A friend had the Northern Lights on her Bucket List and I gladly accepted the offer to join her on this cruise. It all started out great until our first night at sea. The ocean wasn’t that rough, but the ship was rolling and rocking a bit. This was when we discovered our cabin, #6054 had a serious noise problem. It sounded like Thor was banging his hammer on a huge metal pipe under our cabin’s floor. The vibrations from this clanging even appeared to break the floor tiles in the bathroom of our cabin. We asked our Room Steward to see if he could relay a message to maintenance to find the source of the noise. We also asked guest services about it. No one could explain why there was a noise like we were experiencing and never once did we get an apology from Viking during the remainder of the cruise. The noise only happened when the seas were a little to very rough and was loud up enough to interrupt sleep even while wearing ear plugs.

On the bright side, we did see the northern lights in Alta, Tromsø and while passing by the port of Bodø (which was cancelled because of high winds). Norway is beautiful, the food on board the ship was acceptable, the entertainment and activities on board good, the cabin was beautifully appointed and excursions interesting. But the absence of any apology or explanation for the noise was unacceptable behavior by the staff and crew of the Viking Star. I most likely won’t be traveling with them on an ocean cruise again.