M/S Seaward to the Western Caribbean
Norwegian Caribbean Cruise Lines 7 Day Cruise - Dodge Island, Miami, Florida
May 2 to May 9, 1993
Pleasure Island, Great Stirrup Cay – Private Island
Ocho Rios, Jamaica
Georgetown, Cayman Islands
Playa Del Carmen/Cozumel, Mexico
Ilse and I were so enthralled with our seven day cruise on the Norway we asked our friends, Bill and Ingrid, to join us for another seven day cruise, this time to the western Caribbean. The cruise would visit ports we hadn’t visited before and started with Ocho Rios in Jamaica, then Georgetown in the Cayman Islands, then on to Playa Del Carmen and Cozumel, Mexico.
They thought it was a great idea and we made plans to depart Miami in May, a month ahead of the start of the Hurricane season. We booked with Norwegian Caribbean Cruises for the third time, this time carefully selecting our outside cabins to have an ocean view. We would sail on the five year old M/S Seaward, again from Dodge Island in Miami. At least this time I didn’t break the window before we left the house and we arrived at the cruise port without any problems.
We checked in and were soon in line, shuffling up the gangway to be greeted by smiling junior ship’s officers who directed us toward the elevators, and the ever-present hostesses with trays of exotic drinks. We broke down and added new long-stemmed cruise glasses to our collection. I folded my little parasol and stuck it in my shirt pocket. We laughed and joked as we searched for our adjacent cabins, but gasps followed as soon as we opened the cabin doors. What were listed as ocean view cabins should have said life boat view cabins as the ship’s life boats were right up against the cabin windows! Ocean? What ocean? All we could see was the color orange!
We fumed and wondered what else they had snaked us with – oops, sorry, that’s slang for deceived because we paid a premium for ocean-view rooms – and we began to inspect the cabins looking for other misrepresented items. Nothing to do but make the best of a bad situation and we spent most of the cruise with the window curtains closed as the orange hulls of the life boats were just a bit overpowering. Unbeknownst to us, it was a harbinger of things to come as the cruising industry began its migration toward mass marketing.
With a bad taste in our mouths, we joined the other passengers topside for the parade of new shoes, but soon began to celebrate our vacation. We went to dinner and while we waited for our table assignment, Bill had a side conversation with the Maitre d’ and we found ourselves at a table for four, adjacent to the rear wall of the dining room, overlooking the water. The best table in the dining room. We had the same table the entire cruise and it helped make up for the terrible cabin.
Our first dinner, however, had the markings of a first-year marketing neophyte who decided all the diners should wear cardboard crowns or tiaras, a la Burger King, to celebrate our departure. I tore all the individual risers off my cut-out crown except for the one directly in front. While all the other passengers reluctantly placed their juvenile, cardboard embarrassments on their heads, I proudly waited with my altered crown firmly in place for our server, who at first was startled, then laughed and turned around and left the table. The women were so embarrassed by my bluntness at first they actually protested, but began to laugh as they saw the absurdity in wearing cardboard crowns and tiaras on a cruise that cost thousands of dollars. When our waiter returned, he introduced himself with a huge smile and we had a marvelous seven day relationship with all the wait staff.
Once again I regret not having written a diary – sorry, I forgot, guys write journals – during the cruise. Trying to recall the specific highlights of the cruise isn’t difficult, but the myriad memories of smells and colors and noises get convoluted with other timeless experiences and I end up with a homogenized gravy to pour over everything I write about the cruise. That’s when I decided to get serious about journaling and keeping memories fresh. The resulting piles of paperwork often takes a while to decipher, but it does make for better reading.
Our first stop was Great Stirrup Cay, the private island Ilse and I skipped last time we were here. We skipped it again this time as all four of us voted to stay on board and relax instead of fighting the crowds trying to commandeer picnic tables. We lived in Miami so going to a tropical beach was something we could do when we got home. Besides, hot-dogs aren’t the reason we cruise.
We had late morning juice and wandered around the almost empty ship. There were more crew members on board than passengers. The lunch buffet was as good as ever.
