PEACHFRONT SPEAKS

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norwegian spirit western caribbean cruise part 1: roatan and santo thomas 2008-01-21 - 9:06 a.m. photos � 2008 by elaine radford clockwise-- sailing down the river at sunset, old Spanish fort in Guatemala, our small river cruise boat in Guatemala, cheerleaders at the port, view of an ancient sacrificial altar Sunday, January 13, 2008 D. had received a cruise for two as a gift, and thoughtful friend that I am, I volunteered to help him use it. According to our cruise materials, the boat would be open and ready to board at 12 noon, and DH dropped us off dozens of minutes before that time. Imagine our astonishment, then, to find that we were at the back of a huge line of other people who had the same idea. We finally wound our way through the multiple lines for security X-ray, check-in, and photographers -- I put my hands over my face to foil having my photo taken by the cruise photographer -- but it was almost 1:30 before we boarded. We asked about lunch and were directed toward the buffet like everybody else, which was a complete and total zoo. Afterward, we discovered that we could have eaten somewhere else, but you live and learn. D. found a sports bar full of football fans and watched the game. In fact, he watched two games. Meanwhile, in my meandering way, I explored the ship and eventually drifted up to the sailaway party. On one side of the boat, near the pool, a band played pop tunes, and on the other side, a man played some keyboard thingy -- I started to type "piano" but it isn't really a piano, is it? Oh, and while I didn't catch a photo, there was a nice Brown Pelican diving and circling near our boat shortly before we cruised away. I also dropped by the casino for the free "Rum Punch" party. We had dinner late. At first we weren't going to get a bottle of wine just for two people, but the waitress explained that they would put our name on the bottle and keep it for us, and that we could order it again at any bar or restaurant. Also, and I know I'm an evil, evil person, but I had also succeeded in smuggling almost an entire 750 liter bottle of vodka on board, along with its friend, the premium Bloody Mary mix. Take that, $9 "Welcome Aboard" drinks! Yeah, I know. Hard to keep on track of drinking only one drink a day, when you're on a bar in the middle of the sea, but we seemed to be more moderate than the other party-goers on board. Anyway, my tally for the day was three -- 1-1/2 ounce of vodka Bloody Mary, 1 Rum Punch (which as I didn't see it mixed I'm just guessing was about 1-1/2 ounce of rum plus the juices), and a 5 ounce glass of our red wine. The Norwegian Spirit was originally an Asian cruise ship, and it still has the Asian decor. Foo dogs, samurai guys with hands that apparently once gripped swords or spears, paintings of Asian girls, paintings of Asian birds. A couple, three Asian restaurants too, but since you had to pay extra to eat there, we never investigated them. There were too many places to get food that was completely free. Monday, January 14, 2008 A day at sea. Having enjoyed the hustle and bustle of the buffet, we wisely opted to have room service bring our breakfast to our room. I made use of the jogging/strolling track, taking care to stay to the right, since I was slower than most of the other traffic. At some point, we partook of the free Smoothie tastings, which involved a variety of combinations of banana, strawberry, and other assorted fruit. It was pretty much a lazy day. Lunch at Windows in a table for two window seat, which was just a view of water and waves and sky, since we were so far out at sea. We went to the tequila and vodka talk, where we got a teeny tiny sample of the youngest and most inexpensive of the tequilas, and where D's number was pulled in the drawing, which meant he won...wait for it...wait a little more...a mesh bag prominently branded with the Kahlua name. He was a little crestfallen. We'd thought it would be for a bottle of tequila or at least a ticket to the martini tasting. But no bottles were given away and only one tasting. I went hot-tubbing but the water wasn't all that hot, and various drunken middle-aged guys congregated at the bottom of the stairs to watch me climb out of the tub. I suppose at my age I should be flattered, but since they were obviously wearing beer goggles, I can't say that I was, particularly. A lot of people dressed up that night, whether because they were dining with the captain or for various photographic events, so we picked that night to be our formal night too. I wore the black velvet dragonlady dress, and everywhere I went on the ship, I was stopped by people complimenting me on it. We did run into a snafu when we relaxed in one of the bars and tried to call up our bottle of wine. Apparently, they were supposed to give us a receipt for it. Oopsy. But they found it after a suitable amount of running around. We had failed to call the Italian restaurant in advance for dinner reservations, but they were able to fit us in if we were willing to wait about thirty minutes. So we strolled to a nearby bar where we discovered a blues/folk/Dylan influenced singer, who was pretty good, but who we never found again. Then the show was over, and it was time for dinner. Alcohol Notes: 1-1/2 ounce vodka with grapefruit juice, 3 5ounce glasses of red wine. Plus 1 teaspoon of young silver tequila, but who's counting that one? At this point, if the alcohol diet is like carbon credits, I've now run out of credits for my three "no alcohol" days since the beginning of the year, and I'm actually in the red by two drinks. But it is a cruise. We did resist the suggestion that we "buy 6 bottles of wine and get one free!" Tuesday, January 15, 2008 We knew that the boat