5 Months Down, 1 to Go (!!!)

Day 150 – Okinawa, Japan – Find Insignia on CruiseMapper

One morning, early in our fifth month sailing around the world, Doris woke up to find her Fitbit lying on the bed next to her arm. The watchband had snapped in the night – simply given up the ghost without warning or provocation.

The broken watchband in some ways sums up our state at the 5-month mark: a few parts are showing wear, including our dispositions from time to time. 

At the end of every day, we still look at each other and say, “This is the biggest and best travel experience of our lives.” At the same time, we are more and more on board with Dorothy that, no matter how astonishing the land of Oz, there is no place like home. We both had a meltdown (or two) when we wanted to pull our hair out over something in Month 5 that wouldn’t have ruffled us in Month 4 or earlier.   

As we have at the previous four month-markers, we dedicate this edition of Partout to five observations and three surprises. This time we illustrate our reflections with fab photos of flowers we saw while visiting Singapore’s two world-class (maybe world-beating) botanical gardens. The tulips were on display at the Garden by the Sea’s “Tulipmania” exhibition about the history of the tulip. Raise your hand if you already knew tulips originated in Turkey! (Doris – the Leo – especially liked this vibrant variety.)

5 Observations

1 – Novelty is not forever.

We have no new foreign countries ahead of us, and we have to admit: after barreling for months into such a wild variety of ports, hearing so many unfamiliar tongues, handling so much foreign currency and seeing so many global cities on so many continents, the novelty factor of the world cruise has peaked.

We still find the changing landscape fascinating and the on-the-spot world history and geography education riveting, but Doris is no longer in the bow of the ship to catch sunrise every morning and watch a new destination bloom on the horizon. Given the pace of our port calls in the next month, this is not all bad. (The blooms in this photo at Garden by the Sea, btw, are real.)

2 – The world is heating up.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, same-old-same-old.

But.

We are here to tell you it is one thing to read “Asia’s heat waves are a grim sign of the times”in the Washington Post and quite another to live it. Everywhere we went from India through the Philippines, locals told us the heat and humidity this spring were extraordinary, if not unprecedented. The only exception was when they told us the heat and humidity had actually been worse the month before we arrived. We hope to return to Asia again in the future; we will avoid coming at this time of year.  (The heat feels like a cannonball, the common name for this flower.)

3 – We would never take an extended international trip without comprehensive travel insurance.

We have seen what feels like a tsunami of medical mishaps on the cruise: deaths, strokes, falls that required hospitalization or at least ER visits, cruises prematurely ended by one of these events, emergency visits to medical providers back in the States. Before leaving home, we cringed and bought breathtakingly expensive travel insurance to cover these and other contingencies. We have never regretted the decision.

Every time we hear about still another casualty, we breathe a sigh of relief we have some coverage if we become one of them. Many fellow cruisers skipped insurance; we all have different tolerances for risk. Ours is lower.

4 – A shipload of world cruisers is a shipload of Type A personalities.

This observation likely does not apply to short-term cruisers, but a world cruise requires so much discretionary time and money that the onboard Type A factor is stupendous. A random and completely self-serving poll of our best buddies produced estimates that 90-99% of the world cruisers fall into the A class.

With their work lives mostly behind them, many – maybe most – of these types seem mostly chill and well on their way to recovery. But the stampedes to the front of every queue, some demanding behavior toward staff and crew and the challenges to answers during team trivia suggest that, beneath all the gray hairs and bald pates, retirement from being Type A is still a work in progress for more than a few.

5 – Projecting the use rate of toiletries and cosmetics was worthwhile.

Some of you may remember our obsessive projections for packing toiletries and cosmetics (you know who you are!). That exercise proved enormously worthwhile. Everything has run out at essentially the exact rate we calculated, and we will not have excess supplies to take home other than Louis’s lifetime supply of skin lotions.

We congratulate ourselves on this feat every time some bottle or tube is emptied and we have only to reach into our supplies to replace it. We might have been able to find replacements along the way, but that would have required squandering precious shore time haunting pharmacies instead of sightseeing and possibly still be empty-handed. We only needed to make these calculations once. Now that we know the burn rates, we will rely on them when packing for future long trips.

3 Surprises

1 – Easy riding.

Doris proposed and arranged to tour Louis’s post-war Vietnam by motor scooter, the best way to see the city. Anybody who has known Doris for long would have bet a lot of money this would happen about the day hell freezes over, but motivation can be a death-defying thing. She lived to tell the story and even smile about it.

2 – AIChat

How is it possible a term that produced fewer than 10,000 Google hits in all of 2022 has generated about 10 million of them since we boarded Insignia?

With our lame onboard internet, not many of us (maybe none of us) have become conversant on the topic that seems to have set the internet on fire since we sailed under the Golden Gate Bridge. For us, the eruption of the story and its potentially dire threat to civilization mostly has been an illustration of the lightning speed a story can take off in the digital age and how swiftly doomsday narratives take hold.

3 – It rained.

Maybe the previously mentioned heat wave has something to do with this, but we traveled 148 days without a drop of rain falling on our heads. There were some nights when rain fell on the ship while we were under sail, but we did not experience a single wet daytime.

Our dry streak ended on Day 149 in Taiwan, where a gaggle of us set out to explore a geological park near Keelung. Rain made its belated appearance while we were afoot. When it did, we were so out of practice for the wet that Doris managed to be soaked to the skin before remembering she was carrying rain ponchos in her backpack. So much for her reputation as an obsessive.

Another Question Answered

Danielle asked about the effects of living together on the “small island” of our ship on relations among other passengers and between us and them.

This is mostly a good-news story. At five months, we have made friends close enough we can easily imagine visiting back and forth back on land. We have also met more people than we can count who were great company for a meal or an outing. The human dynamic is probably one of the top things we have enjoyed on the world cruise.

At the same time, we actually have seen some signs that nerves and patience are beginning to go the way of Doris’s Fitbit band. There have been squabbles between teams competing in team trivia, for example. People seem to notice and remark more often on behaviors they find rude in fellow passengers. (The term “Type A personality” has probably exploded among passengers at about the same rate as “AI Chatbot” has in Google.)

For our part, there are very few people we would go out of our way to miss, but we do avoid spending much time with people who talk about nothing but themselves. When you meet 400 new people overnight, it takes some time to figure out who talks with you and who talks at you. A two-hour multi-course meal with a talk-atter? Exhausting. The fellow travelers we are introducing you to in Partout? Definitely not of that ilk!

Where’s Snowy?

Besides hanging out in the lobby of the fabulous Hotel Éclat in Taipei where we overnighted on land to better explore Taiwan.

(And yes, Rose. Snowy is ALWAYS in the photo – and followers actually find her!)

Coming Soon!

Fellow Travelers – The ‘Other’ Man