Work, work and…more work

28th June 2007

Surprisingly enough it’s me,

This has been a less than good week. We are still short a cashier and the hours are still long and I’m still not getting paid much for it. On Sunday, our turnaround day, I not only finished at 5am from the night before but I had ’embarks’ at 11.45 am, finished that at 4pm the whole time spent on my feet, straight into boat drill until 5pm, an hour to shower and shave and then to work until midnight. Fortunately yesterday was much better and I only had to work 12 hours! On my master list of pros and cons concerning doing another contract (or finishing this one) the last few days have definitely been marked down in bold on the con side. Already my thoughts are turning to what else I can do once I’ve finished this and had my reward in Walt Disney World. Anyone willing to buy a book I’d write about my travels to some other place?

But on to other things.

I have done the first free tour of my contract and I have a feeling that it may not be the last. How can you knock the fact that you can do these tours and not have to pay for them? I’m kind of surprised that more crew don’t do them but maybe they either have or they just want to do the standard things with their time rather than organised things. On Friday I have a full day one that I’m really looking forward to, a trip to the Mayan ruins at Tulum. It’s an early start to the tour after a late finish at work and a late finish to the tour before a latish start at work but I’m more than willing to put up with the lack of sleep on this one for a tour that everyone who has done it has nothing but nice things to say. At least I won’t have to spend the whole time standing up as there is a 45 minute ferry trip to the mainland and then a bus ride to the ruins themselves so I’ll be able to sit and maybe even get a few minutes sleep. If there is one thing that this job teaches you it’s how to catch sleep when you can, even if it’s just for short periods of time. At Walt Disney World I may have to go on some of the rides I would normally avoid just so I can sit down and close my eyes for a few minutes.

But that tour is still a couple of days away so I might describe the one I did last week in St Thomas. This was a photographic tour, a professional photographer showing the sights of the island and the best way to use you camera to capture those sights. It all sounded good and I had visions of some grizzled old workhorse of a photographer taking a few geeky types like myself around in the back of his old car and then walking us around downtown Charlotte Amalie while giving all sorts of technical tips on how to use a camera. It didn’t turn out to be much like that at all. I really hadn’t thought that there would be many people on a tour like this at, given the much better “sights of St Thomas” type ones that were available but it turned out that there were 23 of us jammed into the back of one of the local “seats welded into the back of a ute” type taxis. The photographer was far from old and grizzled and was actually a young girl who had moved to the island only a year earlier based on the promise of work for her husband. The passengers ranged from the geeky type with two large and very impressive cameras hanging off him to young couples who seemed more interested in the tour and only had their little digital cameras there to take the standard shots rather than learn anything new about them. The two camera guy turned out to be a professional photographer so he was already ahead of the game and at each of the stops there was really only one couple who asked any questions and seemed to learn anything at all. I think the problem was less the tour guide and more the number of people she had to deal with. In effect it was less a photographic tour and more a general tour with a guide who may not have been as knowledgeable about the island as she could have been. This is not to say that I didn’t enjoy it. After all, the price was right and I was going to get something out of it no matter what in that regard, it was just a little disappointing in terms of knowledge gained that might help me take better photos for any potential book.

We started out from the port in the back of the taxi and a problem became immediately apparent. The guide was sitting with us but because the back of the taxi was open, with just a roof on it, she was nearly impossible to hear over the road noise etc unless you were sitting right next to her. Before we had started she had explained that she had only been on the island for a year and had been working for a professional photographer doing everything from weddings to these tours and was loving her job. She did know cameras and photography so at that point I was hopeful but when we got to our first stop I found out what the main problem was going to be. We arrived at the top of the St Thomas Skyride and she tried to start a talk about using your camera but those who were more interested in the view, and were probably only there for the tour component anyway, drifted away and she was left talking to only a couple of us. I think she really tried but essentially only gave us a basic little lecture and then told us when to be back at the taxi. This was the pattern for the other 3 stops we made and I wonder if it may not have been better with a much smaller group rather than the number we had. As part of my ‘payment’ for the tour I had to fill out an evaluation and I was forced to put that it didn’t meet my expectation although I tried to be fair and explain why.

