Arriving at the ports of call in French Polynesia , a collection of exotic islands, it felt like arriving in paradise. Perfect climate, lush greenery, sparkling crystal clear turquoise water, fine sand beaches and friendly inhabitants. Mor’orea was our favourite island and we vowed to return some day.
A conversation with our tour guide in Papeete, Tahiti was rather odd. He remarked that the island was desperate for tourism dollars to mitigate the island’s financial woes. Strange request because we were there for Saturday and Sunday and were disappointed to find all the shops and restaurants were closed. I believe one bar was open.
After leaving Mo’orea and French Polynesia, we were at sea for six days surrounded by sparkling marine blue water in all directions as far as we could see with no land or sign of life in sight. (Except, of course, for the wild life on board.) Hal was on the deck leaning on the railing when he called to me “come quick”. Evidently he spotted something I needed to see…..perhaps we were not as alone on the vast Pacific ocean as we had thought.
With his fish tracking “eagle eyes” Hal had spotted flying fish near the ship. How exciting! These remarkable underwater inhabitants kept us entertained while schools of them jumped out of the water and flew across the water. They are actually miss-named because they don’t actually fly. They propel themselves at 20 mph out of the water and glide through the air for up to 1200 ft before diving back into the water. Their entry is either smooth or with a large splash. I expect it was the adolescent fish that made the most splash. We watched them for miles. Just imagine a creature that can effortlessly fly through the air and live underwater. If you care to fish for these flying creatures, just take your boat and flashlight out in the dark of night. Shine a light out over the water and these fish will jump into your boat!
On one of our sea days heading to Hawaii, we had two low flying planes pass overhead…….I hardly recognized the engine noise. On another day we were very excited to watch a school of dolphins swimming alongside the ship. They looked rather small because our cabin was on deck 10 which made us realize that the flying fish we had seen were much larger than we thought.
Who knew we would find such entertainment out in the middle of the Pacific Ocean?
People watching has become much more interesting than when Hal and I started cruising more than 15 years ago. Back then there were rules of decorum one should follow and specific dress codes. There are some of us who still like to get “dressed ” (by that I mean, meet the criteria for casual, dressy casual and formal) for lunch, dinner and formal nights. Many of the “new” cruisers go for the casual, super casual and backyard look. In other words they prefer the “wear whatever you feel like” protocol. We saw a guy today in the dining room who was definitely following his very own dress code. He was wearing bizarre wildly patterned gardening shorts, a crazy t-shirt and bright green crocs. I almost mistook him for the ship’s gardener but then realized that there are no living plants on the ship.
One night we arrived at the dining room for dinner and found ourselves waiting to be seated. There was a family of six, just ahead of us in line, who offered to wait behind us because our reservation was for only three. A very kind gesture. At first, I thought we might be on the set of the Beverly Hillbillies. They seemed to be wearing a family uniform…….ball caps, plaid shirts and work overalls for the guys, very bright flowered dresses for the gals. The grandfather was sporting a beard that grazed his waist. We got chatting with him and found out they were seasoned cruisers and very proudly announced they had already booked their next cruise. The grandmother had a scowl on her face and stood away from the rest of the family, looking quite uncomfortable. I think she was probably very shy and not happy to be surrounded by so many strangers. Or maybe she was just annoyed that they were going on yet another cruise. Who knows?
Another night we were seated in the dining room enjoying our appetizers at a two-top table in a row of several more . We generally prefer a small table but sometimes the tables are so close you may as well be sharing the same tablecloth. Some diners are quite reserved while others can be very gregarious. As was the case on this particular evening. I was devouring some delicious fresh oysters that were prepared similar to Oysters Rockefeller. All of a sudden a fellow was ushered by a server to the table next to us. This well dressed, well groomed man announced to us that he had already eaten dinner in the Crown Grill,one of the ship’s specialty restaurants. However he heard that fresh oysters were being served in the main dining room. He noticed that I was eating oysters so he wanted to know if I was enjoying them. My recommendation encouraged him to give the server his order…in fact, a double order. While he waited for his food he was quite chatty. As soon as his oysters arrived, the guy pulled a huge bib out of his jacket . (I don’t know what else to call it). It was made to look like the front of a fancy tuxedo. Hal and I both admired it so he said “Look at this…. If you fold up the bottom of the bib and snap the sides together, you have a pouch to hold crumbs to eat for dinner tomorrow. With that, he consumed those oysters so fast, I doubt he could taste them. I mentioned to him that Hal and I could use one of those bibs. He picked up his phone and called his wife to come to his table. I have no idea where she was waiting for him, she appeared so quickly. She presented her phone to him which was open to a website that sold bibs with all sorts of themes. How thoughtful ! I am sure it would take a while to make right choice for us! We sure had a good laugh but then, it could have been the wine!
