The Clearest Blue Waters

Backpacking on a 9-night cruise to the Southern Caribbean!

In early November when we were in San Francisco, we had one of those problems every traveller likes to have. We were trying to figure out where to go after the Dominican Republic.

The problem was that we’d arrive in the Dominican Republic on November 14th, but wouldn’t leave for Vancouver until close to Christmas — leaving too much time to be spent in just one country. We had 40 days to spend in the Caribbean, but the tourist visa for the Dominican Republic is only valid for a maximum of 30 days. We wanted to maximize our time in the tropics and minimize our time in cold weather, so we needed to find somewhere “warm” to go in early December to fill in the remaining time.

We tried finding cheap flights to neighbouring countries of the Dominican Republic, and spent two days going through possible options. To our surprise, there is only one local airline that flies between islands. It is a conglomerate of Caribbean governments and is notorious for being late, losing luggage, and cancelling flights. All other American airlines fly up to Miami or Atlanta and then back down to the Caribbean. Intuitively, this just didn’t make sense. Then… Yuki’s uncle suggested a cruise. This seemed like a plausible idea, so we started looking at how much a cruise would cost.

We chose Royal Caribbean purely because of cost. We were looking during a sale and snagged a 9-night cruise to the 4 ports of call in the Southern Caribbean for a total of $1,400 CAD (including all fees), or about $78/person/day. (As an aside, it cost us $55/person/day to live in Vancouver without a car.)

We didn’t have much time to get excited for the cruise because we had the wedding and all of the Dominican Republic ahead of us, but this would be Yuki’s first cruise and my second, having gone to Alaska on a ship 10–15 years ago.

The cruise got off to a rough start even before leaving port. This is probably because we’re backpackers and not in their normal demographic. Whereas most people come straight from the airport via shuttle service or take a cab, we elected to take public transportation. It wasn’t overly complicated, but it did take the better part of the morning.

The cruise line gave us very little check-in information beforehand and didn’t inform us which terminal (ranging from A to J) the ship would depart from. We took a bus and the driver let us off on the wrong side of the port island, so we dashed across several roads to get back to the Royal Caribbean building. But it turns out this building isn’t adjacent to the ship terminal; it was just the head office, and the cruise ship parked beside it wasn’t our Royal Caribbean ship either. The receptionist in the office didn’t know exactly which terminal we were supposed to go to, and directed us back over to the other side of the island. By the time we got on the ship we were two hours late, annoyed with our heavy backpacks, and really, really tired.

The cruise itself was pretty nice. We had five sea days to enjoy the ship, and they turned out to be the most eventful days. The ship, called the Navigator of the Seas, has three small pools and 6 Jacuzzis that we frequented almost daily. The buffet was plentiful and we lucked out in the evening dining room with good company. Our servers were great and our tablemates were good for conversation. One couple was around our age, and the other couple wasn’t much older. Every night, we were the loudest table in the section and had lots to laugh about. We were all grateful that we weren’t sitting with any elderly people, which make up the majority of the cruise, because we all found that most of them are quite grumpy!

We had breakfast in the formal dining room on the second day and were seated with random guests. The breakfast started with the senior beside me announcing to the table that he didn’t like people and wasn’t going to talk to anyone. Not sure what to do, I sat down and remained silent. Moments later, he engaged me in conversation and once he discovered that I was working and Yuki wasn’t, proceeded to spend the entire meal telling me how stupid I was for working and how smart she was for not. No one, in his mind, should ever work. We left as soon as we were done eating and were put off from having breakfast there with random strangers again.

We saw an ice show on the ship, as well as several other entertaining late-night adult shows like The Quest and Battle of the Sexes. However, most of the regular shows in the theater were rather disappointing; a mixture of mediocre comedians and music and dance styles that were geared towards an aging audience.

I did, however, get to accomplish a long-time goal of rock climbing on a cruise ship.

Although there is plenty to do aboard the ship, most people book cruises for their interim destinations. The ports of call were the main attraction, and we found it ironic to be landing in Haiti on Day 3 because Haiti shares the same island as the Dominican Republic — which we’d just departed from 4 days ago! Haiti is on the west side of the same island. Unfortunately, we didn’t get passport stamps for the country because we landed on a narrow peninsula owned exclusively by Royal Caribbean.

One of the couples at our dinner table did the longest over-the-water zipline in the world and the other couple did some shopping from the locals, but we spent our time swimming on one side of the peninsula in the morning and the other side in the afternoon. Honestly, we were disappointed by how expensive the zipline and waterpark were; the cruise ship tries to sell everyone on practically everything, from water bottles to fancier dinners. Apparently it is a common tactic in the industry to “nickel and dime” but it does seem to work well enough for the older, more well-off generation.

The beach itself was pretty good. It was protected, so there weren’t too many waves and the sand was nice near the shore. The water was warm and it was nice to splash around. Further out, the bottom was covered in sea grass but still pretty warm.

Yuki wanted to snorkel so we made plans to buy snorkels in the next port of call, Curacao.

Two days later we docked in Curacao, our second port of call. The cruise ship port is on the other side of a channel from the main shopping area, and there is a floating bridge to cross over. As we finished crossing, an alarm sounded and shortly after that the bridge pivoted to allow a tugboat through. This was really cool to see and I thought it would be cool if Vancouver had a floating bridge like this somewhere.

Curacao is one of the countries of the Kingdom of the Netherlands and a popular cruise terminal. Most buildings are painted in bright pastel colours and the streets are narrow. It’s not large, but there is a shopping area for tourists that is easily walkable and we went to several shops to compare the price and quality of snorkels and souvenir T-shirts before making our purchases.

