Somehow, in the middle of a stressful week geopolitically, I found myself sailing around Iceland on a luxury cruise, pretending I haven’t got a care in the world. Which I guess is what cruises — or most vacations for that matter — are for. But it was still a bit disconcerting.

Anyone who’s been reading this for a while will know I’m at best ambivalent about cruises. I end up on them an awful lot for all that.¹ The immediate question is practical: in the middle of a global pandemic, how safe could it actually be?

The answer, it turns out, appears to be pretty safe if the cruise operator wants it to be. I booked a cruise with my father on Viking and, in addition to requiring vaccinations for all guests and crew, masks are mandatory everywhere on the ship unless you’re eating or swimming.² Buffets are no longer self-serve. You get a personal tracker so they can do immediate contact tracing on board. Furniture has been rearranged to distance people. You take daily health questionnaires and daily temperature checks and spit in a vial every morning for daily PCR tests, and if any of those comes back funny you’re required to isolate in your room until the staff can send someone to check on you.³

So all in all, this has felt worlds safer than, say, wandering around the streets of London did. I know everyone on board is vaccinated, I know everyone’s being monitored and tested rigorously,⁴ and I guess I’m comfortable with those trade-offs. And whether any guests that had a problem with it self-selected out⁵ or they’ve all accepted the inevitable, there’s been incredibly high compliance with all the requirements as far as I can tell.

Of course, the problem with pandemics is they’ve evolved to get around our precautions, no matter how sensible. One person tested positive on Thursday, resulting in a handful of people having to quarantine in their cabins. And again on Friday, someone tested positive and in this case I was one of the “close contacts” of the identified case,⁶ so I spent the afternoon and evening of the last day of the cruise in quarantine. This was annoying and a little boring, but the sad truth is the room was far nicer than most of the hotels I endured lockdown in and the room service was significantly better. And we had already skipped the last stop because of rough weather, so I don’t feel like I missed all that much.

I can’t fault Viking for the last day; you’re pushing things by traveling at all during a pandemic, and cruises don’t have the best reputations when it comes to infectious diseases.⁷ And I really do like Viking cruises overall. They specialize in small ships⁸ and there’s an emphasis of getting off the boat and participating in the local culture and sights. To this end they deliberately tone down the number of attractions on the ships: instead of elaborate stage shows there’s lectures by resident historians or naturalists, and the live music is largely confined to classical pianists or string duets or guitarists covering folk-rock songs.⁹

That’s not to say you can’t spend your time lounging by the pool or having a drink from one of the dozen or so bars on the ship. And there’s the requisite buffets and three restaurants; the food is all on par with what you’d find at a higher-quality restaurant in New York or London, and all included in the price.¹⁰ But Viking seems to have the philosophy that the world outside is more interesting than the world on board. You’re encouraged to treat the boat like a fancy hotel with a nice restaurant. It’s a place to sleep or unwind or maybe take a spa day, but you should really be outside exploring more often than not.

The itineraries are designed with that in mind. There’s a lot fewer “sea days” than many of the cruises I’ve been on¹¹ and they target less frequented ports.¹² And the shore excursions emphasize natural wonders and cultural treasures over tourist traps or pub crawls. Which is all to say this was probably about as nice a cruise as I’ve been on, with top notch service and attention to detail and a focus on the things I’m most interested in. And I enjoyed myself. I really did. And yet …

I saw a lot in Iceland, from lava fields to fjords to waterfalls,¹³ from fishing villages to cathedrals to landscapes packed with hidden people. I bathed in geothermal baths and hiked along the path of a retreating glacier. I also descended into the inner chamber of an extinct volcano and attended a school to learn about elves.

The last two were my favorite parts. They were also not part of the cruise — I did them both in the couple days I was staying later in Reykjavík. There’s no reason the cruise couldn’t have included them — I know they curtailed a number of shore excursions during the pandemic because they didn’t feel they could control the environment sufficiently — but that’s missing the bigger point.

What you lose on a cruise, more than immersion in a culture or interactions with locals, is choice. You get an itinerary handed to you. There’s no moving on to the next town over if you’re bored or staying late to listen to an unexpectedly great musician in a pub or booking an extra day if the sea was too stormy to go out the day you arrived. It can be liberating if you don’t want to make choices — I’ve had weeks where I just wanted someone else to make all the decisions for me — but most of the time I’m too opinionated to be comfortable giving up all that control.

