Adrift at Sea

The Captain’s name is Massimo Pennnisi - can you guess where he’s from? He is 39 years old (a mere baby by our standards) and has worked with Cruise Lines since he was 18. He looks very handsome in his white uniform and is fluent in at least five languages. Ho hum…isn’t everybody? He says his wife is glad to get rid of him for five or six months at a time.

At dinner the second night the damage in the Fantasia had disappeared and it was business as usual. Everything related to the dining rooms: food, service, ambiance, menu choices, quality of china and cutlery are equal to any cruise line. The dining rooms are decorated with pleasing décor and abundant with comfortable chairs, a real bonus for people on the ‘gain’ plan (more about that follows). Linen table cloths, polished glasses, charger plates, three forks, countless knives and dozens of other pieces of cutlery are scattered around each setting – only Julie & Julia know what they’re for. Each course is served on a charger plate that is set on top of the permanent charger plate which is not taken away until desert is served. For example, a simple bowl of soup involves a large plate, a small plate, the bowl and the main charger. 2300 passengers times 3 meals a day plus tea, snacks, pizzas, occasional deserts and whatever else equals seven to ten thousand meals per day. Each meal involves countless plates, bowls, glasses, saucers, cups and cutlery. 750 staff from 80 countries times tree meals a day, many cooked specific to ethnicity – it just gets so complicated we often rush to the buffet just for comfort. Even with 25 full time dishwashers, how do they keep up? Mark, our head waiter and Philippe, our server produce five star service in white tux and tie every night and almost never make a mistake – no one knows how they do it. The crispness of their service makes us shudder at how wrinkled and unpolished we must appear, and how refined they are in their impeccable, supercilious way. A serious rubbing of Silvo would do budget travellers like us a world of good. On the other hand, no one knows the history behind these gentlemen when they are not working. Philippe is from Brazil and his contract will end in Buenos Aires. Mark is from the Philippines and his contract was also up in BA, but Costa asked him to stay on for another two months – a very hard decision because he is so exhausted and has not seen his wife and child for many months.

The dinner menu is presented in leather binding with the insert printed in a script similar to that of William and Kate’s wedding invitation. It takes time to read a menu printed in six languages filled with fancy words in sinuous script and unheard of ingredients. Course after course just for the asking and since it’s an Italian line, can you imagine the bread and pasta? We are being conservative at all times and try to keep food consumption, no matter how delicious, down to about 1,000 pounds per person, per day. It’s not that easy but we are determined. Remember the joke about my cruise clients coming onboard as passengers and leaving as freight? Well we don’t want to be lifted off by a crane…

What is not so much fun is the ‘butting in’ by the astonishingly aggressive Italians. It is something to see how they push or reach in front of you into a line or stop dead right in front of you when walking for no apparent reason. If two or three are walking abreast they will not move over but will ‘innocently’ ram you and carry on like nothing happened. Maybe it’s because Costa is Italian so they have first rights to everything. We notice some Germans and French are a little like that too so maybe it’s just people in general in small spaces. Breakfast is served in three areas, two are huge buffets. You should see what people shove into themselves, and we’re not kidding. All restaurants close for 1 ½ hours then lunch is served in three places with the same result. Afternoon tea with fancy food is served in two places and then of course, there’s dinner which is served in two or three places, depending on the day. One night we didn’t eat dinner in the dining room, we chose instead to go to the pizza parlour at 10pm. We could not believe the number of people who had eaten a fancy dinner and were there eating again! During breakfast with our Aussie friends, Allan and Margo, we were joking about the pushing and shoving Italians. Then the conversation wandered to the subject of crime and express kidnappings in Brazil, and Richard dryly added that the Italians would probably struggle and push to be at the head of that line too, ‘get out of my way, I wanna be first to go to the bank with these people’.

