Becoming Part of the UnCruise Community
An UnCruise Adventure provides eyes up, chins dropped scenery and wildlife encounters. It is a feast for the eyes, followed by a farm-to-table feast for your hungry stomach three times a day. You will see, hear, smell, touch, and taste things you never have before. Hold glacial ice in your hand. Kayak close enough to a whale to hear its breath. Kiss a banana slug. Plunge into icy water on a dare. But the best part of the UnCruise experience is the people that you see and do all these wonderful things with.
When you step on board, you become part of the UnCruise community. We represent a wide range of life stories. Learning from each other as well as from the expert guides is a huge part of the experience. You will connect over dinner, sharing photos, and giving each other a hand across a stream. Guests make lasting friendships and plan future trips together. One recent guest reached out to fellow passengers to plan a larger group to travel together, because the people were such an important part of their trip.
Our community hails from all over the US and the world – we miss our Asian, European, Australian, and New Zealand community especially this year during COVID travel restrictions. What we share is a desire to see the world authentically rather than from a remove. To get sticks in our hair and mud on our boots.
We learn from the guides and from each other. We find out more about moss than we ever thought we’d want to know – see guide Taylor Buck’s blog post. We encourage each other to try new things. Learn how to kayak. Give each other a hand or a boost during a cross-country bushwhack. Dare each other into the Polar Plunge. There is a lot to do, and we have opportunities for everyone. One of the great things about the UnCruise Community is that we are encouragers. If you want to try something, your crew and your new friends are here to lend a hand and enable you to do it. Take you on a kayak. Teach you a card game. Explore the settings on your camera. Recommend a great book.
We genuinely welcome guests from all walks of life. We are a diverse lot, and we love it that way. Conversations in the lounge or over dinner start with sharing stories and photos from the day’s adventures, but they range far afield. Stories about families, work, other adventures. Discussions about environmental causes, or philosophy, or your passions. Sometimes we sit up late and have a sing a long, if there is a guest or crew member with a guitar.
We connect our community with the local cultures around us – not just in a book or a museum, but by talking to the people themselves. Many of our itineraries offer opportunities to talk with locals and learn about their cultures. In Alaska, we learn about the Tlingit peoples and other native people in Glacier Bay National Park and Ketchikan. In Hawaii, we visit on Molokai with the Filippo family on the land that their family has farmed and fished on for generations. In Panama, we visit the Embera people in the Darien Jungle. In Belize, we explore the ruins of the Maya and learn cooking, dancing, and song from the Garifuna people. In Belize, Costa Rica, and Panama, many of the expedition guides are locals with the history that comes from a lifetime.
The other part of the connection of our community with the local communities is giving back and putting our money where our mouth is. Literally, in the case of the local fishermen and farmers that we work with. Our Local.Fresh.Inspired videos tell the stories of the locals that we work with in Alaska, Hawaii, and Mexico, and how they influence the cuisine on board.
The UnCruise community is an open secret. Secret because with our smaller size, we don’t make the big splash that larger companies do. Our guests and their word of mouth do the most to bring more people in to join us. Open in that we genuinely welcome all our guests. If you are interested in exploration and adventure and have an open mind to teach and learn, you belong with us.