High Plains Panhandler

It's Stingray City, Sweetheart

Our second cruise excursion was to Grand Cayman Island where we were going to see stingrays.

Unlike Jamaica, here our giant cruise ship was too big for the dock so we had to take a tender, a small shuttle boat from our ship to the shore. Under instructions from our tour guide, we hopped on the first tender and got to shore quickly, which gave us plenty of time for early morning photos of our group with our ship in the background looking oddly surreal in the early light.

Dexter from Fantaseatours was our tour guide. After digging around for a while on the web, I decided on him because I found this article about Dexter's campaign against stingray injury from incautious boat captains. Plus he runs a 38 foot trimaran that he said he'd put under full sail if the wind was right. It sounded great, so I chartered the boat just for our group (23 of us were going on this trip, the maximum Dexter could carry). 

We met Dexter at the dock, a large outdoor square surrounded by shops and pavilions. In the square's shadeless center was a line of tour guides holding up signs for their various trips, most having to do with stingrays, and as the guides saw the cruise ship people start trickling in, they began pitching their services: "Stingray tours here!", "Sail the pirate ship!", "Snorkling!"

Dexter had to drive us to his dock, but since we had too many people for his van, we split into two vehicles. The drive to the dock was quick, less than fifteen minutes, although Dexter asked us a few times if we wanted him to swing by the grocery store for snacks (Dexter only had water and soft drinks on board), but we wanted to beat the other tour guides to the stingrays. Any distractions would have slowed us down.

The trip out to Stingray City, a shallow sandbar where stingrays have been congregating for years now (for the free food) took about 45 minutes. We all lounged on the front of Dexter's boat, the kids particularly liked hanging out on the nets near the front of the boat, dangling their feet into the water below. A rainstorm opened up on top of us and kept us nice and drenched for a third of the trip. When I asked Dexter how long the rain would last, he pointed at the clouds, the horizon, the water and then made a twisty motion with his hand. "Not long," he said. "It goes away soon. No worries."

He had a preternatural knowledge of the weather because, a few minutes later, the rain stopped as if on his delayed command.

Except for a few rubber motor boats that raced us and then beat us to the stingrays, we were the first boat out there, but it took Dexter a little while to anchor so some other boats showed up while we were parallel parking. Now I have to say I quite appreciated how careful and sensitive Dexter was to the stingray environment, especially watching how the other, much larger boats (they're called cattle boats - large boats filled with cruise ship passengers that appear like an invading Spanish Armada) simply plow into the middle of everything, drop anchor, and disgorge person after person after person into the water, as if shooing off paratroopers over Normandy.

We did get some good chances at petting and holding stingrays (these, by the by, are friendly, non-aggressive stingrays; they've been fed by local fishermen and now tourists for the past 35 years so there wasn't anything to worry about although we were given a lecture about being calm and not kicking up the sand on the ocean bottom - stingrays, apparently, do not appreciate these kinds of things). A large stingray, easily six feet wide, wrapped itself around me like a bath towel.

Some of the kids, of course, had to panic and kick sand and do the things we were instructed not to do, but I think the stingrays understood that the small humans always did this, and the stingrays, for the most part, paid them no attention, targeting instead Dexter, who had a baggie of tiny squid and was generously distributing them among the stingrays.

Once the other boats began invading, we sailed off to a spot for some snorkling, and once there we could easily see the new floating marina that had developed around the once lonely Stingray City. Snorkling was great although I had to compensate several times for a few ocean swells that filled my snorkling tube with salt water. Megan and I were partners, and I tried to keep close to her, one time panicking when I thought I lost her and whacking my leg against a stump of coral. I hated to do that, but I hated even more the stinging three inch cut on my leg, spilling blood that I knew would instantly attract all kinds of snaggletoothed sharks. That's when I grabbed Megan (who had been right next to me the entire time) and gurgled, "Groog goob karakb." Although sounding like Klingon this was salt water talk for, "Let's go back to the boat."