But the tour itself, as a tour, was good and lacked the glossiness that may have annoyed me of a more professional one, even if it did lack the information that the others would have had. We started at the St Thomas Skyride. This is a cable car that travels up the side of a mountain (or large hill) overlooking the port and town of Charlotte Amalie. We drove up rather than taking the cable car and the view from the top was pretty spectacular. There was the obligatory bar and souvenir shop but the way that the bay was laid out below was the only thing I was interested in and I ended up taking a lot of photos. Our guide did point out the two spots, one on the mainland and one on the island in the middle of the bay, that used to be the two ends of a massive chain that could be pulled across in times of need and either prevent ships from entering or leaving the harbour. A little bit of history and I was happy. I resisted the urge to spend an outrageous amount of money on the ‘signature drink’ of the bar and we moved on to our next stop.

I had already been to Blackbeard’s castle, a misnamed tower that was actually built by the Danish, but we went to Bluebeard’s castle, a much more accurately named structure on a couple of counts. It looked much more like a castle, or at least a castle tower, and had been built by Bluebeard himself. The castle, or more accurately tower, is now in the grounds of a hotel but we could walk around it and also the grounds. There was a row of real cannons still facing out over the harbour, ready to repel any invasion, and the tower itself seemed to be made of the same sort of reclaimed brick and stone ship ballast that so much of the older part of town was built from. This place had a feel of a real pirate and he had actually walked the same steps and looked out at the same view that I was taking photos of.

Our next stop was at Mountain Top, ‘birthplace of the world famous banana daiquiri (over 6 million served)’. This was essentially a viewing platform overlooking a bay on the other side of the island that has been named as one of the 10 best beaches in the world by National Geographic. Magens Bay may have a great beach but the haze we were getting that day made it a little hard to tell from the height we were and unfortunately the haze also made our view of the offshore islands less than perfect. It would have been a spectacular sight on a clear day but for us was a little limited. When I say that it was a viewing platform I’m probably doing it a disservice because the platform is large and attached to it is a veritable shopping mall of tourist shops as well as a large bar serving the aforementioned banana daiquiris. Again I resisted the urge to spend my hard earned dollars and can’t claim to have added to the 6 million already served.

By now a few people had found out that I worked on the ship so I spent the drive to our next stop answering questions and trying to put a “woe is me” spin on things so that if any of them made it into the casino they may have been more inclined to throw a few tips our way. I don’t think it worked because we had another typically poor week in that regard. The drive from Mountain Top took us through some of the real parts of the island and our guide was describing the way of life for the locals in terms of no sewerage and town water. This was coming as quite a shock to a lot of the passengers and I could see them wondering why anyone would want to live in an island paradise like this if you had to rely on tank water. Apparently water is a problem and even though the lushness of the vegetation may say otherwise there is apparently not enough rainfall to fill tanks so they have built a desalination plant on the island. Where I was sitting made it difficult to hear the complete story but I believe she said that they were having problems with the plant of both the physical and political kinds.

Our last stop was at the beach at Lindbergh Bay. This was the closest beach to the ship and was right next to the airport. The bay was picturesque, the sand was white, the water was blue and the beach was covered in rubbish ranging from used nappies to old shoes. A bit further along the beach was a big resort with the pale bodies of guests lying on lounge chairs on the sand but the part we were on was used by the locals and certainly wasn’t going to win any kudos from National Geographic for best beach. It was possible to take photos that hid the dark side of it but if you ever get to see the ones I’ve taken keep in mind what I was standing on when I took them.

From there we were dropped off back at the ship and the tour was over. I don’t know if the tone of this email has really emphasises the fact that the tour itself was enjoyable. I got to see parts of the island I certainly wouldn’t have seen just from walking and took some good photos. The fact that it wasn’t quite what I was expecting was a little disappointing but all in all it was a good day.

I probably need to apologise for the brevity of this message, I probably could have written a lot more about the tour but I’m kind of fitting this into a space I have between a full boat drill this morning and starting work this afternoon. All things being equal I should be able to devote a bit of time to the Tulum trip, ruins being one of my things, and pick up the writing pace a bit.

Greg