You may think I make some of what I write about up. You may ask, questions like is Olaf really a naked birder? Is Olaf really the Dos Equis man? Well, I don't and I am, but sadly no, just a bit of a likeness spread by my PR machine.
Everything in life, for me
at least, goes (or comes) full circle and after having such a nice time on the Big
Nude Boat in 2019 with a friend named Stuart (long story, buy the book for that), I convinced Silja to go on
the 2020 version. We rented a cabin and made plans for the February 2020
sailing by watching the horrors of the Plagueboat, the Diamond
Princess, in Yokohama, Japan and worried of what possibly we had got
ourselves. The day came for departure
and we gathered to leave Tampa thinking of the worst and hoping for the
best.
Some of the
dock workers in Tampa commented snidely.
“I’ve never seen so much luggage for a bunch of nudists.” Which was true and it was not. All I know is we traveled light, as one does have to
dress to eat in the main dining room and in three of the ports (not Roatan) but
nowhere else, one needs something to wear. The Carnival Legend would
be our naked home for a week, and hopefully not longer.
Key West, FL 2/24/2020
It was
clear on this boat even just a day into it that this voyage had a different
feel to it. Bare Necessities (BN), the
travel company that runs these nude cruises, is much more in the background on
this cruise. Their self-appointed cruise
director on previous excursions named Barry, as rumor had it, had a falling out with BN. Direction was absent on this ship, and so his
hosting of parties and events was gone, and BN had no one in his place. Things like the group picture wasn’t
advertised except for on the daily program.
We never read it until after it happened and by the looks of the picture,
not that many others did. I have seen very few BN employees around at any of
the events, and even a toast of champagne given to BN was done over the
loudspeaker by the Carnival cruise director.
This was their 30th anniversary cruise. I guess after thirty years, things change and
maybe there is more to the story.
As the trip
wore on, more and more people worried about the virus especially after we
sailed by an infamous MSC ship that had been denied port in three countries but
allowed to dock in Cozumel before a riot of some sort broke out and passengers
had to be subdued by pepper spray. Would
that happen on a nude cruise? One wouldn’t
think so but even here, people were hogging cushions from chairs to make theirs
more comfortable which seemed rude.
To make matters worse, I also learned that this was a
Pepsi-only cruise, unlike 2019, a Coca-Cola-only cruise. I had tried to by the “Bubble package” but it
had gotten screwed up which was lucky since I couldn’t even drink any of the
soda offered as Pepsi gives me an MSG-like reaction.
The Carnival
Legend is a somewhat smaller ship than the Carnival Sunshine, and there
was less space. Possibly due to the
success of the 2019 cruise and increased bookings, the organizers didn’t offer
incentives to get the younger crowd on this sailing, so gone were most of the
Florida Young Naturists who livened up the 2019 version and left this one with
an older average age. The weather didn’t
cooperate and the itinerary didn’t help matters either. Last year after a cold day at sea the first
stop Carnival’s private island in the Bahamas was invaded by 3000 nude people.
Everyone had a marvelous time, but unfortunately, the first stop in 2020 being
Key West, with no nude options for shore excursions, didn’t get the cruise off
to a great start.
We landed in Key West after an uneventful first morning
at sea. After turning east west of the
Dry Tortugas, I saw my first seabird, a female magnificent frigatebird, but
shortly thereafter, we had to get dressed to arrive into the US port of Key
West.
Our time in the self-described Conch Republic was only
for five hours and we got in at noon.
There wasn’t all that much one could do in such a short time. We rented bicycles for $16 each and looked
around for a few birds and did some people watching. It is still a month early for decent birding
here so all we saw was a few warblers and a few butterflies.
 |
| Monk |
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| Silja and the Key West Chicken, the most established introduced exotic in North America from pre-1800 |
We drove past a block-long line for a picture at the southernmost point of the US, apparently it was the place to be with three hundred people loitering in line to do so, but seemed insane to me. I was going to take a picture of the process to highlight the absurdity of it all but that would only give credence to something that needs to be purged.
I found a twelve-pack of Coke zero to bring back to the
ship. Silja tracked down some lip-gloss
and after a few miles of avoiding traffic we turned the bicycles in, and both
of us took a tourist picture by the end of US Highway 1, something we did back
in 2013, the
last time we were here together. I guess
this is what we have to do now each time we come to Key West.
We came back
to the boat, watched it sail away and then had a marvelous dinner in the
steakhouse restaurant with some Club Orient refugees, for lack of a
better term. The entertainment,
including the comedians were lame so we went to bed early.
The next
morning my wife announced that if we wanted to go to Columbia in 2021 (the
destination of the 2021 Nude Cruise), we might as well just go there and
arrange a birding tour on our own or just pick a nakation destination at some
other place. For Silja to offer that (a birding trip) is a mighty powerful
statement that cruise life is not her thing.
I just hoped that we could survive the remaining five days on this
trip. But I agree, getting drunk and
hanging out at bars on a ship and then drinking more is not our scene, clothed
or not. Hopefully, the organizers of
this cruise will see that the different mix of people on this boat has left it
with a different vibe and they will try to get it going, but I have my doubts and
it was never happened.
Mahahual, Mexico
2/26/2020
If
I was doing a nude year in 2020, I would have taken the day trip to a nude day
trip near this sleepy artificial cruise destination. They made Costa Maya (the name of just the
port) sixteen years ago and it hasn’t done much for Mahahual in the years that
followed. Streets made and platted
remain overgrown and abandoned. I haven’t
been to the mainland of Mexico since 1997.
