This post is part of a series. You can go back to the first one at Cruzin’ then Cruzin’: Day 2. There’s our sojourn in Mexico and this is part four.
As I write there are four liners in port and we are getting ready to leave. It’s just passed five in the afternoon and the captains are playing silly-buggers with the ships’ horns. We toot twice. The other ship toots back three times. We toot back five. Eventually it gets to Shave-and-a-Haircut.
It was another day at sea as we sailed for Nassau. It was supposed to be some other island but the approach of hurricane Helene forced a change of plan. Yesterday, after watching dolphins from the Mast Bar I woke Mrs Sachie from her nap for dinner at Normandie, the French dining room.
I guess you can get used to anything because today the dining room wasn’t a delight. Couldn’t get a table near a window and the food, although fine, was starting to taste of mass-production. Perhaps it’s because some of the same dishes appear on the menus between restaurants. Thousands of beautifully-presented gourmet dishes produced each hour. But perhaps there was another reason for my restlessness…
After dinner I was no good for anything but bed, which Mrs Sachie didn’t like because she wanted to go to the ship’s club to watch a ‘jazz’ show. There was nothing to be done so I let her go and face drunken middle-aged American men alone. But I felt like shit and couldn’t sleep until she came back anyway.
The Symphony of the Seas is blocking our way out of port, hence all the playful honking.
We were in a new timezone this morning so we lost an hour and forgot the room-service breakfast, which found me at the Ocean View café, at the stern of the ship. It’s at the edge of the warehouse-like buffet and wasn’t bad at all. However, the other passengers make it a bit of a zoo — a zoo of overfed exhibits. We were passing Havana, famous enemy of capitalism and often near-starving. Food for musing as I quietly stoked my goatee.
We had tried all the dining rooms but Cosmopolitan (I think it’s styled as American cuisine?) which is a bit of all the other dining rooms mashed together. I mean, it’s all from the same kitchen anyway. Sachie had spotted noodles on the lunch menu but the course change had changed said menu (couldn’t stock up in port?) and they can’t update the app at sea. We also got seated with a stranger, next to the kitchen. The steak was rare but salty. The peach cobbler came out of a packet. Oh well, buffet for dinner I reckon. After which, it would be buffet all the way.
Post-lunch Mrs Sachie got a temperature and had a lie down so it was up to me to hold up the Mast Bar and drink for two. Not easy going, but Nassau crept closer with every hour.
Dinner at the buffet turned out to be not only excellent but also a right rib-stretcher. Picked up a double of Jamerson’s for the walk back to the room but didn’t drink it and chucked it down the sink. Not a good sign but too stuffed to do anything but slip into a food coma.
Zzzzzzzzz.
Uh, God what time is it? Only 11? Mrs Sachie was slumbering but it was time for me to give the ship’s plumbing a stress-test. Runny poo is not a good sign when aboard. Neither is a burning stomach, it turns out. I had the sense to hold my nose as I unloaded the evening’s meal out the way it came in and, about three kilos lighter, went back to sleep.
Zzzzzzzzz.
What time is… 5AM? Oh God! Euuuuuugghhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh! Eugghhhhhhhhhhh! Sob. No! Please no! Eugghhhhhhhhh…
I must have a stomach the size of a rugby ball! It was astonishing how much came out of it. Can’t say I recommend the exercise though. The final meal to come out was the molé from Mexico so I reckon that was the culprit.
If you’re sick aboard you’re obligated to report to the ship’s doctor. I made the call, giving them all the lurid details, and they made an appointment for me at 9am. There is a nice little sick-bay where they put me behind a curtain and sat me down with a clipboard. It turns out that it’s $200 a visit unless you’ve been vomiting all night and reported it, as obliged. When they discovered this was the case the curtain was pulled and I was out before I could finish buttoning my pants.
We had already breakfasted in the room, nothing like fresh fruit and croissants on wounded stomach, and the ship was already at dock in Nassau. Three other ships in port with more to come in and it’s a nice terminal. But lots of walking.
Not a bad walk in though, we got a good look at the ships, and some alarming signage.
That’s the hot-box, where they put the sailors caught masturbating.
I guess if one’s in the mood, it’s best to do it out of sight. Underwater. Oh, wait a minute…
Tugboats! They mean tugboats. Silly me. Kenneth here will tug you all over the port.
But I’m more partial to Rose, she has a nice moustache.
