Heather Shenkman

Age: 28
Occupation: Physician
Number of Cruises: 4
Cruise Line: Carnival
Ship: Destiny
Sailing Date: May 2nd, 2004
Itinerary: Southern Caribbean

Overall impression

The Carnival Destiny offers a young crowd and excellent destinations. However, the drawback is that this is a dirty ship with not much variety in food (especially if you’re a vegetarian or have any other type of restrictive diet), and while the base price of the cruise is inexpensive, you’ll be paying plenty for extras.

Pre-Cruise

We arrived the day before the cruise and used my husband’s Holiday Inn points and stayed at the Holiday Inn Express for free near Condado Beach. I would highly recommend flying in the day before the cruise, especially if you are going to have flight connections, as if you have a delay on the day of the cruise like some passengers we met, you’re screwed and end up flying to St. Thomas to catch the ship the next day. The hotel was a nice hotel and a short walk from many shops and restaurants. We had dinner at a sushi place, which I forgot the name of and had very mediocre food, but then again, San Juan isn’t exactly known for its sushi.

Embarkation

The taxi ride was about fifteen minutes from our hotel. In spite of Carnival saying that you can’t get onto the ship until 2:30, we were able to get on at noon. I was surprised at how smoothly the process went. People who were trying to cut the line were promptly sent to the back. Within an hour and ten minutes, we were on the ship’s Lido Deck eating lunch.

Cabin

Our cabin was 9168 on the Lido Deck. We had a balcony, which was so nice – well worth the extra $100 per person. Though I don’t know the dimensions of the cabin, it didn’t feel cramped at all.

The water in our cabin had two settings – hot and scalding. Our friends on the first deck, on the other hand, had cold water only for most of the trip. There is a hair dryer in the bathroom, which has this nasty habit of falling off the wall and being difficult to put back. Further, our hair dryer broke, as the handle of the dryer wouldn’t stay attached to the cord. The outlets on the walls say you can’t plug in a hair dryer, but as I didn’t feel like spending the entire night drying my hair with the piece-of-you-know-what hairdryer in the bathroom, I used my own dryer from home and managed not to short-circuit the boat.

Belyana, our cabin steward, did nice work keeping the cabin clean. And, when I got accused of stealing an extra beach towel, she resolved the issue so that we didn’t have to pay for the extra towel.

The TV stations stunk – while our daily programs listed ABC, CBS, and NBC, our channels consisted of Spanish-language ESPN, four cartoon channels, six Carnival ship-related channels, and CNN fn.

Entertainment (with a sports bar that doesn’t have ESPN or show playoff games!)
You would assume that the All-Sports Bar would play sports on TV, right? In fact, in order to talk my husband into going on this cruise, I reassured him that he’d be able to watch his dear Philadelphia Flyers’ playoff games. But no – the “sports bar” doesn’t have ESPN, and for most of the cruise didn’t have any network stations. You’d be more likely to see reruns of Frasier or the news in that bar.

The piano bar was pretty cool – we spent one night there and had lots of fun singing along off-key. And, the band on the Lido Deck was pretty good too.

We didn’t spend a lot of time in the bars – they all allow smoking, and I have asthma. The Lido Deck outdoor bar is where we spent a few of our nights. We met our favorite bar waiter there, Suresh, aka “Sushi”, who liked to say “Booze and cruise!” (imagine with thick Indian accent) and would reassure us “Sushi take care of you!”

On our days at sea, there wasn’t much to do. There were only a few activities listed. We found ourselves a bit bored.

The Spa/Gym

I spent a part of almost every day in the gym. It’s a good-sized facility and very nice and clean. There were windows with a view outside the ship. I took the spinning, step aerobics, and cardio kickboxing classes, which were all challenging and fun. There are a wide variety of weight machines and a free-weight area.

Food

If you are a vegetarian or have other food restrictions, this is not the cruise for you!!! The food is geared toward fat Americans – people who like lots of grilled, fried food, lots of beef, and everything loaded with butter and cheese. I am a vegetarian, and when eating anywhere outside of the main dining rooms, I found it difficult to find anything other than a gardenburger or pizza. Happy Valley, the Chinese place, had no vegetarian offerings, and even the lo mein had oyster sauce in it. I looked forward to the Indian spread of food on Friday, but even though most Indian people are vegetarians and every Indian restaurant has numerous vegetarian selections, the buffet only offered main dishes with chicken, beef, and fish. The main lines at the Lido Deck rarely offered a vegetarian entrée. My lunch every day consisted of a gardenburger and watermelon.

Expect to wait in line a while before getting breakfast or lunch on the Lido Deck, especially on a day at sea.

While there were several ice cream soft-serve machines, there was only one that was constantly functional throughout the cruise. The rest were out of order.

The Lido deck dining area was dirty. The tables were rarely clean and the chair arms were perpetually sticky. Worst of all, the drink machines, especially the ones nearest the main deck pool, smelled terrible.

I was impressed with the Universe Dining Room and our server Marina. The service was excellent and Marina was a great source of information about tours and excursions. And, I can’t neglect to mention our very fun dining companions Buck and Kristin. There was always a vegetarian entrée choice on the menu. However, I’d urge anyone with a restricted diet to ask questions about the food and not take any statements at face value. For example, I was told that a soup was vegetarian, but after asking a few more questions found out that it had beef broth.

Passengers

This was a very young crowd, with many young couples and not too many children or elderly couples. The crowd was very ethnically diverse too.

Ports

St. Thomas

There is very good discount shopping in the Havenworth shops. Our friend Buck purchased an engagement diamond ring for his fiancée. Super-Kmart is a short walk from the pier in case you forgot to pack anything. We took the ship excursion to Coki Beach to snorkel, which had beautiful fish and a very nice beach.

Dominica

Dominica is a very impoverished island, but has beautiful scenery and rain forests. There is nothing to do at the port; you will need to take a cab or excursion to do anything of interest. We took a rather cramped taxi tour of the island in the morning to Trafalgar Falls. It’s quite a view. When they say that you’re hiking at your own risk at the falls, they mean it, so be careful on the rocks. In the afternoon, we went tubing with Wacky Rollers. It was a great time, even if rain was pouring.

Barbados

We went on the Jolly Roger Pirate ship cruise. I recommend it highly. There was unlimited rum punch and fun music for dancing. Just about the entire boat was drunk. From there, we went to the Boatyard, a beach with a bar and lots of activities, but by the time we got there, we were tired out from the Jolly Roger trip that we just hung out on the beach.

Aruba

This was by far our favorite stop. In the morning, we took a taxi to Baby Beach – it cost $35 for a ride for all four of us. The beach was secluded and absolutely pristine, with maybe 50 tourists on the entire beach, and the water is clear blue. Do NOT get the bright idea to spend 4 hours out in the sun, even with sunscreen. You WILL end up sunburnt; we learned this the hard way. In the evening, we went to Carlos n Charlies, which was an absolute blast, with loud party music and plenty of tequila to be squirted in your mouth.

Debarkation

This was the smoothest debarkation process that I had ever seen. We were off the ship by 8:30 am, which was one of the benefits of being one of the highest decks of the ship.

Conclusions

We had lots of fun and really enjoyed our company and the ports of call. However, we probably wouldn’t take another Carnival cruise. Carnival seems to cut corners wherever they can and nickel and dime its passengers wherever possible, and it showed.

And finally, a loud shout out to Buck, Kristin, Denny, and Amy, our ship companions and drinking buddies.

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