We made out way back under full sail, a nice and leisurely ride and then we opted for lunch back on the giant cruise ship. While we ate on one of the top decks, we saw the tourist pirate boat sail far below us, it's Jolly Roger flying threateningly. That ship was so very tiny compared to us, and I wondered what would happen if we could take our cruise ship back in time 250 years or so.

We would be the new pirates of the Caribbean, only dressed in tuxes and t-shirts. We'd put all the other pirates to shame.

And based on my observations around the Lido deck, we'd have more tattoos as well, although most would be of the butterfly-on-the-lower-back variety.

Dunn's River Falls

As part of my narrative catch up, today I venture to Jamaica, the first stop of our Carnival Conquest cruise ship.

When a cruise ship docks for its nine or so hours of island fun, most people on the ship use the ship's own excursion desk to find interesting zipliningsnorkelbeach trips, but experience has taught us that if you can find a great local tour guide and book it yourself, you'll have a more interesting trip. So I did some digging and calling and e-mailing and ended up booking a family trip to Dunn's River Falls, a 600 foot waterfall that you can climb.

The trick with this tour was that we were docking in Montego Bay and the falls were in Ocho Rios, a good hour forty-five away, but I noticed that the cruise itself was offering an excursion to the falls so I figured we could do it too.

I hunted around for awhile and talked to quite a few friends who've been to Jamaica many, many times, and they all told me we had to climb the falls. So I ended up talking to Richie at Moby Dick Tours about their tour package. Unfortunately, the tour they give started in Ocho Rios, but Richie was very helpful, waved his hands magically, and conjured a bus and driver named Vivian who would meet us at the dock in Montego Bay, take us to the falls, take us to lunch, and then bring us back to the ship.

The day we docked in Jamaica, we met Vivian as quickly as we could (this was at the cruise terminal; he was holding up a blue Moby Dick Tours sign) and began the long bus ride. Along the way we learned a few helpful Jamaican phrases (in particular: 'Yah mahn," and "It's irie," which means everything's good or okay), learned some about the Jamaican landscape and the road to Ocho Rios, and discovered that Columbus landed in a Jamaican cove that is right next to a giant Bauxite mining operation.

Vivian parked our bus in a narrow spot (well, all spots were narrow) in the official parking lot for the falls and then gave us the rundown of how things worked there. Then he walked us up to the ticket counter, got tickets for the group (this was all part of our tour fee), and told us he'd be waiting for us in the bus when we were done. And he made sure to tell us to take the path back to the parking lot at the top of the falls and to avoid the other path through the small shop area where, according to everyone, you get berated and abused by some high pressure sales people.

We followed a large paved path to the bottom of the beach, which is where you begin your hike up the falls (the falls themselves are not Niagra-like; they're gentle and shallow, perfectly climbable), and once there we were accosted by the tremendous number of people following our very same plan. There were people everywhere, and most were holding hands, forming long chains of slow-moving - creeping actually - lines of bathing suit-clad humans inching up the rocks. 

I wasn't quite sure how to begin, so we all made our own family chain and I marched forward, squeezing in between a man with a bathing suit two sizes too small and a woman who has financed quite a few plastic surgeons' Mercedes.

Clamoring over rocks while holding hands wasn't that tricky. The tricky part was the 10,000 other people doing the same thing. And the double-tricky part was dealing with the 'guides.'

You could hire your own guide to take you up the falls, and these guys were aggressive and unforgiving. They'd grab your hand when you didn't need help. They'd yell and scream and whistle quite loudly. They'd shout for their group to stick together and then guide them right through the center of our own line of people. So we had to push back, just to make it 10 feet up the falls. The guides (well, the ones who didn't think we were part of their own group - some thought we belonged to them) would get frantically angry and shout and scream and use all sorts of non-relaxing, non-irie language.

But we preserved, scraping our legs and knees and toes. Toward the middle of the climb I noticed my swim shoes had tears at the top of the big toes from all my slight whacks with rock bottoms. Suzanne got caught in a collision with three other people and got her foot lodged under a large rock. Later, under x-ray, we learned that she broke her foot on the rocks and is now, as of August, confined to a massive Herman Munster-style ski boot that is, ideally, supposed to ward off any threat of a cast. I'll have more on this later.

