Viking Longship in Budapest
Our European Grand Tour 15-day river cruise from Budapest to Amsterdam took place on the Skirnir, one of many identical Viking longships cruising rivers in Europe. In Budapest alone we often saw 5 or 6 of them docked on the same day. Viking has docks both north and south of the Chain Bridge as well as one near the Elizabeth Bridge. There are 7 bridges across the Danube in Budapest.
stairway from the lobby to the upper deck
Boarding a Viking Longship for a river cruise is nothing like boarding an oceangoing vessel. There’s no port building or security screening or long lines of people waiting to get in. You just hand over your luggage to the waiting crew in the parking lot next to the ship and walk down the gangway. Once inside you show your passport at the desk and that’s it. We arrived around noon, which was about an hour before they had rooms ready so they said to come back to the desk in an hour to get the room cards. Meanwhile they had a small buffet lunch going in the ship’s lounge. People arriving after the rooms were finished got their room cards on arrival. One of the crew shows you to your room and then you are on your own.
one of two coffee stations
Skirnir is named after a servant of the old Norse gods. The ship is 443 feet long and was built in 2015. It holds 190 guests and 53 crew. Free wifi is included for all guests as well as beer or wine at lunch and dinner. A couple coffee stations with machines that make a variety of different coffee drinks as well as hot chocolate and hot water are available 24 hours a day. There’s a small selection of teas to go with the hot water.
random seating near the top of the stairway
Everything onboard is on a small scale compared to much larger ocean cruise ships. Rooms vary from below water level cabins with small windows just above the waterline to their biggest suites. In between there are cabins with French balconies or regular balconies, the difference being a balcony with chairs and a table that you can actually go out on or a door to open and look out from inside the room. The standard suites have a bedroom and sitting area with both French and regular balconies and the two large explorer’s suites are 445 square feet each with wrap-around balconies at the back of the ship. Rooms have refrigerators and a TV, but there is very little choice in things to watch on the TV.
mini golf and shuffleboard on the sun deck
Unlike many-decked ocean vessels, Viking longships have just 3 inside decks and an open sundeck on top. The lowest level is called the main deck. Most of this deck is below the waterline, though the tops of the rooms are above it. Passenger cabins on this deck have little slit windows at the top of the exterior wall, with a shelf all along the wall a couple feet wide making the floorspace in these cabins smaller than cabins on higher decks even if the ceiling space is the same. These cabins are at the center of the main deck with crew areas both fore and aft.
sunroom area of the Aquavit Terrace
The middle deck has balcony cabins down one side and cabins with French balconies down the other. Forward of the cabins, this deck houses the reception area, dining room, and kitchen. All meals during the voyage are served in the dining room, but people also have the option of eating upstairs in the sunroom area called the Aquavit Terrace or at the tables in the forward area of the lounge instead. There are outside tables on the bow too, but on our cold winter cruise nobody ate out there.
lounge
The upper deck has the two explorer suites at the back with balcony cabins on one side and a few French balcony cabins near the back and suites the rest of the way on the other. Forward of the cabins there’s a library with books and games and a small internet space with a couple of computers. Hallways forward of that on either side pass by the coffee stations. These have a choice of paper or glass cups and the machine sizes up which you put on it and fills the cup accordingly. The area also has a couple bins for morning pastries or cookies later in the day. Doors from each side lead into the lounge, which has a bar and a variety of places to sit and relax. It also has a piano where live music often plays. The Aquavit Terrace is just forward of the lounge. Any live entertainment, lectures, or breifings on the next day’s activities are done in the lounge. People can watch that on the lounge TV channel from their room if they don’t want to attend in person.
track on the sundeck with a view of the Chain Bridge in Budapest
The sun deck had a couple putting greens and shuffleboard as well as some seating areas surrounded by a walking track. The footing in that area is some sort of soft rubbery substance rather than a wooden deck. There’s more seating in front of that as well as the pilot house. It was a surprise to find a smoking area near the back of the sundeck since all the Viking brochures claim that their ships are non-smoking rather than just not indoors.
