We were returning home from one of our foreign adventures. The only itinerary available included a layover in Acapulco, a place that was definitely not on our bucket list of dream destinations. To make matters worse, we were booked into a seedy hotel which drove us to be away from it for as many of the remaining hours as possible before our next flight.
Our wanderings led us to the port area. Suddenly we were face-to-hull with a giant cruise ship, docked for the night. There was something incongruous about the scale of the thing, a twelve-story building capable of traversing the waters of the world. We were travelers who prided ourselves on doing it our way – creating our own itineraries, relishing the unexpected encounters with people and places that made our experiences unique. Being cooped up with thousands of travelers with whom we had nothing in common, marching – or more accurately, floating through prescribed and programmed stations – was something we would never dream of.
Well, folks, never say never. We have just returned from a Viking Lines cruise which started in Bergen, Norway and ended in Amsterdam. Although Viking ships, all 90 of them, traverse the world, it is, in fact, a Norwegian company, hence the name. What happened to bring us to this reversal of principle? Age, mostly. We no longer have the mobility to travel as we did before. If the activities in a port require strenuous walking, there’s the option of staying on board to view the wonders without exertion. The unpredictability we used to relish is now a source of anxiety. What if we fall or contract a serious illness. The support you need has been floating alongside you from the moment you set sale.
At this stage in our lives, it’s a choice between staying home or traveling within the embrace of a protective cocoon. There’s a reason Viking’s marketing strategy from the beginning has been to attract a 70+ demographic. It helps the bottom line that a significant portion of that age group has had the time to accumulate the capital to pay the steep fees that most cruises demand. [Some cruises feature casinos and the endless hawking of jewelry. I don’t know if any of Viking’s ships devote space to such things, but the Neptune certainly didn’t. Well, maybe a little jewelry.]
Even within that age demographic, there’s a focus on people with cultural interests and inclinations. Viking advertises on NPR and sponsors Masterpiece Theater. Much of the artwork on board is the work of sponsored artists – painters, sculptors, photographers. Viewing all this tasteful work in the hallways, restaurants and lounges got me thinking of the company as a floating Medici-like patron of the arts.
Can you hear the sound of crumbling stereotypes? Viking was winning me over with its sophisticated sensibility. The furnishings in our room and throughout all the public spaces were – here’s that word again – tasteful when they could just as easily have been gaudy and institutional-feeling. Brace yourself for another stereotype unsupported by hard data. The people we conversed with were not Trump people. We’re talking about a non-random sample of a dozen out of 900 passengers, but it’s those small bites out of a very large apple that shape our impressions in experiences like this. True that Fox News was available on the ship’s TV station, but so was MSNBC, and I’ve been in many a hotel room where Fox dominated.
I’ll add that we spent far too much time watching MSNBC once we had retreated to our cabin for the night. The eight-hour time difference from home meant we were watching daytime hosts we had never encountered before. I will offer a small excuse for our addiction by pointing out that it was the week of the Iran bombings and as much as the cruise offered an invitation to escape the escalating horrors back home, it was hard to turn away from the realities we would soon have to confront again face-to-face.
You can’t talk about a cruise without commenting on the food. The Viking Neptune was no exception in the abundance and quality of its offerings. There are five or six eating locations to choose from for each meal and indulgence is the name of the game. I am shedding pounds at a greater rate than my doctor and I favor, so I was eating for three all week. I don’t know how it could be that I didn’t add a single pound. In a demonstration/lecture the ship’s German executive chef reported that the kitchen staff including 70 chefs. That sounds preposterous, but the quality and variety of the offerings were the proof of the pudding. I’ll spare you a detailed account of what was on offer during the week.
I do want to say something about the staff, whom we encountered primarily in the dining rooms and along the endless cabin corridors. They became an important part of our experience. It’s not unusual for cruises to be staffed with a ratio of one crew member for every two passengers, so the impressions you carry away from a trip like this are shaped to a great degree by the crew. They represented 49 different countries and worked a hard ten months to be rewarded with a two-month home furlough. They were well-trained, personable and by all appearances content with their work situation. That latter is a dangerous assertion, too much like what slaveowners would assert about their property, but somehow the signs of discontent from the ship’s crew would have to seep out and be reflected in the quality of their service. We didn’t see any evidence of that.
You may have noticed that I’ve said nothing about the places we visited. I’m saving that for next week, but it is a sign of how easy it is for the experience of the journey to overshadow the destinations which were, after all, the point of the whole trip. However, I hope you come away from my account with a sense of how positively surprised we were by the cruise experience itself, something we could not have imagined that day in Acapulco. There is a famous essay that David Foster Wallace published in Harper’s years ago called “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again” that mocked the cruise experience as a desire of privileged old people to return to the womb: all that water! All that comfort! It is with pleasure that I can report that the amusing young writer had too jaundiced an eye to see the complexity of such an experience. We don’t regret a minute of it.
