Working theory: the guy who invented the pleasure cruise did
so after traveling by air, and concluding that the best part of the trip was the
airport terminal. Ideally, he thought, passengers should cut out the actual
destination altogether, and just stay put in the airport terminal for the
entire length of their holiday, enjoying the facilities, relaxing and getting
to know one another.
The terminal would be wheeled out into the sea and spend the
week slowly floating up the coast and back again, so the outdoor scenery would
change gradually while the indoor experience remained exactly the same, and
would eventually be wheeled back to its original location so the guests can
disembark and go home. If some of the more arcane and tortuous elements of air
travel and security could be incorporated into the experience, all the better.
Amazingly, despite airports notoriously being some of the
most hellish, stressful places in modern civilization, this pitch caught on.
Nowadays thousands of people willingly sign up for the “floating airport
terminal” experience in all its glory. I am now one of those people, albeit along
for the ride as a guest at a wedding, which just happened to be on a cruise
ship.
I was dimly aware of what lay in wait; one of my favourite
pieces of writing is David Foster Wallace’s seminal “A
Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again”, documenting a seven-day ordeal
on a luxury cruise. And Gabi had done the exact same route 14 years earlier, with
some family friends. But I was essentially going in completely blind, expecting
a somewhat amusing detour with lots of free (or at least prepaid) food and
drink.
In hindsight, a little extra research would have gone a long
way to prepare us psychologically for the horrors that awaited on board. For a
start, this wasn’t a luxury cruise, like the one Wallace complained about so
eloquently in the ‘90s. Nor was it the same cruise as the one Gabi took in
2010, when MSC had just launched the route to limited response and bookings, with
the kind of impeachable international standards which most foreign brands bring
to the Brazilian market before quickly realising they can get away with basically
anything here.
What we were embarking on could be charitably called a
budget cruise, packed to capacity with revellers determined to get their
hard-earned money’s worth over three days of hard cruisin’. In short: a
floating airport terminal, filled with Ryanair passengers, all packed into the
VIP lounge. Which is now, by definition, just a lounge.
Now I have nothing against the common man; I believe he has
just as much right to enjoy his time off as anyone else, as long as no one gets
hurt. I just don’t want to be packed alongside him while he does it, and Gabi
and I have gone to great lengths so far to make sure this doesn’t happen. Our
policy on holiday is to identify what most tourists are doing and when, and
then head in the opposite direction. Unfortunately this is wholly impossible on
a cruise ship, where following the herd is the only game in town.
This became immediately apparent when we entered the hangar-like
waiting area at Santos port and began our long wait to check in and board the
ship. I wasn’t overly worried at this point, because I appreciated the immense
logistical challenge of fitting 4,500 people onto a ship where every millimetre
counts, and was willing to delay the promised gratification of an open bar and
a never-ending lunch until our number was called. The real shock came once we’d
made our way to the main entrance via shuttle bus, checked into our spacious
cabin (we got a free upgrade and a balcony for some reason! Result!) and headed
out to find something to eat.
Having reached the communal stairwell, we were struck by the
unmistakable smell of human vomit. This immediately preceded the entrance to
the main restaurant, which covered almost the entirety of the 14th
deck but was being overrun anyway by a starving mob. Gabi, an only child, had
never had to fight for food before, and was being pummelled with more sensory
overload than she could feasibly process anyway.
Having queued for what seemed like an eternity (a recurring theme
throughout the trip), we managed to grab a slice of pizza on a plastic tray and
found a table, hidden behind a plastic pillar and somehow spared by the
onslaught, and began to frantically rationalise the experience: this was surely
just one restaurant of many! Everyone is hungry from the wait outside, and
boarded at the same time, so surely the rush will die down eventually! We just
need to get our bearings and figure out where the good food is! We need a
drink!