pilot house
The pilot house is attached to a mechanism that can raise and lower it because when the ship passes under low bridges everything on the sun deck has to fold down to the lowest possible height in order to fit. If the water level is too high to pass under the bridge then the ship can’t go beyond that point. It also can’t sail if the water level is too low for the bottom of the ship to clear shallow waters. Sometimes people end up switching to ships on the other side of bridges or getting transported on a bus if the water is too high or too low for the ship to sail. We heard scare stories before our cruise from people who spent part or all of their river cruise as a bus tour instead due to the height of the river, but ours went as planned on the same ship all the way from the beginning to the end.
library on the Skirnir
It’s been years since we’ve had to bring lifejackets to the muster drill, but on this ship it’s required. The safety video on the TV at boarding makes no mention of lifeboats, and there are none to be seen on the ship. People said that’s because the rivers are shallow enough that if the ship sinks the top of it will still be above water. In most places along the journey the shore is not that far away either.
dining room
There’s not the expanse of or ever-available food found on ocean ships. Dinner was not served until 7pm except one night when it was early due to an activity later that evening. Nearly all of the passengers would have preferred to have dinner earlier every night. Lunchtime varied a bit due to the day’s schedule, but was generally around noon. Breakfast has more hours of availability, especially for those who just want the pastries that are set out very early or continental breakfast at the Aquavit Terrace before the full breakfast service in the dining room opens.
lounge with piano
The nightly entertainment was mainly a live piano player in the lounge, who also played sometimes during the day. Each night before dinner the cruise director Marko (who went by Program Director on this ship) gave a port talk about what was going on the next day. An excursion at each port is included in the cruise and most ports also had optional excursions that cost extra. Times of daily excursions were not necessarily exactly the same as what the schedule provided pre-cruise said they would be, though they were fairly close. Some nights they did have other entertainment besides the piano player. Two evenings they had a guest lecturer, a couple times they had guest music performers, a few times they did game show competitions, and one night a glass blower came onboard to do a demonstration.
glass blower
The glass blower actually blew the glass, not like the one we saw in Venice who had a blob of glass, a barrel of fire, and long rods from which he made a horse by pulling rather than blowing molten glass. The one on Viking started with pyrex tubes, which he heated with something resembling a glorified bunson burner. He did not use any rods, but rather heated the glass until he could shape it to where it made its own rods from the ends of the glass tube stretched thin while he had a larger diameter bit in the middle. Blowing into the end of the skinny part enlarged the wider portion, which he had rolled in colored bits of glass while it was hot so he could make a Christmas ornament out of it. The live demonstration was just round ball ornaments – after all how much can you do on a ship. He had other more complicated things he brought with him to sell.
chef demonstration
One day the chef had an afternoon demonstration on how to make apple strudel, after which samples were passed out. A couple passenger volunteers helped out. During the demonstration they also provided coffee with whipped cream and chocolate liquor. In Vienna a local came in one evening for a talk about Vienna’s history.
Katz Castle on the Rhine River
The ship had port stops every day, but when it sailed during daylight it was quite scenic. A couple times were specified as scenic sailing when we had a longer sailing time than usual during daylight. One of those days we passed a whole lot of castles on the Rhine before stopping to tour one of them. After passing one called Katz Castle the next (smaller) one was named Maus. Cat and mouse right next to each other.
Skirnir in a lock
There were quite a lot of locks to pass through along the journey. Most would go unnoticed during the daytime other than happening to look out the window at the right moment. At night in the below-water-level cabin it was a different story. We could hear the ship bumping the lock wall, the water rushing in or out, and some sort of unidentified high-pitched whiny sort of ringing noise each time we passed through one. People in cabins on the higher decks did not have that experience. The noise may or may not have been the underwater sound of the lock gates opening and closing.
top of the stairway
The cruise started on the Danube River, passed through the Main/Danube canal to the Main River, which then connected to the Rhine River. The Rhine ends in Rotterdam rather than Amsterdam, but in the dark of night we did end up in Amsterdam. Probably through the Amsterdam-Rhine Canal which links Rotterdam to Amsterdam without having to go offshore and pass through the sea.
Cruise Stories 