Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast with me Simon Calder.

Today we're going cruising, but not necessarily where we thought.

I'm going to be talking about when your voyage goes a little bit wrong.

Well, let me tell you why I'm talking about this, because a couple of cases just in

a past week or so have been really very annoying for a lot of passengers. It started when a cruise

that was called Arabia and the World Cup, which sounds a fantastic thing to do,

until you learn that actually the people on the cruise

weren't going to be able to go to Qatar, which is the host city.

Effectively, the cruise line, which of course had to start selling the thing a good year in advance,

thought, great, we've got a fantastic

opportunity here. We can say to people, we're going to give you three days in Doha. You're not

going to have to worry about your accommodation. You're not going to have to worry about having

transport in and out. We're just going to give you that opportunity. And then, as you may

have heard, they were told no cruise ships during the World Cup. And so for hundreds of

disappointed people, they've got a choice between canceling the whole thing and finding another

way in. And I still haven't found out what that is.

However, coming down the track shortly beyond them, in their wake, as it were, is the Inca history voyage. This is organised by Hurtigruten, the Norwegian company, and it's an expedition vessel,

and it's just coming down from the northern hemisphere

from the Arctic to the Antarctic and might as well carry passengers. So what they've done,

they've sailed down to Panama. They have sailed through the Panama Canal. They then,

we're going to go to Ecuador, then three stops in Peru.

How lovely seeing the colonial port of Trujillo, going to Kalao, which is the port for

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