Talk about huge! Royal Caribbean's latest incarnation, a Goliath of a vessel dubbed the Genesis Project, will weigh in at 220,000 tons and nab the title of the largest cruise ship ever built when it debuts in November 2009.
Yet unnamed, the ship is so broad (154 feet wide), it can't fit through the Panama Canal.
It's so long (1,180 feet), you could fit nearly four football fields inside. It's actually bigger than the world's largest container ship in service (155,000 tons), and it's even longer than the world's largest warship, the USS Ronald Reagan, (1,092 feet), according to Popular Mechanics magazine.
It carries so many passengers (up to 6,400), it's estimated it will take four hours to get everyone off the ship. In fact on disembarkation day, you'll have to sort through more than 18,000 pieces of luggage to find yours.
Indeed this humongous, $1.2 billion vessel is so enormous, it won't fit into some ports. For example, Fort Lauderdale's Port Everglades, which will be the ship's home port, has to ante up $37.4 million to upgrade a terminal for the ship. San Juan, Puerto Rico, is adding an airport-style screening facility at the head of the dock to alleviate backups at the gangway. Finger piers in St. Maarten must be widened to 60 feet because Genesis overhangs will touch the neighboring ship at a typical 40-foot-wide dock.
Royal Caribbean and Haiti's government are teaming up to build a dock to enable Genesis to come alongside at Labadee, the line's private island, and an entirely new port is being developed at Falmouth in collaboration with the Port Authority of Jamaica.
The ship is so complicated to design and build that Aker Finnyards at Turku, Finland, had to hire 500 designers to fit the pieces together. The basic plan, alone, required some 3,000 drawings and detailed engineering drawings rocketed to as many as 30,000.
So what do you call a monster ship that boggles the mind?
Some 91,000 readers of USA Today suggested names in line with Royal Caribbean's fleet of Voyager-of-the-Seas-class ships.Their top picks: Mosaic of the Seas, Coronation of the Seas, Oasis of the Seas and Allure of the Seas.
The question is what will Royal Caribbean do with this pricey real estate?
Apparently, when you've got as much space as a small city, it's tempting to build a town center with surrounding neighborhoods and plenty of restaurants, and even a small tropical park the size of a football field at its core. And, yes, we're still talking about a ship!
Dubbed Central Park, the line boasts that the park is "a revolutionary design in which the center of the ship opens to the sky and features lush, tropical grounds." Central Park will offer passengers "an exquisite public gathering place featuring serene pathways, seasonal flower gardens and canopy trees." A few hundred rooms with a view - half-balcony aeries - will soar six decks above the open space.
This garden of Eden on Genesis could be a horticulturist's heaven: There will be plant life among the sculpture gardens and other tranquil hideaways - such as drifts of calla lilies amid giant elephant ears, red ginger, rabbitfoot ferns and zebra calathea that beckon to be discovered.
Genesis' trees, some even-1 tually reaching more than 2 /2 decks high, include black olive, Cuban laurel, cherry of the Rio Grande, and painted and golden bamboo.
Royal Caribbean also sees the park as evolving from "a tranquil and peaceful atmosphere during the day to a gathering space for alfresco dining and entertainment in the evening, where guests will enjoy concerts andstreet performances," says the line's announcement.
So if you're a city dweller and don't quite want to abandon your urban creature comforts while on vacation at sea, you might just find Genesis a home away from home.
Travel, Pages 93 on 05/18/2008