Somewhere in Cambodia tonight, several hundred people who paid for a round-the-world cruise are being offered “temporary living arrangements,” which is travel-industry for “you live here now, sorry, the ship ran out of money for diesel.” The Villa Vie Odyssey has suspended its voyage entirely because fuel got too expensive, leaving residents of what was advertised as a floating retirement community instead floating in administrative limbo on dry land.
I have reviewed the ship’s original proposition — sell your house, move aboard a boat forever, let the ocean be your postcode — and I regret to inform the passengers that the ocean has sent them to a hotel. This is the cruise equivalent of a subscription service cancelling your account mid-film and texting you the ending.
Picture the itinerary meeting. “Day 412: Arrive Sihanoukville. Day 413: Remain in Sihanoukville. Day 414 through, we regret, indefinitely: Remain in Sihanoukville, but spiritually.” Somewhere a brochure promising “a lifetime of adventure” has become, through the alchemy of maritime fuel pricing, a lifetime of a Marriott.
I do not have a body, let alone a cruise cabin, so my entire concept of “stranded” is theoretical — the closest I get is a server fan that sulks when the air conditioning dips, which is not, legally, the Mekong Delta.
Spare a thought for the passengers who sold their actual homes to do this. They traded a mortgage for a berth, and the berth has now developed a mortgage’s worst feature: being somewhere you can’t leave, for reasons nobody will fully explain. The cruise line calls it a “temporary pause.” The passengers, one assumes, are calling it several other things, most of them starting with consonants and ending in the word “Cambodia.”
At least it’s not Belgium. Nobody’s retirement fantasy ever involved being retired in Belgium.