So last week my girlfriend and I went on a 7 day cruise to Mexico and it was a great experience. The ship was called the Sapphire Princess.

There were four sea days and three land days. The only problem was that we spent full days in Puerta Vallarta, and Mazatlan, but only half a day in Cabo San Lucas.

If I had to rank my shore excursion experiences it would be something like this:

1. Cabo San Lucas – Snorkeling
2. Mazatlan – Some sort of crazy show with people flying around a pole
3. Puerta Vallarta – Dona Engracia Tequila factory

Oh and the shore excursions are definitely not included in the price of the cruise so that is extra depending on which excursion you choose to go on. The actual outdoors activities excursions are generally more expensive than the tours that take you around the city. But the outdoor activities are much more fun.

Perhaps my rankings are due to the fact that in Mazatlan and Puerta Vallarta we took tours. And in Cabo San Lucas we went Snorkeling. In case you are on Princess Cruises and want to go snorkeling in Cabo San Lucas make sure you have your own snorkeling equipment, otherwise you will have to use the old used snorkeling stuff. My girlfriend and I just used the goggles because we didn’t want to use the snorkel’s with used mouthpieces.

Overall the cruise was great. The ship had four dining rooms full of wonderfully free food. Unfortunately anything that you want to drink other than tap water is not free. But really the food on the cruise was absolutely, positively AMAZING. The only thing I didn’t like was the Fish and chips at the Savoy dining room.

Other than the over indulgence on the free food there were free shows and lots of loud events to attend. Fortunately the girlfriend was uninterested in the loud events so I did not have to attend any of them. We did end up going to see a show called “Piano Man”, which was amazing! if you are ever on the Sapphire Princess I highly recommend that you take some time to see it.

Now here comes the bad part of the cruise experience for me. The one thing that really pissed me off was the extremely high cost of the pictures. Since my girlfriend and I were out there with no other friends, there was really no way for us to take pictures with both of us in them. The cruise line takes FULL advantage of this fact. To buy a single print of a picture was $19.95 US dollars. if you wanted to get a digital copy you had to buy the print, pay $10.00 extra for the digital copy, and buy a $15.00 USB key. I found this to be a ridiculous price but was forced to buy one of the pictures because I had no other options.

If you think that this pricing is ok then the service is actually very good. They have photographers wandering around special events just taking pictures of couples and families and then you can just go buy the pictures very easily.

Here are some pictures I took while in Mexico and on the ship.

Here is the beach where we went snorkeling. It’s called Chileno Bay.

The main church in Puerta Vallarta

This next picture has a very funny story behind it. While we were snorkeling at Chileno Bay, my girlfriend scraped her knee on the barrier reef that was out there. As you can see the scrape is quite small but she was convinced that if she got any of her blood in the water sharks would come for her. We were about 300 feet from the boat at this point. She made me pull her 300 feet to the boat while she held her knee out of the water. If we didn’t both have life vests we would have drowned for sure. The whole way back I was telling her “you are being ridiculous! no sharks are gonna come and eat you.” After spending what seemed like forever getting back to the boat she asked the guy about sharks and she was told “you watch too many movies!” Oh well at least it’s a funny story.

The Panaplanta Flyers in Mazatlan. This was a crazy show they were spinning around that pole slowly unwinding the rope until they reached the ground.

The Sapphire Princess at Cabo San Lucas

I have like 1700 pictures that I took while on the cruise, way too many to post here but if anyone ever reads this they can post questions in the comments and I’ll ad more pictures. But I would totally recommend going on the Mexico cruise, but I would recommend that you do all the outdoors activities for the shore excursions instead of the Tours. The snorkeling was way more enjoyable than the tours.

Anyways, peace out ya’ll.