Successful Failures

We dislike over-tourism. We tried a cruise.

THE EXPERIMENT

Why on earth do such a thing? Like many things, to see what we could see.

We were curious -- about the possibilities of doing a long transcontinental voyage, having an alternate means of travel besides air, experiencing something outside of our immediate world of experience.

Having logged quite a few sea miles as pilots and navigators of different and various floating items both owned, borrowed and rented, the romantic notion of an extended time at sea had always had a strong allure. The sea occupies a place in our family histories: generations of accomplished sailors living on the North Sea and more. We absolutely needed to peek through this door.

We entered into this like researchers, seeing this as a grand experiment in participant observation; pure and deep cultural anthropology: a trial which, pass or fail, would be deeply informative, offering a window on a world we did not know.

What if cruising were our thing? Now, we’d have a whole new world of possibilities before us. What if it was quite the opposite: totally antithetical to every fiber of our being? What then?

The consolation plan if it all went south?? After making a few calls, we ironed it out: a guarantee of bottomless Chardonnay and endless cheesecake on a nice-sized stateroom balcony. So, the worst would not be so bad.

As a few people who know me or have read some of my accounts will tell you, I am a frequent critic of over-tourism. Which of course, makes this all the stranger. The decision to actually go on a cruise was about as foreign to my existence as would be the decision of a dedicated theater-goer to see a production of “Cats.” ?It seemed a bit troubling, sometimes a bit like going behind enemy lines. But, having been a person who has always tried, when feasible, to experience life first hand, it was really the only thing to do. While curiosity killed the cat, even if it resulted in a few dead cat brain cells, the aforementioned wine, cheesecake and a water view would serve to salve the pain.

This was a fundamentally interesting experiment. We were gone for a week, and stopped in four tropical island locations in the Caribbean. ?Once back home, it took about three full weeks to sort through thoughts, unpack, dissect and reassemble the major points, the conclusions and our analysis.

Here goes.

While on the cruise, we entered into and overheard many conversations during our weeklong experiment. ?For much of the time, you are in close quarters with many fellow cruisers.

THE GOOD: CRUISING WORKS -- FOR LOTS OF PEOPLE

We were not so very surprised to hear that this is a successful and pleasing experience to many people. But we were surprised to learn, first hand, how intensely satisfying this experience is to many people. We also were not expecting that so many people just flat out thought of this as a lifestyle choice that they would do again and again, throughout their lives.

Many people plainly LOVE cruising, and do this over and over again. I would say that of all the people we spoke with or overhead, at least 70% were repeat cruisers, many were what we might classify as lifestyle cruisers. Some people had been on an astounding 20 or more cruises, and could talk chapter and verse (with pride, attitude and authority) about different lines, ships, ports of call, regions of the world in which to cruise, et cetera. It was a topic that seemed to be both popular and of great importance in many conversations.

Cruising is also an especially pleasing option for big family reunions. Cruising offers freedom from worrying about “the tab” and who will foot it (and who "should" be picking it up, according to that evil sister-in-law). Some people simply LOVE the all-inclusive nature of this particular line that we were on. No nickel-and-diming, very few upcharges, and the fact that guests are waited on all the time, every moment of every day, by a never-ending team of studiously obsequious cruise ship employees. For many passengers on the ship, this seemed a significant departure from their day-to-day existence and (as you could sense from their manners, dispositions and behavior), something that was quite liberating to these people.

Most of the passengers also seemed to really enjoy the extremely wide and constant variety of entertainment offered aboard the ship, even the overtly silly and stupid fun. Passengers also really looked forward to shore days, to the packaged excursions, and the intrinsic the excitement of going to these new destinations.

TAMELY EXOTIC

Interesting: when people finally got to these exotic beaches and bays, the mojito-wasted, oil-basted majority just stood wading in the water with their cocktails in hand – just as they had been doing at the pools aboard ship. Even though each of the days were precisely the same as the last, from one palmy port to the next, most people felt as though they had been somewhere special. Trinkets, selfies, busy tourists. Stupid fun. Escape. Not thinking too much -- or maybe at all. This was the tonic. This was the point of it all. Stupid, surface-level, silly fun. Mild novelty, tamed excitement and a boozy smile seemed the mix that hit best with most cruisers. Enough, but not too much.