I am intrigued by people who choose to travel solo and who are adventurous, confident and independent. We met a woman at lunch one day who told us she spends 3 months every winter traveling on cruise ships. She picks and chooses cruise lines indiscriminately, depending on how one trip will co-ordinate with the next. She finds there is a lot of comradery on board so it is possible to have as much or as little company as you wish. And she can have all the alone time she wants. I have never traveled alone except to get somewhere to meet up with friends or family. Perhaps that is because I have a couple of concerns. If you travel alone, who is going to let you know when you are wearing your shirt inside out? Or if you plan to go ashore to buy your wife a Tahitian or South Sea pearl as a remembrance of your 50th wedding anniversary, who is going to remind you to take your wallet? Hmmmm….
Today the sea is dead calm. It seems as though the ship is not moving, that we are standing still while an indolent current swirls around the vessel. While we sip our morning lattes on the deck, there is not a breath of air, no birds, no insects and no people to disturb the silence. It reminds me of the “Ancient Mariner” floating around on the Sargasso sea.
This peace gives one space to contemplate some of the oddities of living on a ship that is almost 1000 ft long. For example yesterday we crossed the International Dateline. When the dateline was in the middle of the ship,that meant that the front half of the ship was tomorrow (eg.Monday) and the back half of the ship was yesterday (eg. Tuesday). What happened to to-day ? Was it somewhere, unaccounted for, in the middle of the ship? To make matters worse, the International Dateline at this point in the Pacific Ocean is not a straight line…..it turns corners and goes back and forth. Don’t ask me why, it is a mystery of life…..perhaps there is some tiny island that wants to be in the same time zone as its neighbour.
Just think what it would be like to live on an island with the dateline running through lt. One half of the island would be tomorrow and one half would be yesterday. Consider the ramifications: If your day was going badly, you could cross the line into tomorrow and eliminate yesterday. Or vice versa, you could return to yesterday and re-do it, hopefully with a better outcome. Or maybe you could live on the dateline and always live in the moment.
Are you still with me?
In any case we crossed from today into tomorrow with a plan to return tomorrow night to yesterday. Our ship’s captain gave us specific instructions on how to deal with the time change. Here is how it will happen.
“Today is Nov.21. Tonight we will move our clocks forward 48 hours to Nov.23. So tomorrow night we will turn our clocks back 24 hours and it will be Wed, Nov 23 once again.”
Has anyone tried to change the time on a digital watch?
Have I confused you yet?
I want to know where Nov.22 went. Does every day not have value? Can we just arbitrarily decide to obliterate a day? What if that day is someone’s birthday? Or an anniversary or a funeral? And what gives us the power to live one day over again? What if it is a day we would rather forget? Do we really have to relive it?
OOPS! My pen just flew apart! Maybe I have said enough on this subject….and .maybe I should cut back on the margaritas!
Another Time Related Conundrum
A few days after leaving Los Angeles, Hal and I kept showing up one hour early for our daily dinner reservation. After this happened a few times I decided to find out what were were doing wrong. So I approached our dining room Hostess to see if she had an explanation. Her answered with a broad smile on her face :
” If you look over at that wall, you will see the “ship’s time” which is what we follow onboard ” as she scurried away with a group of diners.
Sure enough, the tiny digital clock was an hour earlier than the time our watches’ GPS indicated. Oh well, I thought I could live with that. The mental math wouldn’t be difficult.
A little while later the Captain asked us turn our clocks back one hour which then meant the discrepancy in time would be 2 hours. What? How does that work? It kinda made me feel like we were slowly cruising into the ” Twilight Zone”. After all we hadn’t seen any other boats of any size or shape for days.
That’s not the end of the story.
One night on our way to dinner we encountered one of the ship’s officers in the elevator. I figured he would be the one to help me understand “ship’s time”. I am like a dog with a bone, I don’t give up easily.
I approached him with high expectations.
” Excuse me , sir. May I ask you a question.”
He replied with a smile ” Sure, I am happy to help.”
” I am very curious about ‘ship time’ ” Can you explain to me what it is and why it differs from GPS time.” I noticed that he was surreptitiously glancing over his shoulder at the elevator’s control panel, probably trying to figure out how quickly he would be able to escape. Because I could see what he had on his mind, I carefully moved into position in front of the door. No escape now!
“Ship time is what we use onboard this vessel. However I cannot explain why that is, (pause) or how it works. ” Hmmmm, that’s interesting.
With another smile on his face he added, ” I find the solution is to wear two watches, one on each wrist,” pointing them out to me.
There you have it. Mystery solved!
Or so I thought. The Captain just announced at lunch that our clocks will need to be turned back one hour tonight so our time will coincide with the time in Tahiti when we land tomorrow.
Can you tell me what to do with this mess tonight?
