Thursday, April 14, 2005

 

Luxury Goes Exploring

The motto of Radisson Seven Seas Cruises is "Luxury Goes Exploring". It's actually a pretty apt one. This is definitely a luxurious ship. It's the nicest place we've stayed this entire trip, except the Dossor's house in Wellington which is in the league of Actual Taste, in which hotels do not compete at any number of stars because it would be unmanageable. The stateroom is large and nicely laid out. The shower has nice pressure, easily controllable constant temperature, and a nice spray. There are premium shampoos (which tell you so right on the label so you know they are premium and leave your hair smelling like toothpaste) and they give you mints or truffles every night. There are plenty of drawers and closets to put your stuff, a TV/VCR, a free minibar with glasses and wine glasses, and lots of mirrors.

From your bed, you can turn on and off one light near the bathroom, all the lights in the room, or your positionable reading lamp. Another switch near the door lets you turn off all the lights at once (while leaving on things like battery chargers plugged into the two US and two Euro outlets). I can only think of one awkwardness -- the shower deposits lots of water in the soap dish -- this could be solved by drilling some holes so it drained. Also, it'd be nice if you could turn on less than glaring bathroom lights at 3 AM when you need some water after drinking all the free wine at dinner.

The food is also pretty luxurious, in quality as well as quantity. The main dinner restaurant has a completely different menu every day, and you can order as many things as you want (each day has 4 appetizers, 3 soups, 2 salads, 2 sorbets, 7 or 8 main courses including vegetarian, pasta, and low-carb, the cheese trolley, and 4 desserts); all the food and non-alcoholic drinks and house wine are free (I mean "included"). They are very accommodating to individual requests - we ate last night with a couple who ate no dairy, sugar or red meat, and they tweaked several menu items for them. It's all quite good, but you can sense that 10 days into the cruise there's no more fresh fish (it's all frozen or smoked) and certain vegetables and fruits have run out. There's also a French restaurant ("inspired" by the chef of a two-Michelin-star restaurant Apicius in Paris) which has the same menu the entire cruise, and accepts no alterations "to preserve the Apicius experience". Breakfast never varies, but lunch is different every day - there's been Italian, French, Greek, Mexican, Spanish. On Sunday there was a brunch which seemed to parody Cruise Ship food, with elaborate watermelon sculptures and piles of profiteroles.

The exploration part is also in evidence. We've mentioned the resident archaeologist, Mark Eddowes, who gives great lectures about Polynesian culture on the ship and tours on the islands. We spent Monday in Hiva Oa in the Marquesas, which have the best-preserved archaeological features in French Polynesia. In the afternoon we went on a tour of a restored site where a village would have various ceremonies, perhaps demonstrating their war skills to a neighboring village (possibly including cooking one of the captured warriors from that village) or just sacrificing some of its own residents to appease its deified ancestors, who speak to its high priests in dreams. On Tuesday we visited Nuku Hiva and the valley of Taipivai, where Herman Melville was taken care of while injured, and where he researched his novel Typee, one of the earliest European works to present the exotic cannibalistic Polynesian society in a non-judgmental way.

Yesterday's daily newsletter also mentioned that RSSC has a cruise ship that goes between Argentina, the Falklands, and Antarctica.

But time is too short in these places. Just as travel is a bad parody of life, so packaged tours and cruises are a mean-spirited parody of traveling. What would Paul Gauguin do with a half-day in Hiva Oa? Or an hour on Pitcairn? Go shopping, I guess, there's nothing else to do. Even Justin couldn't meet a villager in that amount of time or situation.

You have probably heard attributed to various hippie philosophers that the Journey and the Destination are the same. This is a lie invented by the cruise ship companies. Of course the journey and the destination are the same when you are on a cruise ship, they never let you off the damn thing, just sit you down and fatten you up and every couple of days you swipe your electronic stateroom key through a little card reader to indicate to the boat's computer model that you aren't at the moment to be found on board and travel in a herd off onto a smaller boat and then around in a shopping mall which has been done up by the locals to celebrate the arrival of a cruise ship in port. There are some great trinkets in the Marquesas and we bought some but I guess I'm just mad because no young warriors have tried to get to know us, and take care of us for the rest of our lives so they can make headwear out of our beards when we die. This whole custom has devolved with the accession of Christianity into shouting "ZZ TOP!" from passing 4x4's.



<< Home

This page is powered by Blogger. Isn't yours?