Duly fed and watered, we decided to go for a walk around the
top deck, and soon realised the folly of our ways. The ship was equipped with
three small pools, four jacuzzis and two walkways worth of deckchairs, none of
which were a match for the deluge of oiled human flesh currently bearing down
on the 15th floor like some kind of Lovecraftian nightmare. It’s
hard to accurately describe the slippery-floored bacchanal of (kid-friendly!) depravity
on Deck 14 without one’s faculties shutting down completely, and so just like
our shellshocked selves at the time, we’ll block it out completely, never to return.
In one fell swoop, the vast expanse of the cruise ship where
we were due to spend the next three days was effectively reduced to just our
cabin, and the 6th deck, where other stunned refugees such as
ourselves had gathered to seek some remnant of peace and quiet. Our little
group – Gabi and I, Bruna and Bia, who was a late replacement for Bruna’s absentee
boyfriend - ended up spending most of our time in a café there, which was essentially
a ropy shopping mall corridor café, was flanked with gaudy Vegas-esque Greek
pillars, and served weirdly insubstantial cakes, dry rolls and no coffee (the
machine was broken), but which we somehow grew fond of anyway as a safe haven
from the mayhem, like the weary victims of Stockholm Syndrome we were. As the
hours passed slowly by, complaining about everyone and everything involved with
the cruise was seemingly the only healthy way to emerge from the journey with
our sanity intact.
To one side of the café was a profoundly depressing casino
which was always empty when we passed through (probably because the smell of
vomit was especially strong there), and a vast multi-tiered theatre which was
used as a muster point by day (playing “Dune” (2021) on mute, amusingly), and a
venue for unexplainable feats of amateur dramatics – like a review of Italian
showtunes, or a Treasure Island musical - by night. To the other, a never-ending
parade of seedy bars and promos for tours, none of which inspired us to part
with any more of our cash. Dead-centre was a vaulted reception area with a diamond
staircase, which was mostly-odour-free and good for a handful of photoshoots.
Apart from the evil-smelling carnage of the Maya Buffet,
every restaurant on board was shut during the day or exclusive to some
elaborate package which was Not For The Likes Of Us. All other communal areas were
off limits to everyone but crew members and customers who had paid through the
nose for a superior experience, presumably away from the riff raff. Like real life,
the cruise was shaping up to be tolerable for a select, deep-pocketed few, and
unbearable yet somehow also bafflingly expensive for everyone else. I suspect
that even the masses who had come aboard looking for nothing more than a bucket
of beers and endless hamburgers by the pool must have come away feeling a bit let
down, due to the sheer weight of numbers involved.
As an aside, there wasn’t as much upselling and naked greed
on board as I expected – we were a captive audience after all, and we all know
how much even the most basic necessities cost in an airport terminal. But what
little I encountered would have been enough to sour the experience for me, had
I been enjoying the experience in the first place. Internet access – which
should be a basic human right at this point – was only available for the
eye-watering price of $16 a day for the entire trip, or a one-off of $30 for 24
hours. This happened to be equivalent to the ship credit Gabi and I had on our
account for some reason, but I still think they should have just built this
price into the cost of the ticket and let everyone get online “for free”. As it
was, we couldn’t get in touch with anyone unless we rang their cabin, or agreed
on a specific meeting point, like in the Dark Ages.
By this point I was resigned to a thoroughly mediocre trip
which might also double as a fun people-watching exercise and a wellspring of future
anecdotes, but Gabi was having a harder time absorbing the sheer volume of
abject disappointment. We made one last trip up top, to seek out an apocryphal covered
pool on the top deck which someone had told us about, and journeyed through the
spa and gym, only to be pointed back towards the same aquatic Hieronymus Bosch fresco
we’d been trying to get away from in the first place. Something in Gabi’s eyes
went out. This was all there was. We went back to our cabin and ate cold pizza
in silence.
Dinner was a little more civilized than breakfast and lunch –
we had a designated table and didn’t have to sacrifice our humanity to get to
the food, which was brought to us by a well-drilled army of waiters and
busboys. The logistics involved in successfully feeding thousands of passengers
in such a small amount of space and time was undeniably impressive, but the
meal itself – let’s face it – would have been extremely underwhelming if served
in any normal restaurant. Plus, for drinks-related reasons we were sat away
from our friends, and next to an extremely drunk man and his apparently
long-suffering wife, holding forth about obscure Egyptian lore.