THE GOOD: A TIGHTLY RUN SHIP (AND BUSINESS)

I find the operational side of well-run businesses consistently fascinating. Having worked with many businesses that developed extremely complex operational sequences at sometimes staggeringly massive scale, I have developed a deep respect for this specific skill area.

As businesses go, the operational side of this particular global cruise line is something I came to admire for its continual precision, performance, as well as the resulting guest satisfaction. This is as many will attest, something that is very hard to consistently deliver in any human-delivered service industry. While not without a few hiccups here and there, the vast majority of service staff interactions aboard this boat seemed way better than average.

It's an interesting scenario. Consider: You employ a work force of extreme specialists and sign them up for about nine months at a stint… and these specialists each become masters of their small areas of expertise. Dessert-maker, server, waitstaff, line cook, entertainer… the list goes on and on. Given the scale of this operation I would not be surprised that there were people who were the cheesecake specialists, in fact.

Here is where it gets more nuanced: When you run a cruise ship, you are more than the employer; you are also landlord, housekeeper, cook, and quasi-government and nanny, all rolled into one. You house, feed and host all employees. They live only about five minutes from their jobs, and inevitably become wholly dependent upon the job so that, at least psychologically if not financially, it becomes a core reason for their existence. To make matters more interesting, because your ship obeys (usually) Bahamian labor laws, they work 12-18 hour days… most of their waking hours. As a result, life goes on super-efficiently, at times with nearly super-human precision… and in the end, with almost alarming grace.

It's a complex thing.

FLOW AT THE GREASY SPOON

Scene change: Getting through a generally penniless life in my youth, I worked quite a few food service jobs. The most memorable and teachable was a quick-lunch, old-school greasy spoon lunch counter just one block off the beach of Lake Michigan. I really loved that job, since everyone was usually in a super-great mood when ordering ice cream creations (my specialty). I also really enjoyed making people smile.?Win-win-win.

This little quick lunch counter was ruled by a stout little cook named “Dutch,” who also ran a successful bookie business as a side-hustle. He looked not too different from my image of a large elf. He was amazing to watch: Dutch never wasted a single motion as he cooked and assembled as many as five dishes at once, served customers and kept the kitchen sparklingly clean. I was, I realized later in my life, witnessing someone in a state of Flow. Like a highly choreographed martial arts movie character, Dutch danced through the motions of making eggs, omelets, hamburgers, fries and steaks in a constant stream of motion. He moved in a flowing blur, a dance of perpetual motion. Like water. Or magic. He was a master. I quickly noticed that he worked like this all the time, and moved from one item to the next in a concentrated matter of almost religious intensity. Focus. Discipline. He taught me how to combine my then-developing ambidexterity with rehearsed muscle-memory so that like he, I could in what seemed like one continuous motion, manually wash dishes, fill drinks, make fountain creations and keep the counter clean and sparkling… It felt serene... like a state of grace, at times.

On this particular cruise ship, I noticed, the bartenders were all, to a person, like Dutch. Absolute masters of their craft. Fluid, focused, seamless. Flowing. They were endlessly fun to watch, turning their constant ad lib performance into something approaching dance. It was both astounding and deeply familiar; I had not seen the likes of this for over 50 years.

THE ACCEPTABLE: THE FOOD

The performance art of the bartenders notwithstanding, the quality of the food was mostly family dining restaurant level. Think “Denny’s” at the lower end and “Chili’s” at the top end of their spectrum of restaurant areas. A narrow, mass market band of culinary "meh."

There were a few outlier exceptions. A few specialty restaurants seemed to have their own line cooks and the quality was actually decent – think nice supper club. Never gourmet. ?But, generously, it was decent fare. When you consider that most of the kitchens were a few decks below the dining areas, you could imagine the staggering logistics issues they faced every minute of every day. This, plus the ever-present fact that we were on a ship which, most of the time, was in the middle of the ocean… and well, I gave them some slack.

Finally, the sheer mechanics of crowd management was worth noting. Being a career marketing researcher at heart, watching the behavior of crowds is a thing with me. I know their tendencies. This academic knowledge comes in handy when at places like airports, amusement parks or recreational areas when you want or need to go where the crowds ain’t.

