According to some stats I read (I am a researcher after all), cruising is a $25billion industry, and is one of the most profitable segments in leisure tourism. More than 33 million people cruise every year, 27% of whom are doing it for the first time. Last month, I was one of them.
Cruising is all the rage. And why not? There is a lot to enjoy about the whole endeavour. Being waited on hand and foot by attentive staff, an endless supply of food, a good range of bars to frequent, even a library for goodness sake! The rooms are fabulous and the beds hotel-level comfortable, even if you go in at the regular end of the market. They get made up twice a day, if not more. If relaxing is what you’re after, you can’t go wrong with a cruise.
There is probably enough to keep you occupied, even if you don’t set foot on dry land for the whole time. There are shows on every-night and a three course meal for dinner, silver service style to enjoy before hand. Pools to swim in, loungers to lounge on, movies to watch, a gym to run off the excess in, casino’s to spend your money in. Apparently there are shops too, but I didn’t even vaguely investigate this. I don’t like shopping at the best of time. I also avoided the art auction and the diamond sales – both of which slotted into my WTF is that about category. Why is this a thing on a cruise? Any ideas?
One of the ultimate joys of cruising though is going to sleep and waking up somewhere new and exciting. The whole thing is like a high end floating resort, offering a taster of a new place every day or so, without any effort on your part. Visiting new places is exciting. It’s definitely a thing I like to do. But there is something different about arriving by sea and disembarking from a huge floating hotel with your fellow cruisers. I don’t quite know how to define it, but I think it has to do with group identity and the super transient nature of it. It just feels different to coming in by car or plane. More like a taking over, less like a gentle discovery.
Nonetheless New Zealand is beautiful regardless of what angle you approach her, and I found myself longing for a time when we could spend weeks if not months exploring the landscape in a slightly less in-and-out manner.
There is another, perhaps unheralded, upside of cruising, which is that you are forced to slow down (this might also be a downside for me – I’m not really a sit-around type). But the slow down absolutely allows for connection. No one has anywhere to go, really. No meetings, no deadlines, no other social appointments to get to. You can turn up to bingo, knitting club and art classes, but they don’t take all day. A lot of time is just spent being. Reading, crocheting, sleeping, playing games and chatting to each other. This is both deeply restful and socially refreshing. When you’re all in the same boat, so to speak, there is time to talk, to sit in each other’s company, to reflect and most of all to connect. There is time to talk on a cruise. And to listen.
Still, despite its list of highlights and the fact that I had a really lovely time, I can definitively say I am not a cruising person. I enjoyed the two weeks, but it wouldn’t be anywhere near my top three ways to take a holiday. Why, I wonder?
There is the bleeding obvious, which is that I get motion sick and feeling queasy for much of the time is about as fun as you might imagine. I get sick, as they say, on the Manly Ferry in a slight breeze. So, it was with some trepidation that I boarded the boat in the first place. Even when your inner ear gets used to the sway, there is still a weird feeling of being slightly off. My whole body felt heavier than it ought to. G-forces my husband says. I have no idea whether he was making that up or not. To make matters worse, when you get onto dry land you sway more than when you are on the boat! Which says something marvellous about the body’s ability to adapt to changing circumstances, but I found it really unpleasant. It lasted for a week back home too. Like being just the wrong side of drunk, the world moves unevenly.
The other thing I really found deeply disconcerting was just how isolated you feel out at sea.
We went around New Zealand, from Sydney, across the ditch, as they say. The ditch is deep and the crossing takes a couple of days. If you want to feel isolated, even on a boat with 2000 passengers and another 1000 staff, this is the place to do it. There is something extraordinary about being surrounded by water, deep water, as far as the eye can see and where it can’t. Here you are floating on-top of a thin surface – the top of the ocean, with the planet’s surface kilometres away in any direction – even down. I wasn’t afraid of it, although I did make sure to pay attention to the mustering instructions, it was just a very strange feeling. I imagine astronauts must feel the same way. Disconnected from our very deep evolutionary roots as land animals.
And I definitely didn’t like feeling stuck. There were people on our cruise who had been on it for 59 days. Despite the trappings and luxury, this would surely feel like a prison sentence to me.
Some people are cruising people, but I am clearly not. There were many of our fellow travellers for whom this was just another cruise in a long procession of them. One of these couples were younger than us by a decade. I found this incomprehensible. My travel list is full of other things I’d rather be doing, and time seems in such short supply. Different strokes for different folks.
I’m not saying I would never cruise again, nor that I don’t like cruising. I suspect as one gets older it gets more appealing. And there are times when it would be higher up on my list of must dos – certain destinations that you might see best from the water – Fjords, for example, or, perhaps more importantly, so that we can hang out with the people we love for whom this is the perfect holiday option.
But right now, cruising is not what floats my boat. It’s not my favourite thing to do. And that’s okay too.
Midlife Unpacked 
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