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Howdy fellow mottizens. I’m going on a cruise in a week. Any advice to make the most of it?
Not an answer to your question, but I've always been a bit confused about why one would go on a cruise in the first place - the idea of going on a vacation to see the ocean and a ship crowded with people sounds a bit hellish to me. Would like to hear a description of what's attractive about cruises to people.
You get a taste of a bunch of different locations that you can come back to for a real vacation, and places you don't need to return to. It's pretty nice to be in a hotel that moved while you eat and sleep.
Other than that the main appeal is to make it easy to connect low human capital workers with high human capital customers, in a pseudo Western setting (the ships are registered in places like Panama or Liberia but look and feel like a western hotel.
The primary thing for me personally is that most of it is just being in your ship and watching the world move past. You're not really getting to explore the country you're visiting in any significant way, you're just getting little glimpses of it from the deck while it glides through the water. Though I suppose that is the appeal; to passively see the country without having to put in too much effort of your own - trying to make it through a foreign and unfamiliar place can be rather daunting.
But even that's part of the experience of travel IMO, the ability to get lost in the back alleys of some city or wander the trails of some national park and find all kinds of special hidden things you otherwise wouldn't have seen is a big attraction to me. I've long dreamed about driving west into the Australian outback with no clear plan and no destination in mind and just holing up in towns along the way, though that seems unlikely to materialise in the near future. It's a very stirring idea that lurks somewhere deep in my subconscious for no particular reason. Some nights I get a barely-controllable urge to walk blindly and directionlessly until my legs can't carry me any further.
I do understand why not everyone wants this kind of thing for every holiday though, sometimes the goal is primarily one of relaxation (as valid a reason as any other), so the explanation holds up well. I just think it comes down to the fact that I'm more likely to find things monotonous than your average person.
I think of a cruise as a pleasant way to taste places you wouldn't have planned to try otherwise. You have a clear plan for a thing you want to do in Australia, that's not what cruises are for, they're to take you to say New Guinea or the Solomon Islands or East Timor to see if there's something bigger you want to come back to that you didn't realize was there! I'd go back to Cozumel to enjoy the quiet Caribbean beaches! And I would love to spenf more time in the Azores. I didn't know how pretty either place was they were before seeing them. I also know I don't need to go back to St Kitts. I've seen enough of it and didn't need to spend a week or a long weekend to find out.
I also like sea days, and enjoy a semi-forced unplugging normal phone signals don't reach the boat!
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