Boredom at Sea
Back in early 2019, what seems like two lifetimes ago, one for retirement and another for COVID, Kim and I went on a two-week cruise around New Zealand and Eastern Australia, including Tasmania. We had done a similar two-week cruise through the Baltics the year before, visiting nine countries, and had thoroughly enjoyed the experience. The bottom line on our Southern Hemisphere jaunt was that we found that we were more bored than invigorated. We had done both on the Viking Line, which I believe is the best cruise line for us since they seem to strike that balance between less glitz and yet quiet, understated elegance. There are lines that offer much more luxury and, at the other end of the spectrum, lines that offer casinos and pool slides and carnival rides. We sort of like the Scandinavian version of comfort and it appeals, in a bit of an admittedly snooty way, to our sense of noblesse oblige while still feeling more like being at home than not. That raises an interesting notion, do we like our vacations to get us away from what we know or to make us feel as familiar in our surroundings as we can? Some will suggest that cruises attack this very concept straight-on in that you can visit exotic ports of call and then return to the comfort of your home-like suite where you can exhale at ease.
The result of our last cruise is that we have gone off cruises after taking several in back-to-back years. This year we did cruise-lite by spending three out of seventeen days on a Nile Cruise, which was quite relaxing and not at all boring. I guess cruising is a bit like RVing to me. It sounds great in concept, turns out to be less great in reality, depends on who you go with or not, and probably is impacted by duration (the shorter the better). I won’t get into my history with the all-American RV adventure, but suffice it to say that it makes for some funny National Lampoon-quality stories. But while I think I have finally put a silver bullet in the RV zombie, cruises continue to intrigue. Our friends Gary and Oswaldo are loyal cruiseaholics. They just got back from what amounted to a month-long cruise that went Transatlantic (the true test of the cruise aficionado’s patience) that then went all around the Western Mediterranean. Thanks to their schedule flexibility, they get these cruises for cents on the dollar and really do get a high value vacation that keeps them seeing the different parts of the world with minimal packing and repacking.
Our friends Frank and Barbara are next in the list of cruise fans. Unlike Gary and Oswaldo, I think they are drawn to cruising because they have friends that spend much of their year cruising. Frank and Barbara do the hop-on hop-off program and join them for parts of their cruise here and there. I suppose that some people like the ultimate carefree aspect of just living in a floating hotel where someone makes your bed every day and serves you all of your meals. It’s not a bad gig if you have good ways to amuse yourself during the cruise. As I think about it, if I didn’t have any work obligations (like teaching) and I didn’t want to spend time gardening, it would be hard for me to deny that my activity list (reading, writing and watching) couldn’t just as easily be fulfilled onboard as not. The social aspect is a bit more challenging since it is harder to get your friends and family to hop-on and hop-off on your cruise schedule and that feels like the ultimate imperious and self-centered lifestyle. But then again, perhaps you make all new cruising friends that way.
Today, when I looked through the mail, I noticed that Viking, who I figure has mostly given up on us as repeat customers after a four year hiatus, has sent us a nice understated matte-finish brochure on their 2024 world cruises. There are basically two, one that goes East to West and one that goes North to South. Needless to say, the Latitudinal version is longer in duration since it goes from Florida, through the Panama Canal and then bumps around the Pacific, through the Suez Canal and up to England (avoiding the dreaded Transatlantic). That is noticeably longer by 2X than the longest Longitudinal trip they can creatively craft that starts on the Antarctic Peninsula and wends its way up, also through the Panama Canal and eventually ends up in the Great Lakes in Chicago. It is interesting to me to note that there is only a 10% pricing difference between the two trips even though the former goes for 138 days and later for 65 days. In fact, they offer a truncated version of the Latitudinal version for 121 days for exactly the same price as the Longitudinal.
Of the 138 days of the longer trip, I reckon there to be 43 sea days, when one is somewhere not touching land (I am excluding the two canal transits assuming those are close enough to qualify as non-sea days). That means that basically one third of the voyage you are confined to the ship, bobbing around on the ocean somewhere. That compares to the Longitudinal cruise which has about 46% of the time at sea either in the Antarctic waters, the Drake Passage (pretty rough seas I am told), along the Pacific Coastline, the Caribbean or up along the Atlantic Seaboard. In both cases, you have to be comfortable keeping yourself amused for long stretches of time just with what and whom you have with you onboard. Does that start to feel like a version of cabin fever to you? It does a bit to me. I know that our 4 sea days around New Zealand and Australia seemed rather boring to us. And as much as we like being with one another, The ship just wasn’t home to us and we got itchy when we weren’t in port. The good news is that neither of us succumbed to sea-sickness, which would clearly have made a boring situation quite unbearable.
Viking spends a lot of money sending out old-school paper promotions like these nice brochures. They do a great job of intriguing us with world maps with little red excursion lines highlighting the trip and then doing the daily list of great ports of call. They show pictures of the various accommodation levels and deck maps to show you where you would be situated. All of their rooms are external and have verandas of one sort or another. They dedicate a page to telling you all the things that make Viking a classier and yet more sophisticated and pleasant cruise line (all points I agree with). They do not hide the price, and indeed dedicate a full page to explaining the pricing options, always noting that the top-of-the-line accommodations are already booked, as though we needed reminding that the world is filled with the elite few that have too much money that they can’t seem to find ways to spend. And that brings me to my final point, it is whether this a moral alternative?
That’s right, I am challenging the morality of luxury cruise line travel…at least the world cruise variety for extended duration. I just used the movie Elysium in my ethics class to highlight a dystopic world where wealth disparity has run amok. It is hard to think of a luxury cruise ship as so different from the satellite home of the elite in Elysium. As I wrote this story, I wanted to check some fact in the brochure and I asked Kim to bring me the piece. She said she had already thrown it out since she thought I had put it in the trash pile. I had. But she fished it out for me anyway and when I put an end to this story, I will put it back in the trash. I don’t know if I would be bored or comforted at sea for 138 days, but I know that we will probably never do it, not due to price, but because I figure we can do better than boredom at sea.