Managing the ebb and flow of crowds is a subtle and nuanced thing. You want to “nudge” rather than “restrict.” You want to “gently suggest” when it behooves the operation to move crowds around. And this cruise line did it all seamlessly, most of the time.

Honestly, it was something beyond impressive. This ship held about 4000 passengers. The queuing, processing and logistics of boarding, luggage sorting, embarking, debarking so many people from so many places and across so many demographics is staggering. Yet the cruise line teams seemed to handle this with a notable and repeated efficiency that I have never in all my travels witnessed, anywhere else.

THE CONCEPTUALLY UGLY: THE ENTERTAINMENT

Entertainment aboard a ship is also a critically important thing.

With over nine hours of down time per day aboard the boat, onboard entertainment becomes a key issue to passenger satisfaction. This ship had an astounding number of pubs, bars, restaurants and hang out places to pass the time.? Given that you had to be aboard about 4pm each day, the time issues meant that you had something like at least 7 hours each day during which you were both awake and aboard. And… to be frank… most of that time was spent with a drink in your hand. I have honestly never in my life spent so much time in and around bars. Yes, with a drink in my hand, too. (I sacrificed for science.)

There was always a wide range of onboard entertainment, from one or two-person groups, to complex ensembles and music groups. Even DJs and one-off lame contests, just there to keep people busy with something.

To be honest, the very best of the continual onboard entertainment was perhaps of “Cats” quality. By this I mean to say, professional, in-tune, mildly interesting, but usually quite past their ‘sell by” date. It’s a cruise ship, and it must be challenging to get talented people to do this for so many months at a time.

Most of the entertainment was clearly calibrated to be acceptable to people who had been drinking all day in the sun. (They mostly had been.) The lower quality entertainment options were the sorts of things which, if you were sitting in a long row or close to the stage, you sort of wish you weren’t so far from the door.

Most bars that had stages had, at various times of day, some variation of a DJ, playing some variation of EDM/boom-boom mindless dance music. This, interestingly, was a theme that also continued in most cruise ship ports, where the same sorts of DJ army also appeared, with the same sorts of DJ EDM/boom-boom dance music. On occasion it might have had an island dialect within it. But it was EDM/boom-boom. The boom-boom aspect, after a day or two, became quite repetitive and even headache-inducing. But maybe that was just me.

Then again, maybe all people wanted was some stupid fun. IT seemed to work for the masses.

THE RUB: THE PORTS OF CALL

We went to a lovely, palm-fringed string of interesting islands in the Caribbean. Each destination is a storied island, with deep and involved roots, topography and ecology. The tourism brochures all referenced opportunities to do things we enjoy: walk on the beach, snorkel, tour or otherwise occupy ourselves. The itinerary seemed to hold quite a bit of promise for those who like tropical destinations.

But little of that was in the cards.

We travelled from island to island at night. Each morning, almost like magic, we awoke to the sights sounds of civilization and the scenes of different picturesque seaside towns and ports.

In one particularly beautiful morning early in the week-long tour, we arrived in this new, beckoning port just as a gloriously promising day was dawning: I peeked out our balcony window to encounter a stunningly scenic and peaceful landscape fully reminiscent of a Gauguin painting. The clouds were parting to blue skies.. I saw a picturesque harbor with little boats and friendly, bustling activities to the right. Just beyond a string of colorful little shops, lush green hills rose up quite dramatically from the harborside. To the left lay an even more compelling view: a bright reach of water going several miles into the distance, etched by the dawn-sparkled V-wakes of small boats: fishing boats, water taxis, tourist boats, all beginning their day, all going to places one could only imagine. In the peaceful distance were overlapping islands, each island lying in enigmatic silhouette against the next, and all dramatically set against the sparkling water.

I looked out at this tropical tableau and became depressed as hell: we had only four hours at this port.

Let me explain. It was about 8am. We’d be allowed to go ashore by 9am. The constraint: we had to be back aboard by 1pm -- four hours. Four damn hours, all included: from hurrying off the boat, to walking the 10 minutes down the very long cruise-ship pier, to getting a taxi or finding a pre-arranged mass tour operator, and then going to the place offered an interesting excursion activity. Hurry, hurry, hurry. Scoot along. Capture that moment. Get the social proof photo. Get back to the boat.

