After our 3 preliminary days in Amsterdam, our group of 135 intrepid music aficionados joined our chartered cruise ship, M/S AmaSerena for our week-long Rhine River cruise.
To start with, here's a fine portrait of the ship from the AmaWaterways website:
It certainly looks sizable -- and it is, in some ways. The front half, where the topmost section is painted white, contains the public areas: the front sundeck, the main lounge, and the restaurant down below by the waterline. Behind the colour change, the decks shift like a split-level house, and there are 3 decks of passenger cabins and crew cabins, with more sundeck space atop. On this first day, I wandered around taking some pictures of different aspects of the ship -- to show where it's big and where it most definitely is small.
Start with the small -- the cabins. How little space you have to crawl out of either side of the bed without hitting either a wall or a window.
The tiny balcony has almost enough space for you to maneuver around 2 chairs and a table so you can sit down. That's 60% of the front wall of your cabin.
The other 40% is represented by this narrow alcove. Its window can also be slid open to create a kind of indoor or "Juliet" balcony, but again the space is very limited.
And the bathroom runs true to form.
Don't get me wrong, it's all plush and luxurious and comfortable, but elbow room is very much a luxury item here.
On the other hand, the public spaces are generous. Here's the main lounge, which is pretty much the living room of the ship as well as being (for this special cruise) the concert hall. Ignore the small electronic piano in the foreground, and focus on the beautiful Steinway grand in the far right corner.
The main dining room directly below is almost as large, but is divided into multiple small sections to maintain the intimate feeling. You reach it by descending on a curving staircase or in an elegant glass-walled elevator.
And then there's the topside, the sundecks.
And then there's the topside, the sundecks.
The large sunshades are closed because of the rotten, rainy weather in Amsterdam yesterday and last night, but this deck with its nice long walking track should see more activity if the sun comes out as forecast. There are probably going to be some games of deck chess.
You might even see a few people in this pool.
You might even see a few people in this pool.
It's small and shallow, more of a wading/soaking tub than for actual swimming, but there is a "swim-up" bar at the far end for hotter weather during the summer.
The first leg of the cruise is also the longest stretch of sailing time -- about 21 hours of continuous travel from Amsterdam to the modern German city of Düsseldorf.
Sailing from Amsterdam at noon, we first traversed the Amsterdam-Rijn canal, moving at a consistent smooth pace through endless acres of Dutch farmland....
... with the occasional grazing horse and the omnipresent characteristic, um, "aroma" that is the most rural of all smells. Along the way, there are lines of parallel drainage ditches, a continual reminder that we are still cruising along below sea level here.
Look closely at the road along the canal dike and you'll see another intriguing detail -- the entire road is paved with interlock bricks. A little way farther along, we cruised under this railway bridge which somehow contrived, from this angle, to appear oddly asymmetrical.
If that looks like a close call with the ship's wheelhouse, it is. Like many of the more modern canal cruise ships, the AmaSerena is equipped with a wheelhouse which can drop down by about 60 cm into a well in the deck for when the bridges get really low. And those white bars protruding into the right side of the picture? That's the ship's forward radar mast, also lowered for the same reason.
Along the way, the canal took us right through the city of Utrecht, but I managed to miss that by finally catching up on some much-needed afternoon nap time. Sometimes, it's hard to take a river cruise without missing out on things.
This canal requires two locks with a combined lift of perhaps 6 or 7 metres to reach the level of the Waal, the main channel of the Rhine in southern Holland. The lock shown here has gates that lift vertically upwards along the towers. This is definitely not the only lock design used on the European canals and rivers.
I stayed on my outdoor balcony on the way through the lock, and got this intriguing photograph of an algae colony on the concrete lock wall -- a picture which appeared to me uncannily like a satellite landscape photo from Google Earth.
As dusk fell, we were called to the lounge for a welcome-aboard toast and to be introduced to the major heads of departments on board. From there, we went down to the restaurant for a first night dinner that was memorable for quality and imagination in the menu. These river cruise ships take catering to a much higher level of gourmet sophistication than the ocean cruises I've been on, and they can do it because the number of guests is so much smaller.
