Hot time in the old town

The reason we can’t get excited at sea is, I see today, because we need that excitement for LAND. 

GHANA!  We’re in Ghana!

I’m going on an overland trip with a bunch of faculty, staff, and children, around 20 in all.  I write this as we’re stuck waiting for our passports to be released.

People who are not staying overnight in Ghana are streaming off the ship.

Tour guides are patiently waiting for us.  Here’s ours.

It’s hot and sunny.  And really hot.  ETA for our passports is “an hour or two.”  I feel bad for those guys, hopefully studying all the passengers to find their charges for the day. 

I checked with Aparna before making a sign to tell our guide we’re delayed.  But then all the other guys kept standing there in the sun.  So I made this sign.

Welcome to Ghana.  I’ll catch you up next week. I'm leaving the computer behind.

Much ado about nothing

Life is just different at sea.

Back home, I hear that news happens.  Here, we are cut off from everything but wikipedia, and accessing that depends on our cranky internet.  Sometimes it parties like it's 1980, and other times, you just sit and wait.

But we don't much care.  Things get done slowly, or they don't get done, but either way it's soon time for lunch.

I got an email from my Land Boss, who politely reminded me I was seven months overdue on setting goals for this year.  Mm, maybe I'll just retire instead of doing them.  They don't seem terribly relevant under the best of circumstances, but from this distance I couldn't even pretend to care.

My goal, I said, is to learn to multi-task.  I would like to be able to point AND shoot my camera.  I am doing pretty well so far.

Around 1420, my Sea Boss invited me up to Deck 7, optimal viewing for the Event About to Happen.  This is where knowing the right people pays off.  I was sworn to secrecy, but the Captain was going to steer the ship right through Sea Zero.

Since the course of the ship is shown on closed circuit TV throughout the ship, literally second by second, it was not much of a secret.  Anyone could see we were heading closer and closer.  Still, Jim was not allowed to announce it, because the big moment was going to occur during class time.

The big event is the equivalent of your car's odometer turning all nines, or having a date that's a palindrome.  Interesting, but not exactly cause for a party.  Unless you're on a ship.

We took pictures of each other.  Nancy took some pictures of Jim jumping.  This is something the students particularly enjoy doing.  It requires point and shoot and jump, which is way beyond this year's goals.  A few students with GPS-enabled cameras snuck out of class.





















Once it was over, I could put a little blurb in the Deans' Memo.  Remembering Jim's prank about the yellow rope on the International Date Line, I wrote, "Did you see the orange buoy as we crossed through 0-0 0-0? (Neither did we.)"

I heard from several people there WAS a buoy.  It's white.  On the starboard side.  I stand corrected.

No one can give me an explanation for how it stays in place, three miles above the ocean floor.  No one  has been able to turn up any data on it.  But then the internet was down most of the afternoon.

And pretty soon, it was time for dinner.

Sea Zero: The big nothing

There is no yellow rope at the Equator, but you know when you’re there.

We’re back in the doldrums.  The sea is flat, there’s no wind.  The sea and air temperature are the same, which means the sea has warmed up 32 degrees in the last five days, going from 55 to 87.

We’re heading for absolute zero, 0-0 in latitude and 0-0 in longitude.  Wikipedia probably has a better name for it, but the internet is down.

Update:  I couldn't turn up a name for the intersection of the equator and the prime meridian.  Evidently an arbitrary line does not rate a name.  I did, however, turn up two non-royal passengers from Charlottesville who have never crossed the equator on a ship.  I am lobbying for a change of course, and I am claiming "Sea Zero" as mine.

There’s a closed circuit TV system on board and one of the channels shows the ship’s position.  I keep turning it on to check our progress.  At 0645 as I write this, we are 01 48.09 S and 000 54.37 E.  No word on whether Captain Jeremy is going to alter course to hit the big 0-0.  Last fall, the ship did cross precisely at that point, making the passengers “Emerald Shellbacks,” but it was their first crossing (fall was the Atlantic circuit starting from Halifax) and probably the other captain as well.  We’ve picked up a few passengers in Cape Town—no word on whether they’ve made a sea crossing, but I really don’t see anyone’s dunking the Saudi Prince in fake fish guts under any circumstances. 

Although we might like to.  Prince Fahad is one of dozens or maybe hundreds of Saudi princes; they are a billion a dozen.  (A student told me the other day, “He has $7 billion dollars worth of camels.”  I replied, “That IS a lot of cigarettes.”  Joke wafted right up over her head.)  He was brought on board as an Unreasonable at Sea mentor.  Let’s just say that the Unreasonable Institute has shown us over and over that their name is apt.  Just not for the reason they picked it.

