Today was the day I developed cruise ship fever – like cabin fever except on a ship.  I’ve had enough.  This too shall pass, I know, but part of making it pass is that you’re going to have to listen to it for a few minutes.

My friend, Kevin Kann, reminded me before I left about the short story by David Foster Wallace “The Nadir” about his real life experience on a cruise ship.  I should have read it again before I left as it was hilarious and was spot on about the zaniness that comes along with cruising.  I highly recommend it – actually I recommend anything written by DFW.

I am also reminded at this moment by a Peanuts cartoon quote: “I love mankind.  It’s people I can’t stand.”  I’m there.  I’m not a crowd person to begin with and it was one of the things about cruising that I feared the most in the beginning of my cruising career.  Fortunately, the ships are monstrous and there are plenty of places to distance oneself from people most of the time.  However, there are certain times you simply must put up with crowds.  They are the following: meal times, disembarking to go ashore, being ashore, seeing a show, and the worst – perusing the wall of photos looking for your photos. 

Photos are one of the nice things about cruising.  There are professional photographers on certain evenings and every time you disembark in a port of call.  The port of call ones are generally stupid but we will come home with some fabulous formal portraits to share with the family.  The day after photos are taken the prints are posted on portable wall dividers and you have to search for your photo amidst the thousands posted.  People, damn people, myself included I’m sure, get completely engrossed in this process and have no problem positioning themselves right in front of you as you are searching for yours.  Heaven forbid a show should let out while you are in the midst of quietly looking for your photos.  A wall of people descend upon the area and you are swallowed whole by the crowd, totally oblivious to you and everyone who has left the show with them.  It’s all about them, as the saying goes. 

Disembarking yesterday for Nicaragua yesterday involved getting on a tender boat as the harbor is not deep enough for the cruise ship.  This means an extra line, extra scrunched up-edness, extra feeling like a cattle being herded.  This little hop across the water involved sitting knee to knee with a woman who pretty much embodied my attitude in this blog but you could tell she embodies that attitude all the time.  Her eye rolling, disgusted mouth facial expression (ERDMFE) is well practiced as she bitched about  everything.  “They didn’t tell you there would be a two hour bus ride to the tour destination…(ERDMFE)”

Well, yes they did, lady.  Read the description.  Al, silly man, tried to diffuse the disgust by pointing out that you would see the countryside and that is part of the interest of travelling, not just getting to the “shopping district”  but of course to no avail. After touring Nicaragua, it makes me wish I was on the tender with her returning to ship – if I run into her I may ask her how it was just to watch her roll her eyes right out of her head. Nicaragua is a third world country and I fear she was sorely disappointed in that as well.  No Diamonds International at this port of call.

Her eye rolling continued for the twenty minutes we were on the tender – the ‘where are you from’ conversation starter ended with her telling us (ERDMFE) that her husband (blank facial expression) was from California and she got transferred back to Cedar Rapids, Iowa (ERDMFE) by Transamerica after Transamerica merged with somebody else (ERDMFE)…well, you get the picture (ERDMFE).

Nicaragua was the only place we opted for a cruise ship tour as Nicaragua is in recovery and there are few options for private tours that could ensure we would make it back to the ship on time. This is not our preference and I really want to return to Nicaragua someday and immerse myself. My old dream of spending time as a physical therapist in a country such as this has popped up for the second time on this journey.  Perhaps it is still meant to be. 

The folks on our bus to the Mombacho volcano and our hike through the cloud forest were like minded for the most part.  However, here again, please read the description of the tour before you go.  “Strenuous” does not mean “walk in the park.”  If you read a description of the outing, and it is a one mile hike through the cloud forest,  takes two hours, and it labeled strenuous, it does not mean you are walking a mile in your neighborhood.  It means up and down and stairs made of boulders and tree trunks.  It means if you are not in shape but still believe you can do what you did when you were twenty three and a hundred pounds lighter, you should not be on the tour.  It means if you find yourself taking the elevator from the food deck down one level to your stateroom, it is not the hike for you.  I think I make myself clear about what went down on that little adventure – time spent waiting for folks who had no business on the hike and worrying if I was going to have to use my physical therapy skills sooner than I expected.

