Borealis Tuesday 02.05.2023
At 8am we are up as our ship moves slowly amidst anonymous green islets surrounded by a placid sea, almost a lagoon. The sky is blue with occasional puffs of cloud and it is warm, pleasantly warm. Perhaps around 27 degrees. This is what it must have looked like to the earliest buccaneers and settlers as they searched around for harbours and tried to assess which islands were habitable and which could sustain a larger community with potential for crops or farm animals. At least that was the view and the thoughts that came into my mind from our balcony on the port side.
When Albina and I reached breakfast at the buffet restaurant on Deck 8 on the starboard side, the picture changed immediately. I could now see that we had just reached our pier at the front end of our ship and we had a pretty view of a classical English XVII century settlement of Roadtown, capital of Tortola in the British Virgin Islands. Yet even as we finished our breakfast the picture changed yet again as a monster ship with some 13 decks appeared suddenly on our starboard side. I could see the reflections of our funnels in their cabin windows two levels below their main deck. The vessel was so long that fromwhere I sat . I could not see either the prow or the rear of the vessel to establish its name and nationality. But from the brash water slides high up over their pool area I could guess it was American. I cannot imagine a worse situation. With two vessels arriving at this tiny destination at the same time, we are probably doubling the population on the island, Everywhere we could face large crowds, screaming American children and higher prices. Not a good forecast.
As soon as the vessel had obtained immigration clearance, I slipped ashore for a half an hour to check out the wifi connection on land. However, I was still not able to make a telephone connection to British Airways by phone to sort out access to the staff travel department. While on land I found the name for our floating neighbour was Disney Fantasy. Fantasy to some, nightmare to others. Its pasengers are all over the port. So far the children seem quiet and bemused, the young parents polite and not pushy, but when I returned to the pier to re-enter our ship I could compare our passengers and theirs walking alongside each other from their separate gangplanks. Theirs have plenty of children and no people with walking sticks or wheelchairs, but their parents have on balance a far wider girth than ours, even though we have a large proportion of the overweight as well. The Americans have a strange mixture of slim healthy looking parents and a majority who waddle along with beefy kids in tow, already panting with the effort on the arrival pier.
I have just checked up on the American cruise vessel. It is called Disney Fantasy, a new vessel based in Fort Lauderdale, and it ran its maiden voyage at the beginning of March this year. It has a weight of 130,000 tons, which is twice the weight of Borealis, It has 14 decks to our 9, a length of 348 metres to our vessel's 237 metres, and a beam width of 40 metres to our standard 32 metres. I say "standard" because that is the maximum width a vessel can have to pass through the Panama Canal locks. So this giant, like its Disney sister ship, is destined to sail only round the Atlantic and Caribbean, and could only sail on to the Pacific, and thus visit San Francisco or Alaska, if it sails round the Cape of Good Hope or Cape Horn. Its investment in various areas on the ship just for children means it is only suited for local tours of around a week or a fortnight. You cannot take kids on a five week holiday or more. That gives me some satisfaction and I have already given these details to interested passengers and staff.
The shops at the harbour were all uniformly smart and excessively expensive, although Albina did buy me a white shirt and white pair of trousers for 70 dollars. Incidentaly, US dollars are the currency for the British Virgin Isles (BVT), as well as for the neighbouring U.S. Virgin Isles. We got back for a very quick lunch and then headed for our booked tour of Tortola and the surrounding islands. We boarded a boat at the harbour for around 40 people, and set off at a steady pace. We had a raconteur guide called David, who made a point of saying that this was an unsupervized tour without any of his bosses aboard, perhaps to give us a feeling we were participating in some kind of illicit adventure. There was an undercurrent of the revolutionary and buccaneer about him. The boat played soft reggae music with constant references to "be happy" and "let's stay together, it will be all right". Perhaps that was part of the dynamic of black guides showing round white guests, in particular white British guests, on their home turf. They can express their sassiness and their sense of independence laced with some familiarity and even affection. I should add here that ethnically the BVT are 78% of black or African origin, and everybody we came in contact here, guides, drivers, shopkeepers, policemen, are black. Curiously, our guide had a healthy disrespect for the politicians in his country who wanted independence from the UK. He commented on how the British Commonwealth link was crucial in obtaining aid for the Virgin Islands after the Irma hurricane hit the BVT in 2017, imposing life changing destruction.
