Westysclan World Cruise 2023

Today the ship arrived in Brisbane to disembark the final passengers from the 35 day cruise of the Pacific and collect the final passengers for the world cruise. We had anticipated that we would be among the ‘younger’ guests on the cruise and we weren’t wrong. However a number of the passengers that boarded in Brisbane seemed to be slightly closer to our age. I will call us the ‘newly retired’ as opposed to the ‘well practiced retired’

We docked at the very new Brisbane International Cruise Terminal. It was completed in 2020 and then mothballed for 2 years, so everything still looks very new. Unfortunately it is a long way from the city and not serviced by any public transport.

As we had lived in and visited Brisbane many times in the past we didn’t have any specific tourist destination planned. Instead, we were just going to use Brisbane as an opportunity to purchase anything that we might need on the ship. Turns out everything that we thought we might need was provided or could be requested free of charge on the ship. So we decided to save the $80 it would have cost to get into the city and back and just explore the local area by geocaching.

Having found the only 3 geocaches in the area, which took us on a 5km walk, we returned to the ship for a late lunch.

After the first 2 days of walking past the indoor and outdoor pools on the ship and going “too cold yet!” we decided that after our walk around a very industrial Pinkenbah it was finally warm enough to try the hot tubs in the atrium. They have now become a part of our daily routine, and I suspect that it might not be many days before it is hot enough for us to swap to the outdoor pools.