PASSAGE, Part 1
Once again we’ll escape the coming heat of a Sonoran summer, as we drag our bags to the curb in front of our home to flag down the 8:00 a.m. Costa bus. We get a last look at Isla Pelícano as the working people of Mexico board the same bus on their way to jobs in Old Kino and various points along the way to Hermosillo. The bus will cost us each 120 pesos (about US$7). While we’re in the big city we’ll attend to various last minute tareas (tasks), including a visit to Las Musas, the city’s fine arts museum. We’ll spend a night at the Royal Palace, a modest place at a reasonable price, despite the name; and at 4:30 on the following morning we’ll take a taxi to the airport for a flight to Mexico City and onward to Miami.
On this summer’s voyage of discovery we’ll visit a few exotic lands – starting with a few days in Key West (my first visit). Then we’ll board the ms Zuiderdam in Fort Lauderdale for another TransAtlantic passage, this time with my sister Elyse and her daughter Rachael. We’re bound for Bermuda, the Azores, Southampton, Cherbourg, and Zeebrugge/Bruges.
This will be our fourth Atlantic crossing by ship – a good way to see remote and scattered mid-Atlantic islands at a rational price. We’ll disembark in quaint Bruges, Belgium, then spend a week in quirky Amsterdam and two weeks in wonderful Paris with Elyse and Rachael. Then Carolyn and I will spend the next two months vagabonding around Central Europe, traveling cheap as locals.
KEY WEST
From Miami, Carolyn and I catch the Key West shuttle, driven by an engaging fellow named Ben who gives us a good running commentary during the four-hour drive. Highway 1 connects the Keys, serving as the main road, the bypass, and the short
cut, all in one(!); so there are jam-ups in the early going on Key Largo, but things flow smoothly as we near Key West. In answer to our many questions, Ben explains that the past season’s encounter with Hurricane Irma was mostly a ‘middle-Keys event.’ The largest piles of debris have been hauled away, and we only see small vestiges of the damage, along with a number of newly-vacant lots with concrete footings still in place. The old, long abandoned, and well weathered rail line with its crumbling bridges still parallels the road.
Key West is a gorgeously overgrown tropical stage set built of charming clapboard homes adorned with delicate Queen Anne bracketing and lavished with a palette of sorbet colors. We’re staying in the quaint Angelina B&B in the heart of it all, and a wander through these quiet streets is a visual delight. And upon our arrival Key West’s famous Duval Street is ready, as always, for its next nightly performance.
We’re just a few Blocks from the Hemingway House, and that’s one of our first stops. The $14 entry fee gets us an entertaining guided group tour filled with engaging anecdotes of the man whose larger-than-life exploits captured many a young imagination.
This is one of Ernest Hemingway’s three tropical island hangouts, along with Cuba and Bimini. These are the places where he’d go to escape his burgeoning celebrity and work on his next book while fishing for marlin in the Gulf Stream, and his memory infuses each place. Among his trilogy of books giving primacy to these exotic places, The Old Man and the Sea (1952) famously showcased Cuban life, winning the Pulitzer Prize in 1953. The posthumously published Islands in the Stream (1970) is set in Bimini, and is where he describes those Gulf Stream waters as “gin clear.” And To Have and Have Not – one I haven’t read – deals with his days in Key West.
The marvelous Gulf Stream, containing more water than all the world’s freshwater rivers, moves almost 4 billion cubic feet of very warm water every second through the deep Florida Channel between Florida and the Bahamas. This massive sea river flows northeasterly at a rate of four to five knots toward the very feet of Europe, and its warm waters power much of the world’s weather. The annual summer billfish run near Bimini now attracts fishermen from all over the world, thanks in part to Hemingway’s glowing reports. In a 1949 Holiday magazine article Hemingway described it as, “…the great blue river, three quarters of a mile to a mile deep and sixty to eighty miles across [ … ] has, when the river is right, the finest fishing I have ever known.”
Hemingway married his second wife, the rich heiress Pauline Pfeiffer, in 1927, and they purchased the large abandoned home on Whitehead Street in Key West in 1931. He installed a boxing ring in the side yard where he held regular bouts with the locals. Upon returning from one of his trips he discovered that Pauline had replaced it with a swimming pool at a cost of $20,000 – quite a sum during those early Depression years. Hemingway, or so the story goes, pulled a penny out of his pocket and threw it on the ground saying, “If you’re going to waste that kind of money, you might as well take my last red cent!”