Hurry, hurry, hurry. In this place? It seemed so deeply and profoundly wrong.

This was the source of my frustration. And my depression. This was what would happen this particular day, and every day that followed, all week. Over and over again. This time schedule, as we learned, was the unsung and bizarre reality of cruising. Shore excursions were no place for leisurely pastimes. Shore excursions had more in common with a guerilla assault or a gunboat.

Aside from this, there were the cultural considerations of such an excursion. For while you are ashore, you are experiencing a sanitized, plasticized version of reality. You are getting about as much cultural context as one might get at an all-inclusive resort. Zero. Nada. Certainly, some, many or perhaps even most people are okay with this. We were not.

There are artisan shops convenient to every port. But interestingly and perhaps not surprisingly, the shops all sell largely the same goods, promote the same brands, and vend the same ‘basic bar food’ eats. And then there’s the DJ with his formulaic EDM/boom-boom music.

The net impression? Everything felt like a supper club where people enact historic events. Or a rootin/tootin rodeo enactment. Or a renaissance faire. Or a wild west village set up for little kids. It all felt like people were play-acting a pirate movie. Pretend. Hokey. Phony. A multi-verse simulation actually could have been better at offering a more culturally authentic experience.

UNSCRIPTED TIME: SIMULATED TURTLE SEX

One day on one island we decided that we need to go walking, so we plotted a route ad set off for a local botanical garden. It was an urban walk, and took us past many teetering homes, rusted out cars and livestock. We got to the botanical garden and found its exotic flora interesting. On the way out, the custodian beckoned to us with a “psst.” “Want to see some turtles?”

Of course we did. She showed us some land tortoises, and asked if we knew which was male and which was female. We confessed ignorance on that bit of knowledge, and so she turned one over. Concave underneath.

This, she explained, was so that the male could mount the female. She demonstrated by placing the male atop the turtle, and left it there for a time.

We are not sure what, if anything, the tortoises did (or even felt) at that point, as our brains just sort of seemed to stop functioning. But whatever actually occurred there, it stayed with us. It was a quite unexpected “first.” Simulated turtle sex. An original and non-scripted moment, yes. So there's that.

THE MAJOR INSIGHT: “FIRST TIMES” ONLY COME ONCE.

Maybe I knew this once, or perhaps I forgot it. Maybe this is a new insight into who I am becoming, who we are as a couple, and how we compare with the world at large. But this is what I learned on my spring break.

While I am not wholly an adrenaline junkie, the most rare and precious and enjoyable moments in life seem to generally be those in which I am leaping … mentally, physically, intellectually… into the unknown.

“First time” moments only come once. Once.

Jumping off a snowy cornice into a particular unknown, white and gauzy mountain abyss. I got to do that just once. The next time was the second time, which was like the third time. I do not remember those times. Time number one was the golden moment.

Walking out into the cold and bracing sea mist on a long-forgotten trail, heading vaguely toward the ocean and come-what-may! My God, I remember that moment like a metallic photo preserved in amber. I can feel my perfectly idiotic grin despite the cold wet mist. And the shout over the roar of the surf that I loved this deeply.

I remember my wife, walking down a tunnel of trees that we discovered by sheer chance in early 2020, in the midst of that terrible lockdown: the forest alive with birds chirping and the rich sounds of pure energy all around us. Her arms outstretched, a huge smile on her face. Severe victory in the face of global panic. Just once.

These are the sorts of instants which matter: they can make a person feel vibrantly and wholly alive. Like gold in one's hand. The first time only comes just one time. It is to be admired, or even treasured for its simplicity, and its rarity.

These moments tend only to exist in certain circumstances. And places with "filed-off edges" rarely offer them.

ANOTHER SUCCESSFUL FAILURE

There is a Buddhist saying that goes something along the lines of “I know the pot that holds my riches is my teacher when it breaks.”

In this instance, I am very glad we took this journey on a cruise ship. It broke my pot or, in the least, kept my pot from me, just long enough for me to feel and contemplate the nature of that pot... riches I lacked and for which I yearned. So instructive.

Scientists say that there is no failure in experimentation. All is learning. Success and failure are simply the faces of the coin we toss. And it is in the learning that we grow.

No more cruise ships for me.

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