Christmas Cruising: Beyond Late Night Buffets and
Blue water Black Jack
David Judkins, Associate Professor of English
University of Houston
Cruising, and travel in general, have experienced enormous growth in the past thirty to forty years despite incidents of terrorism, hi-jacking, piracy, tour rip-offs, and perhaps most daunting of all, insufferably boring fellow travelers. During my university teaching career, I have cultivated a sub-interest in travel literature, developing a course which I regularly teach to upper classmen at the University of Houston; and a parallel interest in travel itself, which over the past ten years has tended to focus on ship travel; or, as some refer to it, cruising. My talk will be a generally discursive meander through my reading and experiences.
I would like to divide my remarks into more or less three divisions. Like a good professor I will have an opening, the body, and a conclusion. The opening will be a bit academic with some history thrown in, the body will be some of my own reflections and experiences, and the conclusion will look to some practical and I hope helpful tips for those thinking of taking a Christmas cruise this year or in the future.
However, knowing how these talks go, I think the conclusion may be of the greatest interest to the audience, so I have decided to start with my conclusion, then move to the opening which will probably put everyone to sleep, and then go on to my own quiet reflections so as not to disturb anyone’s peaceful slumber.
Conclusion:
The cruise industry is suffering for over indulgence! Passenger counts have risen from 4 million per year in 1990 to 7 million per year in 2000. To meet this growing demand nearly all cruise lines have commissioned new, and most often, larger vessels to be constructed. I will not begin a listing of new ships and their tonnage, but let me just point out that in January 2004 the Queen Mary II is scheduled to be launched. This ship will have a gross tonnage of 150,000 tons. The first ship Alice and I sailed on in 1963 was the P&O liner, Orcades which was a 23,000 ton ship. Six Orcades would fit inside the Queen Mary II. I personally find that astonishing. So it is good news that the cruise industry is keeping up with passenger demand. It is even better news for passengers that this capacity now exceeds demand quite substantially. And while new ships are being launched, some lines are mothballing perfectly fine vessels simply because they cannot fill them.
In addition to the over capacity we also have new issues which I hardly need to go into here. Vague threats of terrorism and terrible random events cause feelings of unease for any foreign travel and make vacationing Americans look more toward state parks than tropical islands. Recent incidents of infectious disease on some ships are a further deterrent for Christmas Cruising or any cruising in the near future.
Nevertheless, even though cruising may be down it is not out, and if you are a bargain seeking contrarian, now is the time to go bottom fishing. It is hard for me to believe that prices will ever be much lower particularly with the level of quality that now exists.
What’s to like about cruising? Alice, my wife, loves ship board life because she does not have to go to the grocery store, she does not have to prepare meals, do dishes, make beds, dust, vacuum, etc. And whereas I protest, saying that we share these duties at home, she insists that it is more token sharing than meaningful work.
I like cruising because it is travel at a measured pace. I have time to plan for new sights and afterward to digest what I have seen and experienced. Alice and I have sailed around the world twice and you return with a real sense of the vastness of the oceans and of the earth itself. It required nine days to sail from Japan to Seattle non-stop. You know you are going a long distance; I listen to the engines and develop a new respect for machinery and for the men who keep it going.
At the same time, one is not dragging suitcases from hotel to airport, choking down dreadful airline food, or increasingly no food at all, renting cars in strange places—sometimes driving on the wrong side of the road or pushing your way through crowded subways stations. Shipboard travel is relaxing and despite the presence of hundreds of fellow passengers, it provides me with a sense of remoteness.
But what kind of cruise? This really depends on you and what you are looking for. I am not a travel agent and so I cannot, from personal experience, list the advantages and disadvantages of each line. But my bibliography which is shortly to be distributed will point you to some guides that should help you make your choice. If you are mildly concerned about shipboard travel, sea sickness, stuck with all those other people on a boat (as you will call it) for several days—you might begin with a short, very inexpensive cruise out of Galveston and if that works out, next time move up to something more adventuresome. Apart from the big cruise lines there are some very interesting trips available to unusual places or in unusual crafts. There are windjammer cruises aboard sailing vessels, or there is motor sailing aboard such vessels as the Windstar. And don’t forget Cruise & Freighter Travel Association, with TravLtips, included in the bibliography. Let me end the conclusion with a quotation from one commentator in a cruise guide I consulted for this talk who summed up the attraction of shipboard travel this way:
"The cruise line might attract you to their ships because of rock wall climbing, the shows, perhaps the investment seminars, the food—not to mention the cheap prices, but for most of the seven million plus cruisers the real attraction is the sea. To go out on deck in the evening away from the casinos, the entertainment, the bars, to stand by the rail and peer out into the ocean—stars above—quiet. The water passing, the thrust of the huge engines—it is rest for the soul. Even though you share the ship with a thousand or more other passengers—there is nevertheless a sense of isolation—removed from your work-a-day world—it is restful to know you cannot be reached by cell phone or email or voice mail. If you wish you can check that email at the first port, but for now you can rest in the assurance that you are really on vacation."
