2 days ago
10
When the idea came up for a 17-day cruise from Barcelona to Miami aboard Explora I, I hesitated. In this fretful age of overnight flights and hurried connections, the very notion felt faintly absurd, like choosing to cross a continent by mule when perfectly serviceable aeroplanes depart hourly.
And yet.
Coincidentally, I was reading Katherine Anne Porter’s Ship of Fools – the blockbuster 1962 novel of a 1931 trans-Atlantic crossing from Mexico to Germany – and found myself wondering what it would be like to trace that same route, to surrender to the ocean’s unhurried rhythms rather than fight them the way one would on an A380.
The Explora I cruising along the Caribbean. (Photo: Explora I)
The Terrace Suite. (Photo: Explora I)
Just 607 of us boarded Explora I in Barcelona, outnumbered by 650 crew from 43 countries. The ship felt vast and sprawling, its all-ocean fronting suites dressed in dark woods, heated bathroom floors, and endless deck space creating the impression of a floating five-star resort that happened to be crossing an ocean.
The first day had that first-day-of-school quality: passengers unpacking whilst eyeing one another’s suite categories, booking spa treatments and meeting new people. One lady from South Carolina immediately confided she always did her laundry at 2am to avoid the pitched battles for the two washers and dryers on decks 9 and 10. “Even millionaires hate paying for laundry,” she observed, proudly owning her fiscal prudence.
The first two days were at sea, the ship finding her rhythm. We found ours too – sweating out jetlag in the steam room, scouting bridge partners, mapping the 13 bars and lounges, and seven restaurants like explorers charting new territory.
The Astern Lounge. (Photo: Explora I)
On the third day, Cadiz loomed out of a bank of bruised clouds, sprawling white buildings against the Spanish coast, with a ruined Roman amphitheatre still defiant after two millennia against the graceful neoclassical Baroque cathedral. Rain fell in sporadic curtains.
A richly decorated altar in one of Cadiz’s historic churches. (Photo: Daven Wu)
Old-school charm at a neighbourhood bar in Cadiz, Spain. (Photo: Daven Wu)
Another sea day, and then Funchal on day five, climbing Madeira’s volcanic flanks in layered terraces, its shuttered houses with doors painted with lurid murals, and gardens rioting with sub-tropical blooms of bougainvillea. The port’s Friday market, Mercado Dos Lavradores hummed with locals scouting cut flowers, mangoes and gleaming fish. A cable car carried us up to the Church of Our Lady of Monte, where Charles, the last Emperor of Austria and King of Hungary, sleeps far from Vienna. Looking up, thick clouds hid the mountain peaks, though occasionally sun broke through, spilling light over the slopes and down to the sea like a benediction.
A view over Funchal, where terraced neighbourhoods climb Madeira’s volcanic slopes. (Photo: Daven Wu)
After that – nothing. Six unbroken days of Atlantic, stretching all the way to the horizon and our restless imaginations.
On a voyage with this many sea days in a row, time aboard ship, I discovered, has the quality of a sojourn with Homer’s lotus-eaters. It slips by unmeasured. Three days, four days slide like water under the hull. I’d wake most mornings for yoga on the aft deck, though “wake” suggests more intention than I possessed. Really, I’d simply find myself there, half-conscious, while the instructor murmured something about setting intentions and the horizon bled from charcoal to apricot.
One day, we crossed the Tropic of Cancer and sailed officially into tropical waters. And heat. Explora I’s four pools – the wake-edge infinity of the Astern, the sun-lit Conservatory with its retractable glass roof, the adults-only Helios, the hidden Atoll – claimed their brigades of determined sun-seekers.
The Journeys Lounge. (Photo: Explora I)
The ship kept us entertained, if we wanted entertaining. Leo Rossi, the legendary tour manager who’d shepherded Fleetwood Mac and others through decades of chaos and triumph, gave daily talks in the Journeys Lounge about what it was really like on the road with rock royalty. The stories were riveting – Stevie Nicks and her incomparable energy, Prince’s musical genius, the Beach Boys led by the musical savant that was Brian Wilson, Bette Midler's exacting standards.
