Cruise Lines

After my mammoth cruise on Ruby Princess I feel I have become something of an expert on European trains, or more specifically Italy's trains.

I would hate to tempt fate but I totally disagree with the guide I met once who told me cruise passengers should never use the Italian trains as they are so unreliable, because each one was bang on time.

But then she was guiding a ship's tour at the time, so it's in her interest to keep the cruisers paying her wages.

Based on the number of coaches waiting to whisk passengers off on their day trips, I reckon her job is safe for a while, but the number of people who are opting to do their own thing in ports is noticeably growing by leaps and bounds, which is not surprising when you look at the price difference.

Our train from Civitavecchia to Rome was €9 per person return, a bargain compared to basic Rome on your own - a coach there and back and six hours in the city (about the same as we had) - which cost $64 (about €44).

But for the extra money, of course, you also get the peace of mind that the ship won't sail without you if things do go wrong and that's still worth a lot to a lot of people.

Our train journeys took us from Naples to Sorrento and back in a very rickety old train that stopped about 35 times, which was very tedious, but at least we got a view of Pompeii along the way, from Civitacecchia to Rome and back and from Livorno to Florence and back, giving us the freedom to do as we wanted in each of the cities.

In Rome that naturally meant throwing a coin into the Trevi Fountain, visiting the Colosseum, the Pantheon and looking out over the Forum, which they have started to charge for, but they are also putting up boards around the outside to explain what the ruins are, which is a good move.

Thankfully, you can still fill your water bottles from the fountains like this for free. These are all over the city, and the water is cold and fresh. It's a sobering thought that these were there way back when Rome was an empire.

There is something very civilised about getting free water - one of the differences I really noticed between a cruise line like Crystal, which I was on at the start of August and where bottled water is free, and Princess, which I have just got off, where it costs something like $3 a bottle - plus a 15% gratuity.

If cruise lines have to charge, why not sell water for, say, $1 a bottle? They could buy it in bulk for half that so they'd still make a nice profit, but also sell masses much more than now as most people with an ounce of sense buy water ashore at the moment.

After Rome, we had another busy day in Florence. It was all a bit rushed because train times into the city are not great, but there was time enough to see the highlights and have a nice lunch as well, which is most important!

I also discovered that you can get a taxi from the port to Livorno station for €20. Get eight people in the cab and you've a one-way transfer for €2.50 per person. Much more acceptable than the €14 per person return the port was charging for a coach.

From Livorno, it was on to the jetset capital of Monaco, where we were moored near a yacht that made you realise Ruby Princess was not that big after all. And it's only the 10th or 11th (depending on what you read) biggest private yacht in the world.

My daughter Ilana so fell in love with the place, she decided we should buy a place there so we checked out a few prices. One flat looked very nice - and was a mere €28 million. Hmm. Maybe not.

While we were car spotting outside the Casino - Rolls Royces, Bentleys, a Ferrari here and there - we noticed these guys cleaning the window outside the Hotel de Paris. Surely this is the only place in the world where people wear suits to clean windows?