Tours and not so tours

July 14 2007

Hi guys,

 

Sorry that it took so long for you to get that last email. I’ve been adding more and more names to the list of people getting them and I must have reached a critical mass because the mail server suddenly started bouncing the messages saying that the header was too long. The problem was that I didn’t know because the bounce message was being shunted into my junk folder and it was only by accident that I spotted it. Long story short; I’ve split up the list into two so that I can send messages successfully now. Exciting stuff but it may help to explain why not everyone’s name is on the top of the one you get and the time differences between the last couple of messages.

 

But on to other things.

 

I must be a bit of a jinx when it comes to tours. I’ve done another one and yet again it had problems. This time we got an email in the cage saying that once a year the company must do a risk assessment on all its tours and, since the tour staff are unable to manage all of them, if anyone wants to do a free tour all they have to do is complete the risk assessment. I thought about it for a couple of seconds, looked at the list of available tours and put my hand up. The more exciting tours were probably chosen by the tour office staff but there was still a number to choose from and I picked €œPedro St James & Nautilus Semi Sub€ in Grand Cayman and a visit to another Mayan ruin, this time deep in the jungle, in Cozumel. Unfortunately I then found out that I’d copped €˜In Port Manning’ for Cozumel, which meant that I couldn’t get off the ship, so it was just the one in Grand Cayman. Pedro St James was described as €œthe birthplace of Cayman democracy€ in the brochure and the sub was a 45 minute ride over coral and shipwrecks, both of which sounded okay so I was hopeful of a good day. It was also only supposed to take 3.5 hours and had a 10.15 start, meaning that I didn’t have to wake up too early, all of which made it sound even more attractive. A late start, an early finish and time to have a look in the supermarket for any new magazines, a good day all round.

 

The ticket duly arrived in my cabin and had attached to it the risk assessment form. This was extremely full on. When they are looking for risks they really are looking for risks. This probably should come as a good thing given that they have the safety of the passengers in mind but it did make for a bit more in depth work than I was expecting. The form even went as far as having to check for the source of the water if you were given a drink on the tour that contained ice. Was it bottled water used for the ice or town water, what was the state of the town water and the risk of any problems from that water. If the tour included any food then the number of things that had to be checked in the food preparation area was horrendous. Luckily for me there was no food involved in the one I was doing so all I had to do was look for marked fire exits, for extinguishers, question the tour people on their emergency plans, make sure that there was a plan in place for the worst case scenario that I could think of and all sorts of fun stuff like that. This wasn’t just going to be a matter of filling out a form saying whether the tour fulfilled my expectations the same as I’d had to do on the last couple. But what the hell, it was a free tour and I’m pedantic enough to actually look for all these things and make sure that they are all there. Maybe not everyone would be so conscientious. The other thing that was mildly annoying was the handwritten note attached to the ticket and form asking me to be in the theatre (the mustering point) at 9.00 rather than 9.45. I figured that maybe this was to get some sort of training on the correct things to look for and how to complete the forms correctly. It turned out that it didn’t mean that at all.

 

The morning of the tour I woke up, showered and shaved, and reported to the theatre a little before 9.00, saying that I was one of the ones doing a risk assessment. The assistant purser who seemed to be trying to organise the passengers into rows of seats according to the tour they were one, looked at my ticket and told me that they only called me early in case they needed a hand organising the passengers. Since everything was well in control I could go away and come back at 9.45. So much for the in-depth training.

 

Coming back at 9.45 I found the row of seats appropriate to my tour and sat with about a dozen other people, all clutching tickets for tour 662. As Grand Cayman is a tender port we had to wait until a boat became available but when one did we were herded out of the theatre and down the stairs to the little dock that juts out from the side of the ship on occasions like this. Bonging my way through the ID reader I boarded the tender and we made our way through surprisingly rolling seas to the shore. Once we hit the dock there was a bit of confusion since the boat moors is a little way from where the tour groups are met. I put on my best €œcrew€ hat (without saying that I was actually crew) and started steering people up the dock, through the gate and into the large open area that was already thronged with milling people trying to find the appropriate queue for their tour. That there were 4 cruise ships moored off shore, all disgorging confused passengers into the same space, just added to the general confusion and I had to reveal at that point that I was crew, had been there before and knew where I was going. I managed to get us all to the right place and we met what we thought was our tour guide. It turned out that he was just there to get us onto the bus and once we were safely onboard we were left with just the bus driver.

