Back on board

Back on board

The night before last we had dinner with the captain of the ship. This would have been a more pleasant experience had Ricardo and I not been suffering from day 3 of Montezuma’s Revenge.

Dinner with the captain was really bizarre. Picture all of the captain’s dinners on the Love Boat: the busy dining room, the affable although overweight captain, extravagant centerpieces. This was not that. But it was really fun and the food was fabulous.

The captain is Croatian with a Hunt for Red October look about him. He’s very nice, but you can’t help feeling like you can take the guy out of the Eastern Block, but you can’t take the Eastern Block out of the guy.

We ate with the staff captain who is second in command. He’s from Sweden but he lives in Thailand with his Thai wife, in Chiang Mai, actually, Beth. Captain Nelson was very charming and funny. Lots of jokes about his years on the sea. Including this one: Apparently, while he was staff captain on a cruise ship there was a woman who called the purser’s desk in an utter panic. When the purser tried to calm her and ask her to come out of her room so he could help her she screamed that that was the problem. It seems ther were only to doors in her room, one was the toilet and the other said “Do Not Disturb.”

He told us about Neptune Day (which is coming up soon). This is something one celebrates at sea. Apparently you’re supposed to shave your head and kiss a fish when you cross the equator at sea. It’s fairly tame on this ship, but he told us about when we was in the merchant marine that the sailors got extremely drunk and it was all done with more force than it is here. Apparently on one of his ships, the chief engineer who was universally hated locked himself in his room to avoid it and the crew told the captain they’d pay for the door out of their wages and they went to knock it down to drag him out and shave his head. It seems that in their fervor they scared the guy so badly (he was older) he had a heart attack and died. I guess it’s not just fraternities who haze.

The kids got a tour of the bridge yesterday. The MV Explorer is the fastest cruise ship every built. It’s only 6 years old, so everything is very modern. They showed us the GPS system, the radar (nothing on it but wave) and all the digital maps. What they do is they program the course into the computers and the ship sails on autopilot until they have to adjust course. Yesterday, we were off the coast of Costa Rica, but today we’re almost in Panama already. We’re operating on only one engine and still traveling at 17 knots. The ship has stabilizers to make us roll less, but I can’t imagine what it would be like if it didn’t work.

We also got a chance to go to the ship’s hospital yesterday. After reaching Day 4 of Turista stomach, Ricardo and I decided to go to the ship’s doctor (he’s hilarious! From Kentucky and a total smart ass in a really good way). We’ve been put on Cipro and we’re finally better. Not to be left out, The Kid sliced his toe, very dramatically in the pool yesterday. The thing bled like nobody’s business and we had to call the nurse up to escort us down to the hospital. The Kid became quite the celebrity. The toe was photographed by the safety officer. Statements were taken, reports filed. Steri-strips and glue were applied. Limping ensued. He’s doing pretty well today, walking around with very little discomfort. We’re hoping everything will be fine for our canopy tour tomorrow.

We arrive in Panama tomorrow morning. Unlike the other ports, we can’t dock so we have to stay at anchor. This means we will have to use the tender boats to get into the port itself. This should be a very exciting thing, I think. We have a tour of the canopy of the rainforest tomorrow on aerial trams. It should be very cool, although if the heat in Acapulco did us in, I can’t imagine what the it will be like in Panama.