Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?
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Notes -
The primary thing for me personally is that most of it is just being in your ship and watching the world move past. You're not really getting to explore the country you're visiting in any significant way, you're just getting little glimpses of it from the deck while it glides through the water. Though I suppose that is the appeal; to passively see the country without having to put in too much effort of your own - trying to make it through a foreign and unfamiliar place can be rather daunting.
But even that's part of the experience of travel IMO, the ability to get lost in the back alleys of some city or wander the trails of some national park and find all kinds of special hidden things you otherwise wouldn't have seen is a big attraction to me. I've long dreamed about driving west into the Australian outback with no clear plan and no destination in mind and just holing up in towns along the way, though that seems unlikely to materialise in the near future. It's a very stirring idea that lurks somewhere deep in my subconscious for no particular reason. Some nights I get a barely-controllable urge to walk blindly and directionlessly until my legs can't carry me any further.
I do understand why not everyone wants this kind of thing for every holiday though, sometimes the goal is primarily one of relaxation (as valid a reason as any other), so the explanation holds up well. I just think it comes down to the fact that I'm more likely to find things monotonous than your average person.
I think of a cruise as a pleasant way to taste places you wouldn't have planned to try otherwise. You have a clear plan for a thing you want to do in Australia, that's not what cruises are for, they're to take you to say New Guinea or the Solomon Islands or East Timor to see if there's something bigger you want to come back to that you didn't realize was there! I'd go back to Cozumel to enjoy the quiet Caribbean beaches! And I would love to spenf more time in the Azores. I didn't know how pretty either place was they were before seeing them. I also know I don't need to go back to St Kitts. I've seen enough of it and didn't need to spend a week or a long weekend to find out.
I also like sea days, and enjoy a semi-forced unplugging normal phone signals don't reach the boat!
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I have done quite a lot of "discover the hidden things" type of traveling and I can tell from my experiences that most of those hidden things were quite crap. You need a lot of free time, bravery, tolerance for discomfort, language skills, executive function, social acumen etc etc to come up with the good things. Vast majority of people don't have almost any of these, and most backpacker types lose it mostly as they age from early 20s as well.
I have a job now, I can't just fuck off to Colombia for 3 months without a plan. Also my back hurts randomly even with regular workouts, nice bed, ergonomic chair etc. I can't imagine anymore spending 6 days sleeping in a hammock on an Amazon riverboat filled with chicken or probably even the cheap hostel beds.
I have travelled quite a bit myself, and my personal dreams are just dreams and are not actually a description of anything I would actually end up doing - I'm not actually expecting people to do full backpacking when one plans stuff. Completely unstructured travel isn't particularly feasible in practice. Mostly, what I do is the kind of semi-structured self-directed travel that still allows me the ability to wander around a city myself, flaneur-style, and pick and choose what I want to see. That neither requires too much executive function or free time (both of which I lack). There's a gigantic middle ground between "lying on a beach" and "backpacking through the Amazon rainforest".
It's pretty obvious how most hidden things are crap by their nature since most things anywhere are pretty unremarkable, but in my experience most of my favourite destinations have been quite out of the way and not on the average tourist's radar. The ability to make these discoveries is an integral part of travel for me.
EDIT: Also, don't mean to seem like I'm randomly shitting on someone's travel plans here - that's not my intention. Casual conversation about low-stakes topics are just sometimes enjoyable.
How does this combine with lacking free time then? Do you just spend a lot of time researching
Pretty much, yeah. Once I've decided to plan some kind of trip I go all-out, and it also helps that I trawl every square inch of Google Maps extensively in my free time when I don't have anything else to do, and just put pins in every single landmark that looks interesting and that I'd like to see. I hardly watch TV or engage in other passive activities to relax after work, I get bored by that easily, and one of the activities I engage in for fun (aside from researching a bunch about whatever niche topic catches my fancy) is to stake out possible destinations from my armchair. I do this even when I lack travel plans.
It's surprisingly easy to thoroughly map out countries - it's almost a mediative affair, in fact. You build up a gigantic reservoir of interesting sites after even just two months. After a while you get good at it - you can eventually identify the nature of buildings and even natural sites from how they look from the air, temples and traditional houses and so on, and can do further research on them on that basis. I've had family members ask me to plan their trips on their behalf. I come back to them with a gigantic slate of destinations, and see which ones they like.
This level of sheer autism certainly isn't for everyone and I don't expect everyone to engage in this kind of planning, but it works for me. And it feels better in my experience, less like you're getting a surface-level tourist view of a certain destination and more like you're actually experiencing a place outside of the heavily trafficked destinations where everyone gets shunted to. Also, less crowds. Fuck crowds.
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