Day 16: Reykjavik

Day 16 — Reykjavik. We arrived half an hour late into Reykjavik, after an unforgettable night with Storm Floris, which meant every guided tour had to be pushed back by half an hour. Which got me thinking.

I'm a sailor on sailboats — I leave when the weather lets me, arrive when I can, where I can, and I'm ready to change my plans at any moment out on the water, as the wind and waves dictate. I use them, I stand up to them when I have to, but in the end, they have the last word. And stubbornly insisting on holding a certain course, or a certain pace, or a certain destination, or arriving at a promised time — that's a recipe for disaster in my world. If that's your attitude, then maybe a motorboat suits you better than a sailboat.

In the cruise ship world, though, half an hour late means you have to tell every passenger they need to add 30 minutes to the carefully printed schedule delivered to their cabins the night before. (Because of course they've got a small print shop on board too, alongside the bakery, the carpentry shop, the tailor shop, the metal shop, and so on…) What time to show up in such-and-such theater to disembark by group. Then the bus drivers and the guides. Then, eventually, the museums or other tourist attractions waiting for your tourists. And so on, and so on. Then the harbor master, the pilot, the tugboats, and the dock workers handling the mooring lines that secure the ship — people you need both arriving and departing, because you can't just take off on your own with a ship like this whenever the mood strikes you. A whole orchestra of contributors from a handful of different companies has to be conducted, all working in harmony, so that Horst and Gertrud get a trip worthy of the price they paid out of their hard-earned pension.

A completely different world. And the guided tours are so popular there was no room left for us on the bus anyway — not that we wanted one, but even if we had, they'd already sold out weeks before the cruise even started. So we did what we always do: rented a red car from a company called Blue Car (surprise! 🙂) and did our own tour of the most important sights around Reykjavik: tectonic plates, a geyser, a waterfall, the lava fields, and that was it, the day was already gone.

Last day. Last stop. From here we still have three days at sea before we're back where we started: Bremerhaven. Three days that have already passed by the time I'm writing this, because we arrive tomorrow morning. Three days in which I barely took any photos, slept a lot, sorted through photos, shot a few video impressions on board that I'll post in the coming days, made plans for future cruises, and thought about how similar a cruise ship is to our own planet.

In fact, all of humanity is on a cruise right this moment — a cruise through outer space. But humanity's ship is in chaos, its crew divided, we've never had a captain, the officers are fighting each other, and the deckhands take the side of whoever seems strongest, or whoever best matches the stories and ideologies already in their heads, hoping things will turn out better for them.

When you draw the curtains in your cabin and turn on the TV, it's incredibly easy to forget where you are. You watch the news, or a movie, or a show, or even go to the cinema, because of course there's a cinema on board too… and you feel safe! You get used to the ship's motion until you forget about it entirely, same with the engine noise.

Then you open the balcony door, or step out on deck, and the wind and the roar of waves several meters high yank you out of the dream you were living, like Neo in the Matrix, and drag you brutally back into actual reality: you're in the middle of the North Atlantic, the water beneath you is 3,000 meters deep, and you know from the History Channel, and from Tom Hanks and Tom Cruise and Tom Hardy movies, that the seafloor you're floating over in absolute comfort is scattered with the wrecks of ships, planes, and submarines, and the bones of so many fellow humans who lost their lives so that you could now sip a Virgin Colada, legs crossed, eyes and thoughts drifting along with the waves.

How horrific that moment must have been — torn away from their loved ones and thrown into the ocean's cold water by some submarine captain living to prove his loyalty to a leader whose ideas are, today, a laughingstock to the world and to history. So much suffering! Such short-sightedness!

I think, out of that need to feel safe — even if it's a trick, a false sense of security — some people on board would do just about anything else: watch a movie, go to a show, play cards in the game room, occupy their minds with the restaurant menu and the entertainment schedule, rather than look out at the ocean. Anything, to escape reality. "Ugh, I don't want to look at the ocean, it's terrifying."

Watching the black ocean from the ship's deck in the dead of night is like watching the universe from the deck of the planet. It's fine to be preoccupied with everyday trivialities like the dinner menu, or the entertainment schedule, or who you'll chat with at breakfast tomorrow, or how to snag a good table — in the sun, in the shade, by the window, whatever you prefer.

But too many of us do that, and only that, nonstop, forgetting to ever step out on deck and glance at the ocean once in a while. If we did that more often, it would be a lot easier to put into proper perspective the trivial nonsense we fight each other over like fools, every single day.