Current times:
Ship’s clock: 2:05 pm
Computer : 5:05 pm
Watch : 8:05 pm
Phone : 2:05 pm/Nov.25 (tomorrow)
Clearly I have too many time pieces so I am just going to chuck them all and just follow the sun. Is that not what holidays are all about?
It was pouring the morning of the day before we were to arrive in Los Angeles, ending our cruise from Vancouver and starting another on the same ship going from LA to Hawaii,Tahiti, Samoa and Mo’orea and then returning to LA. I woke up to find that an envelope had been slipped under the door of our stateroom. I tore open the envelope and read the contents of the letter. Hmmmm……very weird.
Fast forward to me standing in line at the Guest Services Desk waiting patiently for a representative who could translate the message in my hand.
Finally it was my turn.
Me : “Good morning sir. I seem to have a problem that I am hoping you can fix. This morning I found this letter under my door. It says that my husband and I will be allowed to stay in our current stateroom P 310 and that our steward will help us move our belongings to our new stateroom.” Duh?
He: “ Yes that is what it says,” as the man read the letter. “What is your problem?”
Me: “ The problem, sir, is that I don’t want to stay in cabin P310. I want to move to cabin C218 which I have reserved and paid for.”
He: “ But it says here you want to stay in Cabin P310.”
Me: : “Sir, why would I want to stay in steerage in Cabin P310 when I have paid for a balcony cabin on Deck 10?”
He: “ Madam do you have a receipt? ”
Me: “ Yes sir, I have 3 receipts.”
For winning ( a Princess Cruises) auction for an upgrade to a balcony cabin.
A confirmation of my new stateroom C218
A receipt for my payment for the upgrade. (I handed them to the guy.)
He: “ Well, madam, anyone could print out these receipts.”
OMGoodness, did he just say what I think he said?
Him: “ Our system says that you want to stay in your current cabin”
And it is never wrong?….it is only as accurate as the information put into the system. Now my blood pressure is really skyrocketing!!!
Me: “ May I please talk to your manager. Your system is wrong.”
He: “ I can’t do any more for you. What I can do is call our head office (in TIMBUKTU!!!!) Customer Service and they will help you sort this out.”
Been there, done that before so I know what to expect!
Me: “ But I do not want to spend 2 hours “on hold” with the head office, waiting to talk to someone who won’t have a clue how to solve my problem! You created it here on this ship so you should fix it.”
He: “ Follow me, Madam.”
Now we are getting somewhere.
Or not. We are now standing in front of a telephone. Yikes!
He: “ I have dialed through to head office. When they pick up, tell them your problem.”
By then everyone could see the smoke coming out of my ears. At that moment, a poor man standing in line for service, collapsed on the floor. He was helped to a chair and 911 was called. When the patient was taken away, my agent quickly brought the chair over to where I was standing with the phone and offered it to me. How kind of him.
1 ½ hours later……….I’m not kidding, I should have brought my knitting…….. a human voice came on the line.
Her: “ Madam what is your problem?”
Me: “ I paid for a cabin upgrade to stateroom C218 for which I am being denied occupancy.”
Her: “ One moment while I pull up your file.”
15 minutes later:
Her: “ Your file says you want to stay in your current cabin P310.”
Oh no, not this again!!!!
Me: “ That’s what I am calling about. I don’t want to stay in this cabin P310. My husband and I want to move into C218 for which we have paid to occupy for the next leg of our journey.”
Her: “Okay, I’ll check with my supervisor.”
And then she disappeared off the line for another 15 minutes, returning every three minutes for the next 15 minutes asking me to stay on the line. Meanwhile I was subjected to more of the worst music ever, which alone could cause madness.
By now I was seething and wondering why I had allowed myself to be parked in a corner on a hard wooden chair for 2 hours as if I needed to be chastised for my impertinence. It reminded me of an incident when I was in Grade 2 and was sent out into the hall as punishment for questioning the spelling of a word my teacher had misspelled on the chalkboard.
I think that “Him” finally realized he should do something to end this madness as apparently I was not going to leave anytime soon, hanging around as if I were a test strand of cooked spaghetti sticking to the wall. He returned to my station and casually hung up the phone and said: ” They are never going to take your call.”
No kidding.
“ May I have your receipts, please?” He forgot I had already given them to him. And with that, he retreated through a door behind which I hoped a solution would be found.
He returned shortly and said: “ It looks like you can move into C218.”
Hallelujah!
He: “ Go back to your stateroom and I will call you to confirm.”
Really?
Back in P310 a couple of hours later, the phone rang.
Me: “ Hello”
He: “ I am calling to confirm C218 is ready for you. I noticed that your name is Manson. Mine is Mansour, almost the same as yours. Please remember it and call me directly anytime you wish. I will take care of you.”
Very kind, as if I am his new best friend.
Can’t wait for our next encounter……. As soon as hell freezes over.
Cruise Ship Chronicles 