Maybe the first and obvious thing to say about the Explorer is that it's quite nice--we're not roughing it on any converted cargo ship or old navy scupper here. It was built as a cruise ship in 2002 for the Royal Olympia cruise line, which went bankrupt in 2004--apparently because they couldn't pay for this ship and its sister ship, the Voyager, which was built at about the same time. (I'm going by what I can figure out from some archived stories on the web. The whole thing is pretty murky, in part since Royal Olympia was a subsidiary of the still-ongoing Royal Olympic line, and in part because, as far as I can see, this whole ship-going business is filled with weird legal subsidiaries, shell companies, and tax shelters. There is still lots of Royal Olympia stationary, etc. on the ship, and a lot of the crew worked for them back in the day.) After Chapter 11 proceedings, the ship somehow ended up in the service of the Institute for Shipboard Education, the non-profit corporation that runs the logistical side of Semester at Sea, with the University of Virginia running the academic side.
So it's a pretty swanky cruise ship--they were going for a smart set here, and the air of the place is reminiscent of a nice Marriott hotel or the like. But it's not all that big--we were dwarfed by the enormous Carnival and Disney cruise ships that docked next to us in Nassau. Part of this may be that this ship, unlike those, was probably not intended for family cruises--there are no watersides or that kind of thing. The Explorer was clearly intended as a fast ship, designed for longer-distance voyages than the Caribbean, though i don't imagine that the shipbuilders imagined its use as a round-the-world cruiser, which is what it is now. Our rooms are actually pretty big--bigger than we expected, I think--and the common areas are nicely decorated in a kind of international corporate style. Most of all, the ship is always spotlessly clean; the crew works very hard scouring every inch of the place every day. Our room is cleaned, not once, but twice a day by our kind cabin steward Armando.
One thing is certain: this was never intended as a floating campus. Classrooms have been in some cases jury-rigged by putting up room dividers. And you can still see the signs of the original purposes to which parts of the ship were intended. There's a space stilled identified in places as a "casino" that is now the computer lab and library. Smoking lounges and "card rooms" are now classrooms, and the shop that was surely designed to sell high-end duty free merchandise now sells a seemingly endless variety of Semester at Sea sweatshirts, tee-shirts, headbands, and other branded swag. Almost comically, there's a spa, offering all sorts of massages, facials, treatments, and so on. Surely this is not something that we need, but it's still kept going as a money-making venture. Aidan and I have both used the well-appointed beauty salon for haircuts.
What stands out perhaps most of all here are the crew, who are unfailingly helpful and hard working. There are also lots of them--cabin stewards, waitstaff, engineers, deckhands. It's a multicultural group--the captain is Croatian, the staff captain is Greek, the chief engineer is Russian; many of the cabin stewards and cooks are Filipino, many in the waitstaff are from the Caribbean. The sommelier (yes, there is one) is Indian, and this is actually his last day on the ship for now; he's from Mumbai, and is going home for a few months. They're an impressive bunch, really--they work long hours, seem incredibly efficient, and make our lives very easy in so many ways.
Next time, first reflections on India.
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