A Clusterfuck Christmas! (only 3 weeks late)

Reporting from Valparaiso, Chile, Jan 13, 2025

Yeah, I know, it’s mid-January already. Bite me.

There were polar bears in Panama City over the Christmas holidays, dozens of them, hidden among the high rises, tucked away in side-street strip malls, lurking along the edges of Parque Urraca which glowed in the dark, illuminated by a wonderland’s worth of Christmas decorations, twinkling lights cascading down from the trees, luminescent sleighs and Santas and candy canes. It was dazzling. But also weirdly out of place. Like the polar bears. And me.

Christmas lights in Panama.

It’s not just the juxtaposition of Christmas lights on palm trees I’m talking about, it’s this whole ridiculous situation I’ve gotten myself into, floating around the world with people who just 7 months ago were complete strangers. But that was before Belfast and all those nights eating lobby bar pizza at the adorably groovy Room2Hometel. Before the busted pipes and the failed inspections. Before Portugal and Morocco, Gibraltar and Senegal. Before the look-alike sweatboxes that were the Caribbean islands. Before beisbol night in the Dominican Republic. Before the Panama Canal. Before Ecuador and Peru and Chile. We’ve been through a lot together. We’re not strangers anymore.

Which doesn’t mean we’re all friends. There are approximately 230 “Residents” on board now, 80 more than when we arrived in Panama. Some of them don’t like me, not even a little bit, some of them kind of like me, but only in small doses and some of them I hang out with on a regular basis, usually when I’m drinking not-terrible beer. We gossip, we complain, we talk about whatever local oddities we saw that day in whatever port that was. We talk about various maladies and shortcomings, both ours and the ship’s. And some of us, inevitably, go too far, deciding that everyone needs to see that bruise/rash/lump of belly fat, when, really, the descriptions were more than enough. Neurodivergence. It takes a toll.

We know — or think we know — who’s been sleeping with whom, whose partner has been sneaking around, which couple is together only for show. We speculate about which relationships are doomed and which ones, even though not yet commenced, are inevitable. So, yeah, it’s just like high school. Only with more day drinking. (Depending, I guess, on where you went to high school.)

There are jocks and hippies, rich kids and Mean Girls — SO many Mean Girls. It’s as if Heathers were set in a retirement home. There are bullies and suck-ups. There are teacher’s pets and class clowns, organizers and loners, theater kids, shy kids and even a few actual kids, all of whom seem remarkably well-behaved and none of whom, unlike certain adults, spend their evenings drinking vodka through a straw.

These ladies look familiar.

I’m not sure where I fit into all this. I’m an outsider by inclination, more of an observer than a participant, predisposed to maintaining a certain distance (ironic and otherwise) from wherever I happen to be. In my actual high school years — a half-century ago — I was a floater, friends with the jocks AND the hippies but not really identifiable as either one. I didn’t smoke dope and I didn’t play football. But I had plenty of friends who did. I was comfortable in both worlds but not really a resident of either. I was a visitor. Just passing through. I still am.

I’m sure it’s why I lived in a van for 13 years, a physical manifestation of my inability to stay anywhere or do anything for very long. I loved the idea of waking up in a new place every day, of not knowing what might be around the next corner. After a while though, the corners started looking a little too familiar. I’d been around most of them too many times before. And that’s why I ended up here. On the Villa Vie Odyssey, starting the New Year cruising off the Pacific Coast of South America, headed towards Patagonia with 230 people I only just met.

My previous residence.

Can this possibly last for 3 more years? That’s the question on everyone’s mind, even though some dare not say it out loud, as if to speak it would curse the entire voyage. That certain people are so sensitive about the subject is a pretty good indication that they’re worried about it, too. This whole thing is a crap shoot. An entertaining, occasionally exciting crap shoot, but a crap shoot nonetheless. Will the financing last? Will the ship? We’re rolling the dice here on a daily basis and anyone who says different is telling you a lie.

Mentioning these things in public is why Robert “I call him Bobby” Fong, the self-proclaimed owner of the Odyssey went ballistic on me a few weeks ago. We’re good now, though. He gave me some chocolates for Christmas and admitted my recounting of our bizarre confrontation had been mostly accurate. “You only got one thing wrong,” he said. “I’m not a millionaire.”

“Wait, so you’re a billionaire?” I shouted after him, as he scooted away.

We regret the error.

Anyway, the ship is functioning well enough now; it gets us where we’re going. Like a 2004 Toyota. It’s certainly not a luxury voyage, the plumbing still acts up every now and then, the internet comes and goes. As does the air conditioning. There was a small flood on Deck 5 the other night. Nobody knows why. Nobody seems to much care. There are aggravations and annoyances pretty much every day. Most of us have learned to lower our expectations and we’re probably happier as a result. It’s not so much that things have gotten dramatically better. It’s just that we’re used to it now.

