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 Travel & Outdoors | April 2006 
A Cruise to the Mexican Riviera
 Spud Hilton - San Francisco Chronicle
| | Diamond Princess passengers dance the night away on the Aloha Deck during the “Mexican Fiesta,” which bore no resemblance to traditional Mexican culture. (Spud Hilton/SF Chronicle |
It's more about cutting loose than losing yourself in another culture.
By midnight, the party on the Aloha Deck on the Diamond Princess was jamming across the Sea of Cortez at 20 knots faster than the ship itself. Mai tais rose and fell with the ocean, the band provided rock to match the roll and, as I watched the rowdy partiers at the railings, my thoughts turned to culture: Is an authentic Mexican fiesta supposed to have male strippers?
Another nuance, I guess, to the true meaning of "Love Boat."
There isn't much real Mexico on cruise ships these days - little entertainment, less cuisine and virtually no exposure to the culture, unless you include margarita drink specials.
But what the ships lack in Mexicana, the cruise lines are busy trying to make up in frequency, sending a growing number of large ships to Pacific ports south of the border.
Almost every major line has joined the southern migration, including Princess, which not only started 40 years ago with one ship on the Mexican Riviera, but also introduced the route to millions of viewers each week during nine years of "The Love Boat" episodes.
I was drawn aboard the Diamond Princess, the company's largest and one of its newest, to find out if there's anything "exciting and new" to love about Mexico's Pacific coast on a ship that, if you believe the show's old theme song, has "something for everyone."
CHOICE POSITIONS
The boom in the Mexican Riviera's cruise traffic has less to do with Mexico's culture than its geographic position.
For a couple of decades, most of the Alaska cruise fleet repositioned back to the Caribbean or Hawaii in the fall, leaving only a handful of ships to ply Baja and southern Mexico.
Now, a glut of ships in the Caribbean, more vessels in Alaska during summer and more competition in Hawaii has convinced a few of the big lines to keep more ships on the West Coast during fall, winter and spring. It's still not much traffic by Caribbean standards, but it's growing - 42 percent more beds in 2004 over the previous year and almost double the ships since two years ago. It means more choices and, sometimes, a decent deal.
It's not the easiest sell: The glamour of Mexico's most well-known western ports has faded, replaced by tourism based on local history and zonasdedicated to shopping and partying. (Several "comprehensive" books on cruising, including "Cruise Vacations for Dummies," make no mention of Cabo San Lucas, Puerto Vallarta or any part of Mexico outside the Yucatán Peninsula.) Some of the old magic is still there, however, along with some new diversions.
Also, it seems there are some advantages to spending fall, winter and spring here instead of in the Caribbean: shorter flights for West Coasters, less humidity and fewer New Yorkers, to name a few. If that's not enough incentive to shift away from the Caribbean, how about two words - hurricane season.
Apparently, Princess has enough faith in the route to put its two newest and biggest ships, Diamond and Sapphire (2,670 passengers each), on runs out of Los Angeles and San Francisco during the season. In fall, the company adds a third ship, based in San Diego.
NEW CAST AND CREW
The $500 million Diamond (about twice the cost of San Francisco's AT&T Park) looks like a snowy skyscraper upended intact, and is as long from bow to stern (952 feet) as the drop from the top of Yosemite's Bridalveil Fall.Diamond and its twin sister, Sapphire, both born and christened in a shipyard in Nagasaki, Japan, are the queens of Princess, the fleet's glossy centerfolds whose turn-ons include a British accent and long moonlit sails through Mexican waters.
Diamond's sleek, shark-nosed bow is in contrast to its flat-backed stern, a Princess trademark - thankfully, though, designers removed the unfortunate bridge-like nightclub that hangs over the stern on many of the company's ships and makes them look like shopping carts. (Fun fact: According to the captain, the enormous jet-engine-shaped pods that flank the funnel of this and several other Princess ships do absolutely nothing.)
If the ship is a city, Decks 6 and 7 (Fiesta and Promenade) are the lively downtown, with the main restaurants and shops. The public parks and pools and casual cafes are on Deck 12 (Lido), and the promenade on Deck 7 is the municipal bike trail, only without the bikes. (We were secretly hoping for scooter rentals, but alas.)
