Cruise Muse
Sailing With Few Frills or Inhibitions
After an excursion, easyCruiseOne passengers relax in the hot tub before heading back out for dinner.
O.K., so the guy from Southern California was telling me about Seaman's, the strip club on the island of St. Martin where he'd made the acquaintance of two prostitutes, while behind me the self-proclaimed Almost Cool Crowd — a handful of hard-partying Americans ranging from 26 to 42 years old — were drinking Carib beers and rum punches and dancing barefoot to Euro-ish rhythms spun by D.J. Dan, a diminutive music maestro with oversized black plastic eyeglasses and an unshakably ebullient demeanor.
Interest Guide
Passengers head for the easyCruiseOne in Phillipsburg, St. Martin, one of six ports on its new itinerary in the Caribbean.
Dario Endara, cruise director, gives a samba lesson.
But I couldn't concentrate on any of this, because right there, in a corner of Deck 5's outdoor bar, on the black-cushioned banquette next to the hot tub, two gorgeous French women — part of a trio who'd resolutely refused to converse with the rest of us — were engaged in an erotic wrestling match. They were slapping each other's faces with hands and flip-flops, their sundresses riding up their thighs, their mouths stretching to form wide, ecstatic smiles.
The girls had, as they say, gone wild.
If easyCruise — the two-year-old low-cost, no-frills cruise line that is an offshoot of easyJet, the low-cost, no-frills European airline — was aiming for a younger crowd, it had succeeded.
On my trip in mid-December, the 170-passenger easyCruiseOne's first week on a new itinerary in the Caribbean, I saw no walkers, no wheelchairs, no canes, no oxygen tanks. Nor did I spot red leisure suits, conga lines or contract-bridge addicts — hallmarks of the luxury cruise world that David Foster Wallace endured so memorably in his 1996 essay “A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again,” and that had left a generation of irony-drenched Americans — including me — dreading the gangway.
“This is a cruise for travelers, not grandmothers,” Mariah Wilson, a 26-year-old documentary producer from New York City, told me one night in the hot tub.
It's no surprise Grandma prefers Carnival and Princess. When I embarked in St. Martin, where the orange-and-black easyCruiseOne stops twice a week this winter, I was struck not just by its size — it looked like a dinghy next to the 2,500-passenger whales of the big cruise lines — but by where it had docked: at the sketchy cargo terminal. The passenger port had no room for the easyCruiseOne until that evening, when the behemoths departed.
My cabin, which cost $225 for four nights, was similarly tiny. A narrow hall led past the bathroom, with its mighty shower and gasping vacuum toilet, to a pair of white-sheathed mattresses on a platform mere inches above the floor. The ceiling, the shelves and the entire bathroom were, like much that bears the prefix easy-, orange. The whole setup could have fit inside the bedroom of my Manhattan tenement apartment.
This is just what easyCruisers expect. In fact, it's easyCruise's sales pitch. Nothing is included — not maid service (optional at $10 a day) or breakfast or offshore excursions or, most crucially, drinks.
But no matter: Since the cabins cost as little as $19 a night, depending on when you book and how many frills you're willing to do without (I splurged on a window), the $4 gin and tonics and $7 tropical fruit salads seem like nothing.
In any case, the ship itself is not the draw — the islands it visits are. EasyCruiseOne bounces between St. Martin, St. Kitts and Nevis, Antigua, St. Bart's and Anguilla, arriving around 9:30 a.m. and rarely departing before 3 a.m. What this means is that, unlike passengers on most cruise ships, which generally leave port in the early evening, easyCruisers are not required to eat, drink and seek entertainment onboard, but rather have full days to explore the islands.
Often, this took the form of trips organized by Dario Endara, the boyish cruise director, who sent people snorkeling, sea-kayaking and on helicopter flybys of Montserrat, the island ravaged by volcanic eruptions in the 1990s.
