cabo story

Long time coming, but here ya go…

One of the many terrible things about Cabo is the god-damn cruise ships. They park right in the bay, blocking up what remains of the view with their giant floating bulk, and disgorge their bloated sunburned passengers onto The Strip like a corpulent chef rescuing sausages about to burst on the grill.

There were three different cruise ships parked in the harbor over the course of our five-day stay, but the worst (of course… OF COURSE) was a Disney-flagged boat that came and squatted directly in view of my patio for two days. On the evening of one of those days I was sitting there trying to relax when I realized — they were watching a movie on the boat.

I knew this because I could see the screen from where I was sitting, half a mile away: a giant rear-projection rig erected above the superstructure, with stage lighting surrounding it. As I squinted to look more closely, the motion on the screen resolved into human figures and I realized it was a recorded Miley Cyrus concert.

At appropriate moments during the film/concert, the stage lights would flash and strobe. In fact, this was what had caught my eye in the first place, but it took me a minute to realize what was going on. The deep horribleness of the situation sank in: American tourists, on a giant boat with an eighteen foot tall Disney logo painted on the stern, anchored off the coast of an Americanized party town in Mexico, watching a recorded concert video of a groomed-from-birth child pop star offspring of a New Country singer.

Is this truly the only planet we can live on?