We still have time.  The only people awake at this time (besides the crew) are the students trying to get in time at the gym before faculty hours start (at 0700) and the insomniacs.  Maybe we’ll hear from Captain Jeremy yet.

Talking about this in the office yesterday, my boss Jim (from Arizona) was reminded of the Four Corners, where you can put one foot or hand in each of the four states, AZ, NM, CO and UT.  I said, “Or, for some of us, sitting down would accomplish the same thing.”  I was reminded of the first time I crossed the Continental Divide, and Paul availed himself of the handy rest room.  I wondered idly how many men gave in to the urge to watch their pee divide itself between the Atlantic and the Pacific. 

We are at the end of Spirit Week, and it is “Wear the World” Day.  I am wearing a length of Indonesian batik fabric I bought in Burma as a skirt, with a t-shirt made in El Salvador over leggings made, to my surprise, in the USA.  The elastic holding up my skirt I got in India.  Pretty sure my Keens are from Viet Nam. Horn earrings from South Africa make it a three-hemisphere ensemble.

Meanwhile, Thelma and Louise is stuck on Channel 6 in the “Press Play” mode, unmodifiable until our AV guy shows up for the day.  Too bad; I like to watch the last scene, where my friend Chris goes over the cliff, goes over the cliff. 

Before reinventing herself as a savvy MBA and coming to work for UVA, Chris was a production assistant on lots of movies you would recognize.  Her stories keep me entertained on the rare day that my job doesn’t present me with adequate hilarity.  There are probably still a few people reading this blog who don’t know that Chris served as the body double for both Thelma and Louise for the scene where they drive off the cliff.

Speaking of outlaw heroes, we had an Explorer Seminar on pirates the other night.  (Back in pirate territory, evidently.)  In an attempt to get more than a dozen students to come to these seminars, the faculty dressed up, took pirate names, and assigned one person the role of chasing, capturing, and carrying off one of our staff members.  (Interestingly, this versatile young woman had, at 1830 won the "Twins Day" contest by dressing quite convincingly as our IT Coordinator Dan, complete with two-day beard.  At 2000 she was all girl, being carried off by a pirate.  "And other duties as assigned," all in the job description!)

The faculty deconstructed the pirate anti-hero and told us about some famous pirates and privateers. Urbane Sir Walter Raleigh wound up in prison for getting married without the Queen's permission, regained favor, but eventually had his head cut off.  It was the custom of pirate widows to embalm their dead husband's head and keep it as protection.  We even had a discourse on art painted by pirates.  This is a faculty that knows how to research arcane topics.

Then it was time for Captain Jeremy to talk about pirates in the modern day.  He does not find them romantic, cute, or funny. He observed, with his dry Britwit, that one could no longer dispatch pirates in the most expeditious manner, by killing them, as there are now pesky laws protecting their civil rights.  Neither can one bring them back to Britain for trial, lest that they seek asylum in a country that does not have the death penalty—and then where would we all be?  When caught, they are usually deposited in the Seychelles.  The US, he said, has the naval power to do something, but so few cargo ships fly under the US flag there is no incentive to address the problem.  So we are standing by with our extra watch, our crew members posted with high pressure water hoses, and our reports from British intelligence.

If you squint, I think you can see Sea Zero just off the bow, port side.  Unless it’s a pirate ship.

Easter surprise

We just spent six days in Cape Town, so it’s not clear to me why the ship did not have time to gas up, but I guess the gas station is not a particularly good place to have passengers embarking and disembarking, so we have spent all of today bunkered.  We sailed from one side of the docking area to the other and my view changed from water to gas tank.  Every once in a while, the staff captain comes on and reminds us that we are not allowed to smoke while the ship is bunkered.  (So polite:  Why not just say, “Stop trying to blow up the ship”?)

The worst part of this unannounced delay is that, after a week of high winds and clouds covering Table Mountain, today is a day when you could actually go to the summit.  If you could get off the ship, which you can’t.  Anyway, it should make for smoother sailing when we actually do leave. 

