Cruise Control

I’ll be honest, a Caribbean cruise had not really been on my ‘Things To Do Before You’re 50’ list. But on the basis of ‘why not?’ I said, “why not?”, and now find myself at the aft end of Deck 14 (or the "14th floor", as I like to call it) of a ship measuring almost a quarter of a mile long and towering 236ft above the water, amongst 6,000 other passengers and 12,000 plants and 56 living, breathing trees, watching the sea, the occasional tropical island and, hopefully, a few whales and dolphins float past.

With the approach of my 50th year on this planet, the opportunity to see a new part of it while travelling at a sedate 21 knots an hour seemed like a perfect convergence. Admittedly, though, the idea of being on a boat with more than 8,000 people, crew included, is not my normal idea of a holiday: I’m someone who gets people-phobic in a hotel with more than one lift, and I would not, normally, go to a resort offering all-you-can eat dining and a demographic that could realistically enable the staging of mobility scooter races around the half-mile running track on Deck 5, with a grid size not far off the 22 vehicles that start a Formula 1 Grand Prix.

This might sound snobbish, but I assure you it is not. I just - normally - prefer more holidays which don't require dressing up and in which I have the freedom to explore places in my own time or simply do nothing, without having to queue to sit down for dinner at a set time because of a system. So, to be at sea for seven days amongst a population similar in size to that of a small town is certainly out of my comfort zone. And to be on an itinerary whereby whole days elapse without the scenery changing much from, simply, blue ocean seems counter-intuitive. But that should be exactly what I’m doing, 13 days before I turn 50: a new experience, a new vista.

The vast Oasis Of The Seas towers above Port Canaveral
© Simon Poulter 2017

Cruising is, today, far from some Hemingway-esque exercise in rugged adventure it may have once been seen to be. Nor is it anything like Carry On Cruising or The Love Boat, my two sole reference points (carefully removing Titanic from that frame) - a never-ending programme of mass keep-fit sessions and deck quoits, with occasional bouts of projectile vomiting. Cruise ships today come with celeb-chef restaurants, sky-diving simulation machines, casinos and designer brand boutiques. Mine - Royal Caribbean’s vast Oasis Of The Seas - has an ice-skating rink, it's own English pub, a production of Cats, two rock-climbing walls, and more dining options than I actually know what to do with. Cruising is also no longer the preserve of the elderly (though the age group on this boat is definitely skewed somewhere considerably north of my own...). Indeed, the Florida-Caribbean Cruise Association claims that cruisers are getting younger, with Millennials and Generation X-age passengers choosing cruise holidays over land-based breaks. Indeed these two groups, according to the FCCA, like cruising as a means of ‘sampling’ destinations for later and longer trips. 

© Simon Poulter 2017

That said, it's hard - yet - to get a full idea of who is on this boat, such is the enormity of its human cargo. Boarding was relatively - and reassuringly - quick, through the logistics must be astonishing: if you know how chaotic boarding a Boeing 747 can be, imagine more than ten times that number pitching up at Port Canaveral in Florida, in scenes resembling the Ellis Island sequence in The Godfather Part II. Credit, though, to Royal Caribbean: it all works. 

Once on board it takes time for the newbie to get acclimatised. For a start, there’s the sheer scale of the boat. Oasis Of The Seas was, when launched in 2009, the largest cruise vessel in the world, and even with bigger ships coming into use, it still beggars belief. I could probably spend my entire week exploring it and still not cover everything. And that’s the point: these cruise ships are an exercise in over-consumption, and you pay the privilege for it.

The cruise industry is a big, $40 billion-per-year business. The major cruise lines will invest almost $5 billion this year alone in new ships and services, and their 23 million passengers will spend more than $3 billion at the various destinations the ships call into. The US accounts for roughly half those passengers, and with a predominantly American clientele on board this ship, it’s easy to see how. Not for nothing is the baseball cap the predominant headgear, and the capped-sleeve T-shirt very much in evidence. Cruising draws a loyal crowd: the average passenger on one of these big US-based ships will have taken more than five cruises as an adult prior to the current trip, and that’s certainly borne out by the people I’m travelling with on this seven-day voyage around the Caribbean, which will take me to Haiti, Jamaica and Mexico before returning to Florida. And that, in itself, is a statement I couldn’t imagine making before: a "voyage". 

Ever since humankind first discovered that a felled tree could float, we've been exploring these oceans, crossing them, migrating via them, discovering new countries, subjugating their indigenous incumbents, trading with them, exploiting their resources and more. So I can hardly claim, at the end of October 2017, to be Columbus. But, after 24 hours on board and almost 24 hours at sea on the first leg of the trip, with nothing but endless ocean outside of my cabin, and hot-and-cold-running buffet seemingly available around the clock on the interior of this floating town, I’m starting to see the attraction. 

Yes, you can indulge in a daily curriculum that includes Martini lessons, karaoke, jazz guitar instruction, “fun” activities around the pool and a machine dispensing Coca-Cola simply by holding up a cup with an embedded chip in it; or you can lie on a sun lounger surrounded by others exposing their equally pale, flabby flesh to the sky, just dozing to the rhythm of a ship at sea, occasionally dropping anchor to indulge in beach life and local craft stalls for a few hours before returning to the onboard buffet and casino. And despite the size of this ship, with its battalions of 'seniors' moving at a sluggish pace in search of food at 5pm, or the gaudiness and volume of the entertainment options, there is also a peace and calm to be found, that I'm enjoying from my balcony overlooking water of an almost unreal blue. The only sound being the gentle chug of engines and water washing against the hull. In fact, it really is most relaxing.

© Simon Poulter 2017

Tomorrow we stop spend a few hours in Haiti, a country I know principally for its natural disasters, its murderous father-and-son dictators ‘Papa Doc’ and ‘Baby Doc’ Duvalier, and being the back story of Steely Dan’s Haitian Divorce. I have a lot to learn. Welcome to the new order.