16 Night Cruise sailing from Singapore to Port Louis aboard Silver Whisper.

With Silver Whisper, Silversea has taken its award-winning concept of elegant, all-suite ultra-luxury ships to the next level by incorporating technological innovations and guest suggestions to create this extraordinary vessel designed to carry Silversea's tradition of all-inclusive luxury and style into the new millennium.The ships have the highest space-to-passenger ratio in the industry at 74, providing more space per passenger than any other cruise ship. Space ratio is derived by dividing a vessel's gross tonnage, which is a volume measurement of its interior space, by its lower berth capacity.

Silversea's service is simply the world's best. It is a philosophy, an attitude - complemented by distinctive European style and inherent in all that we do. Achieving perfection is driven by our desire to please. To see you smile. It begins the moment you step aboard with a warm welcome and a flute of champagne, and follows throughout your voyage with an unspoken anticipation of your needs. Sailing on Silversea's intimate ships is like visiting a friend's home; you're greeted by name and your personal preferences are always remembered.

Highlights of this cruise:

Singapore
To arrive in Singapore is to step into a world where the call to prayer competes with the bustle of capitalism; where old men play mah-jongg in the streets and white-clad bowlers send the ball flying down well-tended cricket pitches; where Chinese fortune-tellers and high-priced management consultants advise the same entrepreneur. This great diversity of lifestyles, cultures, and religions thrives within the framework of a well-ordered society. Singapore is a spotlessly clean, modern metropolis surrounded by green, groomed parks and populated by 4.6 million orderly and well-regulated people, including many foreigners. At the southern foot of the island is Singapore city, with its gleaming office towers and working docks. Of the Singapore's total land area, more than half is built up, with the balance made up of parkland, farmland, plantations, swamp areas, and forest. Well-paved roads connect all parts of the island, and Singapore city has an excellent public transportation system.

Phuket
Ko Phuket is linked to the mainland by a causeway and to the rest of the world by an international airport. Its indented coastline and hilly interior make the island seem larger than its 48-km (30-mi) length and 21-km (13-mi) breadth. Before tourism, Ko Phuket was already making fortunes from tin mining and rubber plantations. Backpackers discovered Ko Phuket in the early 1970s. Word quickly spread about its white, sandy beaches and cliff-sheltered coves, its plunging waterfalls and impressive mountains, its cloudless days and fiery sunsets. Beautiful beaches and excellent diving and snorkeling have made Phuket one of the world's favorite islands. Although it was hit hard by the tsunami of 2004, much of the island was unaffected.

Colombo
Hot, noisy, peaceful, beguiling, frustrating, and fascinating are some of the adjectives you're likely to use while visiting Colombo. The main city of Sri Lanka (population 2.2 million) can feel like a smaller place than it is because the parts that are of most interest to visitors are fairly compact. As a visitor to the cruise port, you're continuing a tradition that goes back as far as the 5th century, when Colombo was an important port linking East with West. The Dutch used the town for trading with rich cinnamon plantations in the 17th century. Since independence in 1948, it has not stopped growing, with suburbs extending far north and south along the Indian Ocean coast.

Male
The Maldives encompass a chain of more than a thousand small, low-lying coral islands. Created by the peaks of an ancient submerged volcanic mountain range, the islands are protected from the open ocean by barrier reefs that enclose crystal-clear lagoons and brilliant white beaches. The atoll stretches across the equator in a thin strip 452 miles long and 70 miles wide. There are no hills or rivers in the Maldives and none of the islands rise more than nine feet above sea level. It is feared that the whole archipelago could be submerged within 30 years because of the rising sea level caused by the greenhouse effect.

The history of the Maldives can be divided into two stages - before and after the conversion to Islam in 1153. According to a theory by Kon-Tiki explorer Thor Heyerdahl, the islands lying at the trading crossroads of several ancient maritime nations date from around 2000 BC. The first settlers are thought to have arrived from Ceylon and southern India at around 500 BC. While there is no concrete information of the pre-Muslim period, the second stage is well documented through a series of sultanic dynasties to the recent birth and rebirth of the republic. In the long history of the Maldives little interference was experienced from colonial powers except for a 15-year occupation by the Portuguese in the mid-16th century; it was a British protectorate from 1887 to 1965.

Visitors are subject to certain restrictions that limit them to the resorts and the capital, Male. Covering only one square mile, the town is packed with over 60,000 residents. To create more space, the boundaries of the island have been extended over the past 30 years through land reclamation. Business activities are concentrated toward the north end of the island, around Marine Drive and the harbor. The reclaimed land is mainly to the south; a new harbor, inaugurated in the southeast corner of the city in late 1992, has helped to ease the load on the already over extended old port. Male itself has no beaches, but there are over 70 resort islands surrounding the capital. Their main features include excellent facilities that are centered around the sea and its spectacular marine life. Snorkelers and divers will experience an incredible underwater world; swimmers can enjoy the warm turquoise waters of the Indian Ocean.

Port Louis
Located just off the east coast of Madagascar, Mauritius is fast making a name for itself as the tropical paradise of the Indian Ocean. A volcanic island approximately 10 million years old, Mauritius is thought to be the peak of an enormous sunken volcanic chain stretching from the Seychelles to Reunion. In fact, volcanic lakes and inactive craters can be found scattered throughout the island.

Mauritius also boasts a unique marine environment. Surrounded by one of the largest unbroken coral reefs on the planet, conservationists are now campaigning to protect its white coral sand beaches and fragile ecosystem. Though it can be found on the maps of early Arab mariners, Mauritius remained uninhabited until the end of the 16th century. The Portuguese became the first European visitors in 1510, however, they did not lay claim to the island. In 1598 Dutch colonists settled on the island, naming it after Prince Maurice of Nassau. The Dutch colonial period saw the development of thriving sugar cane plantations as well as the decimation of the ebony forests and the extinction of the dodo bird and other indigenous wildlife. Eventually abandoning their settlement in 1710, Mauritius lay unclaimed until the arrival of the French five years later. Renaming the island Ile de France, the French continued the cultivation of sugar as well as indigo, cloves, nutmeg and other spices, retaining possession of the island until 1810 when it was ceded to Britain at the end of the Napoleonic Wars.

Now an independent republic, Mauritius is a vibrant cultural mix with impressive mountains, boundless sugar cane plantations and some of the most exquisite beaches and aquamarine lagoons in the Indian Ocean.