It’s a small world…

28 April 2008

New York, New York

Well, the World Cruise is over, ending with a bit more of a whimper than a bang. Unfortunately the Captain decided that no crew would be allowed off the ship in New York so all we could do is lean on the railing and stare. A really disappointing way to end it.

It’s a little strange now to look out and see so many new faces. Having spent almost four months with the same people was at times annoying, comforting, boring, interesting and always oddly familiar. By the end a number of the passengers had become more familiar than the people I work with. Since I spend my days working in a small space all by myself they were often the only people I would have contact with for hours on end. Now even many of the crew in the corridors are new with there having been a large turnover in Fort Lauderdale.

The other strange and disconcerting thing is the large world map on the wall outside the casino. The map is big, taking up most of the  wall, and is electronic, a red line tracing the ships route with little yellow dots marking the ports and a flashing dot showing the current position of the ship. Every day I would walk past it and see where we’d been and where we still had to go. The line snaked around the world and slowly changed from the red of untravelled water to green as we chewed up the miles. I could look at the map and follow the line backwards and almost have every little dot bring a different memory to the surface. Yesterday, after four months, that changed and the map had a new line. Now it was all red and pointing in a new direction. We are travelling a long way, two oceans, two continents, across time zones and from the warmth of the Caribbean to the (I assume) cold of Alaska, but suddenly the world seems a whole lot smaller. Rather than anything up to a week at sea we now only have two days at the most and that only happens three times between now and when I go home. The names of ports dominate the itinerary that’s taped to my wardrobe door rather than the dreaded words “sea day”. The world of the ship has shrunk and the itinerary has tightened up.

At the moment we are off the coast of Cuba and heading towards Cartagena in Columbia. From there we go through the Panama Canal again (I have a different shift this time so I should be able to stand out on deck for a while and watch it go past), up the coast of Mexico (cheap beer and Mexican food!) and on to LA. From there we head up to Seattle, which will be our home port for our forays into Alaska. I have four of the week long cruises before I go home so I should be able to see each port at least a couple of times, hopefully enough to get a real taste for them. I’m especially interested in seeing Seattle, getting off the ship and finding some free and fast internet access. The costly and sporadic access onboard has meant that I’ve had real problems sending emails and I’ve had to shut down one of my websites because it was hacked and I’m simply not able to fix it until I get home. Plus I guess if I am ever to truly appreciate the Starbucks experience it may as well be in the birthplace. I wonder if there is a “first Starbucks” that I should visit and a collectible cup I could buy for someone I know who collects them.

Having now circumnavigated the world by sea I wonder if I shouldn’t do it by air (I’ve flown long distances but always returned the same way so have never really gone all the way around) and then attempt a Jules Verne and do it by land. It’s probably not something that everyone could say they’ve managed.