CRUISE ISSUE: FALL / WINTER : Party Ahoy! : Carnival’s new Caribbean superliner is big, brassy and, late at night, swings to a Latin beat

Some cruise ships sell themes to their passengers: Spend a week at sea and learn about French cooking, or classical music, or swap very high fives with Shaq.

Carnival’s brand new Imagination, 70,000 tons of freshly painted white steel and neon wrapped around chrome wrapped around glass, offers a theme as well: Big.

Big Food, including goat cheese pizzas 24 hours a day and appetizers such as Drunken Prawns Canadian Club. Big Shopping in the Galleria mall, from a Lindt Swiss chocolate bar to a diamond ring. Big, Splashy Revues such as “B-Bop,” a laser-lit paean to those long-gone “American Graffiti” days. A Big Atrium--a six-story space that erupts in the middle of the ship and literally goes through the roof. And Big Crowds on board--more than 2,500 passengers have filled the ship to capacity every week since the Imagination’s maiden weeklong Caribbean voyage from Miami in early July.

Then there was the Big Ole.

The soul of a Caribbean cruise liner is different things to different people. For the captain and his cadre, it’s a calm overnight watch on the bridge. For the waiters and stewards, it might be those few hours on a Saturday when the ship is in port and empty of travelers. For many passengers, the heart of a cruise ship thumps in the casino or by the pool, or when the cracked crab soup or the Key lime pie arrives at dinner, or in the spa, during a particularly stimulating mud facial.

For me, the heart of the Imagination beat each night from 10 till early morning in the Xanadu Lounge, where four Cuban musicians and dozens of dancers took the stage.

The band was called “Fire and Rain,” three guys and a young woman on vocals and the maracas. The dancers were a mix of the disco crowd, the waltz crowd, the merengue crowd. There were hundreds of Latinos aboard the Imagination, and it seemed that every one of the women who danced the Lambada was beautiful, and every man handsome. When they moved ever so smoothly to the thrum of a new Miami dance craze called La Macarena (a Spanish version of the Electric Slide) the Xanadu Lounge swayed in the sea, which took some doing in a ship so stable that it rarely felt like it was on the ocean.

Late at night on a cruise ship, the options are still wide open: Visit the midnight buffet, walk the deck, make love (usually in a cabin), visit the pizzeria, hit the blackjack or the roulette tables.

But the best option on the Imagination, was dancing--the Big Ole, as I thought of it--and one big reason why this particular Fun Ship was indeed fun.

Kevin Costner may have spent $200 million to make a flop called “Waterworld.” For only another $130 million, he could have acquired a far more attractive product, and maintained the water view.

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The Imagination--one of 11 in the Carnival flotilla--is not the largest superliner afloat (although that honor may be bestowed on Carnival’s bigger boat, the Destiny, due next year), but it is the steadiest cruise ship this part-time sailor has ever shipped on, with service that is above average, a variety of diversions that can rob even the laziest customers of nap time, a superior health spa, and a sailing itinerary that was . . . well, to borrow the title of the cruise line’s theme song, “Hot, Hot, Hot.”

While glitz is in abundance on the Imagination, it is not carried to nauseating excess, unless you have a specific aversion to gold sphinx heads, which stare out from even the most obscure corners of the Finnish-built vessel. Carpets and cool leather settees help to soften the glass and steel fittings.

Pool life is what you make it. The main swimming hole of the Lido deck attracted teens and those in their early 20s, who kept the drink waiters in their raspberry-colored shirts hopping with orders for iced-down cans of Labatt’s Blue and Miller Lite. (Aboard ship, the drinking age is 19.) By the fourth day--an at-sea day--the immediate perimeter around the big pool and the adjacent hot tub with its foamy head was surrounded by cliques of beefy guys guzzling beer and wearing baseball caps backward. Party on, Garths.

One image of the Imagination, as a floating Vegas, is not without validity. There are miles of yellow and purple neon and flashing light bulbs, even in our dining room. Quarters clank ceaselessly into the steel trays at the El Dorado Casino (on the Promenade deck), and it’s nearly impossible to pass a day without ambling by the machines (or the nearby ATM--tease pairing no doubt lifted from the Nevada Hotel and Casino School of Design).

Yet the ship is so large--118 feet wide at the pool deck--that even the most fastidious scholar can sit by a rail, put up his feet and read uninterrupted for hours. (It’s so large, in fact, that on Day One I stood on one side of the rear upper deck and thought the other side was another ship.) Capturing some solitude was not easily accomplished on Carnival Fun Ships of yore, where the atmosphere was more like dawn-to-dusk disco.

Disco on the Imagination was confined to a glossy strobe-lit lounge called Illusions (on the Promenade deck not far from the casino). But I confess that I missed the rock ‘n’ roll. The physical rock ‘n’ roll, that is. Those gentle (and sometimes not so gentle) motions that give away the venue: You are not on land, but at sea, and a ship at sea is supposed to sway.