Pauline had that penny embedded in concrete at the base of a porch post where it remains today, as the tour guides are quite happy to point out. After they were divorced in 1940 and Hemingway married his third wife, the journalist Martha Gelhorn, Pauline would tell her guests in Key West that she was ‘the wife who got his last red cent.’
During the 1950s Hemingway seemed to be the most revered author on the world stage. But by the time I got to college in the early 1960s, his overweening machismo had grown tiresome and his literary star had dimmed among the cognoscenti; such machismo had become a dangerous affectation in the Nuclear Age. And many critics began to require greater complexity from their authors.
Yet recent scholarship appears to have come round to recognizing Hemingway’s imposing stature and forceful talent in the context of his time, and even to appreciating his own personal evolution from a brash and truculent youth to a kind of proto-environmentalist advocating to safeguard the finite resources of his beloved Gulf Stream from the hordes of fishermen who heeded his call.
And during your visit of course, you’ll find the descendants of Hemingway’s famous six-toed cats lying everywhere about the house. The place is a mouse’s nightmare.
A nightly wander down Duval Street gets us a dose of just about any kind of raucous fun we might have craved from living in quiet Kino Bay. The wide variety of music will surely get almost everyone’s bones jumping. And you can book the ‘High Class Hooker’ for a fishing trip on the morning after. We especially appreciated the guy on the sidewalk doing some very fine drumming with only a set of used 5-gallon plastic paint buckets, an old kitchen pot, and a cowbell.
We were very happy to encounter Aardvark paper straws at La Grignote, as it’s time we banned those insidious plastic sticks that cause so much environmental havoc in the oceans! And we probably could have enjoyed several extra days on the beach if we’d arrived in June when the water’s a bit warmer – and if the rents weren’t so high. But it was time to head north, back to Miami. We had a ship to board in the morning.
BOARDING the SHIP
The boarding process went smoothly, and we ordered two towering rum punches on the after deck as Holland America’s ms Zuiderdam pulled away into the Gulf Stream with the sun settling over Port Lauderdale; and we finally settled ourselves into the welcome and decompressing life of several days at sea. We’ll have a good view forward into the Atlantic from our stateroom. After dinner, there will be a talented rock band playing in the Main Stage forward. And at bedtime a towel ‘octopus’ greets us on the bed, along with a menu of the next day’s activities.
For the next three days at sea we’re embraced by the massive Gulf Stream, gaining a northeasterly boost from Florida on our way to sun-washed Bermuda. After much hectic preparation for this year’s getaway, we’ll have time to unwind before our first landfall.
BERMUDA
The beckoning lights of Bermuda break through the dawn of our fourth day, as we carefully transit the tricky shoals and reefs surrounding this remote Atlantic archipelago. It’s a task best left to an experienced local helmsman during daylight hours.
We’re soon tied to the dock with massive hawsers; and shortly afterward, the huge Norwegian Escape joins us almost nose-to-nose. The timing involved in docking these large ships is something of a delicate ballet.
This is our first trip to colorful Bermuda, and this archipelago is one of the reasons we chose this route. I grew up in the southwestern US, and I’ve been to most places in the ‘wild west’ that other people only dream about. But I always dreamed of seeing whatever else the world had to offer, and remote Atlantic islands were part of those dreams.
Our tour driver, an engaging gentleman named Wycliffe Williams, takes us first to the old lighthouse high atop the hill to give us a full panoramic view of the place. Bermuda is a scattering of land that wraps around the Great Sound, embracing the vastness of water in its daily life. In the distance across the Sound we can see the modest HAL Zuiderdam (1,918 passengers) facing off against the huge NCL Escape (4,248 passengers), looking like a floating apartment building. Really, they’re both large floating hotels, but ours looks a bit more modest.
We pass the Henry the Eighth Restaurant and many charming stone bus stops on our way toward Hamilton, the capital city, where we’ll have but a few minutes to explore. And that’s really the trade-off with these ‘quick taste of the world’ cruises. We only have a brief time in each port, so any truly deep knowledge waits for a longer visit. If ever that may occur.
