We continue now our postings of Bill White’s Caribbean reflections, as he steams south from Florida first to Panama and then onward to Peru to meet, at last, Kel, his fiancé.

The movie on the second night was “Salmon Fishing in the Yemen,” which I enjoyed but the ship was rocking so much that I started feeling a bit sick and left early, intending to watch the rest of it on television. Tomorrow they show “The Avengers,” which I will leave before the ending to Skype at midnight with Kel.  We had such a nice long talk last night.  Talking with and seeing my darling ponyo gives me something to look forward to all day, and the days are pretty dull, waking the decks, taking pictures of the same ocean.  Yesterday I borrowed a couple books from the library; a biography of Pablo Neruda and a memoir from Roger Ebert.  But even though there is a dullness about the journey there is also the undercurrent of excitement that prevents me from relaxing enough to concentrate on a book. Whatever I do, I am always looking for something else to do at the same time.

On the third day of the voyage, I am apprehensive about entering the shower, as yesterday I was unable to shut off the water and I had to call for help.  The first person to arrive could not fix it.  He thought the unit was loose and tightened it, but to no avail.  The second to arrive simply shut it off and said there was nothing wrong with it. I had tried several times to turn the knob in the direction he showed me, but was not successful in any of those attempts.  What will happen today when I try to turn off the water?

This is what happened during this morning’s abbreviated shower.  I turned the water on carefully and maintained a low-pressure flow, turning it off altogether a few times while washing my hair and face.  No problems.  Then, for no apparent reason, the water pressure increased to its maximum and when I tried to turn the water off, it would not stop.  So I got out of the shower, placed the shower hose in the sink so the water would not overflow from the shallow shower basin, and spent ten minutes or so aimlessly turning knobs back and forth.  Then, for no apparent reason, the water turned off.  I told one of the stewards that the situation with the water was erratic, and the shower needed to be inspected by a plumber to make sure the same disaster would not occur tomorrow.  I don’t know if he understood a word I said. We shall see tomorrow.

I ran into one of the trivia team players today and we talked a bit about computers, as he had just come from a lecture on Windows 7. I told him I had been using an IMac and now was using the Toshiba laptop, and asked if he knew a good program for editing audio.  He told me he used Audacity.  This is the program I used to transfer my audio tapes to digital files, and I didn’t realize it was a garage-band style recording system, with editing functions as well as an importing function, so I will be able to both record the Skype interviews with Paul and edit them on it.

After we took second place in the trivia game, the ship experienced a severe roll that turned the upper deck pool into mini tsunami and shattered dishware throughout the ship. I barely noticed it, as I was taking a picture of a plant at the time, and were it not for the noise of breaking dishes might well have remained ignorant of the occurrence, for which the captain offered profuse apologies and feeble explanations.  I only had a brief call with Kel before going to bed and falling asleep while listening to Donovan’s album, “Fairy Tale,” having discovered that the DVD player also plays CD’s.

I woke early to catch the sunrise, and became engaged in a prolonged conversation with an Australian couple, who informed me that their stateroom was right across from mine. The guy also had a Lumix Camera, a newer model than mine, and I checked out some of its functions, such as the macro zoom.  Returning to the cabin, I received a call from Harvey, who wanted to come to my cabin and get in a little practice on the guitar.   Harvey was a rock and roller from the early sixties who now played some country and national ballads, of which he demonstrated a few.  They sounded much like our own frontier ballads such as Red River Valley and Home on the Range. We left the cabin to find that the ship had already arrived at the San Blas Islands, and I felt a real thrill at seeing land after a couple days on the high seas.  I didn’t want to go ashore, however, because the stop was primarily to ferry passengers to a tourist bazaar where they could buy some of the products of the Cuna Indians.  I had no interest in being shipped around as a source of income, preferring to stay on the boat photographing the Indians who had surrounded our ship in their canoes.  Had I gone ashore, I would have been forced to pay a dollar to every Indian I photographed.  I am beginning to notice that I am too often taking too many pictures of the exact same thing. I spent a long time circling each of the decks, taking pictures and soaking up the sun before returning to the cabin to doze through the most recent Twilight episode, which I had only seen once before and had such a vague memory of that I wondered at times if I had seen it at all.

In other trivial news, someone apparently came in and fixed the shower, as the water is now dispensed through a clockwise, rather than a counter-clockwise, turn, Still, I was apprehensive and kept it turned down low, switching it to off to soap myself and on to rinse, thus making sure everything continued to operate properly, with no water gathering for an overflow.

And now we lift anchor and leave the San Blas Islands, expecting to reach the Panama Canal at 5am and to enter it at 6:30.   In the meantime, I look forward to talking with Kel, playing some trivia, possibly going to the German film, “The Harmonists,” and maybe checking out a comedian in the Showroom at Sea.  There is a certain ennui, however, that overtakes one, trumping all plans and sending the poor soul to bed where even sleep drags by slowly.

