The ocean’s more than just an obstacle to be crossed during international travel: It can be as much a destination in and of itself. The shifting patterns of light and color in both the sea and the sky are mesmerizing; so are the ceaselessly changing clouds, which may betray a distant island or billow into stirring open-ocean squalls. The seascape is evocative enough from a shoreline or on a brief coastal cruise, but it’s another thing entirely to immerse yourself in it for days on end, out of sight of land.
You might think such an experience would be monotonous—and it can be, most definitely—but there’s an astonishing amount of beauty and mystery only revealed on such voyages. Plus, let’s be honest: There’s still a sense of romance attached to the idea of ship-based travel, whether you’re dreaming of pirates and frigates or the golden age of opulent ocean liners.
Boarding a ship to travel from one place to another still offers its own special advantages. If you have the time and the constitution, days at sea can be a pleasant alternative to the cramped, sealed-off, discombobulating experience of an airplane (which, of course, being vastly faster, supplanted the ocean liner as the mode of choice for globe-hopping). Yes, you can board a 747 in New York City and be in one of Western Europe’s capitals of culture in a few hours, but approaching a destination port by sea tends to be vastly more impressive than stumbling bleary-eyed into a bland airport. Furthermore, logging the miles over days on the ocean imparts a “truer” sense of the distance traveled than a 550-mile-per-hour time-warp—and subsequently a fuller context of the place you’ve traveled to.
Whether you’re on a specially focused ecotourism cruise or simply a transport vessel, you stand a decent chance of observing exciting marine life when you’re trekking the vast ocean wilderness. From whales and dolphins to far-traveling seabirds, you never know what you might spot from the deck.
These days, most people think of cruise ships when they imagine a vacation at sea. Certainly cruises can be an entertaining (if expensive) option, but remember that you’re not limited to giant pleasure-ships and touristy ports-of-call. A rougher-around-the-edges and sometimes-cheaper alternative is booking a berth on a freighter: A cargo ship can be an efficient, exotic means of vacation travel, and the chance to mingle with crewmembers and the relative paucity of fellow passengers can be a great change of pace from a cruise liner.
If you want to get away from titanic ships and rumbling engines entirely, why not charter a sailboat for a “green” getaway on the sea winds? A bit closer to shore, you might also consider an extended sea-kayaking voyage, guided or not: Paddling between tropical islets or along a wild coastline gives you about the most intimate communion possible—topside, anyway—that you can have with the sea.
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