Speaking of being fit, I would like to digress and brag that, although I have not been able to resist dessert each evening, the only time I have not used the stairs on this 15 story frigate is when I am wearing heels on formal night.  For one thing it is much faster than using the elevator, the stairs are right there calling you as you might wait for an elevator, and it is the easiest way to knock off a few calories.  We are on deck 10, the pool/buffet deck is 14 (there is no 13, however), the atrium/main dining rooms/photography walls, cocktail lounges, internet café are all between deck 5 and 8.   16 stairs between each floor.  You do the math.  On non port of call days I have also used the gym or walked round and round the deck til I hit three miles.  Both are delightful as the gym has floor to ceiling windows and the deck walk – well – the other day storms were rolling through and everywhere I looked there were rainbows pointing to pots of gold below the waves.  Stunning.  So, although I doubt I will have lost any weight on this cruise, at least I don’t expect any gain.  The stairs are honestly one of my favorite things about being on a cruise ship – free exercise while you reach your destination deck.

Nicaragua – our Costa Rican tour guide, Ana, had told us at lunch that Nicaragua is heavy.   She said it is so poor that when she goes there she ends up practically giving people the clothes off her back.  Indeed, the bus ride through the countryside was humbling.  We have camped in better conditions than people were living in. This depressed Al, but I could not help but notice the sense of peace.  I remember our cousin, Margie, the opthamalogist who has travelled the world both as a tourist and as an MD, talking about being with the mountain people in Thailand and then returning to LA and being blown away by the consumerism.  The people in Nicaragua, sitting in a circle on their plastic chairs, talking with each other, the children waving at the bus with big smiles, playing baseball ( a big sport interest in Nicaragua, by the way) with a big stick and a plastic bottle, the little boys wrestling as little boys are wont to do, the little brother and sister trying to balance themselves on a small bicycle, the chickens running around – it is lacking by our standards, but it is also lacking a need to get back to blog and frustration at the slow internet using up my purchased minutes.  It lacks being disgusted that you have to endure two hours in a bus in a foreign country to get to your souvenir shopping.  It lacks irritation that you will have to miss the finale of “Survivor” because you are on a two week cruise across the Panama Canal.  I mean seriously.  What is poverty? What is wealth?

As mentioned before, our tour included a hike in the cloud forest.  We were delighted to see a family of howler monkeys – papa, mama and baby on her back.  Papa was not happy to see us, that’s for sure, and gave us an example of why they are called howler monkeys as he tried to shoo us away.  The three-toed sloth did what three-toed sloths do, which is hang on to a tree for 20 hours a day, only to come down at night to eat for a few hours.  Sounds like most cruise ship passengers.

The Mombacho volcano and its siblings rise out of Lake Nicaragua, third largest freshwater lake in the world, I think.  I hear so many statistics I start to lose track but I think that’s accurate.  Big, anyway.  We also passed Concepcion, which I took note is the second largest single cone volcano in the world and is active.  It’s gorgeous, rises up out of nowhere in a perfect cone shape with a little puff of smoke lazily issuing a warning that it is not messing around, and is perhaps only one strong earthquake away from erupting big time.  

We stopped in Granada for lunch, the best food we’ve had on the cruise and that’s saying something.  I had red bass from the lake, Al had a fabulous steak.  When we stepped off the bus we were bombarded by vendors, mostly selling pottery from the nearby artist town (where, I presume, our ERDMFE lady was headed).  Indicative of the desperation to make money,  we had to fight off numerous vendors while trying to look at the wares of one.  My young woman was probably six months pregnant and I had to be harsh with those who were sticking their pottery in my face while I spoke with her.  There was no bargaining in this situation, despite their willingness to do so…only the most heartless foreigner could do such a thing…it was more like a “keep the change” situation.

The bus ride home was eventful.   We were late and the driver was high tailing it down the two lane road.  We passed school busses (education is compulsory in Nicaragua) , tractor trailers, motorcycles (the main form of transportation in Nicaragua), pickup trucks, pedestrians, without slowing down it seemed.  We were in the back of the bus and I just closed my eyes and said a little prayer to Jesus y Maria each time I heard the toot of the horn alerting the pass-ee that we were pass-ing.  After one such pass the bus stopped for a time.  Turns out it was time to bribe the police officer who didn’t like our driver passing in a no passing zone.  That set us back a bit which meant faster and more passing for the remainder of the trip back to the ship!

Al and I spoke at dinner how our time in Granada pinpointed our dislike of cruise ship organized tours.  Had it been up to us, we would have grabbed a chair for an hour and passed out dollars to each little boy who came up to us with an arm full of Palm Sunday type palm leaves and folded them into flowers and birds like little balloon men except with palms.  Instead we were pushed along by the need to keep the tour moving.  The face of the little boy I had to walk away from will haunt me forever.  It is his face that makes me think I may return to this beautiful country someday to spend my American dollars and perhaps share my medical talents as well…