The following is a review of our twelve night Singapore to Perth cruise on Dawn Princess in May 2015. In brief, we have cruised numerous times with NCL, RCCL, Oceania (many times) and Seabourne. If this was the first cruise we had ever taken we would never cruise again because it was absolutely hideous. I thought a cheap cruise fare back to Australia from Singapore would surely have to be better than flying, however I was wrong. At least the pain of flying is quickly over, whereas the pain of being stuck on this old ship lasted nearly two weeks. If you don’t have time to read my diatribe below and you are considering taking a cruise on this ship my advice would be: don’t do it! If you wish to read further, the following is a point-by-point analysis of why we didn’t like it.

General ambience and fellow passengers: If you are Australian please picture your local RSL club; this will give you a good idea of the overall ambience on board. If a RSL/services club doesn’t mean anything to you, perhaps an similar analogy could be a down-at-heel golf club or similar. Your fellow passengers vary from old and doddery to kids, with the former being more common than the latter but the latter being noisily in evidence around the pool. Passengers are 99% Caucasian and, in the main, not well travelled. The local mining company also seems to have sent its staff on a cruise – there are many ‘ocker’ men of a type that I thought went out in the 1970’s: picture huge beer guts, shorts, thongs, singlet and tats with a can of VB beer permanently attached to one hand (yes they do sell VB). On dressier occasions they wore really bad (not funny bad, just plain bad) tropical shirts. For the typical middle-aged woman a T-shirt from Target with as much bling attached as possible on some sort of nautical theme is de rigour accompanied by polyester Capri pants and a pair of Crocs (Crocs were very popular for both genders). If you are a younger woman you will be best occupied keeping your fake fingernails wrapped around a cocktail-of-the-day, which is usually blue and eye catching.

The actual ship was decorated in the 1990’s and doesn’t seem to have changed much since then. The décor is a la Australian country hotel; mushroom, brown, beige and peeling gold sprinkled with bad art of the cheap Chinese-copy ‘abstract’ variety. The decks are partly covered with blackening blue or threadbare green AstroTurf, and the whole thing desperately needs a repaint (or maybe a one-way trip to Chittangong would be the best bet). But wait….they are repainting it. Despite having just emerged from a week in dry dock, the ship was being repainted on most passenger deck areas. Rest assured that if you actually found a quiet spot on deck, someone would come along and paint around you, meaning you have to move unless sunbathing surrounded by paint fumes is your thing. Read more