Nassau is a damn nice town, clean and orderly. That’s a British colony for you. Well, kind of. I guess it started British but got taken over by pirates for a time to become a stateless and lawless settlement of mutineers and deserting sailors. The Brits came back and pushed out Jack Sparrow and his like and then had to re-take it from a parade of other nations. So there’s a lot of ‘colour’ to its history.
We had a wander around town which has quiet and clean streets, shops selling rum and trinkets. The Straw Market and the surrounding blocks are tourism ground-zero. We didn’t buy any straws but did pay six dollars for a fridge magnet.
The Straw Market doesn’t actually sell straws, it sells tourist nick-nacks. It put me in the mind of Bangkok’s Weekend Market, or JJ, because it sells a lot of the same stuff. There’s probably a factory in Central Asia that churns it all out.
Six bucks was the extent of our spending. We had on swimmers and walked up the road to what looked like a good beach.
Lots of beach bars along the road and some of the politest touts I have ever given the bum’s rush to.
More walking and we stopped at a beach where the locals swim to have a look at the map. Wait, what’s that?
Surprise, surprise, it’s another enormous cruise ship! And it’s a whopper.
We never made it to our beach and never had a swim. We only got as far as Sonia’s Jerk. I wanted to try it out but for some reason Mrs Sachie didn’t want to try The Best Jerk in Town. She said that I had already made too many masturbation jokes for one article.
There’s a little fort you can go in. I didn’t because I had planed on soliciting and climbing on the artefacts. And it cost five bucks.
Otherwise there’s the Pirate Museum:
The thing about pirates, as we know them, is that they’re almost entirely based off one book, A general history of the pyrates, : from their first rise and settlement in the Island of Providence, to the present time. With the remarkable actions and adventures of the two female pyrates Mary Read and Anne Bonny … To which is added. A short abstract of the statute and civil law, in relation to pyracy, from 1724. The good old days. Apparently this museum draws heavily from the book and light on artefacts. Read the book though, it’s good.
Back at port we had a new neighbour.
Can’t see the town from our cabin any more.
However, as views go, it’s impressive. Eight decks of shoebox staterooms. Apparently she can squeeze in just shy of 6,000 paying passengers. Ours maxes out at just under four and is a big ship.
Underway again we had to rush to the buffet to scoop up dinner. Great handfuls of macaroni-cheese and jogging between the carvery and the Mexican sections with morsels showering off our plates because we needed to fill up before the show. What show? Why, the ship has a sizeable and modern theatre (big LCD backdrop and lots of lights) in the forecastle and we had front-row seats to something simply magical. A simple magic show.
I don’t know if you have heard of Matt Johnson, “International Magician and Escape Artist”? I hadn’t, even though he’s been on TV more than once, even appearing on that pinnacle of culture, America’s Got Talent.
Sachie and I turned up early, burping and farting our way to the front row. I argued that this is a mistake as the front row gets made fun of, volunteered or, sometimes, wet.
Matt’s got a big beard, a funny moustache and the many tattoos that the modern ‘cool’ magician requires. Being a paid-up sceptic I’m a big fan of magic and magicians but it seems like I’m a bit out of touch these days. Matt’s act was mostly a story about himself: lost youth, regret, but eventual redemption before dad’s tragic shuffling from the coil. He interrupted this tale and PowerPoint presentation with a few tricks. Here’s the ones I recall and their solutions:
- Pulling a rope through your lower abdomen from back to front: wrap an elastic cord around your front.
- A volunteer is called, chooses a number and identifies one of four grids of numbers that contains it: I was stumped by this until I got the same trick in a Christmas cracker that December.
- Something with a bobbin of fluorescent string that’s too thick to be anything but a stage prop.
- Levitating a child off a table: The child lays on a big copper plate (although it’s disguised), and there’s a big electromagnet in the table. Has to be a child, a girl, because grown-ups are too fat.
- Houdini suspended straitjacket escape: Inhale deeply when fitting the jacket, wriggle out.
Listening to Matt’s dull stories I reflected on the formal format of a nattily-dressed magician who has little to no dialogue but makes up for it with timing, a nailed-down flourish and original tricks. A sexy assistant in a corset and fishnets wouldn’t hurt either but I guess the classic magician is frowned upon these days for pushing rabbits and pigeons through a hole in his top hat and into an artfully concealed shredder each night. So there’s me stroking my goatee furiously and getting more and more pissed off but this guy was catnip for the oldies who gave him a standing ovation.
I think he’s a mediocre showman but he’s performing on fancy cruise liners and I’m eating shit in the office all day so what do I know?
