Of Food, Norovirus and Excursions on our Norwegian Star Cruise...

Hopefully you've already read the first installment of my writeup of our recent 8-day cruise on the Norwegian Star to the Mexican Riviera. If not, you should probably read it first...

This time I want to talk a bit more about our dining experiences, about our one organized trip off the boat in Puerto Vallarta, and most especially about germs. Yes, if you haven't been paying attention to the persistence and toughness of modern bacteria and viruses, you might not realize that there's a scary stomach bug called the norovirus (aka viral gastroenteritis) that gives you a yechy few days of bad digestive problems. Its most common habitat? Cruise ships.

The US Food and Drug Administration (the FDA) has an entire section of its Web site focused on norovirus, including Cruising with Confidence, which explains that "CDC investigators believe that most of the recent norovirus infections on cruise ships were spread person-to-person through hand-to-mouth activity. "We suspect that people are probably coming on board with the virus," says Dave Forney, chief of the CDC's Vessel Sanitation Program. "On a cruise ship, people are out and about in very public areas, and so we have this depositing of the virus on various surfaces that then would be easily picked up by others."

Great, another thing we had to worry about on the ship!

Fortunately, as you might expect, the cruise ship industry has responded with great vigor to this viral threat and we were particularly impressed with the Norwegian Cruise Lines and the omnipresent alcohol hand washing stations. One of them's shown to the right.

We were apparently quite lucky that our kids really enjoyed washing their hands at the washing stations (heck, they washed them at every station we'd pass, sometimes three or four times in just a few minutes!). To give them credit, NCL added mint scent and some hand softeners to the alcohol wash. By the time we got off the ship, my hands were lovely and soft. Who would have thought? :-) The importance of on-ship hygiene was highlighted when I realized that there was a crew member assigned to remind everyone to wash their hands every time they came into the Garden Cafe for food. That's all she did, just stand there and point to it with a smile.

Ironically, though, while perhaps that's what we should have been most worried about on the germ front, we were rather quite more concerned about the different bacterial life in Mexico and originally had considered never getting off the ship at all.

To explain, it's not that we're completely germophobic and paranoid at all, but rather that K-, our 3yo, is licking, sucking on and generally getting everything near her into her mouth at all times. We've watched her lick handrails in stairwells, for example, much to our complete horror and disgust. Between bathroom hand washes and the nifty germicidal cleaners on the Norwegian Star, we knew that K- was as protected as we could make her from norovirus, etc., but on land? In Mexico? Where just about everyone I know who spends time there just accepts that they'll eventually get sick?

When we got to Acapulco, in fact, we never even got off the ship. We just stayed on board and played in the pools, enjoying how quiet things were with most everyone exploring the port of call. My folks and sister got back from their Acapulco adventures, however, and we decided it was probably a bit daft to completely avoid getting on solid ground for the duration of the cruise, and so at subsequent ports of call we did get off the ship (though K-, G- and I never visited Cabo San Lucas, while A- and Linda went off on a shopping adventure with the rest of the gang) (maybe we just wanted to avoid shopping, now that I think about it!)

Excursions, or Visiting Our Ports of Call

So when I talk about our off-ship adventures, well, you can see that we were perhaps a bit less adventurous than some of the other passengers on the ship. Heck, even my folks went to see the cliff divers in Acapulco (I would have kept expecting Elvis to show up, but maybe I'm the only person in the world to understand that obscure reference!)

Nonetheless, when we got to Ixtapa-Zihuatanejo, we got off the ship and poked around the town a bit, mostly just enjoying the beach and the ability to stretch our legs and feel terra firma. Ixtapa's a lovely little town, actually, and we were quite taken with it. Quaint. It feels very quaint and peaceful. The Ixtapans were generally pleasant, though being Tourists with a capital "T" off a cruise ship, our interaction was exclusively them trying to sell us something we didn't want to buy. No doubt had we have stayed there and explored we would have found a less commercial interaction and had a different sense of the place.

Germ-wise, we had our little bottle of hand sanitizer and were careful not to let K- put anything in her mouth as best we could. We didn't eat or drink anything on shore (paranoid? or just careful?) and had a splendid time on their beautiful beach. I also enjoyed watching the local boys shed layers of their school uniforms and play some enthused football [y'know, Americans call it soccer] on the beach too.

