We booked the Ancient Empires Cruise with Royal Caribbean for June 2008.. The documentation we received before the cruise told us that we would be sailing with Azamara Cruise Line which is a subsidiary of Royal Caribbean. This cruise visited mainly archeological sites but our reason for booking it was that it is the only cruise we could find in June that went to Istanbul, Turkey. I appreciate history and archaeology but I am not a keen fan!!! The other places I wanted to see were Capri, Santorini, and the Pyramids.

Our journey started in our home city of Dublin, Ireland and we flew to Rome. We were met at the airport by a rep with an Azamara sign and quickly bussed to Civitavecchia (about 1 hour) to board our ship the Azamara Quest. We only cruised once before on the Celebrity cruise ship the Constellation which had 2,000 guests and 1,000 staff and after the week we still did not know our way around the ship. So it was a relief to see that the Quest was a much smaller ship. It had 700 guests and 400 staff.

We were welcomed on board with champagne, wine and orange juice and the check in was very quick and easy. We had checked in online but had not printed the details so they just checked us in again with no difficulty. We were shown tour stateroom on the 7th deck which was spacious and well equipped with a lovely balcony. Read more