 

As soon as the bus started moving and the driver said €œso, you’re all doing the around the island tour?€ I knew that we may have a problem. It seemed that, despite having the same tour number on their tickets, some people seemed to think that they were going to a turtle farm and others to the rum cake factory. The only two points everyone had in common were Pedro St James and the sub, which were the only two things I thought we were doing anyway. The brochures that the passengers had in their cabins had listed the extras, not the one that I had. All this confused the bus driver who immediately shut up and all he would say was that he would take us to Pedro St James and we would meet our tour guide there.

 

Off we went at high speed out of the downtown Georgetown area and into the more suburban and then rural areas of Grand Cayman. The island is a tax haven and some of the homes certainly reflect that. There were magnificent places with views out over white sandy beaches and that familiar blue water. Even the lesser homes all seemed to be neat and tidy and lushly tropical with no real signs of the types of run down places that you would expect to find in the outer suburbs of pretty much any other place in the world. Of course this may just be because we went the wrong direction to see them but I get the impression that Grand Cayman would actually be a nice place to live, if you had the money to set yourself up right in the first place. It turned out that our driver was Jamaican and would deflect any questions thrown at him by saying that he hadn’t been there very long and didn’t know much.

 

After a relatively short ride we made it to Pedro St James.  I honestly went there with no idea of what the place really was or what to expect and was pleasantly surprised once we got in. The problem was getting in. When we arrived there was no tour guide waiting for us and the driver insisted that we wait on the bus while he made a phone call. Out came his mobile phone and he paced around outside while we waited inside the bus in the air-conditioning. By this time I had been given plenty of good natured ribbing by the other 12 people in the group about my status as an official representative of the company and had started answering the normal questions about shipboard life. After a while the driver got back on board and told us that we should go inside and look around and that by the time we came out there would be a guide waiting for us. We were a little dubious but didn’t have a lot of choice so we got out and made our way into the entrance of Pedro St James.

 

The first thing we entered was the gift shop. My first impression was how well set up it was. This is an historical monument owned and maintained by the Cayman government and the amount of money that they have spent on it is apparent. We were greeted by a man who immediately whisked us off into the €œtheatre€ for a presentation. I wasn’t too sure what this was going to be but went along with it anyway since I hadn’t seen anything at this point that actually looked like an historical monument. Inside the theatre we found an area that was a cross between a movie set and a movie theatre. We sat in chairs and looked down at a diorama that had the façade of a house across one side, some stone steps on the opposite side and a movie screen in the centre. We sat under what seemed to be a tin roofed veranda and the ground in front of us had a number of items, from an abandoned dinghy with tattered sails to a small fire place. The lights went out and there suddenly came the distant sound of thunder. The man that had led us into the theatre came and stood in front and began to tell a story of a storm and lightning and a young girl being struck and killed while she fetched water. I jumped as the sound of water hitting the roof above began and then the downpipes began to pour real water into barrels next to us and a fine mist began to blow over us, adding to the feeling of being outside during a real storm. What followed was a mixture of theatre and movies with physical effects thrown in that would not have been out of place in any major theme parks. It told of the history of the biggest stone building on the island and the beginning of human habitation. It moved on to the advent of slavery, the plantation that provided the money for the building of the house, the emancipation of the slaves that was announced on the steps of the house, right up to the eventual decline and ruin of the house. It told of how the house had been through various failed incarnations in recent times and how it had eventually been purchased by the government and restored to its heyday. I was extremely impressed by the whole presentation and at the end a door opened and we were able to emerge into the sunlight and see the house itself. We were standing on the edge of a low cliff with the water crashing onto the rocks and a large green lawn led up to a building that was stone on the lower floor and timber for the two upper floors. When it was restored there was only the stone portion and a number of later stone additions had to be removed and the timber floors completely remade based on old photos. The house was furnished with antiques of the period and felt as if the family that lived there had only just stepped out for a moment. A really great presentation all round and certainly one that a lot of other places could learn from.

