I'm on the Pacific Ocean right now, enjoying a day at sea on the weekend Ensenada cruise. I'm having an extremely good time, although I'm wishing I had booked three weeks earlier while the Royal Caribbean ship still had cabins available.
Carnival is a pretty good cruise line, but it suffers by comparison to RCCI. The food is not quite as good. The shops sell slightly lower quality garbage. The comedian is slightly less funny. The activities are slightly less interesting. The service is slightly less swift. The midnight buffet is slightly less fancy. (I mean, what is a midnight buffet without shrimp?)
But it is festive, due in large part to the massive numbers of passengers who spend most of their travel dollars on liquor. This place is crawling with drunks and scantily clad folks (many of whom should not ever be scantily clad except in the privacy of their own showers). And drunken, half-nekked people know how to have a good time. It's about 11:00 a.m. on a Sunday morning as I type this, and there are already a bunch of people walking around wasted.
My ten-year-old is semi-famous on the boat. She sang a bunch of April Lavigne and Hilary Duff songs at karaoke the past two nights, and everyone remembers her by name. I wish I was so famous. But I did have some people stop me on the elevator and ask me if my little girl would be singing karaoke tonight, and that was kind of cool. No one asked me, however, if I would be singing Birdhouse in Your Soul, It's the End of the World As We Know It, or Pretty in Pink again....
[Update: She won 2nd Place in the adult karaoke contest.]
We went into Mexico yesterday and took an excursion to La Bufadora, which is a blowhole that spouts incoming waves dozens of feet into the air every few seconds. It's pretty cool. I hadn't seen it in about 15 years, and I wanted my kids to see it, so we decided to book an excursion there on the ship. Luckily, we barely got to the ship before it departed, and that left our first evening too short to do things like plan out our day in Mexico. So the next morning, when we disembarked, we found a line of taxi vans waiting to take us straight there, and then wait for us while we explored the place, for less than half of what the ship would have charged to load us on a huge bus with 50 other people, leaving and returning at times decided by the ship, not by us.
Ensenada is still as poor as I remembered. We saw a dead mouse sitting on the curb right outside the ship. Most of the roads outside of town, other than the major north-south route, were dirt. The nicer ones, however, were lines with palm trees. I kid you not -- dirt roads lines with palm trees. Many shopping centers had dirt parking lots. (Would you shop there in the rain?) And we saw a bunch of local highway workers making road repairs that consisted of shoveling dirt from high spots and dropping it into low spots. There was abandoned construction everywhere. And there were beach houses along the coast that some American homeless people wouldn't touch. The scenery is so beautiful at times, I wonder why this region is not doing well. In fact, the resources are so good that they should be affluent. Instead, it's filthy poor.
The blowhole is the same as I remembered, but the path from the parking lot to the observation spot has changed. It is now a long gauntlet of vendors, each selling the same crap that I don't need and don't want. They are in-your-face marketers, and they cannot be ignored or disregarded, or they just get louder. We eventually started telling them that we already spent all our money. That shut them up.
The funniest part of the experience was the churro salesmen. There were at least ten churro stands, and every single one offered you about two inches of sample churro as you passed by. By the time you went up and back, you could have eaten about three churros worth of samples. Who needs to buy a churro after that?
We took only a little time in town, since the best thing to do there is drink and wear wet t-shirts to try to win money, and my little girls are not doing either of those things, and my wife and I would only do the former. One of the shops had a really nice sign welcoming Holiday and Viking Serenade passengers. The Holiday and the Viking Serenade haven't been doing the Ensenada run for about ten years, but I guess they can't see fit to wasting the dozens of dollars they spent on the sign, so they never changed it.
I figured out one of the scams. Those street vendors -- the ones that just stand there on the sidewalk and block your path -- are actually working for the shops. I went into one shop that had a sign that said something like: "yes, this is the same quality bracelet that street vendors are selling for $5, but here, they are $2.95, or 2 for $5." As I was chuckling over the "same quality" line, one of the street rats came in, handed the owner a box full of money, and was handed a box of those bracelets, which he went out into the street to sell for $5.
My favorite shop: the one with window displays that included t-shirts that read "F*ck you you f*cking f*ck" and a bunch of statues of Jesus and the Virgin Mary. It had a little something for everyone. They even had Pulp Fiction style gimp masks.
The one thing I absolutely do not understand is the "your name on a grain of rice" stands. Why do people buy those? What in the hell are you going to do with a grain of rice that has your name on it? Does it impress people? I wouldn't be impressed. Show me a grain of rice with the entire Old Testament on it and I'll be impressed. But your name? Big whoop.
One thing I like about Mexico: they stick these huge Mexican flags -- the size of a building -- on giant poles at the center of every decent-sized town. Why don't we do that in the U.S.?
Tomorrow I'll post pictures showing how I smuggled a bottle of rum on board.
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