Last month, I took part in an online forum about the cruise ship industry that editor David Gillbanks at the Good Tourism blog called “the good, the bad, and the ugly”.
I wrote about the lamentable. I was credible.
I cut my teeth on tourism in the early 1960s when I worked for Frank Leslie Fraser, the Dominican Republic taxicab owner, who stood out among the ancien régime of Miami’s rustbucket operators. Passengers boarded unseaworthy ships through rat-infested warehouses that symbolized the odd backwater that Miami was, torpid and still recovering from the bust that followed the land boom.
I worked for two of those ships, the Evangeline and the Ariadne, a beautiful little vessel unfortunately staffed by a mixed crew of Germans and Brits. At a port in Panama, they refought the Second World War. Several crew were either jailed (as I remember) or repatriated. The ship’s schedule was finished when she returned to Miami, although not because of WW2 echoes. Rather, because she had no stabilizers and wallowed severely while underway, to damning criticism of her inaugural voyage passengers.
There were exactly two downtown Miami restaurants that anyone went to apart from hotel dining rooms. Seminoles in their patchwork dresswear paddled their canoes down the Miami River to pick up supplies and stop at souvenir shops that sold piña coladas along Flagler Avenue. They must have felt ambivalent about the modernity. They had a village upstream on the river near today’s Miami International Airport, where they wrestled alligators for tourists. I went as a boy.
I later studied admiralty and spent four years on Coast Guard ships that traveled the islands as well as up through coastal North Carolina.
And then Knut Kloser brought his cruise-ferry Sunward to Miami for Ted Arison to run. The New Port of Miami rose on spoil islands along the causeway that connected Miami to Miami Beach, and the modern day cruise industry re-launched Miami’s fortunes.
Good Tourism blog
I wrote that in our epoch of climate change, when we extend hospitality to passengers on cruise ships we become stewards for their behavior while with us.
That means more than keeping drunks from falling overboard. We become responsible for their entire effect on the waters that our hospitality extends across.
Ships at sea, like airplanes in the sky, and hotels ashore — the great integers of tourism — warrant thumbs-up to the extent that they draw down greenhouse gases. See below my archived posting Hope that reports promises made to Travel Weekly by new Carnival CEO Josh Weinstein.
That means, among other actions the conversion from fossil fuels to green technologies for power and deep accounting for waste; not only for the recycling or storage of refuse, but also for the opportunity costs (waste) of failing to educate passengers on protecting the seas that make their voyages possible.
Education has to start with a history of humans at sea; the importance of clear horizons by day and dark skies at night for the earliest navigators.
We have to educate on the importance of the creatures that the oceans sustain and the foods they supply, whose evolution recalls our own emergence from briny depths.
Education, also, about how ships as long as three football fields and carrying three thousand people remain buoyant while pocket change lost overboard sinks.
We can’t afford to remain ignorant about what we must protect.
The good news is that expedition ships, which directly descend from human discovery and exploration, are leading our way.
Also, barely beyond our awareness, are the expanding fleets of cruise-ferries that combine onboard service for transportation (think around coastal Europe and coastal Asia) as well as a range of comforts for overnight passengers cruising between ports of call.
Some 250 cruise-ferries already operate today. They are smaller and quicker to build than cruise ships and may be quicker to adopt climate technology.
Imagine the cross-cultural learning that already takes place between these two distinct passenger sets.
Bizarre
I was stunned when I lately had cruise ships on my mind and saw this picture of a cheeseburger in a Times recipe. I flashed on — cruise ship!
These ships have become floating theme parks that engender sybaritic debauchery where passengers and crew fall overboard at an alarming rate. Cruise critic Dr, Ross Klein calls ships “a problem waiting to happen.” I will have more to say about this in a posting at the end of the month.
Alternatives to cruise ships as theme parks exist.
We can book ships driven in part by sails. When deployed, sails cut back on fossil fuel consumption. Miami-based Windstar operates a small fleet of sailing yachts for only a few hundred guests on each of its ships. Their
motto, “The wind and the stars know the way.” No roller coasters, no private islands.
Yet it’s easy to imagine their passengers wowed by the fullness of being there — of being.
On the other hand, while Windstar identifies onboard scientists and naturalists employed for lectures, the company’s website says nothing about even its meager contributions to reef restoration in French Polynesia, where it operates, or otherwise about climate action. Windstar is owned by Xanterra, which readers of The Climate Traveler know drags its feet when not pressured to act.
NOTES
https://www.goodtourismblog.com/2023/05/cruise-ships-blessing-or-blight/
https://herbhiller.medium.com/the-climate-traveler-hope-d4703f7b9ac7
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cruiseferry
https://www.insider.com/alcohol-common-factor-in-overboard-incidents-cruise-expert-says-2022-12
