Nudist Cruise Read online

  I can see why a nudist charter cruise would not have the largest ship. It is probably difficult to sell 2,000 tickets. I can’t say for sure, but it did not seem like there were that many people on board. Then again, the ship was big enough that it never felt crowded no matter how full it was.

  Getting on the ship was like checking in at an airport and hotel at the same time. They had separate lines for the special elite club members. Those were the millionaires and frequent flyer members, or frequent sailor members. Whatever they call it. Those lines moved quickly.

  The rest of us, the regular working class slobs, had to wait in longer lines. This was the only time during the cruise that I did not feel like a five star passenger. The people who work for the cruise line were polite and friendly. They did nothing wrong. Our lines merely took longer because there were more people in them, and it was not even close to the full 2,000. Some people were already on board. I’m sure more than a few people boarded at the last possible minute. This was just whoever happened to be checking in at the same time as me.

  There was a place to check in large luggage. I thought that was strange. If you are already at the ship, why not just take your bags the rest of the way with you? I don’t know if it was a security thing or for convenience since most of us had a pretty long walk from the check in area to the cabins. Dragging along a big suitcase would be a pain. I only had a carry-on, so none of that mattered to me.

  When I finally made it to the front of the line, the woman behind the counter asked me if I was alone. At first I wondered why she was asking me.

  “Do you have to be a couple to go on a nude cruise?” I thought. It did seem like all the other people in line were couples. “Don’t single people like to get naked on boats?”

  “No,” I told her instead. “My boyfriend is working on the ship.”

  “Really?” She seemed surprised.

  “He got you to visit him while a bunch of nudists are on board,” I imagined her thinking to herself. “What kind of freak is he?”

  “What does he do?” she actually asked.

  “He’s one of the entertainers,” I answered.

  “Oh, wonderful,” she said.

  She gave me an access card, like what you get at hotels. The card was the key to the room, boarding pass for all of the stops and credit card for shopping and extras. Since they did not take cash or real credit cards on board, the access card acted like a credit card for anything that was not already included in the ticket price. It’s a pretty convenient system, really.

  Then she gave me a map. When you check into hotels and they give you a map, it is usually for the main tourist attractions of that city. It usually shows where all the restaurants that paid to be on the map are located. This was a map of the ship. The ship was so big that they had to give people maps. There were also maps in the cabin hallways and a few directories throughout the ship.

  The map came in handy several times. The first time was finding my cabin. Getting to my floor, or deck, was easy. The ship had plenty of elevators. Once I was on my floor, there were signs telling you which room numbers were in which direction. It was just like any big hotel. What they did not tell you was that inside cabins were odd numbers and outside cabins were even. That would have been nice to know since I knew I had an outside cabin. There were also no rooms that ended in the number 4.

  “Yeah, why is that?” Liam asked when I pointed it out to him later on.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe because 4 is unlucky in Chinese and this ship makes a few stops in China. It’s like some buildings that don’t have a 13th floor.”

  “But the ship has a fourth deck,” Liam pointed out. “That’s where the medical center is.”

  “I guess if you’re superstitious then you don’t want to get sick on this ship,” I decided.

  The number 4 is unlucky in Chinese because the Chinese word for four sounds just like the Chinese word for death. The fourth deck is probably not the best place to put the ship’s hospital.

  The deck I was on had nothing but cabins. All the other decks had other things. Most of the decks did not have any cabins at all. I was surprised by how little of the ship was taken up with cabins. Most of the ship was devoted to food and entertainment. I guess most people spend very little time in their cabins anyway.

  The deck above me had cabins and the children’s pool and child care area. The deck below me had just a few cabins, but mostly restaurants and shopping. That was also where the lifeboats were. So if the ship sank, I would only have to go down one floor. It never sank, though, and it was never anything I worried about.

  It turned out we did not actually have a suite. Sebastian said it would be a suite.

  “There weren’t any of the cheapest cabins left,” he said earlier. “So I had to book you guys a suite.”

  It was what they call an “ocean view stateroom with balcony” instead. It was not as big as a suite, but it was still very nice. It was big enough for Liam and me, and it had a balcony. A balcony is a very good thing when your hotel is a giant boat and the scenery constantly changes. You could spend the entire cruise just sitting on your balcony and watching the view change. Of course, we did a few other things as well.

  We were not planning on spending a lot of time inside the room aside from sleeping and reacquainting ourselves with each other’s bodies. He was there to work and I was there to enjoy the ship and eat something besides the usual Chinese food. On a ship like this, there was simply too much to do. Hanging out in your cabin all day would be crazy, even with a balcony.

  I was going to unpack, but then I had no idea how much stuff Liam would have. I knew he was staying wherever the people who work on the ship stay, but now that I was there with a paid room, he could come and stay with me. The room was not very big. It was small by most hotel standards, but average by Chinese standards. It was a cruise ship cabin, after all. I did not want to take up all the space with my stuff and not leave him any room.

