Axiom of the High Seas

At first, I didn’t like the movie Wall-E, thinking it the animated version of green propaganda like The Day After Tomorrow. The movie’s inspiring undertone, though, broke through my skepticism. I didn’t fully grasp until last week, though, how much Pixar had computer-generated a satire of American tourism—particularly cruise ship culture.
That realization hit me at 10am. A bouncy British voice popped onto hallway loud speakers to tell my wife and I—and 3,940 other passengers—that bingo was about to commence on deck 3. “You’ve got to be in it to win it!” I immediately got a flashback to college, when our residence manager would call us to our required floor meetings or late night hair check. But then I saw the movie clip in my head—that Wall-E sequence (missing in the trailers) of the ship computer educating its passengers: “Try blue. It’s the new red!”
While I wasn’t lounging in a “hover chair,” I couldn’t help but compare our Independence of the Seas to the Axiom, jewel of the BnL [Buy N Large] starliner fleet. Our ocean liner didn’t have robots, a view of space, or a dome to protect against zero gravity. But it did contain obese Americans, mechanically-efficient wait staff, and immovable itineraries.
And us.
Somewhere amidst the Hawaiian shirts and bridge-playing fogeys, French-fried buffets and almost-innumerable hand sanitizer dispensers, Crystal and I surrendered to tourism.
We’ve been to more than a dozen countries on four continents and have mostly escaped the virus. But there we were, being corralled in herds through narrow chutes like cattle, dumped out onto piers like 1920’s immigrants, and directed to spend our American largesse in duty-free third world shops.
Unlike our typical vacations, where Internet preplanning and “island time” freedom let us rearrange our activities based on weather, meal schedule, and personal energy, we had to wait each night for the room fairy to lay tomorrow’s itinerary on our bed. We had assigned seats at dinner, a designated meal time, and a varying dress code. Plus, our excursions and explorations raced against a timer, as our resort would leave without us sometime between 1pm and 6pm.
Don’t get me wrong: our Caribbean cruise wasn’t torture. We ate better than we do at home and put four new countries on our globe of visited cultures—a photogenic journey punctuated with book-reading and sea-watching, snorkeling and swimming with sea lions. I have no doubt that Royal Caribbean showed us the best that cruising has to offer; multiple reviews from cruising fans we trust confirm that.
But Crystal and I agreed that this voyage was our first and probably-last cruise. To get a smaller crowd, we’d have to lose amenities like the rock walls and running track, basketball court and FlowRider®—and get a ship with even less stability on the high seas. To lose the tourism feel, we’d probably have to go with an exclusive [read: expensive] cruise line with little-to-no onboard adventure.
I can drop a lot less expendable income to sit on a deck and look at the ocean—even the Caribbean—and have the view all to myself. I don’t understand why you’d pay more to share it.
But from what AUTO tells me, tourism is the new exploration.
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