The ship cruised smoothly through the night while I slept -- deeply. Obviously I needed it.
In the morning I took this brief video clip from my balcony to show how fast we were moving.
Oh, wait -- that's not us moving, it's the river. Even here, in the nearly flat lands traversed by the Nieder-Rhein ("Lower Rhine"), the river's impressive current attests to the powerful flow of water in Europe's second-biggest river by volume of water. The discharge flowing into the North Sea from the various mouths of the Rhine averages 2900 m³ or 102,000 ft³ per second.
So we were moored in Düsseldorf by 9:00 am, but I chose not to go ashore. I felt as if I had been running nonstop for 11 days, and I needed a break. Düsseldorf will still be here another time.
The first leg of the cruise is also the longest stretch of sailing time -- about 21 hours of continuous travel from Amsterdam to the modern German city of Düsseldorf.
Sailing from Amsterdam at noon, we first traversed the Amsterdam-Rijn canal, moving at a consistent smooth pace through endless acres of Dutch farmland....
... with the occasional grazing horse and the omnipresent characteristic, um, "aroma" that is the most rural of all smells. Along the way, there are lines of parallel drainage ditches, a continual reminder that we are still cruising along below sea level here.
Look closely at the road along the canal dike and you'll see another intriguing detail -- the entire road is paved with interlock bricks. A little way farther along, we cruised under this railway bridge which somehow contrived, from this angle, to appear oddly asymmetrical.
If that looks like a close call with the ship's wheelhouse, it is. Like many of the more modern canal cruise ships, the AmaSerena is equipped with a wheelhouse which can drop down by about 60 cm into a well in the deck for when the bridges get really low. And those white bars protruding into the right side of the picture? That's the ship's forward radar mast, also lowered for the same reason.
Along the way, the canal took us right through the city of Utrecht, but I managed to miss that by finally catching up on some much-needed afternoon nap time. Sometimes, it's hard to take a river cruise without missing out on things.
This canal requires two locks with a combined lift of perhaps 6 or 7 metres to reach the level of the Waal, the main channel of the Rhine in southern Holland. The lock shown here has gates that lift vertically upwards along the towers. This is definitely not the only lock design used on the European canals and rivers.
I stayed on my outdoor balcony on the way through the lock, and got this intriguing photograph of an algae colony on the concrete lock wall -- a picture which appeared to me uncannily like a satellite landscape photo from Google Earth.
As dusk fell, we were called to the lounge for a welcome-aboard toast and to be introduced to the major heads of departments on board. From there, we went down to the restaurant for a first night dinner that was memorable for quality and imagination in the menu. These river cruise ships take catering to a much higher level of gourmet sophistication than the ocean cruises I've been on, and they can do it because the number of guests is so much smaller.
The ship cruised smoothly through the night while I slept -- deeply. Obviously I needed it.
In the morning I took this brief video clip from my balcony to show how fast we were moving.
Oh, wait -- that's not us moving, it's the river. Even here, in the nearly flat lands traversed by the Nieder-Rhein ("Lower Rhine"), the river's impressive current attests to the powerful flow of water in Europe's second-biggest river by volume of water. The discharge flowing into the North Sea from the various mouths of the Rhine averages 2900 m³ or 102,000 ft³ per second.
So we were moored in Düsseldorf by 9:00 am, but I chose not to go ashore. I felt as if I had been running nonstop for 11 days, and I needed a break. Düsseldorf will still be here another time.
You have such an excellent way with words. I absolutely love reading your posts. You put such great detail into describing attractions and local areas. It's lovely.
ReplyDeleteThis trip has looked great every step of the way. Especially this cruise. It looks so comfortable and relaxing. I cannot wait to read your next entry!
Sometime in the future, I will make travels such as these and use your beautiful blogs as my guide.
Thanks again, Ken! See you when you get back.
Chelsey (from Jesse's)