Scenic Diamond - Bordeaux

 Cruise Day 1 17AUG22 Wednesday – Bordeaux

 

The hotel breakfast buffet had everything and we had a table by the window overlooking the Grand Théâtre. Pick up to take us to the boat was 14:00.

Scenic had arranged a 90-minute tour of Bordeaux by 2CV departing at 09:30. We were tempted to give this a miss and are glad we didn’t because it was great fun. The small basic two horsepower 2CV (aka Deux Chevaux = Two Horses) car was first built in 1948. Ours was built in the 1960s. It has a canvas roof that can – and was – opened. We rattled around the city while our driver, who was younger than the car, chatted to us and showed us the sights. We were following a 2CV carrying the other Scenic couple, but their car was built in the 1970s and didn’t keep stalling at red lights so it was in front.

We lunched at Le Noailles, and got back to the hotel for transfer to the boat.

 Check in at the boat was straightforward. We were given a lanyard with a small plastic rectangle bearing our name on one side and a QR code on the other which was used to scan us off and on the boat. We also got a room key card (On Viking the room key card is printed with your name and is used to scan you off and on the boat.)

Joan had forgotten to bring her health declaration, and I asked for a blank one for her to fill in, but they say it’s OK, they didn’t need it. Neither do they want to see the Covid inoculation certificate.

We were told to wait in the lounge as our rooms were not ready yet. The lounge came full of waiting people. An hour passed and then another. No one came to update us on the delay. Finally our rooms were ready at 17:30.

 In our cabin we started to download data into the app on our phones, but the file sizes are huge and I decided not to download everything.

The tour manager’s talk was before dinner but didn’t contain anything useful, except that daily schedules weren’t printed but a copy would be on reception desk each morning and we should photograph it so we had a copy. Also to photograph the gate code of the landing jetty so we could get on board if the gate was closed. (We are used to the Viking daily schedule on a four-page sheet of information about where we are that is placed on our bed the evening before.)

Meal menus were not placed outside the dining room (unlike Viking); they appeared on the in-cabin TV at the bottom of the daily schedule which would very slowly scroll down. Sometimes this wasn’t updated so the lunch menu would still be showing as you went to dinner.

One interesting fact given at the briefing was the total number of passengers 132 and the nationality breakdown. That was

UK – 68

Australia – 24

Canada -18

USA – 10

Ireland – 1

Which only adds up to 121 so I don’t know which is correct. The departure list has 56 cabins so if there are two people per cabin then there were 126 passengers.

 

And so to dinner. There were no tablecloths. Menus handed out had the recommended wines selected by the restaurant manager to match the food. Since there were many possible dishes, matching seems optimistic, but waiters were coming to tables asking ‘red or white’ and pouring them.

The white was Chardonnay, the red Gamay. Neither variety is grown in the Bordeaux region. I asked if I could have a Bordeaux wine and after a time the waiter brought another bottle which I could tell from a distance was not Bordeaux as it was a Burgundy shaped bottle.

Finally I we got a Bordeaux red, and a waitress showed me the wine list is after the food menu.  For later meals we chose Bordeaux wines from that list, but nearly everyone went with the recommended wines which were mostly cheap branded wines from the South of France.

The boat stayed in Bordeaux overnight.

Grand Theatre seen from our breakfast table in Intercontinental Grand Bordeaux.

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