We begin our postings now of Bill White’s descriptions of his trip to Lima Peru to meet, at last, Kel, his fiance of now six years. Those of us who know Bill might expect that his travel impressions would resemble those in George Orwell’s “Down and Out in Paris and London” but we would be wrong.  Bill spent most of his days “on the road” aboard a cruise ship he compares to a shopping mall sliding though two oceans like a glazed donut.  So the heartfelt journey of reaching his intended took a while. Why did Bill chose not to fly but to travel by land and by sea? Perhaps it was, in part, in order to write about it all.  And yet he has, for a while at least, given up putting fine lines to the train ride from Seattle to Florida, the first leg of his flight and his journey.  The train windows were dirty but more important it was difficult to put aside his fixed idea about where he was going and whom he was going to soon see.  But once on the Caribbean Bill started paying attention to his journey too, and most of what follows – in six excerpts – is his candid and sometimes sentimental descriptions of life on a cruise ship and his first days in Lima with Kel.

As Bill notes this elaborate relocation was most exceptional.  Aside from a few years in Boston running a bookstore and a motion picture theatre and making art (of several sorts) he has been in Seattle working as a free-lance reviewer and writing novels.  For the last few years Bill has been living in what we call “The Forsaken Art House” here in Wallingford.  But now he has broken free. He has forsaken the forsaken for adventure first on the high seas and then with love in a far-away place.  We wish him well – very well.

(We also note that once we have our Skype connections figured out Bill and I will return to the late 1960s and resume here our weekly readings and commentary of the remaining issues of the underground tabloid, Helix – in their proper order.)

We left Florida an hour ahead of schedule to outrun Hurricane Sandy.  Indoor water sports were cancelled, and the eleven decks of the ship rolled a bit, causing passengers to rock on their heels in the stairwells, but the storm was headed north, and the m/s Veendam was going south, so we were spared the fate of a cruise ship that, unable to port in New York, left its passengers stranded in the Atlantic Ocean.  Check-in at Port Everglades in Fort Lauderdale had been easy.  When my baggage beeped, they waved it through anyway.  It was probably the Swiss army knife Kel had given to me some years ago.  Once in my stateroom, I was tricked into drinking a $2 can of coke, as six cans of soda and two of water had been placed on my table alongside an ice bucket, which caused me to assume they were complimentary.  The other five sodas and the two waters are still sitting there, and I declined the steward’s offer to bring me more ice.  It is odd that, although complimentary food is to be found throughout the ship, you are charged for the cokes placed in your room, but only, I presumed, if you drink them.  Odder still is that certain concession areas will charge for items that are free in another area. An example of this is the Explorer’s Cafe, where coffee and pastries bear a price tag, while at the Lido Cafe the same pastries are pressed upon one at all hours of the night and day.

It is a simplification to say that a sea cruise is nothing but ten days of over-eating while looking at water.  The television in the stateroom plays five different movies each day, and there is a DVD lending library of over 1,000 titles. On the first night of the cruise to Peru, I saw “The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel,” but it was a crappy DVD projection.  I left early, planning to watch the rest of it on the television the next day, and returned to my stateroom to watch my own DVD of Pasolini’s “Gospel According to Saint Matthew,” which put me to sleep almost immediately.

The ship is like a shopping mall in Las Vegas, tacky in an affectionate way. I have attended two lectures so far, both by fairly ignorant authorities. The person giving the history of the Panama Canal could answer few of the questions posed by the attendees, and drew a weak analogy between the fact that US ships have to pay a toll to traverse the canal, although the US built the things.  His analogy was along the lines of everybody having to pay the same price for a bowl of oatmeal, whether or not they resided in an oat-growing state, while I thought a parallel between the tolls collected by some new highways might be more fitting. An introduction to Spanish was taught by a girl of Mexican descent who was raised in Connecticut, and her pronunciations were erratic and explanations of the roots of some of the words inaccurate, so I did not continue the course beyond that first day. Most of the food in the four restaurants is mediocre, the deserts being the exception. So far I have had banana crème pie, mango torte, and coconut cake.  Lunch was a poor concoction of Chinese vegetables and rice, but the dinner of Chinese noodles and vegetables was palatable.

The second day of the trip began with an in-room breakfast that arrived a little after 8am and consisted of sliced banana, raisin bran cereal, a blueberry pudding, orange juice, and coffee.  Since the coffee at Lido was stronger, I decided on the third day to skip the room service and head straight up to Deck 11 and get the better wake-up juice.  Also, with the buffet set-up, one could have as little or as much of whatever one chooses at the moment. So I had a chocolate croissant, a blueberry muffin, and a banana, then came back to finally watch the ending of the Marigold Hotel movie, but paid little attention to it.

On the second day I also signed up for a talent show, and ran into Harvey from Australia at the Panama Canal lecture, who asked to borrow my guitar so that he could participate in the talent show as well. As it turned out, the two of us were the only ones who signed up, and the show was cancelled.   Later that night, before the trivia game, I was invited to play couple of songs by the singer/guitarist Glenn, while he took a break.  I did some rusty versions of In the Tomorrow and Love Minus Zero.  I quite like the two couples who are my trivia team-mates.  One is a retired Australian couple who both worked in the defense department, and the other an English couple who now live in Canada. We only got 10 out of 15 questions correct yesterday, with the winner scoring 12, but by the end of the cruise, had taken first place on four occasions.