A Tale Of Two Cruises

By Rick Boettger

 

Not all cruise ships, and their cruisers, are alike. Some cruise ships are full of people who could move into Key West’s Old Town tomorrow and all become our friends. Others are full of people who want cheap beer in Orlando. I’ve just been on both types. Unfortunately, Key West’s cruise ships are the second type.

 

 

To start on a positive note, let me sell a wonderful kind of cruising to those who would turn their noses up at any vacation with “cruise ship” in the title. Cynthia and I, on the recommendation of two real sailors we met on our Amazon backwater adventure, went on the Royal Clipper in our familiar Caribbean waters out of Barbados.

 

 

The Royal Clipper is a real sailing ship, with five masts and forty-two working sails. It puts the sails up every day to a regal symphonic ovation. And we actually sail, as much as the winds and itinerary allow, topping ten knots one night. The best part of the cruise was our shipmates. Like our friends the Maltbys, they are mostly sailors, and two sailors have twenty stories, so conversations never flagged.

 

 

Everyone we met would have fit into Key West and half of them could have bought property here for cash (it’s about $1,200/day on the Royal Clipper). We would be blessed to have a ship like this call on our cheapened port. Actually, our 250 cruisers were a bit like cruiser trash at our best stop, Illes des Saintes off of Guadaloupe. Les Illes are a mini-St. Bart’s, before St. Bart’s got big and, ha-ha, spoiled. Les Illes has streets like ours around the cemetery. The main town has maybe a thousand residents. Our 250 “flooded” their streets lined with casual cafes serving $60 lobster lunches. I was delighted to be ignored if not scorned as cruiser trash by the resident Frenchies.

 

 

Then I spent two weeks as true cruiser trash, as in one of 20,000 cruisers disgorged from four ships like mine in Nassau. Let me explain, as in make my excuses. In a rash 15 minutes, I gave my wife’s family the great gift of my absence over the holidays. Her four siblings have spent a couple of weeks with us over Christmas for the last seven years, continuing a 50-year family tradition of togetherness. We all had a wonderful week together in the summer at their place in Madison, but a week of me goes a long way, and I felt we were pushing it to inflict a second dose of me on them this year.

 

 

Anyway, I ran away from home, and there is no cheaper way to do it, and, hey, sing a lot, than on a Carnival cruise ship. I got two weeks for the price of two days on the Royal Clipper. Reporting on it, I feel like Dante upon his return from the Underworld.

 

 

 

I have the authentic credentials to trash the Carnival cruisers, the ones Marc Rossi, the Westin Walshes and the Chamber of Commerce covet for our shores, because I was raised unwittingly in the lower middle class, and perhaps have that soul in me forever. White men cannot say a word about Blacks or women, but I can talk of my people.

 

 

They are so not Key West people. They wouldn’t appreciate anything but our good winter weather and they’d complain of the heat for nine months. Our sea life and multitudinous cultural activities they would trade in a second for a WalMart. The ship’s programs reflect an intense consumer culture. The “cruise director” is purely a salesman, of jewelry, art, spa treatments, gambling. The port orientations lovingly describe the “best” places to buy mostly jewelry, all of which happen to be shops owned by Carnival’s holding company.

 

 

And Carnival’s cruisers love it. The “Fun Shops” on board selling jewelry and watches are quite busy, as is the casino. The large theater has mostly given up on singing and dancing for bingo and simple trivia games (“Adam and Eve were in the Garden of _____?”) Good singers and tight bands are largely ignored. In a thousand seat dining hall, I counted six glasses of wine. One bottle of beer. The other 993 drank free tap water.

 

 

When these folks, my lower-middle class homies, come ashore in Key West, a prime attraction is our Duval Street cheap beer. It costs $6 and up on board, drinks $9. Our trinkets are cheaper than those onboard, too. When the cruise line owns the port, as they do in Cozumel and Roatan, the prices are as high as on board, and they make the same profits.

 

 

That’s why real cities like Key West are Carnival’s past, not their future. Every buck these cruisers spend on our cheap beer is a buck they are not spending on Carnival’s expensive brewskis. It makes sound financial sense for them to continue to build their own island communities, as they’ve done on a formerly empty island in the Bahamas, and not share their cruisers’ cash with us.

 

 

If Mark and the Chamber really believe, and I’m sure Mark does, that Key West really needs such customers, they are insulting us. We are so much more than cheap beer and trinkets. I am elated that my homies can have so much fun so economically on giant floating buildings that pay no RE taxes and follow no labor laws. The food was great and the rooms immaculate and comfortable. I did not meet a soul who had any intention of coming independently to Key West or any of the other ports we visited. None of us can compete with $100/day for a room with a water view and all the good food you can eat.

 

 

We too should hope that the major cruise lines are part of our past and not our future. Let’s entice the Royal Clipper and their ilk instead. A living reef is a good start.

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