Afternoons drifted past in watercolour classes where we made hopeless attempts to capture the precise blue of the Atlantic, or in the Astern Lounge learning rudimentary French from a patient instructor, though most of us were there for the light slanting in the windows across polished wood. A choir of passengers rehearsed I Dreamed a Dream for an evening concert in the vast Lobby Bar. There were pickleball tournaments, wine tastings by the glass, lectures on our upcoming ports, sound baths where singing bowls sent notes shimmering through darkened rooms.
Marble & Co. (Photo: Explora I)
Sakura. (Photo: Explora I)
The ship offered eight dining options. While no reservations were needed at Fil Rouge, or the Med Yacht Club, the hot tables were Marble & Co and Sakura, the latter’s lunchtime bento boxes still clinging to memory. Sunday brunch in the vast Emporium with its 18 cooking stations, became a weekly bacchanal: eggs Benedict, smoked fish, iced mountains of oysters and lobster, fresh donuts, tacos, home-made pasta made to order. Resistance was futile.
When the sun emerged, everyone flocked to the decks and slowly turned various shades of mahogany. Evenings dissolved into live music across 13 bars and lounges, including one devoted to cigars, and another to malt whiskey. The Gelateria served house-made scoops at all hours. Four watch boutiques – Piaget, Rolex, Panerai, Cartier – gleamed in a row, their windows full of expensive Swiss complications.
Galleria d’Arte. (Photo: Explora I)
One afternoon, I spent 20 minutes studying a Piaget, wondering if one could really measure time that moved this slowly. Every so often, I drifted through the ship’s art gallery where everything was for sale. A Damien Hirst print of For the Love of God carried a price tag of US$21,775 (S$28,218), a Tracey Emin of Me - May 2019 for US$15,695. There was even a 1969 Hockney of Catherina Dorothea Viehmann. The sales lady, sensing our hesitation, said archly, “Where there's a will, there's a wall.”
When land finally reappeared on day 12, it felt like an interruption.
An old church and grounds in St John’s, Antigua. (Photo: Daven Wu)
Inside a timber-lined church in St John’s, Antigua. (Photo: Daven Wu)
St John’s in Antigua, with its butter-coloured cathedral and old sugar plantations felt haunted with colonial ghosts. The next day, at Tortola’s New Town, we ventured to The Baths for their extraordinary tumble of giant granite boulders forming grottos and pools shimmering with absurdly turquoise water.
Colourful colonial facades on a cobblestoned street in Old San Juan, Puerto Rico. (Photo: Daven Wu)
In Old San Juan, we wandered the sun-warmed plazas and lunched at La Mallorquina – Puerto Rico’s oldest restaurant, founded in 1848 – on shrimp mofongo in a high-ceilinged room where Orson Welles once dined, and later Ricky Martin. We visited Juan Ponce de Leon’s tomb in the cathedral, then his dilapidated mansion, the Casa Blanca, its garden overgrown with vines and its pool cracked – a forlorn monument to the man who’d sailed to Florida searching for the fountain of youth and died of a poisoned arrow somewhere in the swamps. A kind stranger bought us a tray of crisp churros when the shop wouldn’t take cash or Amex. Such unexpected grace in a city founded by conquistadors – the kind of small human connection that ocean crossings seem to encourage.
A sunny afternoon on Miami Beach. (Photo: Daven Wu)
And then, two final sea days carried us towards Miami. This route, I learned, retraced the paths Columbus had taken to the New World. We were following memories across the water, as Porter’s passengers had 90 years ago – just as every ocean crossing carries its cargo of history and human dramas.
Miami’s glass towers reared like steel stalagmites on day 17, signalling the return of ordinary life. We disembarked reluctantly, legs still swaying to phantom swells, already wondering which of the other five ships in Explora's growing fleet might carry us just as slowly to somewhere else entirely.
The Explora I next sails from Barcelona to Miami on Nov 1, 2026. Prices start from CHF6,370 (US$8,013; S$10, 350) per person.