The big adventure was when we were in Puerto Vallarta. We signed up for their "Pirate Boat Adventure", about $80/adult and $58/child (meaning we dropped a cool $335 on a five hour excursion) and found it a mixed bag. The ship was very cool, as you can see in the photo on the right, and the crew was generally friendly and enthused, but the show was loud and mostly incoherent (imagine English and Spanish, alternating, fast) and while the brochure on the Norwegian Star advertised the excursion as having "authentic Mexican foods" we were actually served traditional American breakfast and lunch foods. Pancakes but no huevos rancheros, bbq ribs but no tortillas. I was disappointed, though the food itself was good and of good quality.

Puerto Vallarta is an enormous harbor, many miles across, and on the pirate vessel Marigalante we went north to a small private beach they owned. Small being the operative word: we had about 200 passengers with us on the boat and when we were all on the beach it was a pretty tight fit. More frustrating, however, was the disorganization of getting from the ship to the beach and the rudeness of the crew when we found ourselves stuck with the snorkeling party though every announcement we'd heard suggested we were in the right spot to go straight to the beach. Their solution? We got to sit on the boat and watch the snorkelers. Fortunately, G-, A- and Linda jumped in for a few minutes (the entire snorkeling time allocated for even the most die-hard diver was about 15 minutes max) and we did eventually get to the shore.

On the other little boat being used to ferry passengers from the pirate ship to the shore, they apparently went to the snorkeling area and not one person wanted to snorkel. So the crewmember had to bring the boat back to the main ship and ask permission to take everyone to the beach. Ugh, who's running this navy? If we'd have been real pirates, at least one or two of 'em would have walked the plank, the scurvy dogs!

Even given the frustration of getting to the beach, we did have a good time, and most importantly, the kids had a really great time. We bought G- (who is by far the most pirate-enthused) a $20 t-shirt and $6 keychain from the boat too, much to his delight. Indeed, we've had to prise the shirt off his body, even after it got scary-dirty!

When we did get back to the docks at Puerto Vallarta, I was a bit dismayed to see that to get off the Marigalante we needed to pass a gauntlet of crew standing, wanting to shake our hands and, surprise, at the end, the "captain" holding out a box asking for additional tips. I figured that we'd just paid almost $350 for a few hours on the boat, being shaken down for more was not so cool. So I didn't offer up any additional money.

Ultimately would I recommend the Pirate Boat Adventure as a shore excursion? Yes, I would, especially if you have children. You'll have a good time, I bet!

And What About That Food, Anyway?

Linda and I were blessed to have my folks and sister and brother-in-law all ready to help field the wee ones so the two of us could sneak away, and so we did. Twice. The first time we went to see Music of the Night, a dance production based on Andrew Lloyd Weber's most popular musical numbers, as performed in the Stardust Theater by the talented Jean Ann Ryan dance company. After about half the show we ducked out and went up to one of my favorite spots on the ship, the Red Lion pub on Deck 7 to share a beer and chat.

The second evening we planned ahead a bit more and had an early dinner at Cagney's Steakhouse, a lovely 15-table restaurant tucked away on Deck 12 above the Oasis pool area. While food is all included with your cruise charge, it turns out that a few of the higher-end restaurants did charge an additional cover, Cagney's being one of them. Linda had a splendid filet mignon and I enjoyed a very large tuna steak, beautifully prepared. We also had side vegetables of spinach, sauteed mushrooms, asparagus, and corn, having started with both crab cakes and a caesar salad as appetizers. We shared two deserts, bananas foster and a chocolate decadence cake and liked the bananas so much we ordered another one and chowed down! Yum!! Including our alcoholic beverages (wine for Linda, a Gin and Tonic for me) the supplemental cost was about $50, I think. Well worth it for a delicious dinner.

Candidly I admit that I ate far more at that meal than my body needed and I have a memory of not eating much at all the next day, just trying to burn off the extraneous calories. But don't tell anyone, okay? :-)

Food is always a big part of cruises from everyone I've spoken with, and since this was our first cruise, the "Freestyle Cruising" of the Norwegian Cruise Line, where we didn't have assigned tables or assigned eating times, made it feel very much like being in a small village with various restaurants and entertainments. Very nice, relaxing, and good to know that just about any time we could grab something good to eat.

Apparently, one of the nights they had a midnight chocolate buffet, but we were long since passed out by that point so never got to see it. The reports I received were favorable, however, and other passengers were still talking about it the next morning. Too bad they don't cater!

I'll wrap this up here as I 'm tired of typing. Next installment will be all about the chaos of getting on the Norwegian Star and then the complete failure of the crew to help with disembarkation, which was a shambles bordering on a horror. You can read about it here: the terrible experience of embarkation and disembarkation.