Prunes and Mexican food

3rd June 2007

Greetings from the northern hemisphere,

Some good news, or at least its good news for me. I’ve been doing some asking around and I’ve found out all sorts of interesting things about the potentials I have available when my six months are up. Firstly I found out that my airfare home is completely covered by the company. I thought that I still had to pay $500 towards it the way I had to for the flight here but it’s not so and it means that I immediately have $500 more than I was thinking I would. The other good news is how easy it is for me to stay in the States after the contract ends, which means that my trip to Walt Disney World is looking better and better. All I need to do to meet the requirements of the visa I’m on is to leave the States. They don’t care where I go as long as I leave. That means that I can catch a short and cheap (about $160) flight to a nearby place like Nassau, get off the plane and then get on the next flight back a couple of hours later and I’m allowed to re-enter the States as a normal tourist. With about 6 weeks’ notice of my exact finish date I’ll be able to make all the arrangements online and spend 10 or so days in Walt Disney World before I come home!

But enough of my good news, which has given me the mental chant ‘I’m going to WDW’ when I get bored or when some particularly annoying person comes to the window. Today is a sea day which means a split shift and tomorrow is turn around day where we arrive in Port Everglades, disgorge one load of passengers, take on another load and then head out again. The next 2 days are also sea days and pretty uninspiring before we get to St. Maarten Wednesday and then St Thomas on Thursday. Luckily I have stuff to read.

Well, I’ve just had a look at the date of the last message I’ve sent and found it was about two weeks ago. I didn’t realise it had been that long! I have a feeling that it’s been at least a week or so since I wrote the paragraph above this one. The reason I’ve been so lax is probably a combination of a couple of things. I guess that I’m starting to fall into the routine of the place and every day is becoming very much like the last. At times it’s really hard to tell what day of the week it is and I certainly have little idea of what the date is apart from writing it once a day on my balance sheet and even then it has little meaning given that its written in the backwards American style. To a degree life revolves around what time I start work, what time I get a break so that I can catch a couple of hours more sleep and when the next meal is. In that way it’s like a normal working life but with a shorter commute. The only real breaks from routine and ways to mark the passage of time are the ports.

The other reason is that nothing particularly noteworthy has happened. Now that I’ve seen every port, bar one, at least once a little of the initial gloss has gone off them. I still have Cozumel to see, and that will be the day after tomorrow and I’m looking forward to that but nothing much exciting has happened worth reporting. Apart from the toilet in the cabin being blocked, meaning a two deck climb up the stairs to use the ones in the crew bar. A piece of sage advice that I can offer to all you youngsters reading this is not to eat a bowl of stewed prunes at 4 in the morning after a shift and just before going to bed if you have such a long way to go to get to a toilet. The toilets work on a suction system like airplane ones and seem to be very susceptible to blockages.

A quick update on the Walt Disney World situation. On the last ship, when I was kicked off, the crew were the first to leave, even before the passengers. That meant a really early morning start which was a bad thing at the time but it did mean that I hit the streets early. On this ship all the passengers get off first and then the crew, which means not hitting the streets until about midday, which means that there is no way that I can get a flight out and back in the same day. It looks like I’ll have to fly to Nassau in the afternoon, spend the night and then fly back the next morning. Just a little bit more expense, I haven’t done any checking to see how much a hotel near the airport might cost but, depending on flights, I may only be there for about 12 hours overnight. It’s tempting to see what a night at the Atlantis Resort would set me back. It’s that huge resort/casino place I visited the first time I was there but somehow I think it would be many, many times the cost of an airport hotel and probably not worth the added expense. It would be nice though so if anyone wants to pass the hat around…

Today is Ocho Rios and Jon (my Costa Rican roommate) and I are heading out for a look around as soon as he wakes up. He’s getting a couple of extra hours sleep after being up at 7.00 to farewell a Costa Rican friend who was leaving the ship this morning. I’m sitting here with just a little lamp shining on the keyboard and trying to hit the keys as quietly as I can so as not to disturb him. Somehow I doubt that the clicking of the keys will make much of an impression through the snoring anyway but at least I’m trying to be nice.

