Day 4: Puerto Vallarta

Breakfast in Grand Pacific (Main Dining Room)

Looking at my camera roll, it appears I forgot to take any breakfast photos. But then again, I suppose if you’ve seen one photo of the NCL French Toast, a glass of juice, a ham and cheese omelette, and a few strips of bacon, you’ve seen them all. So that’s what we’ll go with! As for the ambiance, the Main Dining Room experience isn’t really superior or inferior to any of the others, it’s more a matter of taste. Our tastes run more toward O’Sheehans (or the Local), though…it’s just more “homey.” We’ll probably hit the buffet tomorrow, though (I’m writing this Wednesday evening as we depart Mazatlan).

Privately-booked vs. Ship Tours vs. Winging It

I tend toward advocating privately-scheduled tours vs. using the ship-scheduled ones. But ultimately this choice is really a weighing of the risks, and an individual (or a party) has to determine their risk threshold on a port by port basis.

The Risks to Consider (as I see them)

• Region and port safety: research is your friend here, along with experience. If you’ve been to a port before you probably have a good sense of whether it’s safe to venture outside the protective bubble of ship-vetted tour providers and locations. If you’re easily intimidated by proximity to poverty conditions and feel less safe simply by being in those conditions, you’ll probably want to stay with the cruise line.
• First time in the port? We tend to lean to the NCL-vetted and controlled excursions, but not always. Not having previous exposure to a port prevents important contextual clues about the surroundings.
• Is the port a closed ecosystem or is tourism only part of what drives the local economy? In a closed ecosystem like Alaska, the vendors you can purchase from directly (or via Viator, Shore Excursions Group, Project Expedition, etc). Are the exact same vendors used by NCL. There aren’t other vendors to be had. You will be on the same tour bus, seaplane, train or other conveyance as the ship passengers, and in all likelihood your tour group will cross over passengers from multiple cruise lines and independent travelers. IN THIS SITUATION YOU ARE WASTING MONEY if you use the cruise line tours. That said, in much of the world you have options other than the ones the cruise line vets and has contracted. In these cases you may want to stick with the ship, but the sites I mentioned also bring the strength of customer reviews and (if I am your travel agent) personal experience and recommendation.
• What about the ship leaving me? Yes, you are responsible for including enough buffer time to avoid being a pier runner. It’s that simple. The ship will wait if their excursions are late; you can build in a responsible buffer. Sources such as Shore Excursions Group and project Expedition, along with many Viator vendors, provide return to ship guarantees. This means the vendor has the additional capacity to be able to return you to the port before sailaway, even if your primary transportation fails, etc.

Our choice for this sailing: Privately-Arranged Tours

I’ve written a detailed review about the resort and our transfer from the ship and back — (TL;DR — highly recommended, I will be arranging a specific tour package for my customer travelers that uses both services). See the review here

Back at the Jade: R&R

Roxan availed herself of the Thermal Suite for a time; I retired to a booth in O’Sheehan’s and had a snack, a couple drinks, and wrote yesterday’s batch of posts. We had a sort of dinner/dessert and a drink or two together at O’Sheehans later in the evening. I wrote my Cruise Critic near-live catch-up and answered some questions, then off to bed at a semi-normal 10pm (in some time zone…)