Mr. Williams is a welcome storehouse of information and shares it freely while managing us through each stop.
We learn that despite the many small and well-tended gardens we see, most food and other items are imported and expensive; bread is about $8 a loaf. Since gasoline is $8 a gallon, motor scooters are popular in this modest climate. I mention that my overall impression of Bermuda is of a prosperous island nation of largely middle class folks, with a few wealthy people around; he agrees that it seems like a fair description. And they have pretty money.
It’s a blustery and chilly Spring day, but on our way back to the ship Carolyn has a chance to enjoy the feel of Bermuda’s famous pink sand between her toes. Soon enough, we’ll be slipping those massive hawsers for our return to the ‘water road.’ The Azores, our next port of call, are lying about four days easterly.
AT SEA
And what else, besides an endless buffet and heavy drinking, is there to occupy us for several more days At Sea?
The good ship Zuiderdam, as with all the HAL ships we’ve boarded, has a decent library with a modestly broad selection of books. And there are many comfortable places aboard to settle in for a good read.
After that good read you can stretch your legs with a brisk walk around Deck 3 (3 laps = 1 mile). Or check your current location on one of the screens aboard.
There are several informative lectures on general subjects and coming landfall highlights offered each day in the Main Stage area.
Rachael finds plenty of good food, elegantly presented, at dinner each night in the white table cloth Dining Room.
After dinner every evening there’s an entertaining show on the Main Stage, and the artists are happy to hang out later with the passengers. Later, Rachael gets her picture taken on the pool deck with the affable Ship’s Captain Wouter van Hoogdalem.
And there’s, yes, drinking and hanging out at various bars and onboard music venues; at at the BBKing Blues venue, affable Walter will mix you the drink of your choice.
Then much later, when your feet are fully danced-out and exhausted, a ‘towel animal’ of some sort will greet you, along with the following day’s schedule, before you fall into bed. Overall, I guess it’s really not such a bad way to cross an ocean.
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PASSAGE, Part 2
The Açores
The ship swings to her anchor just outside the small harbor at Horta on the island of Faial. We had seen a few whales on our approach to the islands, and whale-watching is a popular tourist attraction here. This is the first of our two stops in the remote Portuguese islands of the Açores. [pronounced with a softer ‘zh’ sound and a slight roll to the ‘r’(ah-zhor-es).]
The ship is too large to dock here so we’ll be ‘tendering in,’ and the small orange tenders are soon waiting for us outside the breakwater. We recall from previous experience on other ships the tenders can be dicey to board, as they pitch around in the waves. It’s important to have both hands free to grip whatever you can while boarding and to sit down quickly. Before long we’re untied from the ship to set out over the bumpy seas outside the breakwater. Rachael ends up acquiring a greenish color on the short ride to the dock.
Our tour bus soon climbs beyond the city limits and into the verdant rural countryside of this intensively farmed speck in the Atlantic. Cattle are the main thing here and the once heavily forested land has long been divided into pasturage plots by hedgerows of hydrangeas. Many other flower species are planted along the roadsides. Some islands have economies based almost completely on tourism, while others are moderately diverse. In the Açores, fishing is an important component to economic life, along with its historic role as a connection point for transatlantic cables. Plus tourism. And cows.
We leave the populated areas near the coast and enter dense woodlands of Japanese cedars at the higher elevations, which receive far more rain. The woods are rich with understory plants, and the open areas are dense with ferns and moss. We stop at a rainy overlook and walk through a tunnel for a look into the deep central caldeira of this volcanic island; but it’s filled with dense fog, and nothing is visible.
The Açores lie at the tectonic divide between the European and North American plates, so life here can be very interesting. After a quick stop for espressos and a pastry, we’re off through more verdant countryside to visit the newest part of this continually evolving island, a mostly barren tract of vulcanism that appeared violently in 1957. The black volcanic sand is pillowy-soft to the touch and erodes easily. There are just a few hardy colonizer plants that have begun the long process of making this new land productive and habitable, as the sea gnaws relentlessly at the edges. Despite the almost-daily rainfall in these islands, this area remains a cold, wet desert.
During a visit to an open-air arboretum and garden, Claudia our guide acquaints us with a few of the remaining endemic plants of the Açores and the wide variety of other plants that have been successfully imported here. It’s a well-designed and well-built facility, with good bathrooms.
