Our first sea day is the journey heading due north towards the Portuguese island of Madeira.
We decide to have a proper breakfast in one of the MDR so head to Peninsular restaurant. We’re quickly seated and order taken, but we have to say that’s the highlight of breakfast over already. The coffee is underwhelming, the OJ like vaguely flavoured water. There’s tinned grapefruit and don’t get me started about the cardboard black pudding, anaemic sausage and most of the other items on the ‘Peninsular Breakfast’ – the alleged specialty breakfast onboard.
Afterwards we do our laps – it’s not possible to do 360 circuits like on Holland America ships, so we make a large U, where a single circuit is worth 0.3 miles – compare that to a Seabourn ‘U’ which is 0.07 miles and you’ll get to visualise the size of Azura! One side of the ship is basking in sunshine, the other still has the chill of night air, so one side gets increasingly busy with people, whilst the other is pleasantly people-free. We clock up 9km, around 5.5 miles before deciding it’s enough. There are some lovely fellow walkers, no doubt we’ll see them again in a couple of day’s time.
Then it’s pool-time, or rather deck-time as the pool doesn’t really appeal so we sit on 15 aft and read or write, unable to bag a sun-lounger even though there are plenty unoccupied, apart from lonely towels and book placemarkers. In the several hours we spend in that area at least a dozen remain untouched throughout.
We chat with a couple from Yorkshire for a while, then the swap extensive cruising experiences with the Welsh lady from yesterday, and later our friends Jacs and Mike find us too.
We discover it’s not possible to have a custom-built pizza on P&O, but they will at least cook for us whatever is on the menu, thus negating the possibility of unclean customer’s hands having touched our food. We go for a standard pepperoni which is lovely – what a shame they don’t open for breakfast!!
It’s a balmy afternoon because whilst we’re doing 10 knots, so is the wind in exactly the same direction, so on deck it’s mill-pond calm and gorgeous. The afternoon passes by with socialising until we hit the jacuzzi, and then head home to dress for dinner – tonight is Formal because it’s a sea day.
We’ve chosen to visit the Indian restaurant tonight – P&O has a long standing relationship with India, and Goa in particular, going back 150 years and a good proportion of the crew are from this region, so it’s no surprise that the Sindhu restaurant has a very good reputation indeed. We start with drinkies, nipping out to the Atrium to hear the Captain’s welcome address then return half an hour late to start dinner (it’s OK we told the M d’ what we were doing before we scarpered and she kept our table safe!)
Our dinner is a fabulous mixture of scallops, haddock and ymixed grill to start, followed by chicken, duck and mixed specials for main. Apart from the duck they are excellent. Puddings of dark chocolate ball and rice pudding are super too.
We finish in the playhouse theatre where a thirteen strong ship‘s company perform music from British films across the ages – it’s a great show and we are reminded how the on larger ships the productions are of course so much more ‘big-budget’ although we note it was entirely to recorded music, which is a not so impressive.
