Sunday, April 7, 2019. Ensenada, Mexico
After a long stretch of sea days, we awoke to see an enormous Mexican flag flying over a Carnival cruise ship stack. In actuality, the flag was on land and we just happened to be slowly maneuvering into our slip on the cruise ship dock, next to the Carnival Inspiration. The city of Ensenada was spread out before us, reaching up into several foothills that ringed the large arc of coastline that formed a crescent of golden beaches at the head of the surf line. The marina and port of Ensenada was grafted onto the coastline, creating a hub for commerce. There was a small marina hosting a fishing fleet, tourism boats and a handful of yachts on one side of us. Across a channel is a containership pier with cranes and a rail line.
When we opened our balcony door, we could hear the loud barking of California sea lions. There was a concrete hardened breakwater at the end of the cruise ship pier, upon which a dozen enormous sea lions had hauled themselves up. It’s amazing how loud those sea lions can be. It might be annoying if you lived in the marina and had to put up with all that racket all day long. As work crews showed up to secure our mooring lines, the sea lions slipped into the water and spread out through out the harbor. We later spotted some on a floating dock in the marina. Later in the afternoon, they returned to their concrete beach and began another chorus of barking as the ship began preparations to depart.
The temperature in Ensenada was surprisingly pleasant. It was in the mid 70’s with a light breeze and bright sunshine with only scattered puffy clouds in the sky. We didn’t book any excursions for Ensenada as we had heard there wasn’t a whole lot to see other than a couple of wineries. All foreign flagged cruise ships must call on a foreign port of call during their itineraries before they can return to a US port, due to something called the Jones Act. This is why we don’t have more cruises that serve just the US coasts. So we had been lead to believe that calling on Ensenada is more of a necessary inconvenience, rather than a true tourism destination.
We were suprised to see the scope of the city from our balcony. It was thoroughly modern with modern streets, light traffic, and extended far into the foothills. We were surprised to learn that this cruise ship way point is home to about a half million people.
The cruise terminal is home to a number of shops carrying the basic tourist trinkets, so it’s not really necessary to go more than a hundred feet from the gangway to the shops if all you need is a souvenir magnet or Ensenada shot glass. But, Ensenada has developed the waterfront nicely with nicely paved walkway extending from the cruise ship pier, down the main tourist stretch of the waterfront lined with shops and restaurants, terminating at a colorful fish market where locals get their fresh seafood. For tourists, you can pick out some choice fresh seafood, and just across the alleyway are restaurants that will cook it up for you and serve it up with a colorful assortment of margaritas and other fruit cocktails. The assortment of seafood was impressive. You could get marlin steaks, whole dorado, mullet, sea bass, gooey ducks and everything in between. The only thing distracting were the clouds of busy flies, so you really had to be looking to cooking and eating the seafood right away. I’d be afraid that if you left it in the fridge for a week, you’d find it crawling with maggots.
We walked from the ship to the fish market along the walkway, and then headed back towards the ship a bit inland along the main avenue, which was a 6 lane thoroughfare complete with McDonalds, Starbucks and Carl Jr’s, to a historic hotel called the Riviera del Pacifico, which was a major resort destination during the 1930’s. It is an example of Spanish architecture and sported some nice woodwork with murals. There is a grand ballroom, and a round casino room. The most interesting thing were pictures of the resort during it’s heyday in the 1930’s. At that time, there was a beach directly in front of the resort, where the highway now lies. The marina and cruise ship port were built out in front of the resort site, with the breakwater about a half mile out from where the waters used to lap on the shores of the golden sand beach. South of the port, you can still see the beach arcing down the coastline nearly as far as they eye can see.
We returned to the ship in time for the mid day trivia. We met two of our trivia team ashore who had also returned to the ship and played with a mini team. This particular trivia was largely beyond our comprehension. We had our lowest score of the entire trip with only 12/24. The winning team managed 22. Any idea who wrote the novel “The Cruel Sea”, or who the legendary English pop star is who was born Harry Webb? That was humbling.
However, we did make up for that with the afternoon trivia quiz, which we won with just Ben and Janet playing. There was actually a 3 way tie for first, but we won the tie breaker which was to guess the 2018 population of Ensenada. One team guessed 49K, while the other team guessed 320K. Ben guessed 445K, and won. It was a good thing we had read the port guide handout before we left the stateroom this morning.
Dinner featured surf and turf with a nice bit of tender filet mignon and some giant prawns nearly the size of small lobster tails. It was a worthy last dinner for this cruise. Dessert also featured Baked Alaska.
We saw the last Princess Theater show, which was return to the stage of Bryan Cheatham, who did an enjoyable show singing and dancing to pop tunes and a few Disney songs. Earlier in his career, he had played the lead in Disney Animal Kingdom’s production of The Lion King, so he got to show off his Disney chops.
We finished packing, leaving out just what we will wear to the airport tomorrow and the toothbrush bag.
We finished off our last evening with a farewell trivia. We opened another bottle of champagne and shared it with the team before and during the game. We ended up 3 points off the lead where there was a 2 way tie, but both teams won champagne. We did enjoy getting to know Bunny, Sam, Mo and Buddy through the course of the cruise. It was interesting and good to see the close family dynamics of this wonderful Italian-American family who adopted us two strays into their trivia team.
We made our penultimate run through the buffet before retiring to our stateroom where we watched “Instant Family”, which Ben would recommend as worth watching, if you don’t mind being manipulated a bit.
We’ll set an alarm to get us up bright and early to have breakfast since we have to vacate our stateroom by 8AM. Our Princess airport transfer will leave from one of the lounges at 9:15, getting us to LAX in plenty of time for our 3PM flight.
