"Push not off from that isle, thou canst never return!"
-- Herman Melville, Moby-Dick
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I just returned from a ten-day excursion: three of driving, seven of cruising. The Carnival Conquest, a.k.a. "The Fun Ship," took us to Montego Bay, Jamaica; the Cayman Islands; and Cazumel, Mexico. In total, we went without land for more than four days, and on the first night, the moon was full and the sky was clear.
Two highlights. Swimming with stingrays a mile off the coast of the Caymans, that's one. And two, no kidding, art auctions. I saw--touched--the works of Dali, Goya, Rembrandt, Matisse, Miro, Kinkade, Rockwell, and Picasso. My mom jokingly bid $10,000 on a Rembrandt print, and was saved by a $12,000 bid. The auctioneer was a cool Spanish cat who talks like a Brit. Also got to see Destino, a short animated film created by Salvador Dali and Walt Disney, which was nothing short of stellar. The rights are exclusive to Park West, the auction agency, and the film is only available to private collectors. I also have some giveaway prints that will quickly become the only decorations in my Cincinnati apartment.
In Jamaica we sat in the bobsled and the bobsled cafe, bled time with rastafarians drinking Red Stripe, squatted rhythmically with Marley music blasted from passing radio vans, and haggled with native shop-owners. Interesting tidbit about the Jamaican economy: the government controls it. Souvenir shops are divvied out to those with cash. It's $6,000 up front to get the shop (a three-by-three tin shed with shelves) and all the souvenirs. But the thing is, the items are all part of the same package, so every shop (and there are colonies of thirtysomething shops, all vying for tourist attention) has the same stuff, at the same regulated price. Because it's incredibly hard, given those odds, to make enough ($2,000/mo.) to keep renting the shop, intrepid sellers get the most business. They leave their shops, run tourists down, and use every tactic they've learned to make a sale--any sale. I got a $35 mohagony mask for $10 after only a minute of hemming and hawing. "No problem."
The Cayman Islands claim to be paradise. Tour guides boast an almost-zero crime rate. "Drugs are the source of crime," our driver said, "so we just don't let drugs in." Hotels offer rooms for as much as $3 million a night, and the American tourist suffers a tough exchange rate. The workforce is mostly illegal immigrants who send most of their paychecks home to Indonesia, the Philippines, and Mexico. The people are not as interesting or courteous as the Jamaicans, though they know they don't have to be. They'll get the tourists and the movie stars anyway. They hide their dredge well, planting rows of ten-foot trees to surround the enormous dumps ("The highest peak in the Caymans," said our driver) and shoving the migrants and laborers to the interior of the islands, away from the tourist-trap coasts.
So Jamaica's got the spirit, and the Caymans have the dough. What Cazumel, Mexico, has, is the shopping. A mile-long strip of stores and restaurants line the eastern coast, flaunting strong margaritas and rare jewelry. Alexandrite, a stone that changes color in sunlight, is the world's rarest stone, and tanzanite sales form a huge part of the community's economy. Buggies drawn by horses in somber sombreros and American cars jostle in never-ending lines of traffic, but fifteen minutes west lie the beaches, salty, muddy pits of sand with clusters of small eateries. The sun seemed hottest there. A slim brunette walked around topless, tanning her pale nipples, unaware (or uncaring) of the packs of children ogling her. The taxi drivers hang out between trips in little huts with plastic windows, where they joke and smoke and make fun of tourists. There are over seven hundred of them, just in this one town, and when they see the cruise liner pull into port, they leave home, slap the sign on the side of their van or car, and get in line, like dirty pearls on a necklace. (Incidentally, Cazumel also sells "flat pearls," which are exactly what they sound like.)
On sea days, I read Capote's In Cold Blood and Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio, and watched films. The ship's cable system apparently comes from Colorado, so we got regular updates on the weather in Denver and the tornadoes in Oklahoma. The film discovery of the trip, for me, was Becoming Jane, the true story of Jane Austen's love life, starring Anne Hathaway and James McAvoy. It's beautifully shot and a cunning commentary on Austen's works, showing her progression from teenage writer of family whimsy who read at parties, to a simple old maid who refused to answer to her name in public.
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A long post after a long hiatus.
2 comments:
They let you touch the art?
A lot of them, yeah. The auctioneer had his hands all over a Picasso print as he was describing it. I mean, when they say a work is "one of a kind," "limited edition" or "original," it doesn't necessarily mean it's the only one of its kind. It just means the artist used, say, thirty metal plates to make the lithograph, or twenty sheets of silk for a serigraph, and made however many copies he wanted, and then destroyed the blocks or plates. So he's got all these copies and there is no way anyone can duplicate the work.
One exception: Rembrandt. He was the first artist to use copper plates covered in wax to make etchings. He was also the master etcher. And since he couldn't know how valuable a work of art becomes if the plates are destroyed, he left all his plates to his agent. Most have survived. So no Rembrant etching is a limited edition, because at any time someone with enough money can take the plates and make more copies. Kinda cheap.
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