My views do not necessarily reflect the views of my employer.
We went to Tangalooma once. It’s somewhere in Australia and, like Princess Cays, I’m pretty sure there are people who live nearby but we were only exposed to the resort. We’d been locked down onboard for quite a while so the crew welfare offered tours at half price for crew. There were things to do all day. The Entertainment team gathered outside the crew office to pick partners and make sure we’d be going on tours together.
Our first adventure was a glass bottom double kayak. I was paired up with Georgie, one of the cast singers.
I have absolutely loved my few previous kayaking adventures, so I was excited about this one. The wind and the currents were strong that day. We paddled and paddled and paddled and we seemed to be going nowhere. Luckily we weren’t the last ones in the group.
We looked behind us and Sophie and Oscar were drifting toward the ship! One of the guides had to go rescue them. Tangalooma had some sunken ships that were put there to be a sanctuary for the fish. We paddled by them, but there was so much water in the kayak and we were paddling so furiously that the glass bottom didn’t really add much to the experience. We were trying so hard to have fun, despite the wind and the currents that were literally going against us.
Finally we reached the beach. Sophie was crying. If that had been my only kayaking experience, I probably would have vowed never to do it again too. Everyone else kept a positive attitude. They decided to have a boat pick us up and take us back to the starting place rather than have us paddle back. Was it the best experience ever? No. Did I have regrets? Nah – I was having a great time hanging out with my friends.
We took some time to recover from our morning adventure by getting some food and cocktails and then looking through the shops.
That afternoon we had signed up for an Underwater Safari! Rob thought he had done something similar before where he wore something over his head that looked like a space suit. He said it was really cool. But when we were going over the safety briefing and they showed us what we were going to use, he started whispering to us that this was very different from what he’d done. They gave us something that worked like a fan that would help us go through the water faster than using our own flippers.
This is what Rob thought it would be like:
This is more like what they gave us:
(Just kidding — it was a slightly bigger fan)
We donned our wet suits and boarded a small boat that took us back out to the ship wrecks and this time we climbed into the water. The machine that they gave us made it so I barely had to kick. There were lots of people on different tours so this was nice because I was afraid of accidentally kicking someone in the face. We got to see a lot more fish than we had in the morning. They were all different colors, and everything you would hope for a tropical vacation. We returned to the beach tired and completely satisfied with our experience.
It reminded me of some of the crew tours we had done while in Wet Dock on Grand Bahama. When they use fantastical words like Safari my imagination invents all kinds of adventures which leave me underwhelmed. It works well as a marketing tactic, but unfortunately I think I’m going to have to learn to lower my expectations. Regardless, they technically tick’ed all the boxes of promises and it was more fun than a regular day on the beach and filled me with enough sense of adventure that I was ready to go back to work for a few more days in a row.