The job is definitely becoming easier. Having gotten a lot of the basics out of the way I’m now able to concentrate a bit more on the details and subtleties. I’m even managing to balance a bit easier and there is now a competition between the roses and the thorns for balancing supremacy, Andy and myself against the two girls, to see who has the smallest total variance each day. I’m happy to say that the thorns are winning but then I guess that it shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise (not that I’d be brave enough to say that in front of the girls). The competition has piqued the interest of most of the casino and even the Fleet Manager was keen to know each nights results. Actually the Fleet Manager is an interesting story. She is an English girl (I can say girl since she’s 12 years younger than me) and has what amounts to a trouble shooting job where she travels to ships in the fleet seeing how the casinos are run, sorting out problems and trying to get them to run as best as possible. That’s obviously a simplified explanation but she was here at first to troubleshoot this place and then she stayed on to cover a 2 week period between one casino manager leaving and the next one starting. She was really nice and had so much energy and enthusiasm it was scary. We went up to the bistro one morning after work and she told me how she came to be on the ships and some of her plans for the future and it was interesting to hear what sort of things draw people to this life and where they see themselves going. The bistro was also interesting. Between 1 and 4 in the morning, when the buffet is closed, you can sit and order anything you want off a menu and have it cooked for you. There is a cover charge but for $2, charged to my crew account, I got one of the best steaks I’ve eaten in a long time and had to pass up the prawn entrée and all the deserts because I didn’t want to have to try and sleep on too full a stomach.

So what else of interest has been happening in the casino…not much. The last 2 weeks have been really quiet. Even with my limited experience I can tell that and now that I don’t have to think about everything I do the time is really starting to drag on some shifts. Sometimes I think that it may have been better when I was dazed and confused because at least the shifts seemed to go faster and I was being told to close, balance and get some sleep before I knew what was happening. Now I just get to stand there and look out at all the Americans who have paid money to be here and would rather sit in a small, smoke filled and windowless room giving their money to a faceless corporation than at least be sitting on deck watching the water or using some of the other facilities that they are unlikely to find in their everyday life. Casinos are not that rare a thing in the States these days with the advent of the “Indian Casino” everywhere and I can’t help feeling that the opportunity to sit in a deck chair watching the Caribbean go past while someone brings you a cocktail is much more preferable to what these people are doing. But I guess they are paying my mortgage so I should be grateful they are losing their money instead of spending it wisely.

I had to do “embarkations” again on Sunday. This time around I got deck 12 mid-ship stairs and it had to be the one part of the ship that no one getting on had any reason to visit. It was one of the most excruciatingly boring 4 hours of my life. I spent most of the time walking around a large circular pattern in the carpet like some psychotic animal in a zoo pacing out its cage. There were very few people to direct to their cabins and even when there were it was just a matter of saying that the odd numbers were one way and the even numbers were another. It finally ended when the 10 minute warning was given for stairway guides to be in position for the boat drill and I had to run all the way back to my cabin to get my lifejacket and then all the way back to my stairway position so I could stand there for that. Of course after all that I had to start work so Sunday was a bit of a horror day all around. Luckily the embarkation days only come around about every 3 or 4 weeks and we have a new captain who doesn’t seem to go in for the same number of extra boat drills that the last one did so things have settled down a little on the ‘standing around half dazed from lack of sleep’ front.

I’m back again, a day later than when I wrote the stuff above. I went out to Georgetown today on Grand Cayman. I don’t remember if I’ve described how we have to get to that port by tender so I might do it (and if it’s again then I apologise) but first I better let you know how little sleep I managed to get before venturing out. I finished box count about 3am, which is pretty early compared to all the other times and headed up to the crew bar. Very unlike me you might be thinking but I had been threatened with violence by the girl I had shared the mini bus with on the way to this ship. She accused me of being unsociable (shocking) and threatened to beat me up if I didn’t come up to have at least one drink and watch the regular poker game that’s held up there. The funny thing was seeing her threaten me because she couldn’t be more than about 22 and she might just make it to 5 foot tall if she wore heels. On a regular basis, after the bar closes at 1am, when the casino staff finish work a number of them congregate in the bar and play Texas hold’em poker. I know virtually next to nothing about the game so despite invitations I was happy to just watch. Everyone playing was a dealer so the chip and card work was professional looking and the game was so fast that I had a really hard time keeping up with it. The other scary thing was how much the pots got up to. I realise that the dealers get paid a lot more than me but some of the individual pots were more than a week of my wages. I ended up sitting there until 7am as player after player got knocked out and it got down to the last 4. I don’t know how it ended up because by that stage I really needed to get a few hours of sleep before I headed into port at 10am. There were a few other watchers there just drinking, including my bus buddy and one other girl who is English and blonde. When I say blonde I mean it in the truest sense of the word and I’d been told she was but didn’t think that she could be as bad as she is. When I got there she was playing Beatles music on the jukebox and getting a little bit of a hard time from the others for her choice of music. When I defended her she told me that she really loved the Beatles because her father used to play them all the time and proudly added that she even knew who two of them were. I asked her who the two were and she said Ringo Star and John Lennon. I asked her if she’d heard of Paul McCartney and she excitedly said that she had but didn’t know he was a Beatle and had to admit that she’d never heard of George Harrison!