If this ship is the Love Boat, Capt. Stubing has been replaced by cheerful Capt. Bernard Warner, the very model of a modern major ship captain, whose announcements resembled BBC newscasts. (It should be noted that Diamond Princess holds four times the passengers and crew of the original Pacific Princess and Island Princess, on which most episodes were filmed. Capt. Warner was second officer aboard Island Princess during some of the filming.) Cruise director Julie is now a stout British subject named Trevor (whose entertainment staff I nicknamed the Perky Brit Squad); there are about 20 Gophers, some of them Romanian; and bartender Isaac is now a short Mexican woman named Sai.
INTO THE JUNGLE
To see some of Mexico we of course needed to leave the ship. There's an unwritten rule that transportation to and from an "adventure" excursion must be at least half as thrilling as the adventure itself, and the jungle canopy zip-line tour in Puerto Vallarta was far from the exception. The ride into the mountains on a weary open-sided army transport, past washed-out bridges and over one-lane mountain roads, convinced me that being suspended from a clothesline like so much wash, eight stories above the ground, couldn't be that bad after all.
Puerto Vallarta's star-struck past, when it was Hollywood's love nest after Richard Burton and Liz Taylor trysted here during filming of "Night of the Iguana," has faded like a photo left in the tropical sun. To fill the void, tourism has turned adventurous - snorkeling, hiking, whale-watching, mountain-biking and assorted eco-this and that, much as in Costa Rica or Panama.
Which is why, an hour or so after leaving the ship, I was hugging the side of a giant ficus 80 feet off the jungle floor, wearing 10 pounds of pulleys, carabiners and assorted gadgets on a harness that was intended to do with three straps what a hammock does with hundreds. As one of the guides with Vallarta Adventures hooked my pulley to a rubbery zip line that ended somewhere in the trees 300 feet away, I tried to make conversation.
"Will this helmet protect me if I fall?"
He chortled. "Very funny, señor. Vaya con Dios," he said, and let go of the pulley, sending me zipping off into the leafy abyss.
It was as if we'd joined the trapeze team of a Mexican circus, only the clowns were our instructors, using humor to divert attention from the ridiculous height and the speed with which we zipped among more than a dozen tree platforms.
By the time we reached Big Daddy, a line spanning 600 feet, I'd learned that yelling a specific phrase on a zip line is supposed to bring good luck.
"What should I say?" I asked the still-chortling guide.
"¿Quién es tu papá?" was his suggestion, which I understood from a recent Spanish class to mean, roughly, "Who's your daddy?"
Now that's absorbing local culture.
STANDARD FUN
In Club Fusion, a techno-heavy lounge/dance club with more decor influences than Hearst Castle, one of the Perky Brit Squad members called out, "Bee four. Not after, but ..."
"Bingo."
The symphony of groans drowned out the winners' laughter and men at a table nearby raised green plastic tumblers and toasted the loss. The winning number - or losing number for most of us - beamed from 42 flat-screen monitors around the room, as well from a bank of televisions behind the dance floor.
I'd never been so technologically defeated at bingo before.
In most ways that matter, life on board Diamond Princess is pretty standard. We soaked up the mandatory cruise culture while sunning by most of the four pools (the one in the conservatory has a sliding glass roof); dabbling in paddle tennis and miniature golf on the sports decks; sampling margaritas in Skywalkers nightclub and, ahem, several other bars; clicking our way through the Internet cafe, which unlike on most ships, actually has a cafe; and catching the two Vegas-style stage shows, which were creative and original enough to make up for some weak dancing.
Not so standard is the dining setup under Princess' Personal Choice program. Along with the International Dining Room, for traditional, assigned seating, there are four themed "anytime" dining rooms - Vivaldi, Sterling, Pacific Moon and Santa Fe - each half as big as the International and all at no extra cost. (Be aware that "anytime dining" means any time you made a reservation a day or two in advance. Otherwise, expect to wait.)
Club Fusion is probably the best place to sit and let the action come to you, including bingo, karaoke, nightly dancing to live music, line-dancing lessons and Princess Idol, a knockoff of the TV show-contest that displayed some surprising talent. Fusion also held surprises: A stairway behind the dance floor led to the little-known Wakeview Bar, and a few video-poker machines, my first experience with slots located somewhere other than the ship's casino.