Compounding the misery, our itinerary was altered at the
last minute due to adverse weather conditions in Rio. A scheduled trip ashore
to Búzios was pushed back 24 hours, and we had to essentially tread water in
the meantime. This prolonged spell on board the ship, with limited access to
sunlight, internet and nourishment, and no real way to judge the passing of
time, proved to be too much for Gabi, who developed a case of cabin fever and
started expounding dark conspiracy theories about how the Titanic was an inside
job carried out by a disgruntled employee who simply couldn’t face another day
in the middle of the ocean.
Up in the Galaxy Lounge, the wedding ceremony proved to be a
welcome distraction – it was the reason we were all here, after all - but even
that was fraught with issues. The mother of the bride got more and more anxious
as the day wore on, and had to be talked down by Gabi who was forced into acting
as a makeshift wedding planner, usher, psychologist and photographer; then she
wandered off, got lost and almost missed the whole thing. Meanwhile the family
of the groom were dressed in black and openly hostile to the bride, anyone
associated with the bride (including us) and the entire concept of the wedding
itself.
But the naval-themed ceremony was sweet, once we’d filtered
out the pounding bass and paralytic party-goers immediately beneath us, and
Gabi got some good photos which Andréia leveraged to bring down the price of
the official snaps. Then everyone immediately wandered off to do their own
thing, and after dinner Andréia stormed the stage by the main pool to throw her
bouquet into a sea of ravers dressed all in white.
After that it was full steam ahead overnight, as the party-goers
made one last attempt to “dar prejuízo ao MSC” (i.e. eat and drink so
much that they actually come out ahead on the price of their ticket) – the resulting
spilling of bodily fluids up on the top deck doesn’t even bear thinking about. Instead,
we took in some karaoke in a sports bar, and a final Italian-themed dinner,
which turned into a conga line as the waiting staff came out from the kitchen
to celebrate seeing the back of us, and had an early night.
We pulled into harbour early the next morning, and had just enough
time to snag some underwhelming scrambled eggs before packing up and heading to
shore, heading through the arrivals gate and on to the chartered bus home. We
didn’t glance back.
At home, we had a quick turnaround and headed straight back
out into the countryside, with the same people from the cruise, because one of
our friend’s dad had passed away overnight and they were holding a wake in the
local crematorium. It was very solemn, sad and stunningly hot, and the same-day
transition from cruise to wake was jarring, but not as jarring as it should
have been. There was plenty of sadness and discomfort to go around on the
cruise, after all. Ultimately I think we were all happy to be back on dry land
and in charge of our own fates again.
Looking back, what strikes me most is the uncanny valley of
it all. Everything on board the MSC Preziosa was designed to radiate luxury,
but ended up as a weird, unconvincing simulacrum of it instead. Every crew
member had multiple roles, so you would see the same faces in unusual settings
- like when the cast of “Treasure Island: The Musical” ended up alongside the White
Party hype-woman, who herself popped up the next morning to tell people which
boat they should get to shore, where the croupier from the casino was waiting
with a sniffer dog.
Even now, back at home for Gabi’s birthday with her parents,
grandma and cats in tow, we can’t shake off the creeping malaise. It’s not just
the perpetual pitching and rolling that’s done a number on our inner ear. Like an
ocean-bound Jack Torrance, we no longer trust our senses after prolonged exposure
to the numbing mediocrity of cruise life. What if we open our front door and the
ship’s burnt orange carpeting stretches out before us, as far as the eye can
see? What if we go to give Zila a hug and she turns out to be the busboy from
Table 419, wearing a wig and asking us to give him a good review once our 4G
kicks in? What if I instinctively roundhouse-kick Gabi out of the way to get to
the last slice of pizza? Will we never again be free to lead a vomitless
existence?
It seems we are all in the same boat. Forever, and ever, and
ever…
