A dream vacation nearly turned into a logistical nightmare this week when eight passengers on a Norwegian cruise line were stranded on São Tomé and Príncipe after they were delayed returning from a tour of the island.
Despite being flummoxed and uneasy at being left behind, however, the eight tourists did quite well in their short stint being grounded on São Tomé. “The lovely people of São Tomé were very gracious, very hospitable,” Jay Campbell of South Carolina told NBC’s “TODAY” show on April 2. With help, the marooned tourists all found hotels and transit to the next port of call.
A spokesperson for the cruise company referred to the incident as a “very unfortunate situation” and said, “Guests are responsible for ensuring they return to the ship at the published time.”
Now, a paradisiacal island in the equatorial Atlantic doesn’t seem like the worst place to get stuck for a few days, though language barriers, a scuttled itinerary, and the need to acquire new visas may add some stress to your soothing vacay.
A few days later, on March 30, a section of California’s Highway 1 collapsed into the ocean amid heavy rains, and around 2,000 tourists were stranded in the Big Sur area. The idyllic beach community is home to stunning views and quaint cafes, another decent spot to be beached for a while.
At Outside, we’ve long been fascinated by the idea of being cast away, so much so that we sent author Thayer Walker to the desert island of Pargo in Panama’s Gulf of Chiriquí for 20 days with little more than a dive mask, a knife, and the shirt on his back to see what the Robinson Crusoe life was all about. It turned out to be a lot more difficult than Walker ever could have imagined.
So what is a good place to be marooned? What are the constituent elements that turn Survivor into the Swiss Family Robinson? Below we rank the best and worst places to be left high and dry.
The Best: Alta During an Interlodge, as a Hotel Guest
When Little Cottonwood Canyon, just outside of Salt Lake City, gets its famous lake-effect snowfall, it provides a different sort of desert-island experience. Interlodge is a policy at Alta and Snowbird ski areas whereby no one is allowed to exit any buildings during periods of exceptional snowfall. That’s because ski patrol and Utah Department of Transportation Employees are firing World War II-era Howitzers over the road for avalanche mitigation.
For skiers and snowboarders visiting the resorts, the anticipation that builds during an interlodge is like no other powder panic. Pillows of snow are building outside the windows at a rate of inches-per-hour. Hundreds of skiers line up by the exit with boots on, waiting for the all-clear. And if you’re extraordinarily lucky, the mountain will open before the highway does, allowing only the lucky few up-canyon to reap the deep rewards. My first Interlodge was one of these extremely rare “country club” days. I choked on powder and skied past an empty lift line straight onto the chair.
The Aspen Ritz-Carlton
In 2019 I was in Aspen wrapping up a work trip for Powder magazine when a storm blew in and iced up the aircraft at the small Pitkin County Airport. After our gaggle of editors and skiers waited around all day, the airport changed its delays to cancellations, and we had to pivot fast. Our group finagled a last-minute hostel room, which was fortunate in a town that could have been booked up, and then someone brought up having heard of an easy-to-poach hot tub at the Ritz in Highlands a few miles away. Naturally, I decided to make the most of my strandedness and, taking an easy shuttle, slipped into the side door of the fancy hotel. For the price of a reshuffled itinerary, I spent a heavenly hour or two soaking under a snowy sky.
The Blue Lagoon in 2010
Among the many tourists trapped in Iceland after the 2010 Eyjafjallajökull volcanic eruption grounded all flights was singer Amanda Palmer of the Dresden Dolls. Exhausting her options searching for flights to her touring destination in London, Palmer sought advice on Twitter while still stuck in Reykjavik.
The online chorus sent her to the Blue Lagoon, Iceland’s premier spa, where she could soak her bones in volcanic hot springs while waiting for the ashes to clear. She later posted, with an image: “does it show that perhaps i was starting to get happier and happier my flight had been canceled?”
The Worst: Alta During an Interlodge, as a Hotel Employee
While Interlodge represents the zenith of skier anticipation, for an employee at a hotel in the town of 300 people, it can be its own kind of hell. Managing guests cooped up for 52 hours at a time is like herding rabid mongeese. I waited tables at the Alta Lodge during the big winter of 2019-2020 and nearly had my head bitten off by impatient skiers. Champing at the bit is something snowsports enthusiasts know well, but it’s better if you’re not the bit.
The Beautiful Island of Mauritius… During a Possible Cholera Outbreak
Just the word Mauritius conjures up images of turquoise waters, thatched-roof cabanas, and frosty blended drinks with little cocktail umbrellas. This was not the case for passengers on the Norwegian Dream cruise line in February 2024, when a few cases of mild stomach symptoms left the crew without permission to land and scrambling for cholera tests, which eventually came back negative. The ship of more than 2,000 passengers sat in limbo for two days outside the port of Mauritius until the passengers’ tests came up clean.
High in the Andes
This one is a real disaster and was the worst horror that maroonees can endure. The harrowing story just got a small-screen reboot, with a new film on the 1972 Uraguay Air Force Flight 571 disaster: the excellent and important Society of the Snow.
Many Outside readers are probably familiar with the tale of the rugby team who, after a plane crash in the Andes and a subsequent avalanche, had to resort to cannibalism. The survivors lasted 10 weeks before two of them, undertaking real mountaineering and equipped with an improvised sleeping bag, reached help and effected a rescue.
Under a Boulder in the Utah Desert
We now arrive at the last on the list, between a rock and a hard place. Dramatized in the film 127 Hours, Aron Ralston’s grisly survival tale of being pinned by a boulder just outside Canyonlands National Park describes the unqualified last place we would want to be stranded.
Jake Stern is a digital editor at Outside. His favorite season of Survivor is Cagayan.
