The Avid Cruiser

Some of my most rewarding cruise experiences have been not about the places I’ve visited by ships but about the people I’ve met on ships. Ramelan Lidan has worked on ships for 14 years. I caught up him on Holland America Line’s Oosterdam, where he told me that his love of the sea started with a photo of his uncle at the Leaning Tower of Pisa.
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The cheerful steward who attended daily to stateroom 620 on Maasdam was Hery Afandy. He hails from central Java, is father to a boy and girl, and confides that he likes to stay busy so that he doesn’t have time to think about his family. After all, thinking of them would only make him homesick.

And so Hery cleans, “15 staterooms with no assistant,” he boasts, and adds with equal pride that he does so at a rate of about 20 minutes per stateroom. Do the math, that’s three staterooms an hour — or all 15 in five hours. And don’t forget that Hery does this each morning and each evening, working from about 7 a.m. until about 2 in the afternoon (if you’re questioning our math, remember that Hery has other things to do other than clean rooms).

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For years I’ve followed the career of Jerry Zape, a bar manager for Windstar Cruises who fulfilled a dream to give his wife and three children a better life with earnings he sent home from his job on a cruise ship. 

What wasn’t reported in that story was that Jerry was one of three ship staff that I met in 1999 and wrote about in a story called “A Few Good Men.”

Whether by coincidence or luck, I recently ran into the “second” of the three good men, Bagus Gunawan, who was working in Tamarind, the Asian restaurant on Holland America Line’s Eurodam.

I asked Bagus if he had fulfilled his dream to return to Bali to open a restaurant and bed and breakfast. He had, but his story has a tragic turn. In 1999, Bagus returned home to begin the business he had dreamed about.

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A familiar face greeted me as I boarded the Wind Surf on a recent sailing from Venice to Malta. Jerry Zape remembered me from five years ago when he worked as a bartender on the Wind Song.

I remembered him too. I had talked with him about his family in the Philippines and about how he supported his wife and three children on the salary and tips he earned at sea. In his early 40s then, he had managed to pay off his home and even buy a small convenience store.

When I met Jerry five years later, life was treating him even better. He told me that two of his children had just finished college and that a third will graduate soon. How Jerry managed his family from afar is a remarkable story, but first let me tell you about Jerry.

Jerry started work with Holland America Line in 1987, five years into his marriage. He and his wife agonized over whether Jerry should go to sea, but they knew they could not make the life they wanted for their family on Filipino wages. “I could earn double on a ship what I could earn at home,” he told me.

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In 1999, I talked with three Windstar Cruises’ staff members about their dreams and ambitions. Five years later, I caught up with two of those ship staff, Jerry Zape, who put his three kids through university, and Bagus Gunawan. Following is the original story from 1999.

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Editor’s Note: This interview (recently updated) originally appeared in the winter 2006 issue of The Avid Cruiser.

On the day before Valentine’s Day, during staff introductions to an audience of Holland America Line passengers, the 39-year-old captain of the Oosterdam went down on his knee to propose to the ship’s guest relations manager, the soon-to-be Pam van Donselaar.

In a true “Love Boat” moment, the captain says, “I compared myself to Captain Stubing and compared Pam with Julie (McCoy, the ‘Love Boat’s’ Cruise Director) and said that because officers and crew spend so much of their year on a ship that this was very likely the environment where they would meet their future partners in life.”

She said yes, the audience applauded, and in July the couple married in Vancouver. Ah, “Love … exciting and new.”

Now at the helm of Holland America Line’s new Eurodam, Jeroen van Donselaar is one of the cruise industry’s youngest captains.
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