Whatever floats your boat

 On the asphalt of the beach road in San Sebastián there is a long diagonal scar which I try to avoid on my bike because it's deep enough for an uncomfortable jolt. It was caused by a big yellow bulldozer during a complex operation to cast and transport gigantic concrete blocks with which to lengthen the jetty on the opposite side of the bay.

They were extending the jetty in order to allow longer cruise ships to moor. Cruisers had been growing steadily longer and taller for years and this was the second extension of the jetty since we first arrived over thirty years ago.

The most astonishing aspect is that some of those longer cruise ships are short ones that have been lengthened by cutting them down the middle, heaving the two halves apart and inserting a new section. Unbelievably, the new section is constructed in advance complete with decks, cabins, windows and services, then simply slotted into place. Weld up all the joints, move in with the paint pots and in no time at all you've got a longer ship. But how can they manufacture an entirely new section of a huge ship so very precisely? How can they avoid little changes in level at the deck joints that you could trip over in your flip-flops?

By contrast, the reason it's done is very easy to understand. Longer cruise ships carry more passengers, reducing costs for the cruise company. A cruise can now be as attractively cheap as a boring old package holiday hotel in Crete, Goa or Torremolinos.

There's a downside to that, though. Some people book a cruise who really shouldn't, and it seems to be a particular hazard for the Brits. A package hotel abroad can be comfortably British in ambience, and so indeed can a cruise ship, but the snag is that the ship will dump you daily onshore where things may be disturbingly foreign. San Sebastián is as friendly a place as any you'll find but it doesn't do the Full English Breakfast or Fish 'n Chips or an Irish pub with pints of Guinness. And the bars and cafes are run not by British expats but by Spanish-speaking Gomerans or Latin Americans with minimal understanding of English. If communication hitches and cultural oddities make you nervous it might be better to stay on board the ship, sipping a rum and coke by the swimming pool.

We met a couple a few years ago who should have stayed on board. Both looked anxious and a little desperate. Recognising us as something other than Gomeran, the husband accosted us at our cafe table: 'How do you get out of this place?'

Bus, taxi, walk, hire a bike - there are lots of ways to leave San Sebastián, we told him. What exactly…

'Isn't there some nice little resort near here? Somewhere you can get a decent cup of tea?'

Santiago on the south coast you could loosely describe as a nice little resort, although with perhaps worryingly large numbers of locals wandering around, but the early bus had left long ago and the next would be an hour's wait. They could take a taxi, we told them, but that would be a half-hour trip and a fair pocketful of euros. Not sure about the cup of tea either. We watched them heading back towards the ship.

It's a sad fact that some people really shouldn't go on holiday at all. Recently another couple were safely seated at a cafe table with a colourful jug of sangría in front of the wife, hubby with a mug of beer, blue sky overhead, but both looking a little tense. I asked if they were enjoying their cruise. He wasn't, she was, apart from having a glum husband. 'I can't get him out of that chair. Won't go and look at the tower in the park, doesn't want to see the church or Columbus's house, just wants to sit here knocking back pints of lager.'

Hubby's face darkened to a deeper purple. 'I never wanted to come on a blinking cruise in the first place, it was her idea. I can't wait to get home, to be honest.'

Perhaps he'd just got traveller's tummy. Most of the cruceristas enjoy themselves in San Sebastián, it gets top marks in post-cruise surveys, and as the cruise ships grow longer and more of them arrive - several a week at peak season - the bars and cafes have learned to cope better. Nowadays any waiter or waitress will understand 'pint of lager', 'white wine', 'white coffee' or 'sangría' pronounced the English way, as well as the equivalents in German.

George from Manchester had the right attitude. He asked permission to sit at our table, as there wasn't anywhere else, and introduced himself cheerfully. 'Enjoying your cruise?' I asked him, the standard opener.

'I am, I am,' George said. 'Doing me best, anyway. I'm on me own now.' His wife had died a couple of years ago. We listened to his story, advised him where to go and what to see, treated him to his beer and eventually waved him on his way. Brave of him, I thought. But perhaps he'd meet a similarly plucky lady on board his cruise ship and start a whole new phase of life. Careful of the joints in the corridors though, we should have warned him.

-------------- NOTES --------------

Lengthening a ship is called stretching, which makes it sound easy, and in fact it's not a new technique at all but goes back to the late 19th century. At first it was done to create space in existing ships for a new type of steam engine that was more efficient but also much larger.

I touched on the topic of cruise ships in a previous story, Judgement of nations (22 June 2017), but what triggered this fuller account was a film from Uruguay about a crew member on a cruise ship who happens upon a mysterious doorway that leads to an apartment in Montevideo. Yes, I know, but it's magic realism and supposed to be symbolic. (Window boy would also like to have a submarine, directed by Alex Piperno, 2020.)

That reminded me that we are now into October and the cruise season is almost upon us. It continues throughout the winter until around Easter.

A large proportion of the passengers who come ashore will order a jug of sangría, which is properly pronounced san-GREE-a, not SAN-greeya. It comprises red wine, chopped fruit, lemonade or sparkling water and usually a spirit such as rum or brandy. The word in Spanish also means 'bloodletting', but it's probably better not to know that.

Judgement of nations

Doris and Bill are becoming anxious. 'There's nothing, Doris. We're getting nowhere.'

But Doris is shading her eyes with one hand and seems to have spotted something. 'Over there, Bill. Quick! Go and grab it!'

This is the trouble when you pour off a cruise ship along with fifteen hundred other people and, at around eleven in the morning, everyone wants a drink.

There are plenty of cafés in San Sebastián, more than enough to support the locals and a normal quota of visitors, but the cruisers are a challenge. It's like one of those Guinness Book of Records attempts, how many drunken students can you cram upside down in a Nissan Micra - there are always going to be a few stragglers left disconsolately outside.

