It’s not every day we can say that we have escaped from a cruise ship – not walking the plank, but actually abandon the ship. By our own choice, but not what we really wanted to do. On top of that, we did end up in a jail. Does it sound strange? It is! Let us begin to tell you the story…

We had jumped on a bargain cruise deal Stockholm – St Petersburg and were happy to board the ship in Stockholm, though we did notice that the ship was not exactly a luxury cruise ship when arriving. You could tell from the outside already that it was a bit worn.

As usual we had done some research on the internet, but had not read anything too bad about it, so we thought that it was alright to take the chance – not expecting real luxury either. What was awaiting us though, was not really what we had in mind.

Our A-cabin should have had a rather decent standard and not the worn look it had. The small holes in the bed linen – and one of the bed covers looked like someone had both used it as a toilet and vomit on it – together with the flaking bathroom floor and moldy shower made it very unappealing to us, to put it mildly.

We would not let that lower our mood though, so we adapted to the standard, thinking that we should make this cruise memorable anyway. The general areas at the ship were not that bad, with some bars and restaurants that looked pretty decent (even though the prices were not exactly matching in our minds). We had some nice champagne and the performance of the professional dancers were excellent.

It was when we were going to bed in our cabin the first night when we noticed the biggest problem. Had we got a cabin in the machine room? We had to laugh at the thought. First. Then the noise increased even further. Our bed started to shake. And the floor too. And not of the right reasons (lol). No, not even the neighbors were having fun there.

What the heck was this? Did we have the machine room right below us? But no, we were on the 6th deck, it was not possible. Still, everything was shaking. And it was totally impossible to sleep even though neither one of us normally are easy to disturb when it comes to sleeping. We are used to people partying around us, making noises. We have no problems to sleep to normal noises.

After a whole night without any sleep, we still were determent to make this trip as memorable as possible, thinking positive that now we would be so tired that we would sleep as a rock the second night. It was then we realized the truth: we were on top of the disco loudspeaker equipment somehow! Have you ever tried to sleep in the middle of a disco…? A smoky disco too, because we could smell smoke in our cabin too.

For some (strange?) reason, we did not feel so very fresh at this cruise trip… Without hardly any sleep for two nights (and for me it was actually the 8th night without full sleep!) we were not so forgiving any more. We asked desperately for a new cabin, which we finally got, but a C-cabin way below, in a more quiet part of the ship.

Of course it was more quiet – anything would have been more quiet than our first cabin! But at this time we were so tired that we didn’t even care that we had paid extra for an A-cabin and got a C-cabin, we so desperately needed our sleep to be able to do the sightseeing during the days.

The new cabin were not in any better standard, but at least a bit less noisy – we were not sleeping on top of the loudspeakers any longer, but we still noticed that it was more noises than we are used to hear from cruise ships and didn’t sleep well anyway.

By then I was really tired of this lousy ship experience and said: Let’s escape this shitty ship tomorrow morning when arriving to Helsinki port. I don’t care that we don’t have any other tickets to get home from there, I refuse to stay here any longer. I don’t want to cruise from Helsinki to Stockholm with this ship.

We abandoned the ship the next morning right after the breakfast buffet (which by the way, was not so very fresh and would cause after effects!) without having any return tickets home…

Come back to read Part 2 where we will tell you all about our following nights and how we ended up in jail…

©Lifecruiser Love Cruises