wouldn't be docking at Roatan until 3 PM, so it was a lazy day for me. I exercised on the upper deck, visited the ship's library, and had a slow, lazy lunch with another couple at Windows while D. played in the Texas Hold 'Em tournament. He had a commanding lead at the break but ended up coming in third. By the way, on this cruise line, you are not given assigned tables. You just sort of show up and hope for the best. Doesn't work at all in the buffet, if it's crowded, because it's a free-for-all for seats, but in the dining rooms, you can either agree or refuse to be seated with someone else. Since D. was too busy playing in the tournament for lunch, I did agree to be seated with the other couple. They were pretty interesting. The husband had already lost 250 pounds on a low carb diet, and he wasn't a small man even now, so I was suitably impressed that he had done so well without gastric bypass surgery. From them I learned that you could order more than one appetizer or entree and just pick off the meat/seafood/high protein items and no one had a problem with it. Anyhoo, the boat docked promptly at 3 PM, and we were in Roatan by 3:10. Everyone who was going ashore sort of just surged onto the dock at once. I don't think there were any official shore excursions because of the brief time in port, so maybe that's why a lot of people didn't bother to leave the boat. But D. and I had never been in Honduras before, so we seized the moment. We didn't stop at the first few drivers we encountered, but when we got some distance down the street and we figured that they were ready to deal, we did grab a cab and had the whirlwind tour of the island. It was $30 cheaper than I'd been offered over the internet, so I was happy, and we saw a lot more than we could have just strolling the market including two photogenic shipwrecks, two scenic overlooks, banana plantations, the site where Fantasy Island was filmed. I was startled to see quite a few large specimens of Traveler's Palm from Madagascar that had been introduced to the island, including some nice ones in front of their international airport. Which, unlike our "international" airport, actually gets some international flights. "We have a flight from Italia every week!" our 11 year old commentator proudly informed us. I don't know if New Orleans has had a direct flight from Italy...ever. We were back at the dock for sunset. I grabbed a can of the perhaps not terribly terrific local beer, Salva Vida. D. tasted it and decided on a Coke. We watched the sunset from the fishing pier and then headed back onboard. Our Honduras bird list wasn't very advanced: Magnificent Frigatebird Great-Tailed Grackle Cattle Egret Great Egret Yellow-Crowned Night Heron -- we saw him catch something fairly good-sized in front of one of the shipwrecks Rock Dove Turkey Vulture Some of the people actually took a moment to go swimming, but since it was rainy/breezy when we first got off the boat, we didn't bother. It was going to be much too grey for my underwater camera, that's for sure. Oh, and D. bought the ugliest toucan in Honduras. Maybe the ugliest toucan in the whole entire world. In a marketplace where mass-produced shiny glossy toucans were a dime a dozen, he bought this object that had quite obviously been made from clay and fired in this kid's mom's kitchen and painted with whatever random paint happened to be around. It certainly had character, I'll give it that. I should have snapped a picture of it. Words don't do it justice. Drinks of the day: 12 ounce can Salva Vida beer, 2 1-1/2 ounce vodka drinks with juice, 1 5 ounce glass of red wine. Yeah, we're cruising now. Wednesday, January 16, 2008 Today we had a very long tour planned through the cruise line. This tour has "missed the boat" before and the tourists had to catch a small boat to get back onto the cruise ship, so we figured it was better to do it through the cruise line's shore excursions, so if anything weird happened, it would be at their expense. In the event, however, we were returned to the dock of Santo Tomas de Castilla with 12 minutes to spare. Before he stepped on the riverboat, I grabbed a picture of D. in all his tourist attire, with our riverboat just behind him and a hint of the cruise boat towering behind that. After my escapades in Madagascar, I had been concerned that our riverboat would be open to the tropical sun, but as you can see, it did have a roof to provide some shade -- and the crazy people who wanted to fry were welcome to go sit on the bow. We had 3-1/2 hours of sail down the river, past an area that was mostly green and pleasant. The boat went faster, and the river was much wider, than I'd anticipated, so there was no hope of finding any small stuff. If I saw what I thought might be a warbler or a hummingbird zipping past, boom, it was gone before I could get the glass on it. So we contented ourselves with enjoying the bigger stuff. Near the beginning, there was a strange skipping fish that skipped like a pebble over the surface of the water for a long way, over one dozen skips. Every time I thought it would surely drop, it skipped again. Absolutely amazing. No idea what it was. Most of the raptors seemed to be Black Vultures, but we did catch one Common Black-Hawk well enough to be sure of the ID. A flock of lazily kettling Wood Storks seemed to circle over our boat for a long way, although I think it was mostly an illusion caused by the fact that the river took us under where they happened to be rising. At some point, we approached the old Spanish fortress, built to fight off the many pirates of the day, although the guide hinted that they didn't have much success. Not too terribly long after, we ended up at some resort for lunch, the only disappointment of the day. The lunch was a buffet, and it had