Royal Mail Ship to St. Helena

[Shorex]

Great new thread idea! We're looking at taking the Royal Mail ship that stops in St Helena, Ascension Island, Walvis Bay, and Cape Town and returns to the UK twice a year. Anyone done it? Sounds like a great adventure to places that are hard to get to with traditional transport. Here is the website.

[zxcvbnm]

I haven't been, but have looked at this ship with great interest. It sounds fabulous. I've wanted to visit the island of St. Helena for years, since reading this intriguing book about its history;

The Emperor's Last Island: a Journey to St. Helena, by Julia Blackburn

It's interesting to note that you can stay in St. Helena for about a week, because the ship takes a round-trip voyage from St. Helena to Ascension Island, leaving passengers on St. Helena till it gets back.

Also - friends who spent time in Namibia tell me that it is an absolutely beautiful & very interesting country.

I hope someone else has some more specific information for you!!

 

Robin

[barante]

I was stationed in Johannesburg from 1980 to 1983 and always wanted to do this trip. I doubt that it will ever happen.

But the minitrip from Cape Town to Walvis Bay or back is highly recommended. I've been to Namibia severalo times and it's breathtaking. When I visited the seaside town of Swakopmund, I had never seen as German a town. Even the black Africans spoke German. Southwest Africa, as it was known, used to be a German protectorate.

Outside the town center was a memorial, with a gun-toting German soldier and black figures at his feet either dead or pleading for mercy. The legend on the statue read: "Mitt Gott fuer Kaiser und Reich" (With God for the Kaiser and Reich). The cast iron gates had the iron cross embedded on them.

It was as spooky as seeing Göringstrasse in Windhoek. (The latter was named for some early relative of Hitler's propaganda minister).

Anyway, the Atlantic shoreline is spectacular. So is the desert that occupies much of the interior. Some Germans had built castles in the sand; they looked like movie sets, they were so unreal.

The most fascinating thing was how interesting the desert was. It kept changing with lighting conditions throughout the day.

With some luck, perhaps one of the cruise lines will start excursions out of Cape Town to Walvis Bay and then to Angola. Another route that could be interesting would go from Durban to Maputo to Zansibar!

[sw18]

A wonderful DVD is available of a voyage on the RMS from this site.....

 

http://www.capricorn-studios.com/DVD_For_Sale.htm

 

Produced on St Helena to a very high standard....must have watched my copy at least ten times now!! :D

[englishlee]

Go now before they build an airport at St Helena. There are plans in the pipeline to do so.

[Host Walt]

For the benefit of those of us who don't know where

St. Helena is, here's a locator map of the group of

islands.

 

[Shorex]

With a little luck, I'll be posting a review in January of 2009!

[MYMOTHERSCHILD]

Barante, and all...it's great to see an interest in freighter trips. I'd go no other way if I had a partner AND if I were a youngster under 79! Eons ago, I read a Newsletter from FreighterTips, that whet my appetite. Oh my, I said to myself, shall I take the cruise to South America...how about the Orient...no, I think the Meditterean. Well, my husband was greeted that night with, "Surprise, dear! We're taking a freighter around the world. I've already paid." Of course, in 1971 (!) it cost $1500 each and we were on the seas for over four months. Wonderful, wonderful experience on the Oriental Overseas Carnaval, a cargo liner that took 200 passengers, as well as those voyages I took on freighters that carried 12 passengers. Yes, lots of stories!

I've learned to love cruising, especially since living in Florida where it happens so painlessly.

Hope to read of happy times on the high seas from those of you who are discoverig a new way to sail.

MMC

[sw18]

Mundy Cruising are offering a ship visit to the RMS St Helana on October 5th during her call at Portland. Don't have their contact details but a Google search should help......

[DownUnder]

For anyone interested in the west coast of Africa, you might like to look at the following website.

http://www.alvoyages.com (Adventure Life Voyages )

The Corinthian 11 (114 passengers) is doing a 30 day cruise departing Capetown for Seville on 29th March 2008 calling at Namibia, Angola,Gabon,Benin,Sierra Leone,Senegal,Mauritania,Morrocco & Gibraltar.

Due to visa difficulties for passengers on this side of the world, we have to cancel this trip but they have another planned for 2009 which hopefully we will be able to take. It's a fantstic cruise to a part of the world that is seldom visited by cruise ships and I envy anyone who is taking it.

[sw18]

I visited the RMS yesterday as she was in Portland for one of her two annual UK calls; the first thing that I noticed, before getting anywhere near the ship, was the friendliness that both the island and the ship are known for. We were to meet our group at the tiny and rarely used Britannia Passenger Terminal as passengers for Tenerife, Ascension, Cape Town and mostly St Helena were beginning to assemble for their voyage. Once on board you could tell that the ship worked very hard spending 100% of its time at sea in the Atlantic, however the ship was spotless in the passenger areas and looked perfectly maintained. The crew and shipping line staff conducting the tour were very much one team and took great pride in showing their ship off to a new public. The ship itself can best be described as functional and this most definitely is not small ship cruising a la Sea Dream or Silversea. The public areas are basic, yet comfortable - 2 lounges, good sized shop, an immaculate dining room, very reasonable bar charges- £7 for a bottle of house wine, a generous sized pool (2/3rds the size of a Silversea pool for less than half the passengers), a large sun deck, small gym, passenger laundry - in fact all the facilities you need on a passenger ship just on a smaller scale. The crew seemed to be very passenger focused with personal touches throughout e.g. they have a novel open bridge policy - if the gates to the bridge deck are open, it's "come on in", if they're closed it's "sorry we're busy, come bcack later we'll be happy to see you".

There was definitely no hard sell throughout the tour, in fact quite the opposite. Our guides were quick to stress that this was, above all, a working ship there to serve the "Saints", however you were left feeling that this more than added to the experience rather than detracted from it. I will be booking my voyage very soon!

[LaComtesse75017]

Shorex,

 

Did you make the journey in the end? If so, how was it?

 

Would love to hear from anyone that has made the voyage!

 

:)

[peachpeeps]

I understand that an airport is in the works?

Have they started yet??

[LaCroisiereS'amuse]

The airport project was shelved indefinitely at the start of the recession.....

 

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/7839438.stm

[Anna32]

My husband and I are going to do the round trip Cape Town - St. Helena - Cape Town on the RMS in November of this year. For us the trigger was reading a biography of Darwin in which the author described making the trip, following in the footsteps of Darwin.

 

Already very excited and counting down the days. Will be happy to post a report here once we are back!