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S0 many people. So little to say.

A hundred years past, Sam Clemens aboard the Quaker City voyaging to Europe and the Holy Land had opportunity to muse (often no more than polite groaning) on his fellow voyageurs and the fare offered visitors drawn to those foreign lands.

Much has changed since then, along with many things being much the same.

Sam’s fellow passengers were a mixed lot, well deserving of scorn and appreciation, depending. The notion of cruising hadn’t yet but touched the edge of the bored complacency it’s reached in recent decades, meaning Sam’s companions were but novices at the game of travel boasts.

The basics were there, and clearly open to development, such as a world-weary traveler of Sam’s day laying in ambush for an unwary novice to say something nice of a foreign site as an intro to a spiel regarding the relative virtues of far grander sites visited by the seasoned authority.

In today’s market the ability to casually spool off the various lines and circuits a traveler has traveled is the diamond and platinum standard used to draw envy from the less traveled.

Shame on me for not having used the services of half a dozen cruise lines so I, too, could give the relative merits of sitting down to dine in this ship or that.

Shamefully, that a person once ate lobster twice a week is of little interest to me.

Make no mistake, I ate lots of fish on board. Only seemed fitting to do so, considering. I considered trolling, but our speed was rather too high for that.

Suggestions we hit a whale for some fresh whale steak were not well received, less so, really, than New Zealand inquiries on the edibility of cute, cuddly koala, which by natural rights should be good for something other than looking at.

Tell you this. Cruise travelers heavily invested in outperforming those lesser traveled cling stubbornly to their glory day accounts. Having spent (wasted) so many days and sunk (squandered) so much wealth into eating aboard ships they’ll not change a single note.

But so far as Bob and Marsha are concerned, the entire cruising community (there’s a notion) needs awareness in detail of their 2020 cruise to the incredible Alaskan Mediterranean that’s part of the Pergundian Date Line, figuring figurative figs.

If the most you’ve done some years is sit on ships and eat what choice is there but to puff it up best you can.

I exaggerate (how much is the question) but suggest to you that among life’s most boring and least worth knowing are the cruisers. Maybe they did something of interest earlier in life, but as devout followers of the cruise faith they’ve forgot all about it and will never dirty a hand or risk a manicured nail (not a 8 p) again.

But, supposing you do have a worthy reason for taking a cruise, the death by boredom from cruisers is close matched by the tedious tortures of tours.

These many decades later we still find Fergusons (Sam’s name for a Parisian tour guide who conveniently stopped at every glove and shirt maker imaginable so his guests could make purchases) plying the same enduring trade.

Funny how the tour bus would happen to pause outside a boutique or jeweler. Funny. None on the bus was having a ring or gewgaw emergency, but there we were, in case.

Had I bought rings I’d have run out of fingers and toes in the first few destinations. But there we were again with the assurance the gold on these premises was steeply discounted just for us foreign visitors. Why of course, Exactly how such things work, isn’t it?

If not shoving you into shopping experiences, tours will often herd you onto cable cars, tour boats or cog rail lines in case your innards are in need of the jostling they’ve grown used to.

On one happy occasion a bus jolted us up to a peak where getting down required lots of standing in line with tickets for what I came to call the Red, Blue and Yellow travails otherwise known as gondolas, ore cars and a rather rusty “duck” with a faulty exhaust. Was an ordeal.

Oddly, a great many tours think that getting off a large ship means you should soon be placed on a smaller boat for a ride. Oh joy. They’ll sell you things while riding, so there’s that opportunity not missed.

Another tour staple is the cathedral, temple or mosque. What you get on offer depends on where in the world you are.

In general among cathedrals they are more or less churchy and ornate. Says enough, I think. Temples are harder to pin down because it’s usually the case that an explanation, if any is given, is lean. You can tell something is being recognized, but exactly what and why can be elusive.

At a Chinese temple the occasion had to be “A great many children day.” Groups of several dozen young’uns at a time paraded, danced or twirled. Notable was a smaller knot of barefoot boys doing militarist (karate-judo) moves in wide red pantaloons. They (understandable for 10-year olds) were having a quite good time showing off, not always, I’m sure, to script, whatever that was.

As or more notable were two dozen paired boys in small tuxedos and girls in bright pinafores who weaved and wove in those costumes for a purpose completely lost to me.

Could say I know less of Chinese beliefs now than I did before.

To me, mosques proved of least interest because the interior is akin to an empty basketball court. If unused there’s little to see. When in use I’d say I don’t belong and shouldn’t be there.

Plus, to this casual offhanded observer, it didn’t seem at all necessary to be inside for the services that carried loud and clear for the general vicinity of so many square miles. But, where one giant size mosque stood out there’d often be scores of much smaller minareted mosques standing like corner stores in neighborhoods. I’m sure there are reasons and equally certain I don’t know what they are.