Most of the huge crowd on the falls dissipated after the first third of the climb, and by the end most had given up so the last part of the climb was pain and shout-free. At the top we avoided the aggressive shopkeepers (although we did run into one woman who kept insisting she could weave the greatest hair beads in the entire universe). 

Vivian, as promised, was waiting patiently for us to finish our hike, and once we were aboard the bus, he took us a slight distance toward Ocho Rios for lunch. This was a semi-relaxing lunch - well, semi for me because I was a little stressed about getting back before the boat left. The boat waits for no one (except people on official cruise line expeditions). If we missed it, we'd be sunk.

Lunch was very nice. We sat indoors, close by a waterfall, and had our choice of an extensive buffet including (and I was quite excited about this) sugar Coca Cola - no high fructose corn syrup here!

The ride back was quite nice. Vivian was a very safe and careful driver. He told us a few riddles and then played some reggae while most of us snoozed. 

He got us back to the dock in plenty of time, and as we boarded we were serenaded by a Jamaican military band marching by the boat. Clearing customs was simple, although one of the customs officials goosed me as he was patting me down.

My response: "Dat no irie, mahn!" Even the dour government workers who were shiny with sweat laughed at that.

Eating Across the Sea

Not to generalize, but most people understand that the primary mission of a cruise ship is to provide enough food that, in case there’s a zombie apocalypse back home, passengers will have enough to eat for the next 28 years. Give or take.

In no particular order, there were the usual suspects: breakfast (full of salmon and bagels, hot chocolate, Eggs Benedict, cereal, fancily cut bananas, some weird kind of oatmeal mush, bacon, pastries, more bacon, juices, and all sorts of whatever else the menu commanded us to eat), a breakfast buffet a few stories up, lunchtime dining, lunchtime buffet, lunchtime dessert, tea time (with exotic teas from the country of Lipton and a multi-level tray of desserts rolled about by a waiter), pizza time, burger time, ice cream time, sandwich time (I did, alas, have a pastrami on rye one night at 11:00 because I had slept through Fancy Dinner that night - Fancy Dinner, also known as Elegant Night, is when everyone dresses up, gets pictures taken, and then has a very full meal of lobstersteakfish. There were two Elegant Nights on our cruise, and I, unfortunately, was inelegant for both), dinner time and the mysterious midnight buffet.

The food was generally quite good, although I didn’t care for the half-slice of pizza I had the first night, and the pastrami gave me dreams of taking dolphins. But rather than spend too much time reviewing each meal, let me simply mention one of the desserts: the melted chocolate cake goo brownie fudge surprise in a cup. Of course, this is not it’s real name. It’s called something much more mundane, but that doesn’t do it justice.

The waiters presented it unceremoniously. On a plate were two white ceramic cups. The larger cup, about three inches tall, contained a tiny chocolate cake topped with a dusting of powered sugar. The small, shorter white cup held a scoop of vanilla ice cream, a thin slab of chocolate jutting from the top like a flag. Superficially, it was innocuous, but once I dug my spoon into the cake I began to understand. Beneath the top layer of baked cake was unadulterated melted chocolate fudge. That’s it. A lot of chocolate, a lot of fudge, a lot of ice cream. 

And if I happen to mention to the waiter I like it, he brings me another one! Or one with three ice cream scoops instead of one. It’s sugar insanity, dessert hedonism.

The first time this chocolate goo faced me, I finished it quickly - this after a full meal of salad, fruit, something fried, something heavy, and something in a fancy sauce (there were veggies in there too someplace). A few seconds later, I realized I had overdone it. 

I had completely, utterly, miserably overdone it, and now my veins were filled with the slow-moving (but delicious!) melted chocolate.

The next morning I unpleasantly woke to a stomach in full rebellion.

“I think,” I said to Suzanne, clutching my pillow as if it were a life preserver, “I just threw up in my mouth.”

Please do not take from this that I did not learn my lesson. I certainly did. The next night at dinner I avoided the melted chocolate altogether, pleased at my self-control.

Instead I had two pieces of apple pie and three scoops of ice cream.

I showed them!