Less impressive was the service in the stylish and exclusive Trattoria Sabatini where the 16-course dinner (an extra $20 per person) was above average. Even with the advance notice that the meal takes 2-1/2 hours, we could have timed courses with a Mayan calendar. (A waiter took our drink order 18 minutes after we sat down, and served them 12 minutes later.)
Also, there are a minimum of 1,437 ways to spend money onboard, at least 1,300 of them involving crushed ice and a little paper parasol, but there is only one way to check your balance during the week - at the purser's desk. A ship this new and with this many alternative restaurants should have interactive television in the cabins for booking excursions, making reservations and checking your balance.
And while there was little that stuck out as extraordinary or jaw-dropping, our complaints were minor - it's a big ship, built for fun and relaxing, and there seemed to be plenty of opportunity for both.
ESCAPING TO CABO
Of the Mexican Riviera ports, Puerto Vallarta and Mazatlán are fusions of centuries-old cities founded on mission sites with modern adaptations to North American tourism of one kind or another.
Mazatlán, which apparently is an ancient Aztec name that translates as "Sea of Taxi Drivers," offered a well-worn working town, with most of its surreal side isolated away from the Old Mazatlán area. We toured the seemingly endless beach; the Pacifico beer statue (the top of a brewing tank sticking out of the cement on the Malecón); and the touristy Zona Dorada (think Fisherman's Wharf with a Señor Frog's and cheaper trinkets); as well as Rock Island and miles of residential neighborhoods.
But like Zihuatanejo and Acapulco farther south, Cabo San Lucas was little more than a fishing village before it was converted to a condo capital in the '60s and '70s.
As our tender cut through the waves on Bahía San Lucas, it was easy to see that Cabo San Lucas, its shores studded with upscale resorts, has experienced a little fusion itself. On our second visit in two years, we noticed a host of improvements and construction projects, including the installation of Spanish tiles the length of the promenade that leads from the tender pier to downtown.
Cabo's trio of pleasures includes accessible natural beauty, a host of places for those who worship at the altar of shopping and 1,001 nights of party possibilities. My wife, Ann, and I had already spent a little time at the clichéd-but-still-remarkable Lover's Beach - the Pacific on one side, the Sea of Cortez on the other - and were toting several bags of glazed ceramic bowls, blue-rimmed Mexican glass tumblers and a few T-shirts extolling the virtues of Cabo and malt beverages in general.
To complete the trifecta, we followed the Spanish tile along the harbor to the bustling downtown, where we were led, quite innocently, smack into the patio seating of a restaurant with the copyright-dodging name Margaritavilla. While our waiter tried to explain the difference between bienand bueno, we fed on shrimp and fish tacos and margaritas - a reminder of why, sometimes, you have to get off the ship.
CROSSING CULTURES
It doesn't take all week to figure out that, other than the ports, the voyage isn't very Mexican. There was a bowl of tortilla chips and guacamole on our table the first night (representative of the Southwest cuisine in the Santa Fe dining room, it turned out), but beyond that there wasn't a trace of Mexicana until the "Mexican Fiesta," which had a Brazilian conga line, dance music from the United States, games involving cross-dressing (British Parliament) and line dancing (no culture in particular).
Should it take a U.N. proclamation to have a strolling guitarist, some ballet folklórico dancers or a small band of mariachis? At one point, after the Mr. Sexy Legs Contest, I would have been happy with some historically Mexican games, especially the Mayan contest in which competitors attempt to bounce a ball off their hips through a hoop - and at the end, the winning team is ritually sacrificed. Eventually, it occurred to me that maybe the three Mexican ports are enough exposure: For better or worse, not everyone goes on vacation to become worldly, and cruising has a culture all its own. Which is why, when asked at the not-so-Mexican Fiesta by one of the Perky Brits to be in the Mr. Diamond Princess Pageant, I let the cruise culture take over.
Minutes later, a young bodybuilder and I, both already shirtless, strolled on stage to "The Stripper" under a hail of catcalls, most launched by women "of a certain age" who I was guessing had left their prescription glasses back in their cabins. One of them held out a folded dollar bill.
¿Quién es tu papá? |
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