But back to grand Cayman and the tender ride into port. Hurricane Ivan had done a large amount of damage to many of the islands around here and the Caymans got more than their fair share. I’ve already said that the museum in Georgetown is shut due to damage suffered but it also destroyed the cruise ship dock so no ships can dock directly at the port and now they have to anchor off shore while it’s being rebuilt. Because we anchor a distance away it means that we have to tender to shore. That involves lowering a couple of the lifeboats and using them to shuttle passengers to and fro. Of course this means added time having to be factored into everything because it takes time to load and unload the boats and to get from the ship to the shore. If you’re not in a hurry then it’s a nice little added attraction and ride to the whole experience but if you suffer from sea sickness then you might rather stay on the ship and just look at the duty free stores from the bar or your balcony. There is a bit of frenzied activity dockside as they try and repair everything but if the number of people thronging the streets from the four ships anchored offshore were anything to go by then Georgetown is still doing well despite the minor hassles of getting there.

Jon, my roommate, and I decided to head into town since neither of us had managed to get off at the previous port. When we got downstairs we found out it was raining but the big advantage of rain in this part of the world is that it’s a really tropical rain and while it may be heavy it is warm. Or at least that’s the theory. Trouble was that there was a bit of a breeze and it actually got quite cold when the rain stopped and I had to stand in wet clothes. I was looking for a movie theatre that was marked on a tourist map I’d found the last time I was there and it seemed to only be about 2kms from the dock. I really wanted to see Pirates of the Caribbean 3 (feeling it appropriate somehow, given my location) and the day, being wet, didn’t look much good for anything else. 2kms mightn’t seem far on a map and under normal circumstances it isn’t too far at all but in heavy tropical rain, no footpaths, heavy traffic and no idea of where we were going it started to take on epic proportions. Checking the map later it turned out that we only got about half way before giving up and heading back into the centre of downtown. Once we got there, being cheap arse workers rather than rich tourists, we shunned the bars and restaurants and ended up eating in a supermarket that sold cafeteria style fast food by the pound. You just put as much as you wanted into the plastic container and paid by the weight at the counter. It was actually pretty good and was a meal at the least the equal of the expensive tourist stuff and only cost $7 and no tip.

I was wearing my All Blacks t-shirt as we walked around, from memory the first time that I’ve worn it out, and I must have been stopped about 5 times by people asking if I was from NZ and then telling me either how much they loved the place or how much they wanted to go there. I also had one American girl who excitedly told me how much she loved the All Blacks and then turned to her companion and explained that they were a soccer team! A Kiwi guy and I did a high five and both agreed that they were shoe ins for the World Cup. In a camera store a girl who worked there came up and asked me if I was from NZ and when I said yes she said she was from Australia. It turned out that she was born in Colombia, adopted as a baby and raised in Brisbane. When I said I lived in Mudgeeraba we started to get on really well, much to Jon’s amazement and amusement. She is engaged to an American electrician and they are working there to save as much money as they can while they are paying no taxes (the Caymans being a tax haven) before moving on. She did say that the cost of living was pretty high though and they are renting a small 1 bedroom place for $1000 USD a month. She also said that anytime we are in port she‘d enjoy it if we dropped in for a chat.

So far, on the 2 visits I’ve made to the Caymans I haven’t had the same feelings about the place as the other ports. It may be that downtown Georgetown has a feeling too similar to downtown Surfers Paradise, without any real charm or distinction of its own, but it is not my favourite port. Now that I’ve seen it I may be more willing to do one of the organised tours and see what else the island has to offer because to condemn the place based solely on that small stretch of shopfronts would be the same as condemning the Gold Coast based on a visit to Surfers Paradise alone. I don’t know if I’ve mentioned this before but it’s worth mentioning again…I get to do the organised tours that the passengers do but instead of paying $100 or more for a bus trip and a visit to a butterfly farm I get to do it for free under the guise of “assisting the passengers where necessary”, which simply means being the last one on and off the bus and not pushing in. All I need to do is let the Casino Manager know which tour I want to do and he’ll make the appropriate enquiries to get me on it. I commented that the popular ones must be impossible to get as a freebie but was told that they are the ones more likely to require “assistants” so it’s worth asking for them as well. I know that I keep decrying the ‘tour bus cattle call’ way of seeing the world but if I can save myself hundreds of dollars by doing it that way, and get picked up from and dropped back at the ship to boot, then I think I’m going to do it. Unfortunately the majority of tours in this part of the world involve diving or snorkelling and since I’m completely blind without my glasses I see them as being wasted on me. Fortunately the Caymans offer a couple of submarine tours so I may take them as a dry alternative. The tours that have really captured my attention however are the ones in Cozumel Mexico, a place I visited for the first time this morning.