  I unpacked everything I brought for the bathroom, though. That bathroom was coffin small, and Liam takes up just as much space as I do. He has more bathroom products than I would expect for a guy.

  I also had no idea how to find Liam once I was on board. I did not know where his room was and I was not allowed to go to that part of the ship anyway. We decided ahead of time that he should just find me.

  “So once I’m in Shanghai, how do I find you?” I asked.

  “I’ll already be on the ship,” he said. “I can try to meet you before you get on the ship, but I don’t know if I’ll be able to.”

  “You’d have to know exactly when I get there,” I pointed out.

  “I can check your flight on Sunday,” he suggested. “To see if it’s on time.”

  “Ok,” I said. “But how long does it take to get from the airport to the ship?”

  “I don’t know,” he answered.

  Neither of us had any idea how long it would take to get from the airport to the ship. We had never been to Shanghai, let alone taken a cruise from Shanghai, and we did not know where anything was.

  “How long will it take to get through immigration in Shanghai?” I asked Liam.

  “I don’t know,” he answered.

  “Wouldn’t it be easier for me to look for you since you’ll already be there?” I asked.

  It would not. It was a very large ship and there was no way I could have possibly known where he was at any given time.

  “Why don’t we meet at a specific place at a specific time?” he suggested.

  “Ok,” I said. “But at what time? What if I’m not there early enough? What if I’m still at the airport or still on the way to the port?”

  “How about you just go to the cabin when you check in,” he suggested. “And I’ll try to figure out where you are and just come to you.”

  Sebastian said that Liam would know when all the passengers were on board and that it would not be hard to find my cabin.

  “It’s easy enough to find
out what cabin she’s in,” Sebastian had already told Liam. “Just ask Helena at reception. She knows where all the passengers are.”

  I was not sure when Liam would find me, but I knew that people like to go out on deck when the ship leaves the port for the first time. It’s a tradition. Considering the great views of Shanghai, I also wanted to do that.

  After I staked my claim in the bathroom, I still had about two hours before the ship was schedule to leave, so I left the cabin and looked around the ship. I did not think Liam would come to the cabin at this point because he had no way of knowing exactly when I checked in. I assumed he would come to the cabin after the ship left the port, since I would definitely be on board at that point.

  I was wrong about that. Liam went to the cabin after I left. It turned out he knew which cabin I would be in before I did. Helena told him my room number before the ship even reached Shanghai, and he went there twice before the ship left the port. The first time was before I was even on the ship and the second time was when I was wandering around.

  I had not eaten anything since breakfast, so I went to one of the restaurants. Most of my morning and afternoon was spent at airports, going to airports, leaving airports and on a plane. I don’t like airplane food. I will eat it if it’s a long flight and I don’t have a lot of other options, but this time I knew that I was going to a cruise ship filled with free food, or at least food that was already paid for.

  The ship had eight restaurants and a few other places to get snacks and drinks. There were two Chinese restaurants that I knew Liam would never want to go to. We live in China, so Chinese food is not a rare delicacy to us. It’s great to be surrounded by so much Chinese food when you first move to China, but after a month you start to look around for something else. After two years, you look around for anything else.

  There was an Italian restaurant that I knew I would probably go to every day. I love Italian food. We went to Rome in 2011 and I ate like a celebrity chef that just got out of prison. Serious daily exercise was the only thing that stopped me from getting the waistline of a celebrity chef. People complain about Rome because it has a lot of tourist restaurants that are not authentic Italian food, which is true, but it also has a lot of real Italian food if you just look around a little. Rome is full of Italians and they all have to eat. When in Rome, eat as the Romans eat.

  The ship also had an Indian buffet and a Japanese restaurant. I knew I wanted to try both of those, but I did not know if Liam would like either. I don’t know much about Indian food except that there is a place in Hong Kong that has great roti. I don’t know what they do to make it so good.

  There is a lot of Japanese food in Hong Kong. Most of it is sushi and fast food. I have never been to Japan, so I don’t know how authentic it is, but I suspect that if I ever go to Japan I will be pleasantly surprised by how much better real Japanese food is compared to the Hong Kong version.

  There was an ice cream bar on the pool deck that sounded good and a snack bar on the very top deck, but I wanted more of a supper than a snack. I went to the Mediterranean buffet because I didn’t know if Liam would want to get dinner later and a buffet is a good place to get more than a snack but less than a full sit down meal. I also thought it was interesting to eat Mediterranean food while living in Hong Kong and sailing out of Shanghai on the way to Bangkok. The food was more international than strictly Mediterranean and that fit in with my international setting anyway.

  Since the ship was still in port, everyone still had their clothes on. I was grateful for that. I was still not comfortable with the idea that everyone was going to get naked pretty soon and I still did not like the idea of restaurants full of naked people. Being naked in the swimming pool and on the deck is one thing, but a bunch of naked bodies around food has to be some kind of health code violation. I was still not sure how I was going to deal with that.

