I’m on a boat

We’ve never been on a cruise before.  Come to think of it, I've never travelled on any vessel larger than the overnight ferry to Zeebrugge.  So we didn’t really know what happens or where we go to eat or what we need to pay for or the answers to other very basic questions to be asked before booking a 15 day voyage through Central America.

 

We established, by way of a confused-looking customer service bod, that food is limitless and free (at the point of use anyway), our evening meals were a mixture of semi-formal (shirt and trousers) and formal (black tie) to be taken in one of the two main restaurants (You nominate yourselves for ‘Traditional’ or ‘Anytime’ dining: Traditional means to eat at the same time with the same people with the same waiter; Anytime means you rock up when you feel like it but sit wherever you’re put, with whomever they put you.  We opted for the latter as Chantelle reacts poorly to enforced structure and gets a bit bitey) and we pay for drinks.  So the philosophy is throw food into your gaping face-hole with wild abandon, fearing not the judgement of the eternally polite Filipino waiting staff as they have seen far, far worse from the Americans and are therefore desensitized to our feeble amateur gluttony. On an unrelated note, an entertainer cheerily informed us that the average weight gain on a 15 day cruise is 15.6 pounds. It’s like living in Glasgow. 
Anyway, here’s our ship:

Dinky

She’s the Coral Princess, one of Princess Cruises’s smaller vessels, carrying “only” 2000 or so buffet-guzzlers.  She’s narrower than most of the rest of the fleet, and cruise liners in general, so as to be able to fit through the Panama Canal, which was where we were headed. She is almost the exact same dimensions as a Panamax-type cargo ship, which the largest size you can fit through the canal.  Here’s her big sister, the Crown Princess (who carries about double our payload of porkers), who followed us to the first port in Mexico:

Modest

You might think that cruises are for old people, and you’d be broadly correct. A bloke we spoke to in Cabo told us that the general rule of thumb is: the longer the cruise, the older the passengers.  So the 2-3 day cruises are more of a party boat and have a lot of youngsters rampaging about and throwing up in the pool; the week-long stints drag in more of the middle-age crowd; and anything two-weeks and up is God’s waiting room.  We are either the youngest couple on board or a close contender.  No-one’s up too late but they are all up at twat o’clock in the morning, delighted to still be alive. 
Mind you, we had a ‘Balloon Drop party” one day -as Princess is celebrating 50 years of existence- where they dropped a load of gold balloons in the main atrium, accompanied by the resident lounge singer working his way through 5 decades of music.  So far, so mundane. But what I hadn’t expected were the resident crinklies to turn demented as soon as the balloons dropped.  I figured they’d knock them around a bit and go get lunch, but it turned into one of the scenes in Event Horizon where you catch horrifying glimpses into pandemonium. They all ran around cackling maniacally and stomping anything round with righteous venom. I’m pretty sure there were fatalities.

 
What the hell did I just see?

The day’s schedule is a mixture of films, shows, seminars of varying usefulness (a Moldovan photographer showed me how to use my camera, so expect a deluge of pretentious monochrome wank in the near future), some rudimentary Spanish lessons,  ballroom dance lessons (In which I’m awesome, by the way,  and never stand on Chan’s feet and blame her for it), pub quiz-type trivia competitions and various attempts to sell duty-free perfume, dubious artwork, QVC-sounding jewellery (Ammonite earrings, anyone?) and photographs of ourselves in forced poses with locals in native garb as we disembark in each port. 

I did catch a talk by the ship’s Chief Engineer; a nice Italian chap who was obviously not used to public speaking but did a sterling job nonetheless.  He ran through all the ship’s systems, including some diagrams and schematics I could follow, to my tragic overexcitement. I’ve done some vaguely related work and know enough to be dangerous, so had one or two questions about a couple of things.  Thing is, when you have 2000 mostly-retired middle class people you’re going to end up with a fair handful of engineers in attendance, as was the case for this poor benighted bastard.  Where I limited my queries as to the nature of the duty/standby arrangement of the diesel/gas turbine engines and what they had by way of redundancy for power in the event of total engine failure (I told you I was fun at parties.  The answer is 6 hours worth of batteries, by the way), a serious-sounding chap to my right asked if the 2 hertz oscillation he’d noticed was due to overcompensation by the ship’s stabilisers and what did the they use for analogue feedback from the related hydraulics, and other control-loop related fuckery.  I shuddered in sympathy, but he soldiered on despite having the look of a clanky talking way outside of his comfort zone about him.  He had to fight his way through the inevitable geek maelstrom on the way out too, as engineers will always seek a personal audience for further discussion on some obscure point they’ve been mulling over, and possibly request the last issue of the drawing pack for deck 6 if it’s available.


The Lido deck has a monstrous exterior TV screen as well as several pools and jacuzzis.  They do “Movies Under The Stars” every night, where they play films on the screen and hand out popcorn, which is pretty cool.  I watched Terminator: Genisys while sat in a hot tub.  It added to the experience immeasurably but did nothing to make that movie not suck.  We missed the showings of Jurassic World though, so that’s still arthouse French in my head.
The itinerary was/is (I’m just getting around to writing this two days from our final port in Florida; this blog lives in a timeless dimension where tenses are meaningless):

Day 1: Leave port of Los Angeles
Day 4: Cabo San Lucas, Mexico
Day 8: San Juan del Sur, Nicaragua
Day 9: Puntarenas, Costa Rica
Day 11: Through the Panama Canal
Day 12: Cartagena, Colombia
Day 13: Aruba, Caribbean Sea
Day 16: Ft. Lauderdale, Florida

So *spoiler alert*, despite my twatty sniping up-page, we’re really enjoying ourselves.
Kurzfassung auf Deutsch: Ich sollte meinen Spanisch üben, weil wir balt in Südamerika werden.  Ich lieber Deutsch sprechen, aber es ist vielleicht nicht so nützlich in der nahe von hier.  Abgeshen davon, mit unsere Reisen haben wir viele Deutschen getroffen.
Wir reisen von Los Angeles nach Florida, durch die Panamakanal mit einem Kreuzfahrtschiff, mit Hälteplatze in (oder auf, vielleicht? Was mache ich mit einem Schiff? Mann sagt die Präposition “at” auf Englisch. Die Helfe wird immer mit Dankbarkeit erhalten) Mexiko, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Kolombian und Aruba.  Es gefällt mir hier aber ich fange dickbauchig an!