Preface

For the last couple of years, Don and Mary-Theresa (MT) had been watching the BBC series “Death in Paradise” on our local PBS channel. The show takes place on a fictitious island of “Sainte Marie” that is supposed to be near Guadeloupe in the West Indies. The series is actually filmed in Guadeloupe. MT had said it would be neat to visit that area. In a Viking Ocean Cruises catalog we received in the mail, we noticed the “West Indies Explorer” cruise, described as sailing by Guadeloupe on the way to other islands. Indeed, the cruise route would pass Guadeloupe twice, but unfortunately that occurred only when the ship was moving from one port to the next, always at night. One day, we actually caught a glimpse of Guadeloupe, hazy and in the distance, from a lookout on the island of Antigua.

Map of our West Indies Explorer cruise, showing our route in red (from Viking Ocean Cruises catalog).

Cruise summary showing our stateroom 3086 and ports by day (from Viking Cruise Documents).

Map of our West Indies Explorer cruise, showing Guadeloupe between either St. Kitts or Antigua and St. Lucia, but not labeling Dominica between Guadeloupe and St. Lucia (from Viking Cruise Documents).

Map of our West Indies Explorer cruise, showing Guadeloupe (not labeled) between either St. Kitts or Antigua and Dominica (from Viking Daily newsletter for Nov 21).

Don’s key card (top) and other side of MT’s key card (bottom) [besides being the keys to our stateroom, we had to swipe these every time we exited or reentered the ship].

Deck Plans for Decks 6-9 and side view of ship.

Deck Plans for Decks 1-5; Statistics at bottom include type of ship as “Small Ship (Cruising)” [we say larger ships in some ports] and number of guests as 930 [we were later told that did not include the crew of 450].

Page from Cruise Documents showing the location of our stateroom 3086 (in red) on the port side of Deck 3 aft.

Don took lots of photos on his Nikon digital camera, and MT took some on her iPhone. Her photos from the iPhone are identified by the annotation “MT” at the beginning of the photo caption in this blog.

The following posts are a day-by-day account of our cruise in 2019 based primarily on Don's notes and supplemented with MT's notes. When information from other sources is added—for further explanation to readers or to satisfy our own curiosity—that is set off in a text box (like this one). Occasionally, photos from other sources (such as the public domain Wikimedia Commons) are used for clarification; the sources are identified, as required, at the end of the photo caption.