When we arrived in Seyðisfjörður, there was a ferry from the Faroe Islands in the harbor, about as big as our ship was. I had this mad inclination to run over and book a ticket. I thought I could maybe see what the Faroe Islands were like, just for a day, just long enough to grab lunch in a cafe by the dock before hopping another ferry back to Iceland and continuing on. I wasn’t serious¹⁴ but I did want it, desperately, in that moment.

But that’s the curse of wanderlust for you. I really did enjoy myself on the cruise, and can unreservedly recommend Viking if that’s the experience you’re looking for.¹⁵ As nice as it was, I’m still not convinced it’s the experience I’m looking for.¹⁶

I’m perfectly comfortable, three years in on this trip, in plotting a route and renting a car and booking hotels and restaurants and connections across the face of a country. Having just come out of six months of lockdown in June I’m not having difficulty finding places I want to see. Instead, I worry I’m running out of time. And I’m not prepared to let other people make all those decisions for me.

Next: Cluj-Napoca (CLJ) to Vienna (VIE)
Prev: Copenhagen (CPH) to Reykjavík (KEF)

Footnotes

¹ If roughly once every other year is “an awful lot.” There were some people on the boat who go on three or six or even a dozen cruises a year. Or did, I guess, until 2020 hit.

² Swimming, along with hot tubs and saunas, doesn’t appear to carry much risk for spreading COVID-19.

³ My father, who doesn’t get up and down stairs all that easily anymore, for some reason decided the “Do you have any shortness of breath?” question was asking in general and said “Yes.” We subsequently had to wait to get cleared before we could exit our cabin the first day.

⁴ Among other restrictions they’re preventing guests from wandering around the ports unsupervised. Which is a bummer, but I see their point. And to their credit, Viking always includes a free shore excursion so you aren’t forced to pay them any money to go and do something off the ship.

⁵ Several other cruise lines have announced they aren’t going to mandate vaccines, so I guess you can select your plague ship of choice if you’re into that.

⁶ It seems to have been one of the passengers on the bus tour we took of the countryside around Djúpivogur, in which case all I know is that the “close contact” involved being vaguely in the vicinity of someone positive but asymptomatic while we were both vaccinated and masked. I certainly didn’t talk to anybody.

⁷ Largely unfairly, I think — disease outbreaks are a problem anywhere people gather, whether that’s a restaurant or an amusement park or a cruise ship. As usual, the crappy ones with lousy sanitation make the rest of the lot look bad. But flu outbreaks at ski resorts aren’t going to make the news.

⁸ Although it’s a sign of the general insanity in cruises that “small” in this case means less than 1,000 passengers. The ship I’m on, the Viking Sky, still has 14 decks and is longer than two football fields.

As a comparison, the Royal Caribbean Symphony of the Seas carries up to 6,680 passengers and is half again as long as the Viking Sky — in fact, it’s 30 meters longer than United States Nimitz-class aircraft carriers. It also features a glow-in-the-dark Laser Tag arena, a 30,000 gallon surfing simulator, an ice skating rink, and a zip line.

⁹ Trivia, sadly, was relegated to once every couple of days, which is a real comedown from the thrice-daily ritual it was on some previous trips I’ve been on.

¹⁰ Another nice touch — the room service is 24 hours (also free of charge) and since we signed up for the drinks package the in-room minibar is constantly restocked with soda and beer and miniature bottles of liquor.

¹¹ This one has none, and all the transit is done overnight, so you typically have 12-18 hours in port rather than the 4-6 hours I’ve seen on a lot of other cruises.

¹² Even a cruise ship with 14 decks can fit a lot of places the really large ships can’t

¹³ Waterfalls seem to be Iceland’s leading domestic product.

¹⁴ Among other things the ferry runs overnight and then continues onward to Denmark, so round trips aren’t exactly convenient.

¹⁵ I’m actually booked on another Viking cruise in March, which I’m ridiculously excited about, and we’ll see whether COVID allows it to happen.

¹⁶ The real reason I wanted to be on this cruise was because it was a chance to see my father — the first time I’ve been able to since 2019 — and that alone made it worth it.