Southeast Asia Luxury Cruises

Vibrant and alive, Asia grabs on to your senses and takes them for a ride. Unless you've been there many time before, the sights, sounds, tastes and smells are like nothing you've ever experienced before.

Roughly stretching from India, east to China and Japan, and south to the Indonesian Archipelago, Southeast Asia is a vast region. Cruises here are anywhere from one to three weeks, plus many offer optional pre- and post-cruise land packages so you can go further inland to famed places like the Taj Mahal, the Great Wall of China and Angkor Wat, the ancient city of temples in central Cambodia.

Itineraries vary, but most depart from Singapore, Hong Kong, Bangkok and Tianjin/Beijing between October and May and include some combination of these popular ports * (though the following list is not comprehensive):

• Cambodia (Sihanoukville)
• China (Hong Kong, Shanghai, Canton and Tianjin/Beijing)
• India (Mumbai, Chennai and Cochin)
• Indonesia (Bali, Sumatra, Java, Lombok and Sulawesi)
• Japan (Yokohama/Tokyo, Kobe, Osaka/Kyoto, Hiroshima and Nagasaki)
• Korea (Pusan/Kyongju)
• Malaysia (Penang, Port Kelang/Kuala Lumpur, Sarawak and Sabah)
• Singapore
• Sri Lanka (Colombo)
• Thailand (Bangkok, Phuket and Ko Sumai)
• Vietnam (Ho Chi Minh City, Haiphong/Hanoi and Nha Trang)

(* For those ports with slashes, the first name is typically the port name, the second is the major city nearby.)

Nowhere is the contrast between old and new more vivid than in parts of Southeast Asia. Just about everywhere you turn is some intricately carved temple dating back 1,000 years sitting right next to a towering new office building. Bicycle rickshaws, buffalo-pulled carts, and rickety buses share narrow streets with shiny new cars driven by chauffeurs. Locals in sarongs or saris or baju kurungs, walk along side those in jeans and sneakers.

In the smallest villages of Asia, it's a different story. Time has stood still. Fields are tended with ox-drawn plows and camels plod along pulling carts stacked with wheat. The scent of tropical flowers mingle with incense, and hillsides are blanketed with emerald green rice fields and thatched-roofed huts.

The cruise lines' organized shore excursions give passengers a taste of Asia's multi-faceted history and culture. For example, in Hong Kong Princess offers a Chinese Cooking tour that includes a visit to a local market to learn about typical ingredients, then a cooking demo by a local restaurant chef, followed by a dim sum lunch ($79 per person). Silversea offers a day-long tour to Hanoi to explore the city's French colonial architecture, the Ho Chi Minh Mausoleum, and an ancient temple complex dating back 1,000 years to the Ly Dyansty ($179 per person).

Shopping is also a pastime in most ports, even for those who profess disdain for the sport -- in Asia, browsing the local wares is difficult to resist. From jade, gold and silver jewelry, to embroidered fabrics, and intricately carved wooden boxes, furniture and Buddhas, you'll invariably come back home with something. Seabourn, Silversea, Oceania and Regent all offer Southeast Asia Luxury Cruises.