BECOMING GREEN - Overbooked: The Exploding Business of Travel and Tourism - page 186

um for traveling through the Panama Canal. Tolls to go through the canal can be steep.
The Disney Magic cruise liner paid $283,400 in toll fees in 2008. Our small cruise ship
was charged far less, but the toll was passed on to us in the higher expedition cost.
For the same amount of money Bill and I could have stayed in a deluxe suite aboard
the Royal Caribbean Allure of the Seas for a seven-day cruise in the Caribbean at $3,349
per person. (Instead we stayed in a room with balcony for a five-day cruise.) There is no
question that we couldn't afford this trip very often, compared to commercial cruises.
For us the Sea Lion was the bargain. There was no comparison between the experi-
ences aboard the Royal Caribbean ship, which was largely a crowded floating hotel, and
those on the Sea Lion , which actually took us on a voyage to foreign countries with the
greatest of luxuries in the twenty-first century—actual experiences in the disappearing wil-
derness. We could have stayed in an ecolodge for far less money, but then we wouldn't
have had the breadth of the seagoing experience.
There was more than a touch of luxury aboard the Sea Lion , especially at mealtime.
The dining room was no more than comfortable, an “intimate” space with old-fashioned
round tables covered in standard-issue white linens and the sound of the sea seeping
through the portholes. The décor was 1950s practical, nothing like the high-end dining
room on the Royal Caribbean ship. But the food—that was something else. Gary Jenan-
yan, the executive consulting chef for National Geographic and Lindblad Expeditions,
traveled on our cruise, supervising spicy huevos rancheros for breakfast and a light pine-
apple cream for dessert later at dinner. Whenever we landed near a local market, he sent
a crew member off to buy fresh fish, vegetable and fruits. More than a few of the meals
would have earned praise in a restaurant guide, reflecting Gary's decades-long service as
head of the Great Chefs program at the Robert Mondavi Winery and personal chef to
Mondavi. Instead, the local food earned more good marks for buying and cooking local.
We weren't assigned seats at mealtime. Instead, we mixed and eventually spoke with
most of the other passengers and found a few whose company we especially enjoyed. This
was a self-selected group of people from around the country who consciously chose a va-
cation because it was a rare trip through a wilderness. There was the tree farmer from
Moweaqua, Illinois, who saved much of his old-growth forest and sold what others con-
sidered waste lumber on the Internet, making a very nice living. Also on board was a Na-
tional Park forest ranger and her chemist husband, who chose the voyage because “ Na-
tional Geographic believes in protecting the land and leaving it as you find it.” A British
entrepreneur came on the trip to take photographs of wildlife for his professional website.
Finally, we met a nurse whose husband had just abandoned her, forcing her to sell her
home alongside a national park in North Carolina. She told me it was worth spending
$4,000 on the voyage: “I came on this trip to see paradise before I have to start my new
life.”