One of the famous Grimaldi Line Ships, seen here leaving Le Havre on her way to Bilbao, then Casablanca, Dakar, Conakry, Rio de Janerio, Santos, Montevideo, Zarate, Buenos Aires, Paranagua, Santos, Rio and Dakar. Talk about a fantastic trip.
She will be back in Dakar for the second time on the 17th of January, and New Year will be celebrated between Santos and Montevideo. You can take a cruise as a passenger and enjoy a more robust and realistic cruise, seeing the working end of a port instead of the normal shoebox cruisers with thousands of passengers. A round trip can cost from €2500 up to €5000.
There is a full rundown on their homepage Grimaldi Freighter Cruises
, one of the interesting is that you can take your own car or bike, and then go for a spin around in the country you visit. It is a fairly unique type of trip. They must be fully booked all the time. This particular vessel could do with a lick of white paint in places, the disadvantage of white, the rust shows up so well.
More from the archives. Splendour of the Seas seen at Southampton Docks, not long after her launch from Chantiers de l’Atlantique at St. Nazaire in 1996, (more recently the same shipyard built the QM2). The paint damaged in the hawse pipe shows that the port anchor has only been used once or twice. I was 3/O on the Petro Tyne, her picture is on the side in the flickr bar(ship in ice), I obviously had plenty time for sight seeing back then!
Photos taken with my trusty Olympus Trip and using Ilford XP2 film, apart from that it was just point and press. The close ups were thanks to the daring seamanship of the skipper of the Hythe Ferry “Hotspur IV” a piece of history itself.
The splendid cruise ship was all flagged out and full of people, could even have been her first cruise, perhaps some reader might know more about the ship.
I took the photos 11 years ago, hard to believe it has taken so long for me to digitize them. The scanner is working full time getting all the old negatives catalogued. More old photos coming soon.
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