2004-06-21 - 11:45 p.m.
Well I�m sure excited! This time, for this upcoming summer vacation, I have booked myself on a cruise! That is something I have wanted to do ever since I was a little boy, ever since my grandparents took their first around-the-world cruise on a famous Cunard line ship (the Caronia, otherwise known as �The Green Goddess,� because the ship was actually painted various shades of lime green!). Of course, my cruise will be quite different, a seven-day excursion on the Norwegian Cruise Lines ship, the Norwegian Sea, from Houston down to Cozumel, Roatan (one of the beautiful Bay Islands off the coast of Honduras), Belize City, Cancun, and then back again to Houston. They call this their �Texaribbean� cruise, but I see it as an excursion down to tropical-paradise-Mayan-land, because that, essentially, is what Yucatan, Belize, and Honduras are, or were: the ancient land of the Maya (about whom I am going to have read up before I go�which will be on July 24).
Cozumel has always sounded to me like an amazingly beautiful and exotic island, full of blue water, white sands, and a fascinating jungle full of multi-colored tropical birds. I first heard of it thirty-three years ago when I worked for a time at an elegant men�s clothing store. The store came out with a line of men�s dress shirts that they called �Cozumel� that was meant to go with their line of tropical-weight suits, and in order to push them, all of the sales people were given a Cozumel shirt which the management wanted us to wear, which they hoped would stimulate sales of the shirts. Instead of being solid colors, they were a kind of pebbled blue and white with a sort of rippley watery/white sand effect, most unusual for a dress shirt and yet really quite beautiful�perfect for summer wear. We sold quite a few of them, too!
And now reading about Cozumel, this sounds like the kind of place that I will want to go back to again and again, so this cruise will serve as a basic introduction. It�s probably not much further away for me than Florida would be for a New Yorker, so maybe it can become a special hideaway for spring breaks or maybe a portion of the Christmas break.
While I have been to Mexico, I never did quite make it down to the Yucatan peninsula, where the people are really far more Indian and were much less intermixed with the Spanish colonists. By not having been there, I missed out on seeing the pyramids and other ruins of Mayan cities, which I had always wanted to see. Interestingly, in one of the cities there is a temple to what they called �The Descending God.� Now that sounds a lot like Jesus to me (which it isn�t, or at least I don�t think so), and I am very curious as to what that particular mythology is. The Mayans were quite advanced for their time, maybe even for our time, were master astronomers, had amazingly complicated calendars with interlocking cycles based on the movements of Venus and other astronomical events, and they had an advanced system of mathematics that had the concept of zero and utilized a number base of 20.
I am also excited to add to the list of countries I�ve visited two new ones�Honduras and Belize (what used to be called �British Honduras�), although maybe it is silly to consider �adding� a country that I will be able to visit for only eight hours or so. But yeah, surely that counts as much as some of those whirlwind �If it�s Tuesday it must be Belgium� European tours that some people go on.
I certainly enjoyed Australia�s Great Barrier Reef (and have been giving lectures about it at school for the past four years). Well, the world�s second largest barrier reef is the one off the coast of Honduras on which the island of Roatan is. I will for sure go snorkeling there. It�s supposed to be an amazing scuba-diving site and in a way it is too bad to go there and not go scuba-diving, but the truth is that I haven�t gone diving in fifteen years and many dive boats won�t let you go down if your log book doesn�t show either a dive in the past twelve months or else a refresher course. Well, I could take a refresher course between now and then, I suppose, but thinking back to Fiji where I both snorkeled and went scuba diving, I actually enjoyed the snorkeling more. You pretty much can see the same thing, it�s just that with snorkeling what you see is down below you, whereas with scuba what you see is horizontally in front of you. But I have no anxiety with snorkeling at all, whereas scuba does fill me with anxiety and now I am not in the shape I was back then. Besides, I�m going on this trip by myself, so scaring up a dive buddy (which is essential), would be problematic. Anyway, snorkeling sounds fine.
