“Getting there is half the fun,” goes the well-known Cunard Line slogan. Passengers aboard the Queen Mary 2, which docked in New York early Saturday morning, found the other half of the fun was trying to get into Manhattan from Red Hook, Brooklyn, where the majestic ocean liner docked.

As the huge passenger ship – the world’s largest – sailed smoothly into the new Brooklyn Cruise Terminal, passengers disembarking in the morning hours craned their necks to catch their first glimpse of New York.

So imagine their surprise when then they landed not on the bustling West Side of Manhattan but on the Brooklyn waterfront.

Two years ago, Carnival Corporation, which operates both the Cunard and the Princess cruise lines, signed an agreement with the city to make the Brooklyn Cruise Terminal its new port of call. The Queen Mary 2 is the first ship to berth at the $56 million facility, which is expected to receive about 40 ships in its first year of operation.

Although the crossing went smoothly, the land-lubbing part of the cruise had some problems. Tour buses were snarled and taxis could be scarce. Some drivers weren’t even sure how to get to Red Hook.

“Unorganized chaos,” Ian Sutherland of Oxfordshire, describing his hour and a half wait for a tour bus to pick him up, said. Mr. Sutherland, however, remained positive, saying that although the transfer from the ship to the tour buses was delayed, everything else, including customs, went “like clockwork.”

The passengers may have been arriving in Brooklyn, but a television reporter asked the borough’s president, Marty Markowitz, whether they would be staying in Brooklyn. “If they want to take a day trip to Manhattan, I give them permission,” Mr. Markowitz joked.

One who took advantage of that permission was Marie Hooley of Yorkshire, who said she had no trouble finding a cab at about 8:30 a.m. and heading off to Greenwich Village, Central Park, and Times Square.

Confusion, however, sometimes seemed to be the order of the day. A tour bus bottleneck occurred as passengers waited in lines to get their names checked off lists for buses run by the Academy and Golden Touch bus companies. Delays of up to an hour and a half resulted, passenger William Lucas of London said.

The delay did not dampen Mr. Lucas’s overall good humor about being back in America for the first time in 60 years. He last visited New York in 1946, around the time of his service in the British Royal Navy.

The car situation was somewhat better. A member of the International Longshoremen’s Association Local 1814, who did not want his name published, said that initially there had not been enough medallion taxis, but livery cabs, which charge a higher price than taxis, soon filled the breech.

Will the supply of taxis be great enough to handle passengers from roughly 40 ships scheduled to arrive in Red Hook in the coming year? Mr. Markowitz said he is confident that “entrepreneurship will meet demand.”

Still, obstacles remained for passengers traveling in both directions. Simon Owens of Bristol, in trying to leave the New York Marriott Financial Center on West Street to get to Brooklyn, had to sort through three cabs before he found one that would take him. The first driver said he didn’t know where the Red Hook piers were, and the second driver didn’t want to go there.

Marlene and Richard Briance of Sussex said their resourceful driver phoned fellow cabbies for directions.

John McGregor, who was heading to Brooklyn from Manhattan to catch the ship on its return voyage, assisted his driver with printed instructions from the travel company. His trip from a Midtown hotel to Red Hook in a cab cost about $26. “For us, it would have been better if the Queen Mary 2 had docked in Manhattan,” he said.

Several cab drivers said they had no problems finding the pier. Adel Sadek, who works for Taxi Management of Woodside, N.Y., said it was “very easy to find,” as did driver Ibrahim Bah, who had picked up a fare on 42nd Street. A sign alerted drivers at the Atlantic Street exit, and the terminal area had blue and white balloons marking the path.

One arriving passenger, Maureen Hall of Cheddington, found serendipity at the end of her journey: the magnificent view of Manhattan from the Brooklyn Bridge.