Living the Disney Dream

There is no reason to visit the Caribbean, except the guaranteed sunshine, the jewel blue water, and beaches with pure white sand the consistency of caster sugar. Ok, so there are three really good reasons to visit the Caribbean! However, if you are looking for culture and interesting destinations this is not the place for you.

I’m aboard the Disney Dream - the third, and largest, of the Disney Cruise Line fleet. This is a trip to visit Jeff - the payoff of being apart for so long is the perk of a free cruise. The ship is only in its seventh week of operation so everything has that wonderful new yacht-varnish smell. To be fair to Disney’s unparalleled standards of maintenance it will still have that smell in ten years time.

Disney manages to strike everything right on the nose - the perfect experience for kids, whilst having excellent values, but also a great experience for the adults. The overall quality of everything on offer, and of everything you see around you onboard, mean you feel pampered but without the pretensions that sometimes accompany this type of experience.

I’m on two short back-to-back cruises, visiting only Nassau and Disney’s own island Castaway Cay, both in the Bahamas.

Nassau is, on first look, much like any other Caribbean cruise destination - an excuse for more shopping identical to the last destination. There is a taste still of the old colonial town there with the Government buildings still in use, and the uniforms of the police and army having a familiar look, but there is not a great deal else to see.

By exploring off the main drag a little I managed to find some beautiful, if run down, old buildings. It is predominantly shabby. It could be a quaint place if it didn’t have 10,000 cruise passengers flooding the streets every day, but then without those visitors there is no saying how much more shabby things would be.

There is the upmarket resort of Atlantis  on Paradise Island which I will be visiting on my second stop in Nassau later in the week. I’ll report on the other side of life in the Bahamian Capitol.