Part II. Introduction:
It is now time for you to zone out--as my students would say. There will be no quizzes or questions. I will try to keep my voice low, so as not to disturb you.
First, I would like to distribute my brief bibliography. Professors always must have a handout for students to throw away as they exit the classroom. My able assistant, who is also my wife, Alice, will pass among you this short list of reading choices. I will not read the bibliography to you (I won a teaching award last year, and I think my winning it was based on what I don’t do as much as what I do do. I don’t read syllabi and I don’t read bibliographies to the students). However I have included in the bibliography some arm chair travel as well as some useful guide books.
Why do people travel? Academics always like to ask big questions so that they can kill time speculating on unverifiable answers. So far as I can determine, there was very little leisure travel until the mid 18th century. Before then, people traveled with a business, religious, or military purpose. Geoffrey Chaucer tells of a trip from south London to Canterbury in the late middle ages, but the group traveling was on a solemn pilgrimage to visit the tomb of Thomas á Becket. There was also a great deal of travel to find some one to fight with. The Crusaders seem always to have been trekking across Europe to reach the Middle East and try and kill a few of the Muslim Infidel (some things just never change)! But such travel often had surprising results: people not only fought or prayed, but they actually learned something. They picked up ideas from these different cultures and brought them home. During the Enlightment (that is what academics usually call the 18th century) some people got the idea that maybe one could travel for the educational benefit and forget the praying and fighting. The Grand Tour was born and well off young Englishmen who had completed their University course, would take a tutor and head off for Europe for a year or sometimes more. They polished their French in Paris, studied art in Florence, visited a university in Germany, studied music in Austria, and returned to London a properly educated man with journal and sketch book as evidence their time was well spent.
In the 19th century individual travel gave way to group tours. Thomas Cook was the first to take his sober companions to a temperance rally in Leicester. Of course it was the train, and later the steamboat (or steamship) which allowed large numbers of people to travel together more economically, and for some more enjoyably, than individual travel. We might even say that travel was industrialized in the 19th century like so much of the rest of our lives.
In 1867 one of America’s most famous and best loved travelers wrote a book length account of his voyage on the Quaker City from New York to the Middle East to visit the famous biblical sites. Much of Mark Twain’s writing is about travel. Life on the Mississippi, The Innocents Abroad, Roughing It, even Huckleberry Finn is a fictitious account of a raft trip down the Mississippi. I would like to take just a moment to read a passage from The Innocents Abroad, in which Twain talks about fellow travelers, in this case "The Old Traveler."
The Old Travelers—those delightful parrots who have "been here before" and know more about the country than Louis Napoleon knows now or ever will know,
But we love the Old Travelers. We love to hear them prate, and drivel and lie. We can tell them the moment we see them. They always throw out a few feelers; they never cast themselves adrift till they have sounded every individual and know that he has not traveled. Then they open their throttle-valves, and how they do brag, and sneer, and swell, and soar, and blaspheme the sacred name of Truth! Their central idea, their grand aim is to subjugate you, keep you down, make you feel insignificant and humble in the blaze of their cosmopolitan glory! They will not let you know any thing. They sneer at your most inoffensive suggestions; they laugh unfeelingly at your treasured dreams of foreign lands; they brand the statements of your traveled aunts and uncles as the stupidest absurdities; they deride your most trusted authors and demolish the fair images they have set up for your willing worship with the pitiless ferocity of the fanatic iconoclast! But still I love the Old Travelers. I love them for their witless platitudes; for their supernatural ability to bore; for their delightful asinine vanity; for their luxuriant fertility of imagination; for their startling, their brilliant, their overwhelming mendacity!
