Brisbane to Los Angeles - Grounded: A Down to Earth Journey Around the World - page 102

erupted on board—a swarthy Latin-American beauty was put ashore at Rio, surrounded by shocked whis-
pers of prostitution.”
The Queen Elizabeth met an even crueler fate. She was neglected for a stagnant few years in Fort Laud-
erdale, got sold to a millionaire who changed her name, and was eventually destroyed by a fire in Hong
Kong Harbor. Her successor, the Queen Elizabeth 2 , is slated to become a floating hotel off the coast of
Dubai.
Captain Romeo, during our dinner with him, recalled that in the early 1970s he worked on one of the
last functional long-haul passenger liners. It served mostly to carry working-class emigrants from Italy to
new lives in Australia. The Italian families brought all their worldly possessions with them—even pieces
of furniture, which got stored in the cargo hold. Music played and streamers unfurled as the ship left the
dock, and with tears rolling down their cheeks people waved good-bye to the loved ones they were leaving
behind. It's a scene that just doesn't exist on the docks anymore. Today's poorer immigrants say good-bye
to their families at airport gates, ride in the economy sections of jumbo jets, and bring with them only as
much luggage as the airlines' draconian policies will allow.
THE South Pacific is vast and barren. There's just not much land between New Zealand and Los Angeles.
We're covering sixty-five hundred miles on this cruise—longer than the distance covered by the Trans-
Siberian railroad—and for almost all of it, we're chugging through empty ocean.
Our only real shore time comes in French Polynesia. We've stopped in Bora-Bora and Tahiti. We've also
anchored in the bay of an island named Mooréa. It is a place with emerald hills and turquoise waters so
achingly beautiful that I recommend you never look at a single photo of them unless you can commit your-
self to visit, as the sheer sight of them will make you ill with longing. I'd also add that most of the tourists
in French Polynesia are, not surprisingly, French, which equates to tastier food in the restaurants, trendier
fashions in the boutiques, and skimpier bathing suits on the beaches.
After Polynesia, the only geographic point of interest we meet up with is the equator. Our crossing is cel-
ebrated with a goofy ceremony held out by the pool deck. It's commemorated with embossed certificates
that are delivered to all the passenger cabins the moment we nose into the Northern Hemisphere. (With no
tattoo parlor on board the ship, we can't mark the occasion the way old-school sailors might have.)
We also pass through the international date line, which is a mind-bender. According to the ship's calen-
dar, we wake up on December twelfth, live through the whole day, go to sleep that night—and then wake
up on December twelfth again. This freaks me out.
It freaked out Magellan's sailors, too. They'd kept careful track of the passage of days as they circled the
earth westward. They were incredibly confused when they got back to Europe and found it was one day
later than their records suggested. The date line also threw Phileas Fogg for a loop. In Around the World in
80 Days , Fogg is convinced he's lost his bet when he gets back to London. But because he's circled east-
ward it's in fact one day earlier than he'd realized.
I couldn't wrap my head around the date line paradox for the longest time. Would I be one day older
than a twin brother who'd stayed at home, I wondered, because I've lived through the same day twice? The
key to understanding it is to remember that each time Rebecca and I have crossed a time zone moving east,
we've set our watches ahead and lost an hour. (When we've moved swiftly over ground, we've actually ex-
perienced minor train lag and ship lag.) Now we're getting each one of those twenty-four hours back—all
at once.