So we shrug off things that would have outraged us 6 months ago, that the hot tubs never worked, that the pools are only open on sea days, that there’s never enough bandwidth to stream the really good porn. (Or so I’ve been told.) The medical center is short on resources — which on a 3-year-voyage full of 80 year olds is bound to have ramifications. Fortunately, we’ve been told, the morgue is fully functional and ready for our use. Huzzah!

But, hey, we’ve made it this far without sinking. So, you know, there’s that.

The Culebra Cut on the Panama Canal where they blasted through the Continental Divide.

There have been some truly great moments. The Panama Canal passage was epic. It takes 8 hours to transit the 51 miles from the Caribbean to the Pacific through two sets of massive locks and across a surprisingly-scenic high-elevation artificial lake, giant cargo ships lined up the whole way, a massively impressive supply chain traffic jam.

The canal, as everyone knows, was built by President Jimmy Carter in the 1970’s for the express purpose of selling it to the Chinese for literal peanuts, a scheme to keep Carter’s brother Billy from robbing convenience stores in Georgia. (This did not work. He was shot and killed at a Majik Market in Americus in 1978.)

None of that is true. It’s also not true that the Chinese are running the Panama Canal or that Donald Trump is going to seize it back. Panamanians own and run the Canal, something of which they are duly proud. The “Greetings from Premier Li Qiang” signs on all the marker buoys are just their idea of a joke.

We were in Ecuador for Christmas, Peru on New Year’s Eve. A bunch of us took side trips to the Galapagos Islands (where no one rode a giant tortoise mostly because there were no saddles) and the legendary lost Inca city of Machu Picchu. That’s where I went. Because I’m an idiot.

I flew from Lima, where the Odyssey was docked, to Cusco, the ancient capital of the Inca Empire and now an excellent place to eat deep-fried guinea pig, drink pisco sours and buy brightly-colored ponchos and chullos, those knit caps with ear flaps often worn by itinerant hacky-sack players and Seth Rogen impersonators. (For the record, I did not eat any guinea pig, opting instead for Andean trout.)

Not Seth Rogen

Fun fact: In Peru, it’s considered good luck to wear yellow underwear on New Year’s Eve. Fortunately, the odds of me pissing myself before midnight, as is my tradition, were fairly high. 

As is Cusco, 11,150 feet to be exact, high enough that altitude sickness is a common problem for tourists who don’t take the time to acclimate, which I had definitely not. I took an unlabeled pill before bedtime and crossed my fingers that I would not spend the next day with a splitting headache, stumbling and short of breath. Which is how I’ve spent  more than a few New Year’s mornings.

We spent the day tromping around the Sacred Valley, up inclines and over cobblestones to get close-up looks at the ancient miracles of Inca architecture, the Temple of the Sun near Ollantaytambo , the ingenious circular concentric terraces at Moray, some of them 500 feet deep and 600 feet across, where the Incas dehydrated various strains of potatoes at differing altitudes, like some kind of gigantic Ronco contraption.

Fun fact 2: There are more than 4,000 varieties of Peruvian potatoes, some strains dating back more than 7,000 years. The original wild ones were poisonous but the pre-Inca agriculturist managed to breed the poison out of them. Peruvians put them in pretty much everything now, including rice dishes. One night in Cusco my appetizer was multi-colored potatoes, a purple one, a yellow one and a pink one. I couldn’t really taste the difference.

The Valley is actually a few thousand feet lower than Cusco, so the altitude effects I’d been dreading never kicked in. I didn’t even sweat that much. But the uneven ground took a nasty toll on my chronically-damaged hips. By the end of the day, every step I took felt like someone was hitting me with a sledgehammer. I was in trouble.

By the time I got off the Inca Rail train in Aguas Calientes, a short shuttle bus ride from the Machu Picchu complex, I could barely walk. In a downpour, I made it to my hotel but was already having serious doubts as to whether I’d actually be able to visit the site. The inclines were going to be steeper than the ones I’d walked that day, the steps more uneven. Also — and somehow no one had told me this — we were supposed to get on the shuttle at 6 a.m. When it would still be raining. The odds of me making it didn’t seem good.

Machu Picchu is basically Inca Disneyland. The lines of tourists wind all through Aguas Calientes and the tours are strictly controlled to minimize damage to the site. There was no way to change my booking. I’d have to tough it out.

When the leg cramps hit in the middle of the night, robbing me of whatever slim chances of sleep I might have had, I knew I was cooked. At 5 a.m., barely able to walk to the bathroom, I called the tour guide to say that I’d have to bail. No Machu Picchu for me. More like Mucho Oucho.

There really was no way I could have gotten through even the easiest circuit. I had no choice but to creep back to the train station, make my way back to Cusco, to Lima, to the Odyssey waiting at Port Callao. And think about this: How many people have gone all the way to Aguas Calientes, taken in all those less-famous Inca sites and then NOT seen Machu Picchu? Very damn few, that’s how many. Maybe I’ll get a statue.

Ok, so I didn’t make it to Machu Picchu. Or did I? (Photo illustration by Ed Poole)