That is Mark Twain, at his best I believe, and I always try to keep this passage in mind whenever talking about my own experiences, which I would like to now turn to:
Part III Body:
When I was 23 I received a Fulbright Grant to teach for a year in Tasmania, Australia. We could have flown to Australia, but Alice and I elected to travel by scheduled steam ship. In the early part of the 20th century there was a constant movement of passenger vessels from point to point around the world. In 1963 that network was still largely in place as commercial jet air travel had been with us for only about two years. During the 1960’s ship travel gradually lost ground and it is now difficult to move from point to point around the world on a ship unless you are on a cruise.
Alice and I were really "The Innocents Abroad." We grew up in central Indiana, and we had ventured about as far away as Michigan, before we sailed for Australia. We both fell in love with the Orcades, though she was not like a modern cruise ship. She was instead an old British Ocean liner. We traveled first class, but in the lower range of cabins, so the bath room was down the hall. There were showers, but there were quite specific instructions on how one took a shower at sea. A quick spray, turn the water off—soap up- and a quick spray to rinse. If you wanted to spend more time, a salt water bath was recommended with special soap.
It was coat and tie at dinner every evening, but we had interesting table companions. A couple on their honeymoon from Seattle was with us to Hawaii. (Sadly they divorced about twelve years later), and an older couple from New Zealand who stayed with us all the way to Auckland. We enjoyed visiting Hawaii, Fiji, and New Zealand, but it was the ship we really loved. As you stood on deck waving to the people on shore as we cast off—there is a different sense, a sense of aloneness but also a sense of relief. How long this time before we reach port again? Wow six days to Fiji, while secretly wishing it were ten. Twain scoffs at people checking the weather, or maps, looking for other shipping as if they make any difference, but I disagree with him. It is I believe a measure of the serenity of sailing that allows one to take a keen if unproductive interest in place, time, and conditions.
Alice and I were hooked, and I honestly believe that if I were independently wealthy, we would spend a disproportionate amount of our time at sea. Two years later we took a President Line ship from Hawaii, where we had landed for a year on our way home from Australia, to Japan. This time we decided to travel tourist class for a change. Probably not a good idea. Cruise ships today are classless though the cabins vary widely in cost depending on which deck one is on and whether or not it is an outside cabin.
Children then intervened along with that wretched American practice of career building, and it was not until the early 80’s that we all took a Christmas cruise on the Carnival Line ship Mardi Gras. Our teenaged daughters loved it. We told them they did not have to be in the cabin until midnight each night, and they were never there a moment before.
But it was in the 90’s that Alice and I really returned to the sea. In Fall of 1991 I was invited to sail on Semester at Sea where I taught writing and literature while we sailed around the world from Vancouver to New Orleans by way of Japan, China, Malaysia, India, South Africa, and the Eastern coast of South America. I must say, I liked being a pure passenger better, but not being independently wealthy, I am grateful to John Tymatz and Max Brandt, who, through the University of Pittsburgh, administer Semester at Sea, for giving me the chance to spend as much time on shipboard as I do. In the spring of 1998 we were back, going this time the opposite directions from Grand Bahamas to Seattle. This summer I will be going on my third voyage this time not all the way around the world but from Vancouver to Alaska, across the North Pacific to Vladivostok Russia, thence down to Korea, Shanghai China, Hanoi, Taiwan, Osaka, Japan and back to Seattle.
Some of my colleagues question my sanity spending so much time on a ship with as many as 600 American college students, and perhaps it is a measure of my love of travel that causes me not to pause for a moment when asked if I would be available for another voyage.(I should insert here that Semester at sea always reserves space for about 60 adult non-university passengers who do provide some relief from the steady diet of underclassmen.) Colleagues ask: What do you do with your house when being gone so long? Don’t you worry about your health? Or the health of loved ones when you are away so long? Who looks after your things, I mean who pays the bills while you are away? How can you just put your life on hold for two, three, or four months? There are individual answers to all of those questions, but the main answer is that we find a way because it is worth it.
I will not deny that the students can begin to get to me. Nor would I ever suggest that Semester at Sea is a leisure time activity. Alice will tell you that I work—and work hard when on a voyage. In many ways I work harder than at my regular job at the University. But it is worth all the effort.
I would like to close these remarks with another reading, this time from Sinclare Lewis’ Dodsworth, the story of an industrialist who retired. Dodsworth is a fictitious American auto manufacturer in the 1920s. In the novel he retires in 1929 and takes his wife, Fran, to Europe for an extended vacation. I will close with a passage just after the ship has left New York harbor.
