Blame It On the Bossa Nova (or anyone, really, just not us)

Reporting from Brazil, March 13 , 2025

A note: I started to write this 3 weeks ago, right after we left Buenos Aires. But then, just as I thought it was a good time to post, circumstances started changing on almost a daily basis. They got worse, then better, then a LOT worse and then a LOT better. February, into early March, was chaos. Hence this much-delayed mess of an update. My apologies. Things do appear to have somewhat settled down. At least for now. So keep that in mind as you read. No one’s been tossed overboard. Yet. — Joe R.

I was having a lovely time on the Villa Vie Odyssey as we floated through Chilean fjords, cruised around Cape Horn and sailed slowly up the Argentinian coast. There were bright-light planets in the evening sky, Cuban cigars on the aft deck after dinner.

In Buenos Aires assorted Odysseans ate red meat, drank red wine and tangoed until dawn. Some of us found our way to a great jazz club, Bebop Club , in the oh-so-trendy Palermo neighborhood. It was jam-packed, mostly with 20 and 30-somethings, on a late Sunday night, the sort of thing that almost never happens in the U.S. It was inspiring.

Cool kids, hanging out, listening to jazz in Buenos Aires, like it’s the 50’s or something.

We were supposed to be heading towards Brazil from there — with a brief stop in Punta del Este, Uruguay — towards Santos and Rio de Janeiro and the last vestiges of Carnival. Then we’d be traveling 800 miles up the Amazon, all the way to Manaus and then back to the Atlantic. People were making plans to swim with pink dolphins, to dance shirtless sambas in the streets, to embarrass themselves in Portuguese instead of Spanish.

And then it got complicated, a cascade of near-catastrophes the likes of which we hadn’t seen since Belfast, ratcheting up the onboard tension and stressing me out to the point where even beer, my best friend, couldn’t calm me down. I had to switch to tequila. It was that bad

.The first rumbles of discontent had begun to surface a few weeks before in Ushuaia, when we were surrounded by other ships going to Antarctica, which we were not. A few Odyssey Residents found last-minute deals on those other ships and left the rest of us — envious and not in the best of moods — behind.

And then we were informed that our stop at the Falkland /Malvinas Islands — a bucket-list destination not quite as coveted as Antarctica, but still a place many sheep and/or airplane wreckage aficionados were anxious to visit — was being cancelled. The swells at Port Stanley, the Captain informed us, would be too large for our tender boats — the slightly-modified lifeboats that serve as shuttle craft when we have to anchor offshore because there is no suitable dock — to safely navigate. This is a thing that, apparently, happens quite often there. The Southern Ocean is a treacherous place.

So, yeah, a bummer, but understandable.

Residents of the Falkland/Malvinas Islands, where we didn’t go.

But on the day we’d been scheduled to stop at Port Stanley, several of us noticed that, according to the Cruisemapper app, other passenger ships were indeed anchored there and the weather stations were reporting calm seas and negligible wind. We wondered why those ships could call there but we couldn’t.

Even though I should have known better, I decided to ask that very question on Circle, the Residents-only newsgroup through which we communicate with our Villa Vie (VVR) overlords and each other. It did not go well.

The responses, some from VVR higher-ups and some from other Residents, took immediate offense at what they assumed I was insinuating — that either the Captain didn’t know what he was doing or, even worse, that he was lying about why we weren’t going to Port Stanley. I thought neither of those things.

“Seriously,” Kathy Villalba, Villa Vie’s CEO, responded at one point, “What are you trying to prove?”

Nothing. I swear. I thought it was a straightforward question, easily answered by anyone who knows more about tender boats than I do (which is pretty much everyone.) And, eventually, after much unnecessary Sturm and Drang, it was. Those other ships on Cruisemapper, it turns out, were expedition ships, smaller than Odyssey and designed to handle rougher conditions. Equipped with Zodiacs instead of tenders, they could go where we could not. Question answered. Sorry I asked.

An expedition ship Zodiac, which we do not have.

But that was not the end of it. I was informed that the Captain would like to meet with me in his office the following day. “Really,?” I thought (and may have said out loud), “We’re bringing the Captain into this?” Indeed, we were. Fuck.

I didn’t understand why my question had struck such a nerve. But clearly it had. Everyone involved seemed antsier than usual, way too easily triggered. What the hell was going on?

This is what I was pondering when the Resident Head Cheerleader — the most strident of the Founding Investors who’d appointed themselves as Odyssey’s Positivity Police, looking to silence and shame anyone who they deem Insufficiently Enthusiastic about Villa Vie — approached me in the Deck 5 hallway where I often (ok, always) sit. She’d been part of the back and forth on Circle.

“Why are you like this?” she asked.

“I don’t know, “ I said, “Why are YOU like this?”

“Because it works for me,” she said.

“Same,” I shot back.

“That can’t POSSIBLY be true,” she declared, before harumphing herself down the hallway, her nose literally up in the air, a strange combination of Palm Beach Barbie and Margaret Dumont.

Actual footage of the aforementioned conversation.

My visit with the Captain, to the disappointment of many, was uneventful. He clearly had been led to believe that I, a known moron, had been second-guessing his decisions. He went out of his way to assure me that there was no secret nefarious reason why we’d skipped Port Stanley. It was just the size of the swells that made tendering there too risky. I believed him. As I had all along. It was quite a pleasant conversation, actually. Only one “walking the plank” joke was made. And not by me.

