Westerdam – a cruise ship across the Pacific

Wednesday, 19 July 2023

▲ My 45 day Melbourne to London trip included, Sydney then Seoul and Busan in South Korea, followed by Fukuoka and Yokohama in Japan, next it was the cruise ship Westerdam for 13 days ending at Seattle on the US West Coast.

▲ The Westerdam waiting for me in Yokohama

Now I am not a cruise ship enthusiast, I’ve been on smaller ships (35 passengers) down to Antarctica, I recently made a very interesting French Polynesian cruise on the cargo-passenger vessel Aranui, I’ve crossed the Atlantic on the Queen Mary 2, but that’s a ‘crossing’ not a ‘cruise’ Atlantic Cunard enthusiasts will insist, so this was absolutely a first – a 2000 passenger Holland America cruise ship crossing the Pacific.

So why was I on board? Two reasons, one was that travelling down the Pacific Northwest Coast Inside Passage was absolutely on my bucket list. The other was that Yokohama-Seattle followed by the Amtrak train from Seattle down to San Francisco would complete a circuit of the world at surface level for me. I’d driven from San Francisco to New York in an old 1959 Cadillac. I’d crossed the Atlantic on the Queen Mary 2. I’d driven between London and Beijing in China in an old 1973 MGB sports car, I’d travelled by train between Beijing and Pyongyang in North Korea and then by bus down to the DMZ where I’d stepped across the border into South Korea. Plus I’d travelled up from Seoul to the DMZ and stepped across the border into North Korea. Then this trip had taken me down to Busan and by ferry across to Yokohama. Tag all these trips together and they stretch around the world, although not always in the same direction!

▲ Departing Japan, the Westerdam just squeezes under the Yokohama Bay Bridge with only five metres clearance

▲ Our route across the north Pacific

The first seven days of the trip were all at sea from Yokohama to Kodiak in Alaska and since there’s a seven hour time change between the two ports that meant the clocks went back an hour every day – except for the one when the clocks went back 24 hours as we crossed the dateline and started Friday 28 April all over again. Now you’d think living with days of 23 hours instead of 24 would be no problem at all, but in fact, exactly as I experienced on the Atlantic crossing a few years previously, it really throws your internal clock out of sync. I think I’d rather have the seven hour time change all in one hit and get it over with, as you do with a flight.

▲ The view outside – it was generally rough seas even though we looped further south to get away from the worst of the weather. Lots of passengers – so I was told – were suffering from seasickness on the first few days although the 285metre long, 82,500 tonne Westerdam was certainly tossed around far less than the comparatively tiny Queen Beetle high speed ferry which had zipped me from Busan to Fukuoka through very rough seas.

▲ Watching those reasonably rough seas from the comfort of the Explorer’s Lounge up at the bow

Passing the time on that seven day crossing? No trouble at all, the ship provided lots of entertainment, there were restaurants and bars, plus I had my lecture notes and PowerPoints to put together for the tourism course I would be ‘teaching’ at USI, the Università della Svizzera italiana in Lugano, Switzerland, soon after.

Would I do it again? No thanks. For a start we never got to Kushiro on Hokkaido, the only Japanese stop on our original itinerary, due to bad weather. Much worse we never travelled down the Inside Passage at the end of the trip. Holland America Line had made some fundamental route planning error and there wasn’t time to follow the original route. Then they had failed to tell the nearly 2000 passengers about the change in route until just before we boarded the ship. Half way through the cruise Captain Wouter van Hoogdalem delivered a talk in which he tried very hard to waffle around the ‘operating’ decision to scrap the Inside Passage. In fact they knew well before departure that it was not possible to do the Inside Passage and simply avoided telling the passengers. Essentially it was complete dishonesty on Holland America’s part and as a result there were a bunch of angry passengers. Including me!

But cruising in general doesn’t appeal, on board there were a lot of very well-travelled people, but the travel never stops anywhere for long and never goes more than a few km from the dock. Amazingly even that seemed to be too much for many passengers who clearly would have preferred never to leave the ship and if they did it was for the briefest time possible. When you start to muse about how many more cruises you need to do in order to qualify for free laundry you’ve clearly spent too long on cruise ships.