But Bill is now sprinting towards the vacancy Doris has detected and looks set to reach it ahead of another guy galloping from the other direction. Breathless, he leans on the table to address the two people already sitting there. 'Are these other two chairs free? Mind if me and the wife...?'

Irene and Ted wave amicably - 'Sit yourselves down!' - and soon the four of them are chatting like old friends. We watch them covertly from our own table, whose spare seats have already been snatched away. Meanwhile, Arturo is happily skipping around the outdoor terraza delivering jugs of sangría and plates of ham rolls.

Arturo and his wife Marta approve of the cruise ships. Especially the British ones. It seems your typical British cruise passenger is generally inclined to linger in the town rather than haring off around the island. They enjoy just pootling about the streets, wandering around historical sites and the park, maybe venturing briefly into a museum or gallery but above all, sitting in the sunshine sipping from a sparkling glass of something cool.

'And the best thing about the British,' Arturo explained on a quieter morning, 'is that they mix, they make friends. They sit around in little groups at my tables, they buy each other drinks. They're well behaved, they drink but they don't get drunk, they're polite - always plees, thenkyu - and they spend their money here, in the town.'

This is wonderful stuff if you're accustomed to headlines about football fans throwing paving slabs at each other in Paris or Bucharest. Somebody likes our British visitors! For Arturo and Marta, they're the best!

So how about the other nationalities, how do they rate those? Arturo already has this well worked out. 'Los alemanes are okay too, the Germans. Perhaps not so good at joining up with others, getting together in little groups. And when they do they can be a bit noisier.' He does the Spanish horizontal hand-wobble that means so-so. 'But yes, generally they're fine, los alemanes. The main problem is that most of them want to see the island, they take themselves off in coaches or taxis.'

We've heard this from the taxi drivers too, who therefore much prefer German cruise ships to British. This is a little wounding - have we Brits lost all sense of adventure? Where are the fearless explorers of yesteryear? But perhaps it's more a matter of the cruise category they choose. The British cruise ships that call here mostly cater for the senior sector of the market. Walking sticks obligatory, Zimmer frames preferred. That's exaggerating of course. Well, slightly. What it boils down to is that these are the contentedly retired who just want to float around some calm seas for a week being fed, watered and entertained, with occasional stopovers to buy postcards of palm trees.

By contrast, the German cruisers typically carry a younger and sportier clientele. Some of the ships come pre-loaded with surfboards and little yachts for their customers to skim around the bay, and with knobbly-tired bikes for the even tougher ones to wind their way up the zigzag roads then whizz down again with the wind whistling through their helmets.

So that's the Brits and the Germans pigeon-holed, and these two nationalities account for the vast majority of cruise passengers. We get a sprinkling of others from Holland, France and Scandinavia for example, and occasionally a bijou high-luxury cruiser will bring in a handful of Americans, but these are too small a sample for Arturo to make a balanced judgement. (We once had a visit from that floating American city, The World, whose passengers managed to look wildly rich while clad only in jeans and summer shirts.)

Arturo is perfectly happy to judge the Russians, though. Russian in this context can be taken to include almost anyone living east of Vienna. These tend to arrive not so much on cruise ships but on ferry day trips from Tenerife, and Arturo is not so keen on them, as a species. 'They take over the place,' he complains, arms indicating swarms of beefy Russians sprawled around his café. 'They behave as though they've bought it.' This is probably because they have indeed bought an awful lot of everything everywhere, although not so far in La Gomera. Disclaimer: I'm quoting just one café proprietor's opinion here, and he's no doubt hopelessly biased and unfair.

Just out of academic interest, though - who would Arturo place at the bottom of his list of favourites?

He doesn't hesitate. 'Los españoles,' he confirms, the Spanish. 'Sin duda alguna,' without any doubt, he adds, as his wife Marta nods from behind the counter. Specifically, Arturo clarifies, 'los peninsulares,' those from the Spanish peninsular, the mainland.

Oh dear. We rather like the Spanish. What have they done wrong? 'Well, you've seen them!' Arturo says. Yes, we have.

'They push into my café like a herd of goats and yell for service across the bar, all at the same time, as though I've got twenty coffee machines.' Yes, they do.

'They complain there's too much milk in the coffee or not enough, it's too hot or it's too cold, they want extra straws for little Berto's orange juice...' They do, they do.

'They move the tables around and block up the entire terraza and expect me to fly through the air to reach them.' Oh, it's all true. No Spaniard will hesitate to move café tables around to accommodate grandma, five kids and three sets of aunts and uncles.

'And half of them come in just to use the toilets, then walk out again without buying anything.' By now Arturo is flushed with indignation.

Yes, but the point is - the point is - well, the Spanish who come here feel at home. This is their country. This is their way of life, more or less, although Canary Islanders are marginally less noisy. When you live in Madrid or Barcelona you get used to yelling.

And this Hispanic furore never lasts very long. They turn up in coachloads, take a guided walk around the town, are released to create a brief bedlam in Arturo's café or one of the others, then they all scramble back into their coach for a trip around the island. And suddenly the place seems terribly quiet.

I don't mind our Spanish visitors from the Peninsular, they're disruptive but fun. And the truth is that they leave Arturo's cash till nicely filled up, so he's not really complaining either.


Notes for the serious student
The cruise season lasts from around mid-September to the following Easter. There are several cruise ships that call in regularly with about 1500 or so passengers, and occasionally larger ones of over 3000 now that the jetty has been lengthened to accommodate them. In San Sebastián's neat little port, these give the impression that someone has towed in a six-block hotel complex from Tenerife.

Doris and Bill who feature in this story also appeared in an earlier one, The clandestine emigrants, 21 December 2016.