The last cruise the Wife and I took was on the SS Rust Bucket for a one day journey from Miami to Nassau. I felt like I had a sinus infection the whole time. We docked beside a Disney boat which stood fifteen stories and blotted out the sun.
Going ashore, one of the crew pointed to the beautiful Atlantis Paradise Island and said we weren’t welcome there. We walked around downtown, drank a beer, bought the shirt and headed back to our stateroom – as if. I think the whole boat was steerage.
Upon our safe return I indicated to the Wife that I was done with cruising unless we could do better than that. She assured me such was the case. We got busy and the subject hasn’t come up.
I enjoyed Black Hawk Down, the book, movie and video game. Those pesky Somalis, armed to the teeth and living in garbage cans, make Charlie of the Mekong look like pikers.
I’ve enjoyed reading of their recent captures of Ukrainian tanks and crude-laden supertankers. Of course, sailing into those waters had been deadly or at least expensive to the public for years. What a bunch of fun-loving scamps.
The problem is everyone wishing to navigate the Red Sea and the Suez Canal must wave hello to the quaint, if starving, citizens of Sudan and Eritrea to the south and the precocious Wahhabi in Saudi Arabia and Yemen to the north.
Some of the wildest shit Captain Sir Richard Francis Burton wrote concerned Somali mens’ treatment of their women. According to him, they’ve been murderous little bastards for centuries.
So, imagine my surprise at the following:
NAIROBI, Kenya — Pirates chased and shot at a U.S. cruise liner with more than 1,000 people on board but failed to hijack the vessel as it sailed along a corridor patrolled by international warships, a maritime official said Tuesday.
The liner, carrying 656 international passengers and 399 crew members, was sailing through the Gulf of Aden on Sunday when it encountered six bandits in two speedboats, said Noel Choong who heads the International Maritime Bureau’s piracy reporting center in Malaysia.
The pirates fired at the passenger liner but the larger boat was faster than the pirates’ vessels, Mr. Choong said. “It is very fortunate that the liner managed to escape,” he said, urging all ships to remain vigilant in the area.
I just called the Wife and told her to set it up. I’ve been wanting to go somewhere with residents worse off than Stenchville, but not back to Mexico. The squalor outside of Cancun was heartbreaking. A guy got off the bus to Tulum with a dollar bill and came back with a beer, a pack of cigs and an eight year old girl. Maybe the cruise line can provide weapons to even up the odds.
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