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Harry's round-the-world vessel, Queen Mary II.

Incidental contact with a fellow inmate causes me to think it might be appropriate to address some cruising concerns.

First it might be wise to forewarn potential cruisers the possibility of getting drawn into squabbles. Some passengers seek allies for their mutinies.

In the case I was able to sidle away from the issue first in play was the cruise line not having done (in the complainer’s mind) enough to protect her from discomfort as a woman traveling alone while in a group. See, tricky. The complaint went on and on-on and on-on-on some more, long enough for a person to drift away whilst nodding attentively.

A true complainer, however, leap frogs and step stones from one thing to another so that feelings of vulnerability on a tour land on a spot alleging soil on a tiled floor. Whew. You’ve got to keep track. More importantly, you’ve got be careful of getting snared in hopeless wrangles.
Hopeless? You bet. There is, you see, nothing, as in not a thing on this earth ever, can be done regarding individual feelings rising from a past event.

I suspect the supposed faults aboard ship and on tour were useful in making the one reporting them (complaining) feel important by having to be taken seriously by a polite ship’s officer who surely could have been doing something (anything) of more interest. A half hour is a long time to listen to nit picks that can’t be addressed by any possible action.

Thankfully, I mean this, most ego-needy cruisers will be more than content telling you about the excellent “authentic native” delicacy they ate or what port X was like when they visited a decade earlier.

Good to know, but useless in any case.

Fun as it may be for me to make jests about my fellow cruisers, if you’re ever going anywhere by sea it’s a good idea to be somewhat mentally prepared for more than sunburn and water-borne illness.
In truth, you should be prepared as well for ones like me who are rarely intrigued by the damned obvious.

For many of us a special trip to the tropics on a cruise ship will be our first and dream encounter with vacations at sea. The Queen Mary 2, which I’m on, is, unlike most other cruise ships, an ocean liner, and possibly the end of her kind. She, ships are shes, it’s a nautical thing, carries a mere 2,000 or so passengers and is full of large spaces.

A modern cruise ship is apt to carry twice or more that number. That means embarking and disembarking can be rather a mess. Likewise, many thousands of visitors all looking for something to do for a day in port do create problems for local populations.

Imagine the Twin Ports getting regular doses of six thousand visitors. How many Grand Views’ or Meteors or Glensheens would we need? More than we have, certainly, even with the Irwin and Canal Park added.

You get part of the problem is simply one of numbers. So, if on a cruise tour keep that in mind.
In addition, remember that modest expectations might be your best friend. If, as some make it sound, you think you’ll learn much of local culture you might as well define American culture as a burger and shake. At best, tours give a short impression of an area, enough to spark future interest in the area.

Who’d say they know the Iron Range from visiting Iron World, or the Hull Rust, or the Zimmerman house and Greyhound Museum? You see a bit of something or other, usually something prepared to be convenient and palatable for tourists. Or fakes, such as South Shore pineapple, wilderness coffee or underground mine pizza.

In one respect a tour gets you off the ship for a while and then back on. Simple. But again, low expectations can help. I’ll give a sample from what was sold as a leisurely river day trip was an hour spent on a poorly ventilated passenger barge where one presentation ran something like this.
“Behind the trees on the riverbank you’d find Europe’s second largest youth stadium, built using imported marble and featuring six pillars representing things everyone should know.”

I’m not fooling. That sentence is very close to one I heard. Very often, sad to say, tour info is limited and aimed at trying to please or amuse visitors with minimal effort.

Bluntly, I’d be a fool to think I knew much of Dakar from a few-hour tour. I’d know about as much of it as I’d know about Greenland from a fly over.

For me, cruising has given unexpected perspective on entering other countries. It’s surprising to see which places are fussy, as if there’d be a real worry visitors would add much to the debris already existing in gutters and alleys.

Even those places seemingly having something to protect can be opaque, unless, that is, the object of their visa requirements is to harvest the visa fee. No nation I’ve visited this time ‘round has ignored its own borders. It’s possible to ascribe visa motives based on politics, but I’ll leave that for others.

In general, even with the flaws and occasional nuttiness, I can’t complain because good enough is good enough. If you insist on riding a bus when you need a wheelchair or walker there will always be delay and inconvenience.

A cruise is a method of travel and entertainment. By nature it will not be fast or 100 percent entertaining.
However, what could have prepared me for the quirky fact that the QM2 world cruise made an accommodation for (are ye ready for it) ukelele players. In my case, I’ve never thought of taking a ukelele anywhere on any trip I’ve ever taken. Yet, there they are. Maybe it’s a cult, the ukelele sister-brother-and-undecided-hood.

Feels strange how quickly lunch table talk about the joys of biking while cruising, line dancing and classes in basic watercolor turn my mind murderous from bored disinterest. Fortunately we had at the table a gray-haired man with pony tail and large earing to provide the question “How are things in the pirate business?” As typical of Brits, he was unamused.