Each cruise line has access to a “Private island of some sort.” The parent companies of all the cruise lines have leased or purchased several Bahamian islands just for that purpose. Every time we’ve been to Pleasure Island, which is really Great Stirrup Cay in the Berry Islands, we’ve been anchored not far from whichever Royal Caribbean Cruise ship is visiting the adjacent Coco Cay, actually known as Little Stirrup Cay. They are only a short kayak paddle apart. Coco Cay is slated for a massive, 250 million dollar upgrade, due to open mid-2019. I can’t even imagine what they are going to do to this little island. It was announced in 2018 Carnival cruises would use the Coco Cay island as well as its own island at Half Moon Cay, which is actually named Little San Salvador. There are other private islands in Eleuthera and in Haiti for other cruise lines.
I recall sitting in the dining room of the Seaward the next morning listening to the cruise director give instructions about our excursion in Ocho Rios. We booked excursions in all three ports, something we don’t usually do, but this time we decided to have the professionals drive us around. We listened intently and picked up our packets that included brightly colored stickers.
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| Ocho Rios, Jamaica, M/S Seaward, 1993 |
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| That's our cabin, right behind the third lifeboat. |
The ship had been docked for awhile by the time we left the ship, but we found ourselves at the end of a line that stretched the entire length of the narrow dock that disappeared somewhere beyond the distant bow of the ship. Believe me, the Seaward was a long ship. After shuffling along for ten or fifteen minutes, we finally reached the portal to Ocho Rios at the end of the dock, where the ship’s photographers were staging elaborate arrival photos for every passenger.
Ocho Rios, Jamaica is beautiful. The lush vegetation and the rolling hills are just what our imaginations had pictured. We found our assigned bus in the mini-traffic jam of white buses, and being the first ones to board the bus, we headed for the rear seat so we could all sit together. We were soon driving up a hill headed to an abandoned Bauxite mine.
At the top of the hill, our tour guide waved vaguely in the direction of an adjacent hill and we roared back down the mountain, headed for our first T-shirt store. We never got off the bus! Our guide told tales and jokes the entire time, even singing old songs made famous by the Kingston Trio, and keeping everyone mindlessly engaged as we sped toward spending more money. We stopped at a non-nondescript shopping center where fat women with colorful baskets on their heads demanded payment if you took photographs of them.
After most passengers ended up milling around the bus waiting to leave, our driver and guide team reappeared and we headed to the nearby Enchanted Garden botanical garden overlooking the harbor. It was a beautiful garden incorporating the area around a broad, cascading waterfall. A special stop for us as we love tropical plants and palm trees. We raise bromeliads at home and could have spent our entire visit to Ocho Rios in the garden. 45 From there it was a quick bus ride to Dunn’s River Falls, almost a mandatory stop for anyone who visits Ocho Rios. The official web site for Dunn’s River Falls states,
“Climbing the waterfalls is a popular tourist activity and is often, but not exclusively, performed with the help of tour guides from the park. It takes about 1-1.5 hours to climb with short breaks for photographs & video recordings taken by the guides. There are also stairs, alongside of the falls, for those who do not want to get wet or are unable to manage the rocky, uneven terrain of the actual waterfall.”
We had been cautioned by friends who climbed the falls but suffered not only cuts and scrapes and a serious leg bruise, but a badly sprained ankle as well. “Take the stairs alongside the falls,” they said. “You’ll see more and stay drier as well.”
We watched as long lines of climbers, all holding the hand of the person in front of them as well as the person behind them forming a human chain as they struggled up the terraced falls. The stream of climbers was endless. As soon as one long line passed by, another would soon follow.
As we walked out past the gift shop toward the parking lot, several of the local “guides” were standing at the very top of the falls, looking down at the climbers below them. They were laughing but we couldn’t see what they were doing as they had their backs to us.
