Random Insights From a Cruise to Central America

Just back from a week aboard a cruise ship, with almost no Internet access (Yeah, I could have bought access at 75 cents a minute, but I saw no reason to grab my email at highway robbery prices. I did manage to use an Internet cafe on shore, twice, just to check if my Virtual Assistant forwarded anything urgent. But it wouldn’t be a vacation if I were still dealing with 300 incoming messages a day.

Anyway, some totally random thoughts from the trip:

Transportation Safety Administration has spiffy new bright blue uniforms (my last flight was several months ago). They look gorgeous–but aren’t we supposed to be in a budget crisis? There was nothing wrong with the old white ones.

Cruise ships completely distort not only the local economy but also visitors’ perceptions. The feel we got for Guatemala in our three-week trip last summer was almost completely different from the artificial world of a cruise port that waits only for boats to dock. It’s even different from the land-based tourist towns and attractions that deal with a continuous (but much smaller) flow of tourists but also have a vibrant non-tourist life, integrated into the fabric of the nation.

The cooperative movement and indigenous self-help organizations have even penetrated the restricted corridors of cruise terminals–Good!

If you turn off email and Internet, it’s not that hard to completely ignore the outside world.

Our flight to the boat was canceled, so we arranged with the boat to meet it at the next stop, arranged with the airlines to reroute us to the closest point, arranged for a one-way car rental, and drove four very scenic hours to meet the boat. This astounded many of our fellow passengers–but we’re used to making our own travel arrangements and it didn’t faze us at all. It didn’t even seem like one of our more difficult travel adventures, compared with some of what we’ve done over the last 30 years together, but cruises for the most part don’t attract intrepid travelers. Of course, it helped that we followed the Principled Profit philosophy and were so nice as we explained our situation that people went out of their way to bend the rules for us. And it also helped that we had access to a cell phone and a laptop.

Environmental consciousness has penetrated even to the cruise industry. I went to a lecture from the ship’s environmental officer and was pleasantly amazed at the sophistication of waste treatment, etc. Still a ways to go. But they’re even considering having one nonsmoking ship as an experiment.

Rainforests are very special places, and some of the landowners know this. In Belize, we visited a 3rd or 4th generation landholder, a young man in his mid-20s, who has organized his neighbors to provide many acres of unbroken habitat for howler monkeys, and has done quite a bit of research on them.

Weather can always impact a trip. In addition to having our flight canceled, we had to skip our call in Mexico, because it was too windy to dock the boat. Bummer!

It’s always better to have a reservation for car rentals. We didn’t when we docked in Tampa, and the cruise terminals had no cars. So we had to buy tickets to an airport shuttle, hunt around the airport for a car to rent, and then go off to see Tampa.