already gotten cold. (I felt especially sorry for the next group, which arrived as we were leaving, an hour later -- imagine how cold their lunch was.) If I had it to do again, I would have brought my own food. Obviously, you can't bring vegetables, fruit, dairy, meat into a foreign country, but the problem was nothing that a couple of boxes of cereal from the cruise ship buffet couldn't have solved. If it was me, I wouldn't have devoted an hour to this place so maybe one couple out of the entire tour could look at a condo they had no intention of buying anyway. I'd go with a packed lunch, eaten on the boat, to maximize time spent at actual sights. But then I guess that somebody else would have complained. I'd say it was about an hour bus ride from there to Quiriqua, where the ancient Mayan stones lived. The sculptures were well-preserved and apparently tell quite a bit of history of the place, at least from the point of view of the various rulers memorialized. The trouble with this kind of history is that it's fairly inventive. These old dudes apparently got high and traveled through time, back and forward to their other lives, to report back on how they were there at the creation and how they will be there at the destruction of the universe. And modest too. Further back was an outdoor stadium with a view of an altar where I'm pretty sure that there may have been some human sacrifices although, as I've said, it was pretty hard to tell what really happened in consensus reality and what just happened in the minds of these rulers who commissioned the stones. But I'm fairly sure that the common folk expected to see more for their entertainment dollar than just some high priests and rulers rolling around drunk on the ground, vomiting out the various hallucinogenic plants. So, yeah, some appropriately grody sacrifices no doubt took place. There were any number of American Redstarts who were using the park as their winter vacation home, some of them quite confiding. However, we were more interested in checking the forest for birds we couldn't get back home. Although it was a hot afternoon, and not a particularly auspicious time for birding, we did get a very nice Turquoise-Browed Motmot, who posed and flashed for a long time, perching low in a shady area that permitted his blue fluorescent feathers to gleam as if lit from within. I've seen Turquoise-Browed Motmot at Chichen Itza, but apparently I forgot to enter it into my data base, since it came up as a flashing "Lifer" -- and it was certainly D's very first motmot of all time for his life list. So, a very good sighting. Into every life a little Empidonax must fall, and we saw two of them, one of them a very plain bird fly-catching from a low tree, and another one that had a very, very yellow underbelly. The guide saw the second one and said that it was Cordilleran Flycatcher, but I dunno. Although he was generally a rather serious fellow, I strongly suspect one of those tour guide private jokes. In any case, the birds are both going down as Empidonax species in my records, since neither of them spoke. On the bus ride back, he reviewed the history of post-WW2 Guatemala, a subject I might have avoided in his place. It was fairly painful to listen to the poor man try to explain away United Fruit, CIA assassinations, and the rest, although we are assured that all of the war criminals responsible have died anyway, and besides they probably all meant well, and it would be tasteless to actually say "war criminals" so he didn't quite. We sat far in the back, where our hopefully muffled calls of "Wood Stork" or "White-Winged Dove" did not interfere with the history lesson too much. Eventually he did make his way to the back of the bus, where he gave us a shiny new $1 Guatemalan quetzal. It's made of a thin plastic rather than paper and has security features that leave our $1 in the shade, although it's only worth about 15 cents. Well, don't worry. Our dollar will soon be worth only about 15 cents itself the way it is going. The port of Santo Tomas de Castilla is really a huge industrial port, new to welcoming cruise boats. However, they would like to encourage more tourism, and as the boat sails away, the taxi drivers and even the ambulance and security service come out and sound their horns, while various other folks play drums or dance or wave the flag. A little bit high school amateur hour but you have to admire their enthusiasm. Several of the, hmm, Acadian-Americans on our cruise boat reciprocated by throwing Mardi Gras beads, and one handful of beads came this close to bonking a security officer on his helmet and creating an international incident. Tonight D. and I agreed to share a table for six, but this time the shared table didn't work so well since, and I'm truly sorry to say it, the other two couples were -- what would be a nice word for it? -- pretty much idiots. Drinks of the Day: 1-1/2 ounce of Dewar's, 1-1/2 ounce of vodka grapefruit. Only two? Heck, you'd hardly know I was on the NCL Spirit at all. My Guatemala Bird List: Brown Pelican Neotropic Cormorant Magnificent Frigatebird Great Egret Little Blue Heron Cattle Egret Wood Stork -- a nice flock well seen flying low Black Vulture Turkey Vulture Common Black-Hawk American Herring Gull Laughing Gull Royal Tern Forster's Tern Rock Dove White-winged Dove Belted Kingfisher Turquoise-browed Motmot -- on my life list at last Golden-fronted Woodpecker Social Flycatcher Empidonax species -- the guide said he thought it was Cordilleran but I guess I'm not convinced that I understand why Mangrove Swallow Clay-colored Robin American Redstart You have just read Part 1 of my "Western Caribbean" cruise report. Stay tuned for Part 2, Belize and Cozumel. back - next All Rights Reserved, Copyright 2002-2017 by Elaine Radford