Gigantic cruise ships are incredibly popular, but not for everyone. For some, like myself, the mammoth ships carrying thousands, are, well, too big. Small ships can maneuver better. They bring you closer to the action around you, in the water and on land.
This is what I cruise for, the places a ship transports me to, not the ship. Don’t get me wrong, I appreciate my comforts as much as the next passenger. Good food and accommodations count for a lot. But I generally don’t require eight meals a day, a midnight buffet, disco, nightclub shows or a casino.
If you do, then small ships probably aren’t for you.
It all depends on what you’re looking for. A small ship 200 feet long may contain far less in the way of dazzling up-to-the-minute amenities than one stretching 1,000 feet. If you’re still interested, small ships make up for these differences in other ways.
Port formalities usually move faster on a small ship. With only about 100 passengers to move, not 1,000, 2,000, or 3,000, the process is generally smoother. And 3,000 passengers crowding a port at once can be overwhelming for all concerned. One-hundred passengers are more easily assimilated into even the smallest port.
Small ships tend to be more casual than the larger vessels, although all cruise ships, in all sizes and shapes today, range from casual to formal, simple to ultra-deluxe. Some small ships have sails. That’s an option you won’t find on a 3,000-passenger ship.
All cruises include all of your meals and in-between snacks, onboard daytime activities, and nighttime parties or entertainment. All cruises provide relaxing voyages to some of the most exciting and exotic places in the world. Small ships just carry you there with less baggage, so to speak.
The following small ship cruises have transported me in distinctive style to unforgettable locales where large cruise ships are unable to travel.
Windjamming
It is a peaceful, cool night in a simple, quiet world. A tall ship’s billowing sails, lit by a full moon, are keeping time with the rhythm of the lapping sea against the ship’s wooden hull. Savoring the rarity of this experience from the deck of the Mandalay, sailing beneath a bright nighttime sky, the salt air and Caribbean breeze can lull one into considering just what sets this Windjammer cruise apart from the mammoth floating hotel experience on a 2,000-plus passenger cruise ship.
Aboard this tall ship, 248 feet of unvarnished oaken decking is occupied by several of the ship’s 72 passengers. They are sleeping off a day of sunning, swimming, snorkeling, motor biking or fishing around the small secluded beaches of Terre-de-Haut, one of the picturesque French islands in the group called Iles des Saintes that are off the coast of Guadeloupe. In the distance, a moonlit silhouette of volcanic rock outcrops rises above calm emerald waters shadowed by postcard lush greenery.
Barefoot Cruises is actually this line’s motto, so you know the dress code is casual, as is the ambience on board and off. Dressing up on this cruise means putting on a makeshift grass skirt outfit for an on-board costume party. The small fortune you save on formal cruise wear can be further augmented with cash not contributed to a shipboard casino; there are none among the entire Windjammer fleet. “The big cruise ships offer movies, jogging tracks, racquetball and swimming pools, all things that can be found at home,” says a friendly Windjammer hand. “We offer adventure.”
Windjammer Cruises are very casual. Itineraries include tiny, infrequently visited Caribbean ports that cannot accommodate large cruise ships. Offbeat destinations include Grenada, St. Vincent, Mayreau and the Tobago Cays, and Palm Island, all in the Grenadines, and ports in Venezuela, including Puerto La Cruz and the infrequently visited islands of Los Testigos, Margarita and Blanquilla.
Standard five-night voyages are available from $875 to $1,200.
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Windjammer Barefoot Cruises, Box 120, Miami Beach, FL 33139; 800-327-2601; www.windjammer.com/home.html.
Oh, Canada
Mists swirl around 5,000-foot mountains, revealing glimpses of snow peaks and waterfalls. Because of the treacherous currents guarding its tiny entrance, Princess Louisa Inlet is usually accessible only to seaplanes or private yachts, even though it’s only 50 miles from Vancouver. But thanks to the maneuverability of our 143-foot-long, 82-passenger vessel, we are enjoying the seclusion of the 4-mile long, half-mile wide inlet. The space is shared only with a single sailboat. We are on board the only scheduled passenger service to the inlet.
Lunch is served onboard. We anchor beside a waterfall. Huge Sitka spruce, western hemlock, cedar, broadleaf maple and alder trees are carpeted in soft mosses, framed by lettuce leaf lichens, fiddlehead ferns and wild sweet peas in every conceivable shade of green. It’s very quiet as the ship noses nimbly into shore to transfer passengers via gangplank from its bow for a forest walk.