We share our table with some mighty interesting folk. One couple, Kevin and Shirley, (married 30 years) are from Durban, South Africa, very knowledgeable about the itinerary and ports because this is their third Trans Atlantic sailing between Europe and South America. When they finish this cruise they will fly to Florida from Buenos Aires and do a sailing on the Oasis of the Seas, Royal Caribbean’s massive new floating city. Another couple, Paul and Lindsey (in their 20’s), from California, are on an extended honeymoon and celebrated their 2nd anniversary on December 6th. By the time they boarded the Victoria in Savona they had been travelling the world for seven months, and I mean the world – high energy adventure travel with amazing accomplishments on mountains and seas on almost all continents, a result of immense planning and budgeting the bucks. They worked several jobs and saved religiously to pay for their one year journey and plan to be home in April 2011. Only young people make that kind of travel look easy. We should kill them.

Lindsey and Paul mentioned they were in Paris when they decided to book this cruise, so they went to the Brazilian consulate to apply for the visas. They had to give up their passports for a week which meant they could not leave Paris. OMG, stuck in Paris??!!! What bothered them about applying in Paris - apparently Brazil has a ‘pay back’ clause with the US and although it is not called a visa fee, Brazil charges US citizens US$140.00 per passport plus shipping for permission to enter Brazil – that’s if the application is made at a consulate in the US. Well of course they applied in Paris so the fee was in euros – 140 euros X 2 equals about US400. For Canadians the Brazilian visas are good for five years (because passports are only valid for five years), but not in their case. Theirs is ten. Bonus.

Lindsey and Paul told us that when they were checking in for the cruise in Savona they met a Russian couple from Florida who did not have the Brazilian visas. They were denied boarding and advised to take the first train to Milan, fly to Barcelona and find a hotel, taxi to the Brazilian consulate the next morning and see if the officials would expedite the visas, then transfer to the port and board the ship before it sailed at 5pm. Tremendous Travel Terror! They stood to lose everything. We later learned that twenty people in total (mostly Americans) were denied boarding because of the visa problem. Of the twenty, nine gave up in Savona and forfeited the cruise. Eleven did fly to Barcelona from Milan and they all went together to the Brazilian Consulate the next day. The queue outside the consulate was already huge by the time the doors opened so their chance of success was almost nil. Two more dropped out. After hours of dread and uncertainty and much later in the day the consulate decided to grant the visas. The remaining nine were able to make the ship in time for sailing. These folks paid the same for their visas, 140 euros, but they were only valid for 90 days. Imagine the collective sigh of relief when they set foot inside their cabins.

Third night at dinner the two empty chairs at our table were occupied by Tom and Tom. They are two wonderful guys from the Tampa area and wow, did they have a story to tell. They rented a car to drive three hours from their home to the Miami airport, cheaper than leaving their car in paid parking. They slowly moved through the queue and were asked for their passports at Air France check in. Well. Tom remembered he did not have his; he had left it in the photocopier at home. They knew there was no way they could make the flight so they rented another car and drove home, heartbroken and deflated because everything was lost, the cruise, the airfare, hotel and car expenses, everything. Then Tom realized they still had one chance – the Victoria’s first port of call was Barcelona and she would remain there until 5pm December 3rd. Tom searched for internet options and considered buying two new tickets on a routing that involved two changes, one in Warsaw, Poland, if you can imagine - about as far in the wrong direction in Europe as you can get. Then he called Delta and spoke with an agent who said, let me see what I can do. The agent was off the line for awhile and returned to say he had found a way to get them to Barcelona. It would involve only one transfer and Delta would only charge them a ‘change fee’ of $150.00 per ticket. YeeHaa! The Delta rep became the hero of the century. To make a long story short, they arrived in Barcelona and were at the port when the Victoria arrived - two of the happiest and most excited men on the planet.

December 4, 2010 the Victoria was abuzz with the news. Spanish air traffic controllers went on strike that day and shut down all of the airports (every single one!) in Spain for the entire day…

Horseshoes! Every one of those delayed people had horseshoes, that’s all we can say!

That’s it for now. Stay tuned, there’s more to follow – some if it may even be true.

Hugs from R and D adrift off coastal Brazil.