For Karen, a woman in her late 50s who visited Asia for the first time this year, a cruise was a comfortable space for her to step outside of her comfort zone. She boarded a cruise in Taiwan and visited Singapore, Ho Chi Minh City, Hong Kong, Nha Trang, and Bangkok – a whistle-stop tour of Asia in just 10 days. It sounds amazing on paper, but cruises don’t have the best reputation among travellers. In the same way that going to a new country and not leaving your all-inclusive hotel is seen by some as an exercise in culturally ignorant indulgence and a waste of air miles, taking a cruise is often viewed as a lazy form of travel. Cruises leave passengers very little time to explore places on land, which some believe leave tourists with a ‘shallow’ understanding of the place they are visiting.So why do people take cruises? For many, travel can be daunting. While the adventurous may delight in exploring new cultures, unable to communicate in the local languages and faced with unfamiliar food, for others this is nothing short of terrifying. Often, cruises will provide tours you can book with professional guides that can show you around a new place during port days. Karen was able to experience new cultures without feeling lost in a new environment, and for her it was life changing. “Pulling into a new harbour and new place each morning is the most exciting feeling,” Karen wistfully recounted. And the best part? The travel was part of the fun. Being on the water is part of the appeal – Karen spent a long time looking out of the windows with her binoculars for wildlife. She remembers “sleeping with the doors open and hearing the waves crashing on the boat,” her favourite part of the experience. When taking a trip abroad, travelling can be gruelling and physically demanding. Anyone who has taken a long-haul flight will know the pain of trying to sleep upright in a cold cabin, squeezed in between two strangers – a far cry from Karen’s idyllic experience on the cruise. But what about the price point – is it a more expensive way to travel? The answer is not necessarily. If you’re a budget traveller, then cruises are probably not for you. But if you’re someone who tends to splurge on a trip, you might find yourself saving with a comprehensive package.And as we fall deeper and deeper into the climate crisis, we can’t talk about travel without acknowledging the environmental impact. It gets harder to switch off the travel guilt and book the trip you feel you so deserve, even if Taylor Swift’s private jet racked up more air miles last year than you probably will in a lifetime. For many climate-conscious travellers, the question is simple: is my wanderlust worth the emissions? In so many of these conversations the focus is on flying – but cruises emit far more CO2 (per passenger per kilometre) than flights do. For marine life down below, the noise pollution from these giant vessels is confusing and disorientating. It’s a bleak picture, and certainly worth considering.But is it fair to judge if you would happily catch a flight to ‘find yourself’ in South East Asia, or if you bopped around South America on a gap year? For the mobility impaired, the elderly or those living with disability, the travel-anxious, or even plain introverted, cruises provide a comfortable way to get from a to b. Perhaps experiencing what the world has to offer should not be reserved for the young and daring.So, if we can justify travel for the love of it at all in this world of contradictions, we can justify cruises. If we see value in going to a new place, whether it’s to learn about different cultures, experience the beauty of new and exciting places, or simply just to put your feet up, we have to accept that for some people, cruises are a happy medium.
Words by Abby Neve
