The 30-day Cape Town to Dover cruise on the Ocean Princess was a great adventure, and it really made me fall in love with Princess' small ships.
I’ve been wanting to go on a West Africa cruise since Princess first started them in 2009, but the timing has never seemed to work. Fortunately, the May 2015 cruise happened to coincide with an extended period off work, which allowed for a long vacation. Prior to my booking this cruise, Princess changed the itinerary due to fears of Ebola – even though there was a total of just one Ebola case in the four countries where ports were cancelled! Stops in Benin, Togo, Ghana, and Senegal were replaced with Angola, Madeira, Malaga, and Lisbon and the cruise was rebranded as the Two Continents Adventure. While I was disappointed to miss the cancelled ports, I had never been to any of the added European ports, so it still seemed like a great itinerary.
Ebola and the subsequent itinerary changes really seemed to have an impact on bookings for this cruise. On the roll call, it seemed like most of the people who had originally booked this cruise a year ago or earlier ended up cancelling. The result was some really good last minute pricing. In March, balcony cabins for this 30-day cruise were going for as low as $1800 pp. Since the cabin is not very important to us, we booked an inside guarantee for $1300 pp, but we were upgraded to a full oceanview cabin on Deck 4.
We had booked an inside cabin, as we usually do, but were upgraded to an oceanview cabin on deck 4. It was nice having the window, but not a big deal - I will continue to book inside cabins in the future. Often, the window was filmed with salt spray, so you couldn't see outside clearly.
I liked having the small couch in the cabin, but the extra space given for the couch seemed to come at the expense of less space for the closet area, which was smaller than on most Princess ships.
This was a convenient location, but I suspect that any cabin would be in a convenient location on this small ship!