 

But then came the problem. With no time specified for us to finish looking around and no idea of when we were likely to get a tour guide we just started to amble back to the gift shop and attached café in ones and twos. There was no guide and no bus and the woman in the gift shop had been ringing the tour company on our behalf trying to find out if she was going to have to put us up for the night. After the third call she was promised that someone would be there soon and we settled in to wait. Two hours after we were dropped off our original driver turned up and, although extremely apologetic, still didn’t know quite what to do with us. We said that we were supposed to go to the submarine so he said that he could drop us off and that we would then have plenty of time to go on to the rum cake factory before we had to be back at the dock to catch a tender to the ship. Back in the centre of town and only a short distance from the dock itself we were dropped outside the submarine company dock. The driver assured us that he would be there to pick us up when we were finished and disappeared into the distance as we made our way towards the submarine. The submarine people were a little surprised to see us but agreed to take us onboard anyway.

 

This wasn’t a full submarine as such, more of an oversized glass bottom boat. From the outside it looked like a submarine but it was never designed to fully submerge and we made our way down a narrow set of steps and into a space that was decorated to look like something out of Jules Verne’s classic. It was a combination of timber and wrought iron in that Victorian tradition and had the real feel of a submarine despite knowing that it really wasn’t. A young, tiny and very attractive English girl with a lovely accent did a commentary for us as the boat toured around the harbour and the advantage of being so few was that we could move easily from one side to the other in order to see everything that was pointed out to us. The fish life was tremendous and we even passed over the wrecks of a couple of ships that had gone down in the harbour over the years. At one point the €œcaptain€ stopped the boat, donned scuba gear and appeared in the windows, trailed by masses of fish eating bread out of his hand. All in all a very enjoyable trip and I doubt that it could have been done any better in a €œreal€ submarine.

 

Back on shore we looked expectantly for our bus but it was not to be seen. As we exited the sub another group got on for their 45 minute trip and we were still waiting when they got back. At this point a couple of buses pulled up to collect them and they happened to be from the same tour company as our errant bus and guide. Much talking later and the driver agreed to take us back to the dock as we were starting to run short of time to make the last few tenders. We agreed that there was no way that we could make it to the rum cake factory, much to the disappointment of all. At this point things could have gotten nasty but, especially for a bunch of Americans, they were taking it all in surprisingly good humour. There was certainly talk of refunds but no real displays of anger and, luckily, nothing aimed at me. I had been busy noting all that had happened along with the assessment I had to do anyway and agreed to present it all to the tour office when I got back.

 

Back at the dock I went into tour guide mode again and managed to steer everyone through the mass of returning passengers and back onto the correct tender for our ship. Feeling really sorry for everyone and how they had missed out on the rum cake factory I got them to wait for a few minutes before boarding the tender while I ran across the road and bought mini cakes for everyone from a place I knew. They all seemed to appreciate the gesture and we returned to the ship in a disappointed but otherwise good mood. Everyone agreed that what we had seen had been excellent, it was just the way that we had been transported and the failure to see the whole tour. There was a desire to complain to the tour desk though and I agreed to go along to provide official verification so we all trooped off. Arriving at the desk we found it didn’t open for 1.5 hours so, after agreeing to meet back then, I had time for a shower and to complete my reports. Back at the desk at the appropriate time we all made our report and the purser dutifully wrote it down. He wasn’t able to make any promises about refunds at that stage and I don’t know, as I write this, what the outcome was. All the passengers did make nice comments about me and how I behaved through the entire day so I did leave with a nice warm fuzzy feeling about the whole thing.

 

This is kind of a short message but I have port manning today so I slept in and then wrote this and now want to send it off before I start work so I’ll finish it now. The good news is that we are getting a new cashier on Sunday. She is really green and will be earning even less than me because of her lack of experience but at least she’s a body to fill a window and should take some of the pressure of us.  I should have time to get back into long message mode in the next few weeks.

 

Greg