A few days later the extra edginess in the air began to make more sense. There were consultants on board, hired by Villa Vie to give Odyssey a preliminary once-over and determine how prepared we were for upcoming inspections in Brazil and, in June, the United States, where we’d have to pass muster with both the Coast Guard and the Department of Public Health.

A Brazilian Inspector

The consultants were mostly there to identify what needed to be done before we could pass U.S. inspections, making sure we addressed ongoing problems with our wastewater systems, that food is being stored and prepared properly, that every cabin door has a peephole, things like that. What they’d discovered was that we had a lot of work to do before we could meet U.S. standards and, more alarmingly, that we might not be ready to pass inspections in Brazil.

Where we were due to be in four days.

As is their tradition, VVR went into last-minute way-too-late freakout scramble mode. We cancelled our stop in Punta del Este and our first scheduled Brazilian port, Porto Belo. Instead we’d go, slowly, from Buenos Aires to Santos, Brazil. That gave us an additional couple of days to make sure all the mayonnaise jars had lids on them and the syringes were cleaned out of all the hot tubs. Kidding. The hot tubs still aren’t working.

But there was a lot of scurrying and hammering and crew members looking anxious. Also we had five continuous days at sea, which people did not love. And, oh yeah, the air conditioning kept breaking down, the hallways flooded a couple of times and we ran out of lettuce. Not sure why. I will say that cabbage-only salad bars are not good for passenger morale.

While other people were sweating through 80-degree nights in their cabins, my AC functioned reasonably well, as did my wi-fi. We backslid some on the beer front, the Morning Light Lounge running out of drinkable IPA’s and forcing me to consume La Rubia Blond Ale instead. But, as I am a warrior, I soldiered on. We made it to Santos. The Brazilian Inspectors never showed up. The worst of it seemed to be over. It was not.

A ship that is not the Odyssey, cruising down the Amazon.

We were three days out of Buenos Aires when the announcement came. Due to a management oversight Odyssey would no longer be able to visit the Amazon. No pink dolphins. No jungle tours. No Opera House in Manaus. In other words, of the four most-anticipated stops originally included in our South American itinerary — The Galapagos, Antarctica, The Falklands/Malvinas and now The Amazon — we would be visiting a total of . . . None.

The problem? Someone in management — and Villa Vie was quick to point out that this was the fault of Columbia Cruise Services, who manages on-board operations, and absolutely NOT theirs — had failed to notice a Brazilian requirement that any ship sailing in Brazilian waters for more than 30 days was required to have at a crew comprised of at least 22.5 percent Brazilian citizens. Odyssey was scheduled to be in Brazilian waters for 40 days and the percentage of Brazilian crew members was approximately zero. Uh oh.

This monumental oversight meant we’d have to haul ass out of Brazil to avoid violating the 30-day limit. It meant tearing up the itinerary, cancelling not only the Amazon but several other Atlantic-coast ports. People were mutiny-grade pissed! This, by the way, is the point where I switched from beer to tequila.

I hadn’t seen this many angry Residents since the night in Belfast when Villa Vie said they were no longer going to reimburse us for our hotel expenses. Fueled by margaritas, I immediately went on Facebook where, using the precise legal terminology, called it “a fuck-up of major proportions.” When someone suggested that maybe I should not be complaining in public, my measured response was, “Fuck that. I’m just getting started. I’m gonna burn this motherfucker down.”

I can see in retrospect how this remark, apparently overheard by members of the Positivity Police, might have been misinterpreted by some of the more sensitive souls on board. And ,sure enough, the whispered threats commenced.. “I hear you’re going to be more actively engaged in taking VVR down,” one of the Cheerleaders messaged. “If you’re that unhappy, why don’t you get off the ship?”

What I should have said, but didn’t, was, “I would, but I can’t swim.”

You might be asking why I didn’t immediately post a special emergency edition of Unmoored at that moment. Well, for starters, I am very lazy and was full of distilled blue agave. But, more importantly, because the next day Kathy Villalba posted an unprecedented mea culpa in which she apologized for throwing Columbia under the bus and admitted that even though this particular fuck-up hadn’t been VVR’s fault, she and the company still had to take responsibility.

She even offered us a choice: If we didn’t want to skip the Amazon entirely, we could go to Santarem, about halfway to Manaus, and still get out of Brazil within the 30-day limit. But, as Residents familiar with the area quickly pointed out, the first part of the River is the least interesting stretch; wide, boring and not at all jungly. We’d be better off sticking to the coast, they said, visiting Salvador and Recife instead. We voted to do so.

She went further, acknowledging a long list of problems — the air conditioning, the wifi, the busted hot-tubs and long-delayed repairs, the ongoing plumbing problems, the communication problems and lack of responsiveness. All of it. She promised to do better and was just as specific in listing the steps they were taking to address all those issues and more.

Of course, making promises is easy. Keeping them is another matter entirely. As we move away from Brazil towards the Caribbean and, hopefully, Mexico and the U.S., we’ll see how many of those promises pan out.

I really, truly hope they do. And if they don’t? I know where they keep the tequila.