon in the afternoon and had the late-night gig in the Horizon Lounge, typically starting at 10:15.

The Marina Show Band provided music for the primary evening shows, backing up the guest vocalists and the ship’s production company song and dance people.

The Marina Production Company consisted of, I believe, six dancers and three vocalists who were also pretty good dancers. They put on good shows, considering the limitations of the stage and other facilities. I would put the show quality just a notch or two below the better Las Vegas level shows. It seemed to be that the performers were more talented than the arrangements they were given to perform.

There were a couple of guest entertainers for some of the evening primary entertainment and I’ll cover those in the daily log section of this report.

Excursions

Susan and I had signed up for six off-ship excursions through Oceania plus two independent tours arranged by people on the Cruise Critic Roll Call. I will, of course, describe each of these in the day-by-day sections of this report. In general, the excursions arranged by Oceania will be more expensive than their independent equivalent and will probably be in fairly large groups (typically 20 – 30), on large busses. They will, however, be completely free of worry and of at least reasonable quality.

Other

Like all ships, Marina has an exercise room. We both tried it our early, and it was OK but trying to use an elliptical machine or even a treadmill on a rocking ship is difficult. When I got sick after about 5 days, I did not feel at all like that kind of exercise and figured I should not be breathing hard in an enclosed space with other people. Susan went another time or two but gave up when she started feeling bad. There is a walking/jogging track on an upper deck: 10 laps to the mile but most people just walked laps on the upper deck overlooking the pool area. We continued to walk as much as we could, but the cold temperatures (30s and 40s) and strong winds across the deck (20 – 30 MPH) tended to discourage very long walks.

The pool was almost big enough to actually use and there were two spas/hot-tubs.

Like other non-Windstar cruises, we essentially never saw the captain or, with one exception, any other senior officers around the ship. That exception was the ships “General Manager”, Susanna Cahyadi, a woman from South Africa who seemed to be everywhere around the ship, talking to the customers. I was very glad to see her out and circulating like that, but it appears that, the larger the ship, the more remote and unavailable the officers are.

End of Chapter 0: The Oceania Marina

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