We boarded the bus and headed back to the ship docked not far from the docks made famous by the James Bond film, “Dr. No.” We all sang silly songs with the tour guide, or we pretended to at any rate, as we futzed along the coast road past the old McCormick plantation, now known as Sandals, headed to the dock. It’s been years since I’ve seen a busload of sober adults sing Kingston Trio songs but it somehow seemed appropriate for time.
Back on board, we changed clothes and went to dinner as we sailed out past Dunn’s River Falls headed toward the Cayman Islands. The weather was beautiful and we were enjoying the cruise and the fine dining. The cruise to the Cayman Islands, less than three hundred miles away, was an easy, relaxed cruise.
When we awoke the next morning, we were at anchor at Grand Cayman. We went ashore at Georgetown in local tenders as the ship laid offshore from the docks. Bill and Ingrid immediately headed for the local post office in the heart of town to call their daughter. After we were all caught up on the goings on at home, we strolled around town for an hour or so, then caught a tour bus that took us to “Hell.” Our cruise director had handed out round, neon green stickers to put on our lapels to show our bus assignment. Ingrid decided to place her bright green dot on her forehead. It worked, we all got on the right bus.
We took a side street through the edge of Georgetown to drive past a small, one-story, nondescript house made entirely of conch shells. We stopped at the “shell” house long enough to take a quick, hurried snapshot through the bus window and we were once again rolling.
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| Hell - One version, anyway. |
Hell is a rather small stop on a two-lane road – with a convenient post office – on the other end of the island. Its claim to fame are the black limestone outcrops that stick far enough out of the ground to make walking uncomfortable. The limestone formations dominate the local landscape behind the parking area. It looks a lot like the Everglades during the dry season. From there, it is a short trip to the Grand Cayman Turtle Center, where we spend an hour or so, followed by a quiet trip past beautiful seven-mile beach as we head back to the ship. The local people we met and talked to were all fabulous. The locals were really cordial.
Back on board and on our way to the Mexican Riviera.
I have always been fascinated by the Mayan ruins in Mexico, and the opportunity to visit the ruins at Tulum was something I didn’t want to miss. We had flown into Cancun years ago and rented a car so we could spend a week driving through Quintana Roos and the Yucatan, with the specific destination of the ruins at Chichen Itza. We also had the opportunity to visit the nearby Xel-Há lagoon and grotto and were excited to visit the beautiful park once again, but we didn’t have time then to visit the ruins at Tulum. This was the perfect chance to make up for our missed visit. The first time we drove down from Cancun in our rented Volkswagen, but this time we could kick back and leave the driving to someone else.
The M/S Seaward laid a mile off shore from Playa Del Carmen, about 45 miles south of Cancun. The island of Cozumel lies just on the horizon to the east. A passenger tender quite larger than the ones used by the S/S Norway pulled alongside as soon as we dropped anchor. Only a few chose to stay on board the Seaward as we headed ashore in mild swells. The Seaward would leave Playa del Carmen as soon as we departed and dock at Cozumel, where the ferry would bring us back to rejoin the ship from our excursions later in the day.
As soon as the tender cast off from the Seaward, local vendors laden with silver bracelets and jewelry started hawking their wares, walking between the aisles of the tender.
“Cheap!” they all said. “Last chance to buy real Mexican silver! Cheap! Only thirty dollars for sixty dollar bracelets! Cheap!” A few, giddy women scrambled forward with cash in hand. I looked back as the Seaward began sailing away from us and by the time we landed at the dock, she was already disappearing in the distance. A weird feeling watching your ship sailing away from you.
A modern, concrete pier replaced the old wooden docks from our first visit, and the town had undergone a resurgence of sorts. Ilse and I were struck by the changes to Playa Del Carmen since the last time we were there. Tourism does wonders for a place. There were several armed soldiers quite visible around the area, also a change from the laid back atmosphere of only ten or eleven years ago.
