Dan and Sachie have been Cruising. No, it’s not like in the Al Pacino film from 1980, quite the opposite. While Al descended into a sleazy world of leather and gay sex, Sachie and I ascended to the heights of luxury and first-class travel. That is, Sachie scored a fam trip on a boat.
Not just any boat, it’s classy Celebrity Cruises Celebrity Beyond and apparently it’s quite a score. Not your usual family-friendly booze-and-buffet cruise that has you packed into tiny airless staterooms but something closer to the golden age of sea travel, 1977’s The Love Boat.
But first! A long and arduous flight across the Pacific.
It turns out that Philippine Air is pretty good and the airport in Manilla isn’t too bad, which was lucky because we had a stopover from 1am to 10am. The lounges were busy and they’d cut off water for construction so there was a shitsmell but, we’re on holiday! A little fatigued on arrival at LA but that’s OK because we had to race to meet our connecting flight of God knows four and a half hours to Miami. Now that I’m on US soil, sort of, it’s time to start judging people. The Latino couple next to me are fat and jolly and switched seats with me to sit together, so I’m in the aisle. The white chap across from me watched four and a half hours straight of Beauty Beach TV. The TSA chap who checked our boarding passes had 5.56mm magazines stuffed in the front of his body-armour but his sidearm is 9mm. I wrote notes, quietly stroking my goatee.
It was dark when we arrived so we didn’t get to see much of the town until morning. Sachie wanted to see Little Havana and had found a likely candidate for breakfast. We took a local bus, walked the rest of the way.
Cuban sandwiches, Cuban coffee and Key lime pie.
It was OK I guess. I wasn’t much impressed with Little Havana, big roads, restaurants with enormous carparks. We did walk thorough the cemetery on the way back, which was nice.
There was a tourist ‘trolley’, a bus made to look like a tram, back to the hotel. It was free and took us through the actual Little Havana. Cheap hotels, payday loan places, pawn shops, bong shops and people who looked like they needed to get home for a good sleep after an all-nighter. Nice murals though.
No time to lose, the hotel had booked us a transfer to the cruise port, which turned out to be very close by. Trouble is, our ship was at Fort Lauderdale cruise port.
One lengthy Uber ride later.
I’m going to apologise in advance to anybody else who has been on a cruise or knows anything about them, because all the observations in this piece and the following ones you will find, well, obvious.
Like the fact that processing onto the ship and out of the US-of-A is remarkably light. They x-ray your luggage (and they’re not even armed!) for contraband (booze, guns) make sure you have a passport but don’t really look at it and, gangway. Here is our stateroom:
This little room would be our home for five nights, or something, and features a ‘balcony’. It’s really just half a window that lowers down but you can shut the doors on the inside so you have kind of an inside-balcony. It’s a bit of a wheeze and apparently they’re getting rid of it but it was awfully nice to be able to open a big window. Beats a porthole.
The view is blocked a little, by the lifeboat and you will see loads of 08 in following shots, but it doesn’t hurt to be handy to one. Speaking of abandoning ship, the ship’s app demanded that we find our muster point shortly after boarding. Ours was in the casino and a nice young Ukrainian couple pointed to an assembly point sign and some life jackets. I guess if the ship is going down the casino is not a bad place to find out if you’re lucky. Drill complete.
Now, you may ask how I know they were Ukrainian. Was it Katrina’s 1000-yard stare? The fact that Pavil had no legs? No, it’s on the name badge as well as their occupation, which I expect saves the crew a lot of time explaining where they are from and what they do. It would drive me mental being mistaken for British or South African nine times a day and kills a lot of useless small-talk.
We’ve started to mess up the room but there’s plenty of time for that later. We are hours away from castoff and our package lets us drink anything under nine bucks and it’s time to see what costs nine bucks.
It’s windy at the mast bar but it’s not crowded. The bar-lady is from Trinidad, polite, efficient and quiet. The prosecco comes in under nine bucks, is pretty good and we haven’t had a glass since we got off the ship. But that’s for later, right now we were toasting and soaking up the view on this glorious coastal afternoon.
Fort Lauderdale looks very nice, at least this bit. All those boats going in and out are full of happy people. It’s a Sunday, I think, and these folks can afford a nice boat and it’s a beautiful afternoon. But their boat isn’t as big as ours.
Speaking of enormous floating office towers, Freedom of the Seas here pulled out before us, probably to cruise the South China Sea or Taiwan Straight. You will notice that it was a water-slide. Our ship does not have a water-slide, it has a running track, thus marking it out as a more stately vessel than this, family-oriented and mass-market hulk. I gazed at them down my nose while quaffing the last of my prosecco.
Now that we are warmed up, let’s explore the ship.
Down there? That’s the magic carpet. It’s actually a lighter dock that can be lowered to transfer passengers, via lighter (no, not the thing smokers use, it’s the thing that’s in Nostromo) to some port that is too shallow for the ship and I’m told that this is a distinction only for our ship. When it’s not in use they raise it up and turn it into a bar. Like this:
This is the stern, also called the ‘thic’ end of the ship.
The pool. Ignore the elephant in the room, I’ll get to him later. A pool on a ship seems a little ironic to me, you know, being in the sea, but I can see it’s charms. This one had apparatus for lowering less-mobile people in and out with a chair so was probably pull of piss. No way they are spending ten minutes getting forklifted out to limp off to the loo.
And with much tooting, the lines are cast off and we are underway.
We pass though a gap in the barrier island and are upon the Caribbean! Adventure calls, but so does dinner.
This is a fam-trip, or ‘familiarisation tour’ whereby people who work in the travel industry get free or heavily-discounted trips to try out the holidays that they are trying to sell. It helps sales and is a fringe benefit for travel industry folk. Trouble is, we have to have dinner with Mrs Sachie’s colleagues who joined us on the junket.
This liner takes great pride in its restaurants, which really are very good. There are four main dining rooms with different cuisines and a big buffet. If you are feeling fancy or your wallet is uncomfortable to sit on you can go to one of the non-free places, one of which has a Michelin-star chef. Sachie and I ate our escargot with the rest of the proles.
And that was it for the day. Sachie’s Marriott colleagues were very nice and we had a lovely time until our sommelier refused to pour Mrs Sachie any more prosecco so it was time for bed. This piece is long enough already and there is a heck of a lot to put in this trip. So get a good night’s sleep and stay tuned.