He explored the steamer. It was to him, the mechanic, the most sure and impressive mechanism he had ever seen; more satisfying than a Rolls Royce. He marveled at the authoritative steadiness with which the bow mastered the waves; at the powerful sweep of the lines of the deck and the trim stowing of cordage. He admired the first officer, casually pacing the bridge. He wondered that in this craft which was, after all, but a floating iron egg-shell, there should be an ornate music room, a smoking room with its Tudor fireplace—solid and terrestrial as a castle—and a swimming-pool, green-lighted water washing beneath Roman pillars. He climbed to the boat deck, and some never-realized- desire for sea-faring was satisfied as he looked along the sweep of gangways, past the huge lifeboats, the ventilators like giant saxophones, past the lofty funnels serenely dribbling black wooly smoke, to the forward mast. The snow-gusts along the deck, the mysteriousness of this new world but half seen in the frosty lights, only stimulated him. He shivered and turned up his collar, but he was pricked to imaginativeness, standing outside the wireless room, by the crackle of messages springing across bleak air-roads, ocean-bounded to bright snug cities on distant plains.
"I’m at sea!"
He tramped down to tell Fran—he was not quite sure what it was that he wanted to tell her. Save that steamers were very fine things indeed and that ahead of them, in the murk of the horizon, they could see the lanes of England.
She, in their cabin with it twin brass beds, its finicking imitations of gray blue French prints on the paneled walls, was amid a litter of shakenout frocks, heaps of shoes, dressing gowns, Coty powder, binoculars, steamer letters, steamer telegrams, and his dress-shirts.
"It’s terrible, " she lamented. "I’ll get things put away just about in time for landing. . . .Oh, here’s a wireless from Emily, the darling, from California. Harry and she seem to be standing the honeymoon about as well as most victims."
"Chuck the stuff." He said "Come out on deck. I love this ship. It’s so --- Man certainly has put it over Nature for once! I think I could’ve built ships! Come out and see it."
"You do sound happy." She replied. " I’m glad. But I must unpack. You skip along—"
I suggest you too skip along...down to your travel agent and book a bargain cruise for this Christmas or at least some time this winter. Prices will probably never be lower, occupancy rates will be moderate, and the service should be great.
Cruising: A Selected Bibliography
Craig, Patricia, ed. The Oxford Book of Travel Stories. Oxford. University Press, 1997. A well selected collection of classic and contemporary short stories that which center on some aspect of travel. See particularly Evelyn Waugh’s "Cruise: Letters from a Young Lady of Leisure."
Cudahy, Paul J. The Cruise Ship Phenomenon of North America. Cornell Maritime Press, 2001. Highly readable discussion of the cruise industry since the advent of jet air travel with individual chapters on all of the major cruise lines.
Fussell, Paul. Abroad: British Literary Traveling Between the Wars. Oxford University Press, 1980. Fussell is an eclectic literary scholar with a pleasing readable style. Here he explores the explosion of tourism in the 1920s and 1930s and the literature which accompanied it.
_____ ed. The Norton Book of Travel. W.W. Norton & Co. 1987. A popular anthology of travel writing from Herodotus to Jack Kerouac
Mancini, Marc Cruising: Guide to Cruise Lines Industry. Delmar Learning, 1999. Comprehensive guide, written in conjunction with the Cruise Lines International Association, explains history and development of cruising with details on individual lines and ships.
Showker, Kay and Bob Sehlinger. The Unofficial Guide to Cruises 2003. John Wiley & Sons, 2003. Winner of the Lowell Thomas Award for best new guide books, attempts to provide a behind the scenes guide to cruising with hints on best fares, air connections, whom your fellow travelers may be, and other resourceful information. Helpful without being cynical.
Twain, Mark. The Innocents Abroad. Introduction by Mark Quirk, Penguin, 1988. A modern edition of Twain’s classic and hilarious account of the Quaker City’s 1867 cruise from New York to Jersualem to view famous Biblical sites.
Ward, Douglas. Berlitz Complete Guide to Cruising and Cruise Ships 2002.
Berlitz Travel Guide, 2001. Detailed ranking of individual cruise ships includes food, service, amenities, and others.
Cruise & Freighter Travel Association P.O. Box 580188 - Flushing, New York 11358
Telephone: Toll Free 800-872-8584 E-mail: info@travltips.com