The tour tops off with a visit to a self-filling ocean pool in the rocks that’s warm enough in summer to be a popular swimming hole. Claudia has mentioned that whale watching is a popular tourist outing here. So when we pass a few locals angling for fish, a little girl on the tour asks, “Mom, are they fishing for whales?”
We return by another route along the rugged coast to the port of Horta where we opt to look around and walk back later to the tenders. The sidewalks of Horta are constructed of white and black stones, a distinctive style also seen in the streets of Lisbon. The cloud-encrusted island of Pico stands just offshore. For centuries Horta has been an important stopover for trans-Atlantic mariners, and there are friendly places to grab some long-awaited grog and tucker. There are also good chandlery services available here in the charming streets of Horta, if you’ve sustained any boat damage during a crossing.
And it’s a custom here that passing yacht crews are expected to paint their boat names on the seawall. A stroll by the docks is like a quick visit to the world, as you notice ‘artwork’ from every corner of the globe. Some efforts are more refined and artistic than others, but every one of those crews has earned the right to be posted on these walls. The good yacht Theodora, from Albuquerque (!?), is even represented.
After a good day ashore, we retire to the rail to be blessed with the glorious sight of clouds dissipating on the towering island of Pico. Then we’ll face down another fine dinner and a decent bottle of wine on the HAL Zuiderdam.
PONTA DELGADA
Our next port of call is Ponta Delgada, which is on the island of São Miguel, also in the Açores. Soon we’re tied to the dock and loaded on tour buses heading uphill beyond the coast-hugging settlements, and heading for the famous twin lakes at Sete Cidades. Up here at the old volcanic rim, on a clear day, one lake is green due to its biologic makeup, and the other is blue. We saw that effect during a visit on a prior crossing, but today the sky is partly cloudy and the closer lake is green but the other one reflects a muddled gray from the sky above. We’ve stood at this overlook before, but this time we’ll go down into the caldeira itself for a closer look.
Our tour bus crosses the little isthmus between the lakes, to the modest settlement of Sete Cidades. It’s a lush and tranquil spot on the banks of a pair of beautiful lakes – if the idea of living deep inside an old volcano isn’t a bit unsettling. We can imagine how peaceful it must be on an average day without a busload of tourists tramping about.
Next is a quick stop at the viewpoint, or miradouro, for Lake Santiago, nestled into a pine-embraced crevice. We also get a quick snapshot of a recent landslide, a common feature of life on these still-evolving islands. And we see lots of cows.
An ancient abandoned aqueduct still graces the landscape, along with several old stone storage structures. In the distance we can see the coast-hugging villages below.
Soon we’re back in Ponta Delgada for a taste of local wine and cheese, and with time enough to wander through the city’s warren of interesting back streets. The main avenue is modernistic and largely devoid of charm, but just a block inland you’re right into the very essence of Portugal. Things are generally freshly-scrubbed and well-maintained, with only a small bit of unofficial 'personal expression' on the rare abandoned building. There’s only sporadic traffic on these narrow streets, and walking is a great pleasure after several days at sea.
Then, once again, we must return to the ship to steam ever onward over the vast Atlantic toward landfalls in distant Europe.
Our next stop: Southampton and a day at Stonehenge.
—PRW
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A THOUGHT ON REMOTE ISLANDS
As in Bermuda, remnant hurricanes are common in the Açores and there’s no place to run for shelter out in the remote Atlantic. The Açoreans and the Bermudans just hunker down in place and hope for the best. It’s a life for only the most hardy of folks.
A NOTE ABOUT: MOUTHWASH
Most clothing and other items in the onboard ship’s store seem reasonably priced, but basic essentials can be an exception. I ran out of mouthwash and went to the ship’s store for a replacement; the $4.50 price tag for a tiny 100ml bottle was an eye-opener. When we arrived in the Açores I got a 500ml bottle – 5 times larger – for only €1.48, or US$1.76. I realize there are extra costs for stocking things at sea, but that’s a ridiculous markup. So bring plenty along.
(BTW: The Portuguese label on the bottle says ‘mouthwash’ is elixir oral. In Spanish it’s enguaje bucal. In French it’s bain de bouche quotidien.)