Other kinds of excursions in these places include swimming with the dolphins, inner tubing down a river through the jungle and into some caves, and riding all-terrain vehicles to the site of Mayan ruins. I�m studying all the various excursions to see which ones I can fit in during the time we will be ashore. I think the excursions I will most likely do are the ones I mentioned, snorkeling, dolphins, Mayan ruins, and tubing through the jungle and caves. Sounds like such a blast to me!
Of course I will also enjoy the ship itself, and there are two days that are entirely at sea. I plan to be on a lounge on the sundeck and also in and out of the pools and hot tubs. I�m sure to visit as many of the bars as possible (the poolside bar, the piano bar, the martini bar, the showroom bars) and we won�t talk about EATING! Two main dining rooms, a pasta restaurant, an intimate restaurant, and a poolside buffet.
I�ve read over a hundred reviews of the ship and this particular cruise, and while those reviews run the gamut from �five stars, the time of my life, the best cruise I have ever gone on� down to �one star and that is generous, it was hell on earth, I will never go on a cruise with NCL again,� two things the reviews all seemed to consistently RAVE about, and that was the level of friendly service from the crew, and the quality of the entertainment.
I also read reviews of quite a lot of other ships and cruises and whether the cruises were expensive or less expensive, whether the ships were immense superliners of over 100,000 tons or more of a megaliner like the one I am going on (42,000 tons), the reviews all had a spread between the lowest and the highest ratings. I decided that whether a person actually enjoys the cruise or not is more based on their own attitude. But beyond that, it seemed to be a rare ship�s crew who received as many raves as this ship, so maybe it is the optimal size. I don�t know, there is something about it that seems to make this crew really enjoy their work, instead of it just being a job.
Maybe it�s because the ship is ported in Texas. That�s no small factor�I will say from my experience traveling in the country that Texans are among the friendliest and most fun-loving of Americans. And many reviewers, especially single travelers like me, mentioned how great it was to travel with Texans who just added an extra dimension of fun to the whole cruise. Of course not everybody on the cruise will be from Texas (after all, I'm flying in from California), nor will every Texan be friendly and fun-loving, but to make a generalization, that seems to be the case. Anyway, the crew seems to really get off on the passengers on this particular ship, so I will really like that.
People sure raved about the entertainment, too, the Broadway shows, the Las Vegas type revues, the singers, the comedians, and the magicians. Sounds good to me. And after the shows, I plan to spend quite a while up on the top deck relaxing on a lounge chair, listening to the splash of the waves, basking in the warm tropical breezes, enjoying the pitch-black night emblazoned with the brightest stars I�ve ever seen. I have read that down there, you can see entire galaxies, their spiral shape and so on, and that, so far, is something I have never seen. I may never want to go to my cabin which, while quite small (according to some reviews, but I think it is at least bigger than a compartment on a train and I have sure enjoyed multi-day travel on a train so why should this be judged more harshly?), is an outside cabin with a window (not a port hole), and is midships on the main deck (starboard side). Midships means that there will be less ship movement (and less noise or vibration from the engines) and I am on the highest deck that doesn�t have lifeboats in the way of the view or joggers running around the Promenade deck!
Of course I�m bringing my video camera and hope to make a cool little movie of the trip! I remember the slide show my grandmother gave us after her round-the-world cruise. After a while, everybody in that room was snoring away�everybody that is, except me! I was all of seven years old, and yet it ended up that her slide show was a private showing just for me, as I was the only one really interested.
However, when I called my father on Father�s Day, he admitted that he was envious. �I wish I could go with you,� he said, and I wish he could, too. But my mother would hate it so there�s no chance of that. Didn�t he have enough of ships after having been in the Navy during World War II, and then later working as a clarinet player in the dance band on the S.S. Lurline and other Matson Lines ships that plied the Pacific between San Francisco or Los Angeles and Honolulu (prior to having that trade destroyed by the advent of passenger air travel)? �Not on your life!� I think once it�s in your blood, it never gets out. Okay, so does this mean that this is just the first of many cruises? Well, I certainly hope so!
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