Cruising without haste, this Cruise West vessel, makes this trip in spring to view colorful flowers and cascading waterfalls, and again in fall, when colors are changing. It covers only about 450 miles on a six-day, five-night voyage. The line’s popular Seattle to Alaska Inside Passage small ship cruises, lasting only one day longer, cover 1,500 miles. The difference on this voyage is a chance to turn around and take a closer look at a waterfall, to slow down for harbor seals, or to explore this inlet. Still, there’s ample time to wander around nearby Vancouver’s busy Chinatown, or its 1,000-acre Stanley Park, or sip afternoon tea at the proper Empress Hotel on the waterfront in Victoria.
Other itineraries visit Mexico’s Sea of Cortez or the Snake River. Rates start at about $1,695.
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Cruise West, Suite 700, 4th and Battery Building, Seattle, WA 98121; 800-888-9378 or 206-441-8687; www.cruisewest.com.
Do you like boobies?
Ecuador’s Galapagos Islands are the small ship cruise destination of a lifetime for many passengers from all over the world. Large cruise ships are not allowed. It’s a carefully controlled natural environment here, limited to about 60,000 visitors yearly who all pretty much get to do and see the same things, as dictated by the rules of the national park, which protects the islands. A wide range of small vessels cruises here. My small ship recommendation: The MV Santa Cruz. It carries 90 passengers, the maximum allowable in the Galapagos at one time.
The Galapagos Archipelago is a cluster of 13 major islands, six smaller ones and scores of low-lying islets in the Pacific Ocean, 600 miles off the coast of South America, directly on the equator. Galapagos is a province of Ecuador (five of the islands are inhabited), and the archipelago is Ecuador’s most important national park as well as a biosphere and marine reserve–a protected world of animals and plants, of soils and surf that preceded man by millions of years.
Galapagos is one of the few places where nature has evolved undisturbed. Unusual birds, fish and animals help maintain a delicate ecological balance. Blue-footed boobies, red-throated frigate birds, flightless cormorants, albatrosses, giant tortoises, penguins, sea lions, sea turtles, and iguanas of the land and sea are among the distinctive species here. After visiting these islands in the 1830s, Charles Darwin wrote his famous book “The Origin of Species.” The animals Darwin saw are still here, and remain unafraid of humans. Visitors obeying rules of the national park may approach them in the wild like nowhere else on earth.
Naturalist guides onboard the MV Santa Cruz ferry passengers via rubber inflatable Zodiac boats to dry or (where docking even a small Zodiac is impossible) wet landings on various islands. Hikes over varying rocky and sandy terrain lead to up-close experiences with booby rookeries, hundreds of spitting marine iguanas basking on black sun-drenched volcanic rocks and sea lion mothers suckling newborns on a deserted beach, all of which is carefully explained onboard ship, both before and after.
It’s a photographer’s dream, and tremendously informative for anyone interested in wildlife, or life on earth. It’s a well-guided tour of a lost world, and then there’s a plush air-conditioned ship at your disposal; I think of it as the best of both worlds. Rates aboard the Santa Cruz average $200-$400 daily, depending on cabin accommodations.
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Adventure Associates, 13150 Coit Rd., Suite 110, Dallas, TX 75240; 800-527-2500 or 972-907-0414; fax 972-783-1286.
Asian River Cruise
Operated by Orient-Express Trains & Cruises, the three-, four- or seven-day itineraries on the Ayeyarwady between Bagan and Mandalay on the Road to Mandalay ship carry passengers only a short distance in miles, but cover several thousand years of culture. The river has been a lifeline for trade and communication for many centuries. This is not a particularly casual cruise. Sumptuous meals are served elegantly on bone china embossed in gold with the ship’s symbol, a mythical lion-like creature. It is nearly impossible to move more than 10 feet onboard without one of the ever-solicitous crew offering help or greetings.
Outside, local river traffic floats very close by, dwarfed by the vessel, which carries a maximum of 126 passengers. People paddle by in dugout canoes heaped high with produce. Others sail bamboo rafts, some with tattered sails. Crowded riverboats list, swaying against the current, ferrying local passengers in less luxury. On nearby banks, farmers in lampshade hats plow with oxen. Monks in red robes stand in silhouette against white or golden-domed pagodas.
The highlight of this voyage for many passengers is the visit to the city of Bagan, an ancient repository of 2,500 Buddhist shrines and temples dating from the 11th Century. Connected by a network of dirt roads, some raise several precarious stories into the air. Most are in daily use and maintained as troves of incredible ancient Buddhist artifacts, religious relics, large and small Buddha figures, statues and paintings. You can climb up and down the steep faces of shrines, tour by dust-churning horse cart, then return to the impeccably kept ship to sip a cocktail in a wood-paneled, comfy, modern air-conditioned bar. The result is something like stepping back into the 11th Century, but with bottled water. Rates start at around $400 daily per person.
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Orient-Express Trains & Cruises, c/o Abercrombie & Kent, 1520 Kensington Rd., Oak Brook, IL 60523; 800-524-2420; www.orient-expresstrains.com.
