We’ve not sailed on a Viking ocean cruise ship before, so the size and facilities on the ship are new to us. The passenger capacity is 930 guests, but it’s carrying just 533 passengers this cruise. We normally prefer smaller cruise ships but we’ve become quite comfortable with the Yi Dun. I’ll not bore you with many pictures of the ship’s layout and amenities. That is better done with an internet search.
Perhaps more interesting is the history of the ship. It was launched as the Viking Sun in 2017. In 2021, however, it was sold to the China Merchants Group and registered as a Chinese vessel. It’s now operated as a joint venture between Viking and the China Merchants Group. The crew is almost entirely Chinese. (An odd exception: The head chef is a Mexican woman.)
While almost all the passengers are American, with a few Canadians, Australians and Brits mixed in, perhaps a third of the passengers are Americans and Canadians of Chinese ancestry. Some are from Hong Kong and Singapore.
All the crew who interact with the passengers have some proficiency with English, but less so than on other cruise ships. I attribute this to the fact that on most cruise ships there are twenty or thirty nationalities represented amongst the crew. Hence, the common language even among the crew members is English. On this ship, it’s Mandarin. This likely slows improvement in English proficiency. Nuanced statements are error prone. I passed an Asian noodle station on the way into one of the restaurants and stated the noodle dish (dan dan) looked good. Later, sitting at a table in the restaurant, eating a course I had selected from the buffet line, I was brought a bowl of the noodles I had apparently inadvertently ordered. They, in fact, were good.
The decor of the ship is Scandinavian with Chinese accoutrements. (An oddity is that one of the restaurants, a small one, serves only Norwegian dishes. When we passed through it to reach a bar where the pianist was performing, no one was dining there.)
Not unexpectedly, the restaurants serve both Western and Asian fare, although the two specialty (i.e. reservations required) restaurants offer mostly Western cuisine.
We have multiple reservations for these specialty restaurants, in several cases sharing with couples we traveled with in Mongolia. One night we inadvertently entered a specialty restaurant instead of the main restaurant. Rather than turn us away, they invited us in, saying it was a light night for customers.
I promised only a few pictures, but here they are.
There are four lecturers on board, but only one we really like. For the rest of the cruise, we’ll go to her talks and, for the others, if after the fact we hear we’ve missed something good, we’ll watch the lecture later in our cabin. Frances and I have both read and listened to Great Courses lessons on China and we’ve found most of the lectures too simplified to be interesting. The oddest lecturer, to our mind, was the former Mexican Cultural Ambassador. His English is marginal and his lecture pictures generated by AI. As I said, odd.
On Viking, unless one purchases the enhanced beverage package, wine is available only during lunch and dinner. This does not prevent us from refilling our glasses several times during meals, then taking the last glassfuls back to our cabin. 😁
There are several musicians and musician groups on board, but our favorite is the pianist. She plays classical in the atrium before dinner and more contemporary selections in the evening in one of the lounges. The atrium piano is a Steinway and she does it justice.
The pianist. I thought she played the Chopin a bit fast. Aren’t I the snob? (She’s very good.)
Next, it’s back to our ports of call along the coast as we travel east through the South China Sea, pass between the mainland and Taiwan, then head north through the East China Sea.