Cozumel is an island off the coast of the Yucatan peninsula, in Mexico and if you are any sort of history buff like me or have watched any amount of the Discovery or National Geographic channels then you’ll know that it’s a part of the world that is chock full of Mayan ruins. I am now saying ‘Mayan ruins’ in my best Homer Simpson “pork chops” voice as I sit here with a couple of glossy brochures about some of the tours and the places they visit. The main one is Tulum, a big complex built on a cliff overlooking the ocean. The only problem is that it’s on the mainland and not on Cozumel so it means having to take a ferry and then a bus to get to it and then the same back. The two different tours that visit it both leave at 9am and don’t get back to the ship until 5pm so it’s a full day but one I fully intend doing the next time we’re here. There’s also a couple of other tours to smaller sites both on the island and the mainland so hopefully I’ll have the opportunity to Maya myself out before this contract is up.

But on to Cozumel today. This is my second time in Mexico, if you count a short visit to Tijuana about 19 years ago, which barely counts since it was only just over the border and seemed to be a place consisting almost entirely of Mexicans with their noses pressed up against the fence between them and unlimited junk food and menial jobs. I wasn’t impressed with that place and it had soured me a bit on Mexico as whole before I began to realise that not everyone in the country was so keen to give up their nationalism for a job picking beans or cleaning toilets and that there seemed to be some truly beautiful places it had to offer. Cozumel may have a sense of a Mexico presented for the cruise ship tourist rather than the truly authentic but it was one that was much more palatable and at least I didn’t have to stamp my own passport this time like I did to get out of Tijuana.

Walking down the gangway the first thing that struck me was the massive white wall directly in front of me and it took a few seconds to realise that it was actually the hull of another cruise ship that was docked alongside and seemed almost close enough to touch. It must be very disconcerting as a passenger paying money for a balcony stateroom to fling open the curtains in the morning expecting to see a quant Mexican seaside town and actually be looking into the startled face of another American across the way who’s wondering where in the hell you came from. Walking through this white walled alleyway brought me to the bows of both ships and a left turn gave me my first glimpse of Cozumel, which looked quite a distance away at the other end of a long concrete jetty. A number of tour boats were pulled up and either loading passengers for various excursions or trying to encourage others that they were the best and the holes were atmospheric rather than structural. Passing through the hordes of people being herded into the appropriate groups for tours by guides holding signs with numbers corresponding to tour codes I finally made it out onto the street. The port structure itself looks new and impressive and despite the small amount of construction happening on the fringes gives an impressive first impression of the town. Cozumel has been a bit of a boom and bust island with a couple of different industries having died out for economic or environmental reasons. The last major cash crop to flourish here was a type of rubber that was shipped off to the Wrigley’s factory in the US to be made into chewing gum. After that went under in the years after WW2 tourism has become the major money earner. I know all this because the first thing I did was find a tourist maps and look to see if there was a museum in town.

An easy 20 minute walk past the standard array of stores selling genuine Mexican items and genuine generic duty free and I found myself standing outside what used to be one of the finer hotels in its day and what is now the Cozumel Island Museum. It’s still a work in progress and really only consists of four rooms, one on the geography of the island, one on the biology of the reef that surrounds the island, one on the pre and post Columbian history of the island and one detailing the last hundred years or so and how the island became what it is now. As soon as I walked in there was someone to point me into the first room and then into each subsequent room. There was plenty of work being done around the place but the building has lots of potential and with a bit of funding (it cost $3 to get in) and effort it will become a really nice attraction. I found myself moving slowly around the room with the archaeological artefacts at a speed that made me feel as if I was moving in some sort of slow motion in comparison to everyone else. Tourists would come in, walk around at a pace that would have made it impossible to see, let alone appreciate, all the exhibits. Kids would touch everything that was even remotely within reach and turn to their parents to ask if it was real. The Disney effect was in full swing because the parents would usually say something like “I guess so” and then hurry the kids on to the next room. The lack of moving, glowing and noisy displays probably made them distinctly uncomfortable and having to read the labels on items was something that simply shouldn’t happen to someone brought up in the spoon-fed culture that is modern America. I really enjoyed it however and that connection with the past that you feel when the genuine thing is in front of you rather than a plastic prop was there in abundance.