It was a relaxing atmosphere, where a number of guests opened up to each other despite still being stangers. The lady next to Albina, who was accompanied by her quiet husband, disclosed how her husband's condition had deteriorated in the last 2 years due to memory loss and advanced Alzheimers. He barely knew where he was. Like us, they had chosen this cruise two years before. During the covid crisis his Alzheimers had made big strides. He had turned increasingly difficult and even violent and she had had to warn him she would commit him permanently to a separate home if he tried to hit her again. As time wore on, and he still proved to be physically capable, she decided to take the risk of not cancelling the cruise nd to go ahread with it with him in tow. So she had spent 70 days so far of this cruise, helping him dress and going about the daily activities, including the more relaxing excursions, and put up with his occasional unexpected mood swings. I remember how I once passed him at the promenade deck rail during the crossing of the Panama Canal. We had chatted amiably about his previous experience as a sailor passing through the canal and he talked about how beautiful the surrounding jungle was. However, I soon realised that he was not taking in whatever I had been saying and was repeating the same words over and over again. So many of our fellow passengers carry burdens and crosses of which we largely remain unaware. Despite the holiday atmosphere there is an undercurrent of pain, physical but particularly mental, which adds such poignancy to our visists and to the enthusiasm and cheeriness of our staff and our fellow passengers.
Our craft rode and bumped over the waves in the direction of a ring of islands around Tortola, beginning with Salt Island. David stoped the engine and gave us almost an affectionate account of how Queen Victoria honoured the island after its inhabitants, who had been harvesting salt, had helped rescue the survivors of the wreck of ss Rowan, which had been a particularly favoured vessel for the old Queen. She let Salt Island off payng taxes to the Crown except for one annual tribute of 1 sack of salt, which was retained for the Queen's own use. Drifting in the blue crystal clear waters of the Sir Francis Drake Channel, David served out glasses of rum to us all and regaled us with stories about how Francis Drake robbed other pirates like himself, or how Christopher Columbus, who arrived at the shores in his second voyage in 1493 was desptached by the King and Queen of Spain because he was an alcoholic that they were trying to get rid of, or how an adjoining island got the name Fat Virgin, or Virgin Gorda, because its shape reminded a drunken Columbus of a outsize virgin lying down on her side, or how another island was named by Columbus as Dead Man's Chest because of its shape, and how that same island became the source of a famous pirate drinking song, after the pirate Blackbeard left fifteen mutinous sailors to starve on that island. Yo ho ho and a bottle of rum to all that. By then he had restarted the motor and we proceeded towards another island called Norman, named after another pirate called Norman had left his buried treasure there, and how stories of that treasure were the inspiration for Robert Louis Stevenson's "Treasure Island". Norman Island was actually full of secret coves and caves, which made David's story all the more believable. As we drew near we found a boat similar to ours with American tourists in what I could only call a mass snorkel, as they were nearly all in the water with the same identical snorkelling masks, probably supplied by their Disney ship.
As most of us had been drinking rum quite liberally we could probably believe any stories that David regaled us with. He described how we can get hangovers from drinking the normal rum we buy in supermarkets, which is based on molasses, and that the pure white rum, made from cane sugar, would not give us any hangover, no matter how much we had drunk. That ties in with my experience with neat vodka not giving you a hangover. David then suggested how we could even fool Fred Olsen and smuggle rum aboard the vessel disguised in water bottles. Then he started the boat once more and suggested we all risk becoming illegal immigrants as he streered us in the direction of St John Island, which was actually part of the U.S. Virgin Islands. I could have told him that we all had Amercian visas, without which we could not have taken part in this cruise, but why spoil his fun.
Finally we reached a high point on the shoulder of the mountain with a little pub and restaurant called Stout's Lookout, where the driver at last stopped. Here we could get out of the vehicle, take pictures of the blue Atlantic on both side of the mountain's shoulder, and enjoy a beer and a snack. Then we resumed our journey across the mountain. We passed a convoy of some 10 jeeps going the opposite way with what we assumed were Amercian tourists. Finally, he passed another ridge and he stopped for us to take a picture of the more turquise coloured Caribbean Sea on the other side of the island, with Road Town visible with the two cruise ships down in the quay. As we descended from the mountain, breaks screeching, in another steep drive along a zig zaggy route, we passed more and more houses, mostly a sign of prosperity. This was marred by the fact that every third or fourth house was damaged and empty, which I put down to the effects of the unrepaired hurricane damage from six years ago. By the time we reached Road Town the ratio of prosperous housing decidedly improved, presumably from some UK based post-hurricane community investment. Certainly the tourist areas clustered around the pier appeared neat and spotless.
By 5pm we were back on the quay. We walked through the harbour entrance building with its souvenir shops and sad huddled passengers standing against the side of the corridor and linked to their loved ones. We rejoined the ship and waited for dinner, as I started my blog entry for today. The vessel sailed at 6pm.
While chatting with other passengers I heard that one who was on a later bus to our tour refused to continue risking his life with that driver after they had reached Stout's Lookout. Consequently the bus left without him. The ship had to book a taxi to collect him from there. Wonder who paid for that?
Our quiz did not go too well that night (only 6 right out of 15) as we swapped stories about our various excursion experiences. I noticed that they had that ridiculous silent disco game again in the Observatory, where people dance to different styles of music that they hear on their earphones. I gave that a miss and got ready for bed.
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