2009 Entry # 5: Bobbing from Bermuda to Boston…

We left windy Aruba and sailed north through the Caribbean Sea. At the time of writing (a week later), said sea is being churned by a hurricane but it was unruffled during our transit. Our next port call was Bermuda, which turned out to be something close to a paradise on earth.

Bermuda is actually a collection of islands (30-odd, I think), the main ones being arranged in a fetching half-moon configuration and connected by bridges. We docked in the old naval dockyard, once home to an outpost of the British Royal Navy but now used mostly by cruise ships and pleasure craft. The dockyard was picturesque, with a fort and surrounding buildings all constructed from limestone. (We could tell it was limestone because an old arch in the old walls was obviously letting in rain water and then releasing it in a series of leaks which were in the process of forming small stalagmites.)

Pretty as the buildings were, they were mostly derelict. The Navy had gone and, apart from somebody who’d installed a maritime museum at one end of the dockyard, only a few local shopkeepers had stepped up to take over. The boarded-up doors and windows were a surprise in a little country where ordinary-looking houses sell for millions. Maybe prospective developers were deterred by the fact that the dockyard was at the far end of Bermuda (which means about 20 miles away from the only two towns of note, Hamilton and St George).

We decided to visit both towns, avoiding the excursions offered by the cruise line and taking ourselves off on public transport, catching a local bus that wound through narrow streets and across the narrow main island. The views from the bus windows were all of leafy gulches leading down to sandy bays. There were tiny bridges over inlets (including a miniscule drawbridge) and lots of cute pastel-coloured houses. The towns themselves were like English villages transplanted to the mid-ocean. With the sun blazing down, it was a very pleasant spot. We talked to locals on the buses who agreed it was idyllic but told us that crime had been on the increase and that there was a growing drug problem. Good ol’ humanity. Find paradise and do what you can to stuff it up.

After a couple more days at sea, we entered US waters and, as dawn broke, sailed into New York harbour. The rising sun played hide-and-seek. I took photographs of it divided by the Brooklyn bridge and, a few minutes later, peeking from behind the Empire State Building. We had a whole day scheduled to explore the city. We thought. The US immigration service, of course, had other ideas. Everyone had to go through a full face-to-face passport check, as in the US airports where, of course, they only employ people with masters’ degrees in buggering up travellers’ lives. By the time we got ashore it was midday. We abandoned plans to cover all of Manhattan and confined ourselves to the area around Times Square and Central Park.

The famous Times Square was, as advertised, abuzz with people, although it was a lot smaller than I’d imagined. (Although I’d been to NYC before, I’d skipped the square for some reason.) The skyline, however, is an entertainment in itself, blazing as it does with massive neon advertisements.

Central Park was as beautiful as ever, even though the temperature by this time was close to Saharan. It seems they’d had quite poor weather until the day we arrived, when everything suddenly got brighter. We wandered under the famous park bridges and took more photos of the high-rise skyline over the trees, ate ‘chilli dogs’ and made for the John Lennon memorial at Strawberry Fields.

It wasn’t quite as good as the last time I was here, ten years ago. The memorial features park benches arranged around a mosaic circle. In 1999, the circle, the centre of which bears the single word ‘Imagine’, was full of tokens, poems and small flower arrangements, left by those who still grieved for the one-time Beatle. I sprawled on a bench, wiping sweat from my face. The other seats were occupied by a mixture of visitors and elderly denizens of the city. After a moment, one of the old men climbed to his feet and, bending creaking knees, pulled several of the flowery tokens out of the circle. As he made his way back to his seat, I heard him mutter ‘now we’ll have some fun’.

Right on cue, I heard the screeches of an approaching bag lady. She stopped in her tracks when she saw the relocated tokens by the mosaic. ‘OH MY GOD,’ she thundered. ‘I HAVE TO DO EVERYTHING AROUND HERE!’ Dropping her carrier bags, she swept the tokens back into the circle and positioned them just so before resuming her journey, the accompanying commentary loud enough to drown out the sound of traffic on Central Park West.

