Sea Change
2011 World Cruise · Notes From the Working Side
TrialsMonotony Tinged with Hysteria
Six months without weekdays, thirteen-hour shifts, impossible passenger questions and the strange immunity of being somewhere else.
A change brought about by the sea: I had not known what day of the week it was for six months.
Before that, the days of the week became countries. Let me slip into something more comfortable, like a comma. No—I am on a ship.
Here are some of the other strange innuendos of meaning contained within cruise-club culture.
The Asymmetric Equation
Chosen Suffering + Sustained Attention = Meaning The route supplies the scenery. The work supplies the education.The Working Side of the Ship
Cruise-Club Culture
The sea rearranges time, language, privacy and the definition of an easy day.
Arriving in a new country usually consisted of finding the free Wi-Fi. Taking a bath was considered a luxury. You talked about how to spend your “hours off,” not your “days off.” You had to turn on the television to see the weather outside. When you returned to the real world, you stopped yourself from saying hello to random people walking past you.
Living on a ship might be summed up as monotony tinged with hysteria—but you could get drunk for five dollars.
Working fewer than ten hours was considered an easy day. You had just spent a thirteen-hour day with the same people, so you went to dinner and happily spent the rest of the night with them.
A Pain in the English
The Quest Is in the Questions
The most ridiculous questions I ever heard from passengers—and one Christmas complaint that answered itself.
On December 25, several guests complained about the music: “Why is there nothing but Christmas music throughout the ship?”
Then came my collection of top cruise questions. There were more than three because the sea is generous.
The Bigger the Summer Vacation
The Harder the Fall
The routines of packaged tourism can become more monotonous than the daily life they promise to interrupt.
The march of stupidity and the routines of tourism are even more monotonous than those of daily life.
On an excursion, you are always sure of reaching your destination. Everything is arranged. Souvenir shops sell made-in-China junk. Taking a tour becomes a kind of self-induced torture, like going on a wild stuffed-animal safari, with rules such as “Do not feed the animals” and “No flash photography.” Once you have taken enough of these tours, every additional one becomes both unbearable and trifling.
Cruising the open sea is a virtue. Shopping the ports of call, a deadly sin.
The Asymmetric Equation
Comfort Protected Too Long = Perspective Compounded Too Late A perfectly arranged excursion can protect the traveler from the very encounter travel was meant to create.My Impressions of the Caribbean
An Embarrassment of Coconuts
Dominica, St Maarten and Barbados: island life seen from inside the port-of-call machine.
Read the original companion story, An Embarrassment of Coconuts.
When you're born into this world, you're given a ticket to the freak show. If you're born in America, you get a front-row seat. Island life in Dominica is Project Maรฑana.
I do this real moron thing called thinking. Apparently, I am not a very good tourist because I like to form my own opinions.
Is it Maรฑana yet? Maรฑana: 1. Tomorrow. 2. An unspecified future time.
Christopher Columbus never actually discovered Dominica; it had merely been detected. He spotted the island on a Sunday—dominica in Latin, domingo in Spanish; you get the idea. It is more like Maรฑana: not much gets done on time. When it happens, it happens. Life goes on, and you can just pee in the ocean. Carpe Diem versus Carpe Maรฑana.
Caribbean Roadkill: What Am I Doing Here?
If St Maarten is the Mitt Romney of vacation destinations—self-restraint in an age of rage—then Barbados is the Keith Richards of the Caribbean. It is over the hill and showing signs of age, but it can still belt out the karaoke hits of paradise it once sang.
A sort of life is going on, beating with a reasonable version of a pulse, but that life consists mostly of travelers like me. The very unspoiledness you are there to experience still appears in unexpected ways, like the coconuts and flowers.
The newly refurbished Fairmont Royal Pavilion is beautiful. Yet I always end up in that part of the Caribbean made almost exactly the same as everywhere else in the world for the cruise ships that have come all this way to “inhabit” a port for six hours.
To be a cruise-ship tourist in the Caribbean is to escape accountability. Quirks and flaws do not stick to you the way they do back home.
You can drift across continents and languages, suspending the operation of sound thought. Tourism is the march of stupidity. You are expected to be stupid. The entire mechanism of the host port is geared to cruisers acting stupidly. You are economically significant but existentially loathsome.
You walk around dazed, squinting into fold-out port and shopping-guide maps. You do not know how to talk to the locals, how to get anywhere, what the money means, what time it is, what to eat or how to eat it. Being stupid is the cookie-cutter mold, the level and the norm. You can exist there for weeks or months without reprimand or dire consequence.
Together with a thousand other passengers, you are granted immunities and broad freedoms: an army of fools in bright polyester, riding scooters, four-by-fours and Jet Skis, taking pictures of each other, bloated, drunk and still thirsty. There is nothing to think about or lust after but the next shapeless event—alien, ignorant and greedy for something you cannot ever have: sunshine, sand and indifference to the treadmill of consumption and stuff.
Read the Companion Story
Los Angeles to London in 110 Days
This field note belongs to the larger 2011 World Cruise: one long route, many foreign lands, and enough encounters to recalibrate the meaning of home.