WSJ -- The Debate Over Cruise Vacations: Wonderful or Torturous ? .................................
Travel
Off Duty Travel
Love / Hate Relationship
Aug. 14, 2018
The Debate Over Cruise Vacations: Wonderful or Torturous?
High-seas holidays have as many boosters as they do detractors. Two savvy travelers debate the pros and cons
By Mark Childress, William Sertl and Sara Tucker
Why We Love Them
I am a Travel Loner. When the crowd heads off to see the sunset, I go east. Once, before a Costa Rican volcano tour even reached the volcano, I paid a taxista $100 to take me back to the capital, far from the chatty tourists on the bus.
I spent a lot of years dragging my suitcase up those long stairways to European train platforms because I thought cruises were stupid. I was entirely sure that only old folks and sheep go on cruises. Who wants to board a gigantic floating condominium? Who would choose to be trapped inside a hotel that wallows in the waves? Then we have “The Poseidon Adventure” factor: I can swim, but so could Shelley Winters! And we all saw the pictures of that Italian cruise liner beached on its side on the rocks -- who wants a holiday like that one?
Then, an incredibly cheap deal on a cruise from Valparaiso, Chile, to Boston lured me in. Seventeen days, through the Panama Canal. How else would I ever get a chance to visit the remote western coast of South America? I jumped.
Aboard the ship, I unpacked. Once. (Unpacking just once is the first great thing about cruising, I’ve come to realize.) I put my socks in the drawer, stowed the suitcase, and brought my room along with me on a journey of 4,790 nautical miles, 12 ports-of-call. I had a tiny bathroom, a desk, a balcony about the size of a lounge chair. A rectangle of blue Pacific to call my own. A vacation, to me, is best spent reading long books and not wearing a watch. There’s no better place to do that than a lounge chair with the ocean rolling by at 15 knots. (Knots are miles per hour plus the glamour of the open sea.)
What about the herd of sheep? Turned out to be a wildly eclectic mix of European bargain hunters, South American wanderers, North American party animals, couples young and old, families, large friend-and-family groups -- and I learned the second great thing about cruising. You can find your people, or no people at all. You can slip through the crowd unnoticed with your Proust and your tea, or party the night away with 20 hedonists who won’t be going to yoga at dawn. If you choose the party option, you are never farther from your room than an elevator ride, and you won’t meet law enforcement on the way.
No other mode of transportation allows time to read David McCullough’s “The Path Between the Seas” as you approach the Panama Canal, then to watch the canal’s spectacular machinery from the deck while an expert narrates everything over the ship’s PA in satisfying detail. Ocean travel is all about time. And a day aboard ship can seem endless, in the nicest possible way. The horizon, like the vacation, goes on forever.
-- Mark Childress
Why We Hate Them
In the glory days of oceanliners, your fellow passengers might have been actresses, CEOs, spies or card sharks. The glamour was self-perpetuating. Then magazine ads for Cunard began promising a bit desperately that “getting there is half the fun.” The jet age was dawning, and steamship companies knew how things were going to end: Travel-hungry Americans would opt to fly to Europe to spend as much time there as their vacations allowed, foregoing the sheer pleasure of a trans-Atlantic crossing. But even without the threat of jets, a cloud hung over the liners as they steamed across the Atlantic, the legacy of the Titanic.
As a kid in 1956, I was mesmerized by TV coverage of the sinking of the Andrea Doria off Cape Cod on its way to New York. While my parents read danger on the screen, all I could see was adventure -- scary, sure, but also thrilling. As I grew up, that changed. “Ship” came to mean “cruise.” While it was great to be on the water, no cruise ever met my expectations. The only people I met onboard were unglamorous strangers who refused to remain strangers forever.
Cruise fans insist there’s a lot to do onboard, but if I wanted to see a Broadway show, I’d stay in New York. If I wanted to learn Spanish (or Urdu or Mandarin), I’d stay in New York. Should I decide to climb a wall, what better place to struggle upward than my walk-up apartment in New York?
What about those small luxury cruise ships, full of like-minded folks, headed far up a lazy river? Sounds good, but I have a problem with them too. I am by nature an Existentialist. I need chores -- a rock to roll up the hill every day -- to give my meaningless life meaning. I ride my bike to the grocery store, the post office, the farm-stand. When cycling just for the sake of cycling, with no destination in mind, I end up asking myself the same question I do on a cruise: “Why am I doing this?”
I’ll admit to taking one cruise -- from Lisbon to London -- that I thoroughly enjoyed in spite of myself. On the way to the Thames, we traveled up the Gironde Estuary to Bordeaux and up the Seine as far as Rouen. I was enchanted as rural France rolled slowly by, so close I could almost milk a cow. For the grand finale, Tower Bridge triumphantly opened to welcome us. Passengers stood on deck cheering, as jubilant as a conquering army. We could see the HMS Belfast, a warship-cum-tourist-attraction from World War II that is permanently moored by the bridge. We had tied up right beside her. I went back to my stateroom to grab my luggage. To my surprise, when I opened the door, no expanse of ocean greeted me through the window. Instead, I looked across the cabin at huge antiaircraft guns from the Belfast, aimed straight at my balcony. I threw up my hands in mock surrender and cried: “I confess. I loved it. Let me go, and I’ll never do it again.”
-- William Sertl
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