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Comment by ourmandave | Hacker News Reader

Sounds painful. You're on a boat filled with tourists making stops at tourist traps.

After the 30th "tropical island" port, will you even bother to get off the boat?

To wander around souvenir shops or try the local cuisine, again.

I’ve done a few cruises and there’s nothing stopping you from doing your own thing. When we went to Korea, for example, we just had a driver and hit all the stops we wanted for the day.

I think the issue is more with the depth of the experience, because as you say it's only what you want "for the day." In the shorter timeframes you're allowed the worry might be that you only see what the material aspects of life are like, but never really get a sense of what it's like to inhabit that world.

Though even with that in mind I guess different people could be looking for different things when they visit a place.

I've admittedly only done a cruise once, but I saw it as sampling from tasting menu. After my cruise there where two places (out of 8) we'd stopped that I really felt I wanted to see more of, so I went back to those places on later vacations and explored them more.

One person’s dream is another one’s nightmare. I’ve been on cruises as a child and they felt claustrophobic. But got to see some cool places and you can definitely do your own thing in each port or just stay onboard relaxing. I think that as a way to go around the world and see 130+ countries in a year it would be awesome. You’d be pretty sick of it by the end but at least you’re not stuck rotting in some retirement community doing puzzles and watching daytime TV. Again one person’s pleasure is another’s poison.

At many stops, “local” cuisine includes Jimmy Buffet Margaritaville.

Isn't that the way most Westerns go on holiday anyways? Doing the same things at the same places like everyone else?

Calm down your biases. Take a trip to Australia and tell me that Japanese and Chinese tourists don’t do the exact same thing. Turns out tourist traps exist for a reason. People seem to enjoy them.

Perhaps. But that doesn’t mean people would want to do that 103 times in just 3 years.

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