Unsure of what to expect, I signed up for three trips in three days. The first, on St. Kitts, was a $55 hike led by an older man who pointed out fluffy egrets in acacia trees, scooped up almond pods from the forest floor and attributed all we saw to “the Almighty.”
Another hike ($35) took nine of us up Nevis's central mountain. At first, the guide, a biologist and former Peace Corps volunteer named Jim Johnson, seemed freakish with his unruly beard, nerd-worthy eyeglasses and professorial intensity. But as we trudged up the centuries-old trail and through the wet, muddy rain forest, we realized Jim knew his mountain.
Need a rain hat? He fashioned one from leaves and twigs. Want to open a coconut? He showed us how with a rock. Burned your hand on the caustic sap of the manchineel tree? Urinate on it, he said — or use vinegar.
Only one trip was a total bust: a $45 S.U.V. “safari” of Antigua, during which I and 11 other cruisers stared at dense but uniform foliage — broken only once by an inlet carpeted with water lilies stretching into the distance — until we reached the top of a hill overlooking English Harbour, where a fleet of fancy yachts were docked. Then we drove back to our ship. Whee.
Still, that trip taught me something — that easyCruisers are by and large independent. They rent scooters to explore islands on their own; they disappear into colorful towns and hunt down lesser-known beaches; they seek out restaurants far from the port and follow local residents to pubs where the cocktails don't bear cutesy, tourist-friendly names.
Indeed, my best times were when I went off on my own. My first night, wandering a boardwalk in St. Martin, I happened on three local men engaged in a passionate discussion that, as I joined in, ranged from Turkey's European Union prospects to the kidnapping of Patty Hearst to the real estate market in TriBeCa.
Another evening, in Antigua, I took a $15 cab ride to Deep Bay. This peaceful, out-of-the-way beach — which arced gently from an empty hotel to a fortress-topped hill and offered a perfect view of the sunset — was deserted but for a single woman doing her evening workout in the waves. She ran back and forth through the water, then onto the sand, where she stretched like a yogi and kicked like Bruce Lee and then just yelped for joy. I knew how she felt.
Whatever the day's activities, virtually everyone would return to the easyCruiseOne for two-for-one happy-hour cocktails and a soak in the hot tub before dinner back onshore.
This was where I befriended the Almost Cool Crowd, with whom I hung out for most of my trip. We watched the planes land next to Maho Beach on St. Martin, tracked down Antigua's best roti — an Indian flatbread stuffed with curry, $5 at Roti King — and knocked back yet more beers in yet more island bars.
Yes, there was a lot of drinking, but the easyCruisers I met were not simply drunken youngsters. My companion on the St. Kitts hike, for instance, was a woman from Houston hoping to understand her African-American heritage by learning about slavery in the Caribbean.
Locals, too, would board at each port of call since easyCruise offered them a way to visit nearby islands that might otherwise lie beyond their budgets. And numerous couples — young and old, married and dating — from England, France, Canada and the United States were onboard.
Quite quickly, a kind of community began to form. With only half the ship's cabins occupied, we learned each other's names and faces with relative ease, and it was common for strangers to coalesce around a breakfast table or trade stories of the day's adventures in the evening. (Making friends also cut costs: Taxis are cheaper when shared.)
We were helped along by the crew, a young, cheerful bunch who, when we ran into them off-duty onshore, were indistinguishable from us passengers.
Along with community, we had gossip. The easyCruiseOne was suffused with sex, and along with the topless body-shots and strip-club visits, there was constant talk about in-cabin video shoots and the occasional ménage à trois (or, some said, quatre). Certain passengers, we joked, put the “easy” in easyCruise.
Still, I think we all felt quite special. Those Carnival cruisers who had spent somewhat more were probably isolated, lost among the masses of their fellow passengers. We, however, were experiencing a novel, affordable form of adventure together, and when, say, the bearded, garrulous Dr. Lucky and his wife, Cupcake, urged us to visit them in Key West during Fantasy Fest, there was a genuine honesty to the invitation.
