Vacation Nightmare

It was supposed to be the ultimate spring break vacation - touring Greece and a Turkish island - but 23-year-old Tiffany Gittens’ five-day cruise gave her much more of an adventure than she had bargained for.
Gittens, of Howard Beach, was aboard the Sea Diamond when the ship carrying an estimated 1,600 passengers ran aground into a reef off Santorini, Greece last week, listed to one side, and sank.
At the time of impact on Thursday, April 5, Gittens was in her fourth-floor cabin with her three bunkmates and felt a jolt, but did not think much of it, so she made her way up to the seventh floor of the 469-foot Diamond to meet with her Contiki tour group.
“Strangely, it was the first day that I was early for a group meeting,” she said, explaining that her roommates - two from California and one from London - opted to stay in the cabin for few extra minutes and were evacuated from there.
Once upstairs, Gittens started noticing that the ground beneath her was shifting towards one side, and glasses started sliding off tables and falling to the floor. Although electrical power shut down, plunging many parts of the ship into darkness, Gittens did not notice because where she was standing had a lot of windows, letting in the strong sunlight from outside.
“The whole time we kept thinking, ‘Did this really just happen?’ ” she recalled. “It was nerve-wracking, but I never had that moment where I thought I was going to die.”
Throughout the “surreal” ordeal, the well-traveled twenty-something said she kept her head about her.
“I kept pretty calm, probably because I didn’t know what was going on. When I saw the lifeboats going down, I thought maybe I should get serious about this,” Gittens said sheepishly.
Crewmembers, who Gittens believes had been on break at the time of the crash, began running through the halls, frantically trying to get dressed between steps.
The cruise staff collected passengers on one side to shift the boat’s weight, and then began evacuating the vacationers - first through lifeboats and then using rope ladders. To get down the stairs and to evacuation points in the dark, passengers formed a human chain, gripping onto one another’s life jackets. Women and children were told that they would be rescued first from the listing ship - as the boat began its 15-hour, sideways descent into the Aegean Sea.
“The whole time, we were all just trying to stay calm, and keep everybody else calm,” she said.
By the time Gittens’ turn to evacuate came - about three hours after the initial impact - an empty cruise ship, the Aegean Two, had pulled up alongside the crippled Sea Diamond, so that passengers could slide down a ramp onto its deck.
“It was definitely hard getting off, especially for some of the older people,” Gittens said, explaining that passengers were passed down onto the safe cruise ship by rescuers. “There was nothing to hold onto.”
After sliding down, Gittens waited an hour until more than 100 other vacationers and crew members were brought aboard, so that the evacuees could all be brought to land. As she waited, Gittens snapped photos of the sinking ship and passengers being rescued with her digital camera.
“I was glad that I happened to have my wallet and my camera on me,” Gittens said. Although the rest of her belongings, including her cell phone and green card, and those of other passengers, went down with the boat, tour organizers held onto the vacationers’ passports and were able to grab the documents before leaving the ship.
Meanwhile, Gittens’ roommates and 18 fellow Contiki travelers had been evacuated onto other rescue boats - one woman fearfully stayed in her second-floor cabin and had to make her way to a rescue point in waist-deep water.
Other passengers may not have been as lucky - rescuers are still searching for a French passenger, 45-year-old Jean-Christopher Allain, and his 16-year-old daughter, Maud.
From Santorini, passengers waited by the shore and watched their cruise ship keel over in the water. Several hours later, Gittens and friends boarded another cruise ship to be taken to Athens and flown home.
From Greece, Gittens was only able to get in touch with her boss at Trout Group, an investor relations firm in Manhattan.
“I said, ‘Can you please call my mom and tell her I’m OK?’ ”
Back home in Howard Beach, Gittens’ mom, Camille, and 82-year-old grandma, Aura, who is visiting from Trinidad, had no idea that Gittens had been aboard the boat they had seen on the news. Therefore, when Gittens arrived at J.F.K. International Airport on Saturday, April 7, the family had a tearful reunion at the terminal.
“I gave my grandma a good scare,” Gittens said. “She actually thought she had lost me, that I was a goner.”
Instead, Gittens is already gearing up for another vacation - possibly backpacking in Central America - and planning a rendezvous with her Contiki touring pals.
“We’ve already been emailing each other like crazy,” she said on Monday, April 9.
As for the Sea Diamond’s captain and five senior crewmembers who have been charged with negligence, Gittens bears no ill will.
“I don’t think they should do jail time. It was an accident, but somebody should be held responsible. It was a pretty preventable thing,” she said.