Marian and Alan met over happy hour drinks on a cruise ship in 2021, and have hardly stopped travelling since. The retired couple have taken around 20 cruises in the past four years. They discovered VoiceMap just before their last cruise, and used the app to explore in each of the twelve or so stops along the way.
This interview is part of our How We Travel series, in which we speak to VoiceMap’s community of curious explorers about how they travel.
What do you always pack that other people find strange?
Marian: I always take my smoothie maker so we can have our smoothies wherever we go. It’s easy to pick up local fruits anywhere in the world – and then you’re good to go.
Alan: And we sometimes bring an air fryer with us too, if we go somewhere for a month or so.
Tell us how travel brought you together.
Alan: I was on a cruise out of San Diego down to Mexico with my son during Thanksgiving week…
Marian: I got to know a couple on the ship and every day at 4 o’clock we’d meet for happy hour down at the Crow’s Nest – and that’s where I met Alan. We both had such an interest in travel, and I’d been widowed for 12 years. I wanted to go to Italy for a month. I wanted to go to France for a month. And none of my girlfriends were all that interested… But Alan wanted to go to all the places I was talking about.
Alan: The second time we saw each other was on another cruise. We had communicated for the month in between.
Marian: He phoned me every day.
Alan: We met down in Florida and I decided to show her around the southeast. She’d really never seen it, and she didn’t have a flight back to Vancouver scheduled. So we ended up travelling around for about three weeks. Her children were very concerned – they were wondering “who is this guy you’re with, and when are you coming home?”
Since then, you’ve spent weeks at a time in one place. What are the advantages of slow travel?
Marian: When you’re cruising, you get a little glimpse of a world – you might take a tour, but that’s all you get: a little feel for a place. The value of staying for a week or a month is that you find a local bakery, and you feel like you actually experience what life is like to live somewhere.
You’ve taken several VoiceMap tours when you’re docked for the day during a cruise. What do you enjoy about taking VoiceMaps?
Alan: We do a VoiceMap at every location we stop.
Marian: It’s so much more economical. We did a tour in England once and paid quite a bit of money for each of us. It was miserable weather and drizzling that day, and we had to wait because two of the party hadn’t shown up. Right after that we did one of your tours and thought ‘This is just brilliant!’ We can go for lunch and come back and finish the tour. If it’s raining, we can duck in somewhere for a while. You can’t do that on an organised tour.
Alan: One of the tours had us standing at a fort, saying “Look to your right and imagine 100 years ago. You see hundreds of ships coming this way to attack…” The publisher went back from 100, to 200, to 300, to 400 years – all in the same spot, helping us visualise what had happened there.
Housesitting and pet sitting is something you’ve tried when you spend a few weeks in one place. What are the advantages over traditional accommodation?
Alan: We’ve done that three times, through Trusted Housesitters.
Marian: I lived in a condo in Vancouver and people rented out their place on Airbnb – but you don’t know who’s coming into your building. With housesitting, we found that the neighbours knew we were coming, and wanted to know if there was anything they could help us with.
Alan: Like Marian said, you’re a bit like the enemy when you stay in an Airbnb, but when you’re dog-sitting in someone’s home, you’re part of the neighbourhood.
In one of the places we house-sat, it turned out the husband was a top executive with a major cruise line. Soon afterwards, we ended up having to cancel about a week of an upcoming cruise from Australia to Vancouver while I was being treated for cancer, so I contacted this guy we’d met through the house-sitting, and he fixed it all.
When we did pick up the cruise in New Zealand about a week late, the staff said, “We want to upgrade you – here’s a key, go and take a look.” We thought maybe they were going to give us a balcony – but it was a whole suite, called ‘the owner’s suite’. It had two huge rooms, two bathrooms, a 50-foot-long patio, your own private concierge…
Why do you travel, and has travel ever changed your mind about a place?
Marian: It’s such a wonderful education. You learn that people are people are people… There are good people, bad people, and nice people everywhere. And now, because I’ve been to China, when I hear a news story about the country I feel I can identify with it. If you haven’t been there, it’s just this country way off somewhere – it could be the moon!
Alan: It’s exciting, and you learn so much about the countries you’re in and their history – and you really feel it – compared to just seeing something on YouTube or reading about it. And that’s why we’re trying to go to places we haven’t been before.
I lived through the Vietnam War, and Southeast Asia just seemed like… the third world. And then we did a river cruise from Vietnam to Cambodia, and we got to see temples and all those things. You don’t realise how beautiful a place is and how wonderful the people are until you go.
Marian: I remember my son travelling to Cambodia, Vietnam, Thailand, and the Philippines many years ago – and it terrified me. We have these ideas, and people say things like “You’ve got to be crazy to go there” – and now we know you’re crazy not to go.
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This interview is part of our new How We Travel series. If you have an interesting perspective on travel to share, send a message to claire at voicemap.me.
