Well, look at it this way.....

Those who have missed Progreso, known to those familiar with the Yucatan as "Noprogreso", ought to be pleased, ought to be pleased, willing to pay Cram-eval for avoiding the pestilent port. Compared to its sister city on the Rio Grande, Nuevo Progreso, a single broad avenue of pharmacies. eye doctors, cheap dentists and a few bad saloons, Progreso is a warren of narrow streets double parked with peddlers pushing merchandise discarded by Neapolitan vendors after the fall of Mussolini. If you had complaints about the ship's food, you obviously had not taken nourishment ashore.

Progreso is an entirely artificial "resort", for decades a PEMEX oil terminal with a giant finger pier/causeway extended out into the Gulf several miles to a depth where deep draft vessels can come alongside. At the "Fleet Landing" are a handful of modern stores, essentially "curio shops", straw hats, TShirts and embroidered pillows. Carnival charters buses for the 15 minute or so ride into the "center of the city", populated by vendors of an aggressiveness surprising to one who has spent his life near Mexican Border Towns.

Essentially, Progreso would remind old Mexico hands of Matamoros, Villa Acuna or Tijuana cerca 1950. I first visited Progreso in 1957, and found it at least unspoiled except for oil. I was apprehensive when friends and family induced me to join them on a "cruise" calling there, having spent too long as sea in large grey vessels with numbers painted on either side of their bows seeking respite from the long days at sea in calls at little known ports which even shipwrecked mariners hastened to avoid. My apprehension was deserved, but after reading the posts above, apparently Cram-eval has really scr*wed the pooch out of Immobile.

I thought Cram-eval's food was about as I expected....not near as bad a Columbus's crew must have endured, and fully up to the standards of the wardroom mess of an ancient aircraft carrier aboard which I gained my sea legs. The breakfast special, "Eggs Benedict" was appalling, and to be served those giant tasteless artificially colored pre-cooked frozen and defrosted shrimp while crossing the Campeche Bank, source of some of the world's best shrimp, was a little off-putting, but I survived on daily double orders of bottom of the product line smoked salmon, even the lowest grade a safe haven in any storm of modest cuisine.