Several hundred of us paid for the side excursion south to nearby Tulum, and while we all fit on the tender for a short but choppy ride to the docks, it took ten buses to fit us all in for the short trip south to the Mayan ruins. All ten buses stopped together – convoy style – at a roadside trinket and T-shirt super-store en route to Tulum. They never shut off the bus’s diesel engines in the parking lot as they need to run their air conditioners constantly. The resultant noise is bad enough, but the stink of diesel fumes drifting through the shopping complex was almost overpowering.
At the entrance to the Tulum ruins, just outside the gift shop, I have to pay another $10 dollar tax, in US dollars, in addition to the entrance fee if I want to take my VHS video camera inside the grounds. Bill and Ingrid elect to take a guided tour while Ilse and I decide to check out the ruins on our own as we only have an hour before we have to re-board the buses to visit the beautiful natural limestone basin at Xel-Há. They spent most the time listening to an educational lecture that was more of a classroom than a tour, and it reduced the time they had to actually see the ruins.
Ilse and I enjoyed our visit to Xel-Há back in 1983 when we drove down from Cancun in a rented VW, and again the second time as well. It was a unique coral rock basin that invites swimming and snorkeling.
[Xel-Há is no longer a park run by the State of Quintana Roos, but is now leased to a private company that has built a huge, ten-story, four tube, water slide. They also changed the format of the once pristine park. The entrance fee now runs $89 to $130 US dollars. Not Mexican pesos, but US dollars. I still have my first tickets to the park in 1983 when we paid 90 Mexican Dollars – pesos – or a little over five dollars each.]
Tourism is a mixed blessing. The air conditioned buses were welcome as we started back to Playa Del Carmen. We stepped out of the buses still quite a ways from the dock at Playa Del Carmen, but the walk was needed just to stretch our legs, even in the fading heat of the late afternoon. When we reached the dock, we found the same tender we had come ashore with, but the Seaward was nowhere to be seen. She could still be seen when we came ashore, but now she was out of sight, docked in Cozumel on the other side of the twelve mile wide channel.
We cast off to rejoin our cruise ship across the choppy channel. Riding one of the fully loaded ferries around a protected harbor is one thing, but wondering where the life jackets are when the ocean spray comes over the bow is another. The weather was sunny, but we had fairly heavy seas as we bobbed and splashed our way back to the ship. More than a few of the passengers were seasick in the constant tossing and slamming. The same vendors were on board as when we arrived, still hawking their silver bracelets and jewelry but now the prices were five dollars each or three for ten dollars! Several of the women passengers were irate and berated the vendors, demanding refunds but the vendors just ignored them and kept walking through the boat. They never skipped a beat, even in rough seas. Our supposed forty-five minute trip took well over an hour, and not soon after we re-boarded the Seaward, she cast off for our trip back to Miami. We were under way by the time we changed clothes.
Our last day at sea will always be remembered for tagging the whole cruise as the “sugar cruise.” There were no sugar packets to be found anywhere on deck when we had coffee that final morning at sea. We asked several waiters for sugar. “Certainly,” they said, but none of them ever came back. Finally, Bill and I finally went searching, finding an unattended sugar dispenser in a dining room several decks below us. We stopped a Maitre d’ in another dining room and, keeping the now captive sugar dispenser out of sight, asked about the lack of sugar on deck.
He rather embarrassingly acknowledged the ship’s staff was aware of the sugar shortage, and he simply hurried away.
The dessert at the last evening meal is once again the Baked Alaska. The delicious ice cream-cake meringue dessert is of course delivered by a conga line of waiters balancing it on their heads as they sway to “Hot! Hot! Hot!” They still used real candles.
I rose an hour before dawn the last day to take photos of our predawn entrance to Government cut in Miami, but I was late to the party as the railing was packed with passengers by the time I got on deck.
At four o’clock in the morning, the sky is dark except for the reddish glow that rises from somewhere over the edge of the ocean on the forward port side that belies the bustling city I called home for most of my life. It is amazing to see the city lights of Miami appear from well over the horizon. Don’t expect to go on deck on a cruise ship at night and see stars. The bright lights of any cruise ship preclude any serious night sky viewing.
Miami, however, powers its way through.
Next: The Star Princess - Our first balcony
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