Review of a Carnival Cruise to Ensenada: A Soliloquy of Madness and Buffets
The ship rocks, the machinery rattles, the fluorescent lights hum. Revelers tramp up and down the hallways, safeguarded by Carnival Cruise employees who wear gold badges proclaiming their names and places of birth. I am writing this with a Carnival Cruise pen. My own pen has disappeared, along with my sanity. I write in a cramped room equipped with seven TV channels — my only tenuous lifeline to the outside world. On my right is the door to the passageway, on my left a window curtain that hangs, not over a window, but a window-shaped section of wall!
This is a place where the money flows out of vacationers’ pockets like the water we sail on, a place where every nook and cranny has been leveraged and monetized as a paid photo opportunity. The main rooms are like cheap Vegas casinos, all neon lights and patterned carpet. The hallways connecting them last for miles, and they are lined with photography studios, performers, bars, and fine watch shops. One of the passages is an art gallery; another sells T-shirts. The deck of the ship is occupied by buffet lines that stretch out feverishly like Depression bread queues. The mass-produced steaks and hamburgers they wait for grow worse in quality as the voyage progresses. Rumor has it that should the seas grow rough and the ship be out of port for a few days extra, the cooks will begin serving the passengers to each other — surreptitiously, of course. Not that the other passengers would notice or care; it would put them off their shopping.
The buffet is served all day, and at all hours I find people feasting at the tables. At night dinner is served. At the appointed time the passengers crowd around the entrances to their assigned dining rooms waiting for the doors to open, like cattle outside the slaughterhouse with an itinerary for a cattle prod.
On that first night at dinner I sat in my seat and I perused the menu and I waited. As the minutes ticked by and crew member after crew member stopped at my table, not to take my order but to sell souvenirs — souvenirs of a trip just begun — the truth began to dawn on me. As the meal was finally served, the truth became inescapable. The idea of food is presented at Carnival cruise dinners, but the actual eating of actual food only occupies perhaps a quarter of one’s time. The idea is what’s important — and so menus are left on the table to tease us, and Carnival employees come by again and again offering expensive cocktails (already poured), souvenir cups, and photos. Meanwhile the waiters are nowhere to be found. The meal is brought out teasingly over the course of hours, and by the time they leave the dining room the guests are salivating at the mouth. They are released into the bars and shops and casinos ready to consume and consume. They are a herd of buffalo and I am a snake beneath their feet — if I am not quick I will be trampled.
Quickness is impossible on this ship. The floor constantly undulates, the better to sell you a Dramamine on the lower decks. In fact the ship is purposefully kept rocking in this way both to increase sales and to give ticket-holders the real oceangoing experience. To this end dozens of passengers are kept on their knees vomiting around the clock, and thus turns the wheel of commerce. Were it not for this the so-called ship would appear to customers as it really is — a poorly appointed floating hotel, overstaffed and underserviced.
The ship’s rocking motion keeps me dizzy and lightheaded at all times. I stuff down bread and chug water to take the edge off my buzz before I remember I have not had a drink in several days; the only beer available here is Budweiser that was canned in 1979.
Ensenada is a city I know and love. I have walked its streets, played futbol in its fields, slept in its houses, eaten lunch in its taquerias. To my dismay, when the cruise reached its destination, it was not Ensenada, but a hollow imitation of it, a counterfeit to fool and ensnare tourists. I could tell right away; the famous flag was not even on the flagpole! Once I off-boarded I was immediately accosted by salesmen who tried to convince me that a piece of colored glass was a ruby. I sneezed in one of the shops near the docks, and to my embarrassment, the building collapsed like so much newspaper (the wares were unharmed). Significantly, it is not the residents of Ensenada who are doing the selling. They have to import salesmen from Tijuana. In fact salesmen are the city of Ensenada’s biggest import. Its biggest exports are “Papas y Beer” T-shirts.
Shaken, at a bar I ordered a shot of Don Julio Anejo. The bartender selected the appropriate bottle, but when he poured, out came not Don Julio Anejo tequila, but Jose Cuervo’s imitation tequila! I sat there incredulous. The bartender had accomplished the inverse of Jesus’ famous water-into-wine trick. (Naturally, he was from Tijuana.) I took the shot anyway, of course. What else could I do? Raise hell?
It was at this point that I began to lose my grip on reality — either that or reality itself had begun to lose its shape. In a moment of surrender to the dark forces surrounding me I bought a pair of phony Ray-Bans from a street vendor. They were half-price because the fake Ray-Ban logo was missing on the fake Ray-Bans.
Nothing was making any sense. Once I boarded the ship, I ended up huddled at a table meant to seat seven eating a banana like it was the last piece of fruit on Earth. The sound system played a Maroon 5 B-side back-to-back with an Elvis record, and why not? Why not compress the whole 60-year history of rock-and-roll into two songs meant as background noise in the buffet section of a Carnival cruise ship? Why not eat a banana as it happens? What is there to do but eat, consume and eat?
When dinnertime came I concealed myself in my cabin’s bathroom, staring at the dots on the tile floor and calculating the Fibonacci sequence in my head, fearing the knock, the knock on the door, like a dissenter in Stalin’s Russia —
“Room service.”
Oh sure, room service. I saw it all — I saw two burly Carnival security guards, one from Indonesia and one from Texas (in Texas they have real fascists — none of this namby-pamby stuff). They drag me screaming from my room down the long hallway of the E floor, upstairs, downstairs, into a banquet hall with 300 other similarly coerced diners, and they force me to order from the appetizer menu! “All for fun and fun for all,” they say, repeating their terrible motto.
No!
I am a man, and I must do more than merely eat and drink and pose for pictures. I am determined to fight. Here I make my stand. I may die here. If I do, know, reader, that I died as a man, with dignity, and with a slightly queasy stomach due to the constant rocking of this accursed vessel.
Anyways I don’t recommend the Carnival Ensenada cruise. The Alaskan one is much better; the ship has a bigger casino.
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