As a kid, a long one-way train ride from Louisiana to California took me out of the Asthma Belt and

The hottest segment of cruise travel is river travel new ships being built, new itineraries and destinations in the works, new cruise packages being offered. quality accommodation bologna In Europe and Asia especially, river cruising is big and getting bigger.
Cruising a river as a different vibe than ocean cruising. In general, the whole experience is more intimate. If anything, it might be closer to what ocean cruising used to be, before the cruise ships evolved into enormous floating quality accommodation bologna theme parks.
A typical modern river cruise vessel will typically carry only about 100-200 passengers total, maybe as many as 400 for the very largest ones. Your newer ocean cruise ships nowadays carry more than double that on one deck.
When you cruise the world's oceans, there will be days when all you see is ocean. Endless sea, endless sky, air that doesn't smell like auto exhaust. If you're lucky, maybe a few or a few hundred dolphins showing off beneath you. For some folks and I'm one of them that's plenty quality accommodation bologna entertainment enough.
The two biggest lines today, Carnival quality accommodation bologna and Royal Caribbean, are so worried that their thousands of passengers might grow bored that they've spent the last decade or so transforming their ships into floating entertainment centers restaurant districts, amusement parks, theaters and shopping malls at sea. Not to mention the bars and casinos, of course.
You won't find all that hype aboard a river cruiser. The river itself, and the lands through which it passes, are the stars of the show. And unlike an ocean cruise, when you're plying a great river, quality accommodation bologna the scenery changes by the day, the hour, the minute.
Towering skylines quality accommodation bologna give way to towering forests, mountains, sand dunes, farm fields, vineyards. Above the banks of European rivers, you may spy castles, cathedrals. In Asia, perhaps ancient temples. In Africa, wildlife.
Vessels of all kinds, from small pleasure boats to low-slung barges laden with cargo, huge freighters and tankers, and even the occasional sea-going cruise giant, form lines of traffic that literally flow on either side of you.
I discovered all this, oddly enough, during a Caribbean cruise aboard Royal Caribbean's Grandeur quality accommodation bologna of the Seas. The cruise originated in New Orleans, which meant that the first day was spent slowly negotiating a hundred miles of the twisting, turning Mississippi River.
Around every serpentine bend, it seemed, there was something waiting to hook your attention a massive oil refinery here, a historic battlefield there, huge commercial vessels flying the flags of seemingly half the United Nations.
Nor is river cruising a one-size-fits-all affair. As small as most river cruise vessels quality accommodation bologna are compared with oceangoing cruise ships, you can go smaller still, aboard commercial barge converted quality accommodation bologna to carry passengers, some carrying as few as six. You ll see a lot of these in Europe, plying the smaller rivers and canals long abandoned by most commercial traffic.
The pace is leisurely enough that you can take a bike ashore and ride ahead, exploring the countryside and stopping in villages along the way, then re-boarding downstream in time for lunch or dinner.
Unlike the ocean cruise industry, which is dominated by a relative handful of giant companies, there are far more river cruise operators around quality accommodation bologna the world. Some sail in multiple regins around the world, while others limit themselves to a single country or continent:
The growth of tourism in China and Vietnam, coupled with the opening up of Myanmar (formerly known as Burma ) is opening up ancient river and breathtakingly beautiful country quality accommodation bologna little seen by Western travelers. It s the reason river cruise lines like Viking are busily building new ships.
China in particular is offering tour packages that include not only Yangtze River and Three Gorges cruises, but airfare to and from China as part of the package, sometimes for substantially less than $2,000 per person.
Indeed, the one country that seems to be lagging when it comes to river cruising is the United States, which has some of the world s major rivers including the one that Native quality accommodation bologna Americans dubbed the father of waters, the Mississippi.
What you find mainly in this country is a relative handful of steamboat cruises, aboard actual old-time steamboats or modern replicas of them. The theme is almost always the same, trying to re-create the ambiance of Old South. Antebellum 2.0, so to speak. Mansions, plantations, cotton and sugar cane fields. Slavery. Ah, the good old days.
IBIT says: Until somebody comes along to make river cruising as modern and attractive here in the States as it is elsewhere quality accommodation bologna in the world without quality accommodation bologna the sanitized version of US history as a bonus I ll look Europe, South America and Asia for a chance to head upriver.
This entry was posted in Cruise travel , Independent Travel and tagged AMA Waterways , Amazon River , Asia , Burma , China , Europe quality accommodation bologna , Mississippi , Myanmar , Old South , river cruise , Russia , South America , Three Gorges , United States , Vietnam , Viking River Cruises , Yangtze River on 02/11/2013 by imblacknitravel .
Greg Gross is a New Orleans native. Southern California resident. Award-winning journalist. Lifelong writer, traveler, dreamer. Loves trains, cycling, Paris and sunsets at sea. Dreams of Africa and comfortable seats in Coach. You can never have too many visa stamps in your passport. We live in a global village; it's time you met the neighbors.
As a kid, a long one-way train ride from Louisiana to California took me out of the Asthma Belt and into a place where I literally could breathe. Along the way, it showed me a world beyond the one I knew. It taught me to imagine, to wonder, to dream.
Let's take the mystery, confusion quality accommodation bologna and fear out of travel. quality accommodation bologna Let's see how it works (and ways that it can work better), how it can benefit your life, and your children's lives, how it can strengthen us as a nation and help lift us up as a people.