Afterwards, we took a walk around the harbour but it didn’t lead anywhere. We did find a CIBC bank and then found free WiFi at a bar nearby. To get the best signal, we stood in an alleyway beside the building to check our social media accounts and send an important email.

Heading back towards the ship, we found the coast and were able to take some good pictures across a dilapidated building.

Curacao was my favourite island because we found an amazing spot to spend our afternoon in. Shortly after we found the coast, we stumbled across an old dock protected by a breakwater and fronted by an unused parking lot. We were astounded by the clarity of the water and immediately pulled out our newly-bought snorkels to test them out.

We jumped into the pristine clear-blue water, which was the warmest seawater we’ve ever swum in. We found a lot of different types of fish that we were able to look up later. There were trumpetfish, rainbow parrotfish, and bar jacks, among others. We got to swim with a school of fish that were clustered like a sphere, see blue fish that looked like they glowed in the dark, and even saw a large meter-long fish swim past in a hurry.

We spent a lot of our time on the cruise ship doing trivias and scavenger hunts. There were several short 20-minute hunts for certain objects and for photos of certain things located around the ship, but the one that took the longest was called the Find the Nations Scavenger Hunt. We were given 7 days to hunt for signatures from crewmembers of different nations, as well as the senior officers. Yuki got really excited about this and went to extreme measures to get the signatures. We waited outside an officers’ meeting for the senior management as well as got up at 8AM for one person.

At the end of the cruise, we submitted our list along with a surprisingly large number of others (around 10 teams). Unfortunately, the scavenger hunt scoring wasn’t administered very well. The back of the paper we filled out had a blank box for countries not explicitly listed on the front, and several people (including us) had more names than there were rows in the box — but the scoregiver only counted what was in the box up to a total of 60 points. As well, the paper said a crew member could only sign once, but sometimes they were the only person from their country and some signed twice, which led to some people getting double the points. The scoregiver crossed out the captain knowing he was the only Norwegian but he ignored the others. The points weren’t well-distributed either; some countries were worth a lot of points (like Canada and the USA, worth 20 points each), but other rarer countries like Kenya were worth just 1 point. If you didn’t collect signatures from all of the senior management (worth 50 points each for a total of 450 points), you didn’t have a chance of being in the top three.

We are sure that the winner, with 630 points, won by a miscount. We got second place with 620 points, which got us a silver medal and Royal Caribbean baseball cap.

We weren’t the only ones who were disappointed with the results of the scavenger hunt. Some people were really pissed off because they couldn’t read the scoregiver’s writing and thought they got 680 points instead of 480. I don’t think anyone was too happy, because we’d all spent a week and a significant effort on the scavenger hunt, only to be disappointed in one way or another.

The day after Curacao, we arrived on the island of Bonaire, another former Dutch colony. The water here was even clearer than it was in Curacao.

We tried going to a beach, but there was a $10 entrance fee which seemed silly because we had just passed some spots along the shore that would give us access to the crystal-clear ocean. So we turned around and took a nearby side street to the water behind some houses. We found an old dock and took some photos that are sure to cause some envy (we wish everyone could see this!). There was no better place to be in at that moment.

We spent the day snorkeling and taking frequent breaks on the dock. We even met some crew members from our ship, who went for a swim there as well.

The fourth and last port of call was Aruba. Apparently it is the most well-known of the ABC islands, probably because it is the largest and most developed. We weren’t interested in the huge shopping complexes, many of which had American brands, and chose to seek out another beach for snorkeling instead.

Unfortunately, the weather was windy and rainy and we were also having an off-day. The beach we found had bits of sea-glass and bottle caps here and there. When I dove into the water, I couldn’t see more than 2–3 feet in front of me due to the stormy conditions, so we spent a few hours lying on the beach and took some photos in the trees before the rain came and we decided to head back to the ship.

Overall, the cruise was pretty enjoyable and lasted the right amount of time. We especially enjoyed visiting Aruba, Bonaire, and Curacao — countries that aren’t easy to visit on our own — and we had an absolute blast snorkeling. I noticed that both my swimming and snorkeling skills have improved since we started snorkeling in Akumal Bay near Cancun, Mexico.

Cruising isn’t for everyone and we certainly felt “sneaky”, being backpackers surrounded by senior citizens throwing out money left and right. We hear that other cruise lines have a younger demographic but they might cost more and the industry as a whole is geared towards “nickel and dime”-ing. At the end of the day, we’d go on another cruise to visit difficult-to-reach ports of call and for the food, but not again anytime soon.

Our cruise was cheap for a few reasons:

1. We got the cruise on sale, saving $300 USD. When we logged onto the website a few weeks later, the webpage said we had an outstanding balance of $300 USD ($384 CAD) but we just ignored it. We think this was a mistake on the cruise company’s part.
2. We didn’t pay the automatic $13.50 USD/person/day gratuity, which would have cost us another $243 USD ($312 CAD).
3. We didn’t buy anything on board, such as fancier meals or drink packages that cost upwards of $55 USD ($71 CAD)/day/person.
4. We didn’t do any excursions or tours, opting to find our own free beaches nearby to snorkel at. Our snorkels usually cost $20 each, but since we were buying two we got both at a discounted price of $35 USD ($45 CAD). The cruise ship was selling National Geographic snorkels, which didn’t seem nicer than the ones we had, for $45 USD each.
5. We didn’t buy any souvenirs for ourselves. The only souvenirs I like are free maps from the ports of call. Yuki collected free bracelet charms and coins from the jewelry stores.

Now, we are headed back to the Pacific Northwest for Christmas. We’re not looking forward to the cold grey landscapes, but we’ll be in Vancouver long enough to see family and resupply our packs before heading off across the Pacific once again.