Another of the old men caught my eye. His voice crackled with the distinctive New York brogue. ‘You’re not from around here, are you?’

‘No,’ I told him, ‘I’m from New Zealand.’

There was the slightest hint of a smile. ‘Count yourselves lucky. We have to put up with this sorta thing all da time.’)

Nowadays, we’re told, some people still place tokens in the circle but, this time around, there were none. I felt a little cheated.

We walked back to the ship, wilting in the heat. So much for NYC.

The next day, we were in Newport, Rhode Island. Newport is where American royalty families like the Kennedys had their weekend ‘cottages’, as they called them. The ‘cottages’ are humble affairs, rarely bigger than the average English stately home and mostly crammed into gardens of only a few dozen acres. JFK married Jacqui hereabouts. We caught a local bus and did a bit of the obligatory gawking and then walked around the town of Newport, which was quaint, well-swept and full of friendly, polite people. At one time, you could only buy a place on Rhode Island if you could pass muster with the residents’ association. (Typical entrance interview: ‘How many zeroes do you have on the end of your bank balance? ‘Gosh,’ (stifling a yawn) ‘I ain’t got a clue but my accountant once told me it was more than eight.’) You expect to see the Great Gatsby stroll along the main street. (As ‘Gatsby’ is one of my favourite books, this wouldn’t have been such a bad thing…)

Leaving Newport, we fetched up (as they say hereabouts) in Boston harbour, not far from where the famous Tea Party took place. Again, we skipped the ship’s organised excursions and took ourselves into the city, where we rode around on a bus and, at the point where the road got wet, a boat. The city is home to about 6 million people but it doesn’t feel like it. Downtown has a cluster of skyscrapers but they’re in a fairly small area. They’ve nearly all been built since the sixties, prior to which the central city was low-rise. (Given which, it’s a bit of a shame they didn’t follow the lead of the great European cities like Paris and London, which remain low-rise and confine the big buildings to locations off to one side.)

That said, Boston is very pretty and in turns tidy and scruffy. The city’s glory, as in NYC, is its park land, which is known as Boston Common. It stretches over many acres and includes ponds and memorials and even a couple of early-settler graveyards. (I love graveyards: they tell such stories.) We even saw a Park Ranger on a big, stolid horse, suffering platonically as tourists took his picture and little children plucked up the courage to touch his horse’s nose.

The city is full of history, most of it concerning the American’s break with Great Britain. Those of us who feel that independence was a bad move and that the Yanks who have been better remaining as colonists (disagree? How about ‘no George Dubya?’ I rest my case…) are well outnumbered. We went to see the old sailing ship USS Constitution, aka ‘Old Ironsides’, so called because British sailors fired cannonballs at her and, seeing the shot bounce off her hard-wood sides, concluded that she was made of iron). There’s a museum next to the ship with a theatre which showed blatantly biased films about the Constitution’s battles, in all of which the British got beaten…

(Mind you, Britain was at the time ruled by George III, who once had a conversation with an oak tree under the impression it was the Spanish ambassador, so I suppose we can’t be too surprised that the Royal Navy wasn’t at its best.)

We liked Boston a lot and could happily have spent more time there. Modern ships, however, wait for no person. We sailed out and away from North America (although, two days later, we’re still just south of Newfoundland). Coming up: later today we will pass over the grave of the Titanic (we expect to see passengers at the rail taking photos of the sea); then, in 4 days time, we’ll make landfall in Ireland. More on that later.

The Atlantic crossing, as the more mathematically-gifted among you would have calculated, takes us 6 days. J is in her element as she loves every second on the sea. Me, I could do with more time on land, but still. Our main concern at present is that a substantial minority of our fellow passengers have developed rasping coughs. Those who remember our 2007 travel blog may recall ‘Funchal Flu’, which affected the whole ship. We’re considering the use of the anti-swine flu masks we brought with us from NZ and wondering if we’re prepared to go to the next evening show looking like complete wallies. (OK, OK, looking more like complete wallies than usual... Happy now?)

For now, though, it’s ‘so long, pardners’.