  After I ate, I walked around the ship. There were people in the swimming pool, but since we were still in port, they had to wear bathing suits. At first, I thought it was funny that nudists brought bathing suits with them on a nudist cruise, but then it occurred to me that they were going to all the same places I was going. They needed bathing suits if they wanted to go to any of the beaches in China, Vietnam or Thailand.

  They may have been nudists, but they had to wear clothes every time they left the ship. Even on the ship, they could only be naked when it was at sea. The ship spent a lot of time docked at each port. Even if you were a nudist, you could not be naked on this cruise twenty four hours a day, seven days a week.

  That was the first time I started to look at things from their point of view. I suppose if I was a nudist and I paid a few thousand dollars to take a nude cruise, I would want to be naked as much as possible. I would not enjoy putting on clothes every time the ship docked somewhere. Even something as simple as swimming has a lot of rules. You can’t see the pool from the pier. It could be full of naked people, but no one on land would ever know. But since it is outdoors, you have to wear clothes while the ship is docked.

  There were people sunbathing on the pool deck, but they could not do it naked either. That must be terrible for a nudist. That would be like if I could only dance in my bathroom. I need more space than that. Sunbathing with clothes on has to be the last thing a nudist wants to do. This was a beautiful day. The ship was just sitting there. Not everyone was on board, so it was not even close to crowded. It was the perfect time to lounge around in the sun. Yet they could not do it naked. It was almost sad.

  I did not want to be sad, so I went down to the children’s pool. Children are always happy around a swimming pool whether they have to wear clothes or not. I also felt like this was the best time to go to the children’s pool. Watching children swim and play is one thing. Watching children swim and play naked seemed kind of creepy to me. Since we were still in port, I knew they would still have clothes on.

  I don’t know what the rules are with children in a nudist environment, but I knew that any child on this cruise would have to be with a parent or two. Children can’t go on cruises by themselves. Parents today are so overprotective that I didn’t think any children on this cruise would be in any danger. Today’s parents watch their children like hawks. If there is a child around, you know a parent is very close by, no matter what they are wearing, or not wearing.

  The group that organized all of this was also very serious about the no photography rule, so there was little danger of people taking pictures of any children. Anyone caught taking pictures of anybody could be kicked off the ship.

  I still was not comfortable with the idea of a bunch of naked children running around, but at least I convinced myself that they would be safe.

  Not that any of that mattered right now. The children’s pool was completely deserted when I went there. The adult pool was not crowded, but there were more than a few people. The restaurant where I ate was about a third full. I saw some people pretty much everywhere I went, except at the children’s pool.

  The more I thought about it, the more I realized that I had not seen any children anywhere on the ship. I did not see any children when I ate or while I walked around on deck. I did not see any when I checked in, and there were a lot of people there.

  Was this cruise only for adults? That would mean I would not have to worry about being uncomfortable with a bunch of naked children around, but that would also mean that this was an adults only cruise. That just brought me back to my fears of a giant wild orgy cruise. A bunch of naked adults on a cruise is an invitation to trouble. At least with children around, most people would control their animal urges.

  I did not like this sudden turn of events in the least. I did not want there to be any naked children, but I did not want there to be only naked adults. I was not sure which option would make me more uncomfortable.

  I was unsure where to find the answers. You are supposed to go to the reception desk if you have any questions or problems, but they were busy with people checking in. I had no i
dea how to find Liam, and I didn’t know if he would know what was going on. I did not have Sebastian’s phone number. He was always more Liam’s friend than mine, and he was going to a funeral anyway. Bothering him was the last thing I wanted to do.

  I really did not want to be on an orgy cruise, but the only thing I could do about it was leave the ship. I knew that would be stupid. The cruise ship was already paid. All the airlines to get back and forth were already paid. The hotel in Bangkok was already paid. It was supposed to be a very nice hotel. If I left the ship, I would have to get a flight back to Hong Kong, and that would cost more money. I was also supposed to meet Liam on the ship.

  If I left the ship and it turned out not to be an orgy cruise, I would just be a total idiot. If I stayed and it was an orgy cruise, I could always stay in my cabin. That may not be the best way to spend a cruise, but it did have that nice balcony. There were no orgies there.

  Then there are meals. If it is an orgy cruise, are people going at it in the restaurants? I don’t want to see that while I’m eating. I did not like the idea of people being naked during meals. Having sex on the tables has to be a far greater health code violation.

  That e-mail from Sebastian clearly stated that this was not going to be an orgy cruise. It was very clear that anyone having sex in public would be kicked off the ship. But how much could I trust an e-mail? It was written by some nudist group I have never heard of. They could be the most respected nudist group in the world and I would never know. Or they could be some guy working out of his mother’s basement. How would I know?

  A million different thoughts were racing in my mind and I was probably working my way toward a panic when I saw a man and woman walking hand in hand with two children.

  I felt more than relieved. This could not be an orgy cruise if these children were on board. Maybe in some sick and twisted world, but my mind does not go there. These looked like normal parents who would never think about bringing their children to an orgy cruise. This father would probably tear apart anyone who even tried to touch his children, I decided.