Which is why, perhaps, we were mystified by the antisocial French women. The trio stayed aloof the entire cruise, refusing to let anyone buy them drinks or engage in polite chitchat. One carried a novel to an offshore party the ship had organized, and she was once spotted in the ship's gym during happy hour, pedaling an exercise bike at full speed — in a dress.
Weird though they were, I worried that their apparent misery was not the cruise's fault but my own. Had the Almost Cool Crowd and I offended them with our stereotypically American behavior? If so, they had responded with equally clichéd French arrogance.
It wasn't until my last minute aboard the easyCruiseOne that I got an answer. As I hauled my bag down to shore, I bumped into the friendliest of the three, the one who hadn't sneered when I said hello, and asked how she'd found the cruise.
“I'm not sure I'm a cruise person,” she said, adding that she was writing about the trip for the French edition of Marie Claire.
She did not ask me the same question, but as I walked down the gangway, I realized I was, if not a cruise person, then at least an easyCruise person.
VISITOR INFORMATION
HOW TO BOOK
To book, visit www.easyCruise.com or call (650) 385-0563. The Caribbean cruises can be booked for three, four or seven nights. Cabins without windows start at $19 a person a night and suites with balconies are about $47 a person a night, double occupancy. St. Martin, where the easyCruiseOne docks twice a week (Mondays and Fridays), is probably the easiest place to embark because of airline service (Continental and American have flights there from the New York area), but you can get on at any of the islands the ship visits.
I spent $770 on my five-day, four-night vacation (not including airfare); if I were to go again, I would skip some activities, order food and drink differently and make the trip for $550. Comparing easyCruise with other lines is difficult, but Celebrity Cruises has a four-night trip to Key West and Cozumel out of Miami in March with an ocean-view cabin for $560 a person, but $1,021 for a single traveler, which I was.
WHERE TO EAT AND DRINK
Fusion4, the ship's main restaurant, offers good but not exceptional food, with the most expensive item being an $18 steak. Sun&moon, the Deck 5 bar and cafe, sells cheap snacks like spicy-sweet chicken wings, and pizzas and burgers.
Chances are, you'll eat mostly on the islands. In St. Martin, try the Holland House Beach Hotel (43 Front Street, Phillipsburg; 599-542-2572; www.hhbh.com), whose Ocean Lounge serves good tapas, like Indonesian chicken satay and grilled goat cheese on crostini ($6.95 each).
If you're flying out of the Princess Juliana Airport, check in early, walk 10 minutes to Maho Beach and munch a $10 yellowfin tuna burger at the Sunset Beach Bar (2 Beacon Hill Road; 599-545-3998; www.sunsetbeachbar.com).
In Basseterre, the capital of St. Kitts, head for Ballahoo (869-465-4197; www.ballahoo.com; about $25 a person for dinner or lunch) and eat conch chowder ($5.50) on the balcony overlooking the Circus, the town's colorful central square.
In Antigua, taxi drivers and easyCruisers agree: Roti King (corner of St. Mary's Street and Corn Alley, St. John's Town; 268-462-2328) makes the best roti in town, with a rich, sweet stew inside fresh flatbread, starting about $5.
Sunshine's (869-469-5817, www.sunshinenevis.com), a sprawling bar and grill on the beach in Nevis, is where everyone stops in for $5 Killer Bees (a kind of rum punch) and slabs of grilled fish ($18) caught that day.
Check Out My Other Blogs (click on blog name to go there) = / 1.3rd Eye Blog / 2. Favorites Blog/ 3. Vita Excolatur (Living Well ...) Blog/ 4. Humor Me Blog/ 5. News and Current Events Blog/ 6. Consider This ... Blog/ 7. Consumer Warnings Blog/ 8. New Orleans Pentimento Blog/ 9. We Constant Gardeners Blog/ 10. Chaillot Family Blog/
posted by Joe Paris at Saturday, February 24, 2007
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