23 years ago, the Minnesota Gophers made it to the Final Four. We watched them lose to Kentucky at a bar in Zihuantanejo,
on the opposite coast. As such, I needed
many Mexican birds. I had made arrangements
with local guide Victor Rosales, who took me and my wife out for the day as no
one else on the ship wanted to go. We
started at the Chacchoben ruins.
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| Spider monkeys |
Victor quickly got us in before the cruise ship passengers
and we scoured the area for birds. We
saw spider monkeys and the best bird we found was just a laughing falcon, a
bird I’d seen in Costa Rica, but still a nice bird and photo.
 |
| Laughing falcon |
We drove around a little and saw some fun birds including
six lifers. I had a camera malfunction on
a squirrel cuckoo, but at an abandoned spa we found three black-headed trogons,
the best bird on the trip for me.
 |
| Black-headed trogon |
We found a tree in the small city on
a neglected block which had berries and birds. I finally got a photo of a Yucatan woodpecker, I( had heard one the year before but not seen it on Cozumel (long story)
 |
| Yucatan Woodpecker |
Victor was a good guide and a nice guy. It was lucky to have found him by chance. I’d recommend him for any birding in the area. I didn’t bring up the fact I am a naked birder. I figure it would get lost in the translation. Maybe I could have added a few birds to my lifetime naked list, but I was just happy to do my own thing for a day and avoid the cruise ship outings.
 |
| Rufous tailed hummingbird |
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| Yellow throated euphonia |
 |
| Young immature Yucatan Jays, a lifer bird |
My
re-return to the Garden of Eden, my name for Paya Bay Resort on Roatan happened in the
middle of a downpour. Unlike 2019, we
had no goofy stores after being hungover playing naked beer pong to the wee hours of the day. We’d gone to bed early and the difference of ship time and local time did not cause us any issues. But this was no beach weather day. It was windy, wet, and nasty outside. The rain according to Forest Gump could be described as big ol' fat rain.
 |
| A tropical washout |
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| Even Leroy thought it was a little wet |
Many of the people that went out here on the east end, made a
u-turn and went back to the boat. This
seemed to be a frequent happening as we saw guests do this here and also on
Cozumel. There was a break for a while in the weather. I went birding, Silja read.
I saw some birds that were on my nude list previously and
enjoyed a place we’ve visited now separate five times.
 |
| Mangrove Vireo |
Yucatan vireo
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| Canivet's emerald |
 |
| Erato heliconian |
 |
| Tropical Buckeye |
We thought about how much we liked Paya Bay and thought
about booking a trip there in the future.
Before we went back to the ship, I went back to have a moment at the
Tree of Harmony.
I thought about how I had
ended my 2016 big year here with the death of my grandmother the day after returning. I thought about what I had deduced in 2019,
in that I needed to spend all trips, if possible, with my lovely bride of
nearly 30 years. In 2020, I thought of some what ifs…what if we’d die
from COVID-19 and the coronavirus? What
if the world economy collapsed? What if
we’d never get back here?
Edward Abbey, wrote in Desert Solitude about
finding the prettiest place on earth, which is different for different
people. His was the redrock country near
Moab, Utah. Ours was St. Martin until it
wasn’t and now, maybe it is here at Paya near this tree. Maybe, like I read in a book here on our 2017
visit in Finding Abbey, a book
about finding the hidden grave of Edward Abbey, it isn’t about actually finding
anything. It is about the search, and
maybe that is true for us. Life is the
journey, and NOT the destination.
We drove back contently to the ship and shortly, it
rained again. That evening we met up
with two couples we had met on the Grand Canyon nude rafting trip and had a
great reconnection. That is also what
life is about, the connections.
You could have read about the Cozumel portion of this trip already so I'll just repeat pictures of two of my lifer birds.
Cozumel Vireo
Cozumel emerald
Leap year day
on the Carnival Legend turned out to be much like the rest, rather plain
and without much excitement day. I did spot
a red-footed booby and a brown booby somewhere north of Cuba as we waited out
this day at sea looking for something to amuse ourselves, I began to think
about the previous week. Some of the
other guests were saying things like even that was a waste of a very good
week. I tried to think of a phrase
or word to describe this trip. The trip wasn't bad, the food wasn't bad, and well, the company was good.
All I could
come up with to describe this cruise was white toast—white toast without
butter. Like I said, this cruise wasn’t bad just like
white toast isn’t bad, but it was unremarkable and just plain, and nothing
really worth writing about any further.
It made me
think of larger issues, like one can’t go back to the past. The past is past. The 2019 cruise was great but past fun has no
bearing on future fun. In a larger
sense, and how I started this project, St. Martin was fun but it is now gone
and over so now we are moving on, finding newer and hopefully other great
things to experience. Many of these trips will lead to new birds,
sometimes I will be wearing clothing and sometimes I won’t be.
Silja and I decided
to buy an RV lot in Lutz, Florida from a seller who lives in Alberta
and is having health issues and I think we will avoid most cruises in the future unless
they are going to exotic locations like the South Pacific. Other St. Martin owners are buying condos in
Treasure Island and another, a house nearby in another nude development, Paradise
Lakes. Maybe Club Orient will like a phoenix,
rise again some day, and if that happens, we will probably add it to our itinerary. This fall, going to Asia.and Brazil.
All I can say is that wherever we
go, we will wear lots of sunscreen and in all likelihood, you, my readers will get
to read about it.
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