But the Imagination is an ocean-going Lexus and its engineers have come close to eliminating the gremlins of noise, vibration and harshness that are common to inferior cars and ships. One night we passed, rock steady, through a vicious thunderstorm and high winds. “Wait ‘til Friday,” the captain, Giovanni Gallo, warned a guest early in the cruise after she said she missed “the comforts” of a swaying ship, especially at night.

On Friday, the liner would make the run from Jamaica to Miami at a no-nonsense speed in a sea that was choppy. But even the most sensitive passenger could have dumped the Dramamine down the vacuum toilet; there was no motion. (This late August trip was pre-Hurricane Luis, which in any event wouldn’t have much jostled the Imagination on its western Caribbean route.)

Of course, Imagination did share much with its sister ships across the lines. There was the obligatory unctuous cruise director, who must have received a dollar from the boss for each time he said “wonderful.” If Letterman is listening, I propose a sketch called Stupid Cruise Director Jokes.

Far more entertaining encounters would come to pass during the week. There was the Stuff Your Bikini With Ping-Pong Balls contest by the pool. I was amazed that a young woman named Amy was able to put 20 balls in her bikini . . . until Amy’s sister found room for 25 balls! The event so exhausted me that I had to beg off the next activity, the art auction.

Ken Byrne, the affable maitre d’ in the Pride dining room, made it a point to offer a “How are you doing?” to our table most nights, and one evening the Imagination’s hotel manager, Pier-Giorgio Micallef, made time to chat about some of the stranger questions put to him over the years. “A woman once asked if she could have the ice sculptures after the buffet,” he said. “Another passenger wanted to know if the waiters lived on board.”

The variety of the food was admirable, but the quality was several notches below gourmet (add a star if you sympathize with the 92 chefs who had to feed 2,500 ravenous passengers each evening). The final night of the cruise--American night--I ordered the blackened pork chop, which arrived blackened and topped with a white cream sauce and a drippy peach. The dish did an immediate 180-degree return to the kitchen, replaced rapidly with seafood Newburg, which turned out to be the best meal of the trip.

Between eats, I made a point to don sneakers and ride one of the sexy glass elevators to the top of the Atrium, to the Nautilus spa. The workout room gleamed with an array of modern, shiny German-made exercise equipment designed to remove digested seafood Newburgs from the legs, arms and abdomen. Muscular guys grunted as they performed arm curls with the free weights. From the treadmill belts, men and women in tank tops, sweating gleefully, looked out to the Caribbean Sea and sipped from small bottles of Evian water. This was cruising, ‘90s-style.

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Speaking of sweating, the Imagination’s itinerary glistened with three hot shore-leave spots: Grand Cayman, Jamaica and the island of Cozumel off the Yucatan Peninsula. Barstow’s got nothing on the Yucatan in August. The shopping streets around George Town in Grand Cayman begin to blister about noon on a sunny day. Dunn’s River Falls in Jamaica, which some of us adventurous passengers climbed while the Imagination called at Ocho Rios, provided wet relief, but the 600-foot falls were so crowded with climbers that you began to sweat waiting to step on the next rock.

Certainly the most educational tour offering in our three ports of call was the early morning excursion to the Tulum ruins in Mexico. The white-stone fortress, spectacularly set on a rocky bluff overlooking the Caribbean, is among the most significant ancient Mayan artifacts in the Yucatan, a legacy of the culture’s religious and family life.

Despite the ship’s orderly agenda for nonstop fun (horse racing, super bingo, singles’ parties and the like were listed daily in the Carnival Capers newsletter), unexpected epiphanies at sea can still happen.

To escape a broiling sun during an afternoon at sea, I planted a chair by the Lido deck rail. Everybody was at lunch, and I was alone with a terribly graphic book about the death of the great Grand Prix racer, Ayrton Senna, who was killed when his car crashed into a wall at 170 m.p.h.

Soon four or five busboys and waiters were leaning on the rail next to me, pointing out to sea. The day was glorious, with tiny whitecaps raised by a fresh wind less humid than it had been.

“Hey, Chiquita! Chiquita!” shouted one of the busboys, and I saw in the water off the side a school of dancing dolphins. They dived and spun and jumped, and it was a sight.

But our private showing was short-lived. The dolphins were announced over the PA system and dozens of lunchers, cheeseburgers in hand, rushed to the rail around me. But they were disappointed; the dolphins were gone.

Alone again with Senna, I marveled at the great aqua sea and ways of smart animals, and the joy of things unplanned.

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GUIDEBOOK: Imagination Fascination

Cruise facts: The Imagination sails every Saturday from Miami, departing at 4 p.m. and returning the following Saturday at 8 a.m.

Fares vary with season and availability. Published rates range from $1,399 (for cabins) to $2,329 (for suites) per person, double occupancy. Prices include air fare from Los Angeles. Carnival is offering some discounts on the Imagination. Through December, for example, there are some 2-for-1 deals starting at $574.50, double occupancy, without air fare.

For more information: Check with Carnival Cruise Lines for general information and various discounts, telephone (800) 327--9501. For bookings, consult a travel agent specializing in cruises. Individual reservations aren’t accepted.

--S.W.