Having satiated my cultural needs I slowly headed back towards the pier, passing up places like Senor Frogs and the Hardrock Café in the hope that there may be have something a bit more authentically Mexican to satisfy my need for lunch. But what is genuine Mexican? The genuine Mexican may very well eat at McDonalds for lunch and enjoy Chinese at night. The ability to eat true Mexican cuisine is probably limited to those who venture much further off the tourist path than I was able or to those who have a friend that can invite them home. Having little ability to do either I sat down under the shade of the band rotunda in the middle of the plaza and thumbed through the tourist brochure I had picked up. The types of places that advertise in glossy brochures like this one were not the sorts of places I wanted to spend my hard earned dollars so I just sat for a while and watched the tourists scurrying from one shop to the next while people began to set up small stalls around the edges of the large open plaza, beneath the clock tower that was the focal point and under the gaze of the Catholic church that may have been considered much more of a focal point to the locals.

I could have sat there for some time just watching the people go past but hunger waits for no man and I had to get up and start to explore the side streets in search of Mexican food. I passed the stores selling genuine Cuban cigars and the ones selling all manner of ‘tasteful’ souvenirs. I followed tourists who were being implored at every step to come in and see what was for sale and walked by unbothered myself, so I guess I can add Mexican to the list of nationalities I can pass for. I passed by a restaurant called ‘Casa Denis’ on the assumption that it had to be dodgy and finally settled on one that sat on a corner of the very plaza where I had begun my wanderings. I ordered a corona, perused the menu which listed everything in pesos and decided on the mixed fajitas. A basket of corn chips and a bowl of salsa appeared and I stretched my legs out into the street and savoured a cold beer, crisp chips and tangy dip while I waited for my food and watched the roaming mariachi bands desperately trying to get someone to pay them to play. It wasn’t long before the sound of sizzling and the smell of the onions arrived and I had one of the simplest yet most satisfying meals I’ve had so far. When I was finally finished I went to pay the bill, completely unsure of how much it was going to cost me. The food and two beers came to a total of $11.70 which also made it one of the best priced meals I’ve had so far. An ice-cream from a street vendor a bit further down the road, which I ate sitting on the edge of a pier watching the boats in the harbour, and I was pretty happy when I finally made my way back to the ship.

I enjoyed Cozumel and was pleased to have spent some time in the town rather than spending all my time on a tour. To me that is the ever-present danger of a cruise ship, the balance between the activities on offer and the opportunity to simply explore a place at your own pace. I’m glad I have the opportunity to return a number of times and do everything I want to do having seen everything that there is to do.

But enough about Cozumel for the moment. Today is a sea day and I’m finishing this in the precious break between long shifts. I’ll try and send it tomorrow so no one thinks that I’ve vanished into the Bermuda triangle.

Greg

Me again, just with a quick addendum.

It is now 04.00 and I have just finished work and am in less than a good mood. I was the last cashier to finish tonight and one of my tasks, given that it’s the last day of the cruise and all the passengers are getting off tomorrow, is to deliver tax letters to the cabins of the punters who have won over the US tax reporting threshold. Not a difficult job to just leave an envelope in a holder outside the cabin door, just a time consuming one as there are usually a lot of them and they are never in a central area, always spread out over as many decks as possible and at opposite ends of each deck. So there I am, having climbed from deck 6 to deck 14 to deliver the first one (always easier to start at the top and work down) and having walked along 2 miles of corridor to find the right door and I’m stopped by a little Indian security guard who tells me that I’m not allowed to be there. I explain what I’m doing and he says that the envelopes must be left at the front desk who will deliver them. I explain that we have always done it but he insists that I’m not allowed to and I must leave. Back down all the stairs I go and check with the Head Cashier, Casino Manager, Night Manager and Security Shift Manager (who are all awake and working on end of cruise paperwork) and am told that he doesn’t know what he’s talking about, will be spoken to and I should now resume my deliveries. Back up the stairs I go, hoping to meet the security guard again but no such luck. All of which is bad enough after a day that started at 11.30 am but I now have less than 2 hours before I have to queue up with everyone else on board for a 3 monthly check of our papers by US customs and immigration. I have no idea how long that’s going to take but somewhere between that and when I have to stand in my stairwell for the boat drill I need to get off the ship and buy some groceries and, if I’m really lucky, get some sleep. All of which puts me the closest I’ve come to saying that I’ve had enough, it’s been fun but I’m going home.