Today is also Easter, which I celebrated by wearing a skirt.  And earrings.  It turns out that holidays don’t really register unless advertisements make you aware of them.  It’s hard enough to keep track of days of the week when your only distinction between days is whether you’re moving through the water (sea days, when we work) or not (port days, when we don’t).  Valentine’s Day slipped by virtually unnoticed, since we were in Viet Nam celebrating Tet at the time.  On St. Patrick’s Day, the Lifelong Learner Coordinator, Deb, handed out Mardi Gras necklaces, I supposed because she forgot she had packed them.

A lot of us are reassessing what we packed and what we purchased, and trying to figure out how to get all of it home.  Several people mailed packages from Cape Town.  My plan is to stuff my coat of many pockets full of everything that won’t fit in my luggage. Some insane person actually brought a Le Creuset dutch oven and cookbook as an auction donation.  That's half the allowable weight of a suitcase!

The Field Office coordinator, Karen, a person of incredible energy and dedication, has been sorting through cabinets and drawers, organizing materials that are useful, and getting rid of things that aren’t.  Today, she found…teeth.

Yes, teeth.  This is m y voyage for teeth.  Not one, but two sets of dental models from an orthodontist in Charlottesville.  (Perhaps this is because I didn’t pick up any of the dental casts in Yangon?)

Best answer to “What were they thinking?” gets a more traditional, and quite lovely souvenir from my trip.  Your ideas in the comments.

Five of one, half dozen of another

Day 4 in Cape Town, I led an SAS tour to the southern tip of Africa, the Cape of Good Hope.  It's not quite the farthest south you can go, but it’s where you go from the Indian Ocean into the Atlantic, an area of tumultuous weather and treacherous terrain.  Our guide for the day was a biologist, so we got a minicourse in the flora and fauna along the way.

Cape of Good Hope in the distance, where two oceans meet.

And history and culture.  My older son gave me a blank notebook for the trip, and I am filling it with jerky, bumpy bus writing on every trip.  Our guides are full of fascinating information.

The ride down the coast is very like the Pacific coast of the US, steep and rocky and dry.  But I don’t recall any warnings about not feeding the baboons in the US.  (I did see coyotes in yards outside of Yosemite…)  Baboons are a particular menace.  They have learned how to break into locked cars and houses, and they will completely trash the place looking for food.  Houses in the coastal areas have elaborate security systems, and all the garbage containers have to be baboon proof.  Our guide also told us that the baboons of this area are the only primates (besides humans) who go into the water in search of food. 

So, high on my agenda for the day was seeing baboons.  Our bus driver spotted these eland (see?  It’s not just a crossword puzzle word) and ostrich while speeding along, which was remarkable, since I couldn’t see the eland even when told where to look.  After the bus stopped. 

The eland were taking it easy at the moment, but they have a kick that can kill a lion.  In the savannah, eland have straight horns, with a span up to 12 feet, but here in the scrub, their horns are curled.  Similarly, the ostriches are at a real disadvantage in this habitat, and they are not native to this area.  We passed an ostrich farm, but these ostrich were wild, brought to the area for visual interest.  The ostrich eggs are also huge.  One ostrich egg is the equivalent of 2 dozen hen eggs.  (Three dozen eggs’ worth of cholesterol.) 

The ostriches, we were told, eat anything.  Including your earrings, if you are foolish enough to wear any near them.  They can see 3 km away, and they are territorial, so you can be in real trouble if the males interpret you as a threat.  You can’t outrun them, of course.  And they are huge!  Much taller than you’d think. 

At Cape Point, I climbed to the lighthouse and was rewarded with the view of two oceans.

This furry creature, it turns out, is a hyrax (17 points in Scrabble, more depending on how you can place it).  Smaller than a groundhog, its nearest relative is an elephant! 

They have identical digestive systems and very similar hands and feet.  Also, the incisors of the hyrax are ivory, curved inward instead of outward like the elephant’s tusks.  They are herbivores, but the land is slim pickings, so they have to reduce their body temperature considerably at night to survive (slow down the metabolism to make the most of the food).  One hyrax stands sentry and whistles to wake up the others if an eagle approaches.  And they’ve developed a third eyelid that acts as sunglasses so they can look into the sun to see the eagles.  Factoids you can surely use at your next cocktail party.

On to Boulders Beach to see the African Black Footed Penguin colony.  It started with two pairs of penguins and now has thousands and is one of only three penguin breeding grounds colonies not on islands.  They just swam up and started laying eggs in a suburban neighborhood, which had some people trying to get rid of them and others trying to make a buck.  The entrepreneurs won.  Formerly called jackass penguins because of their call, they now sport a G-rated name.

I was hoping to see them all waddling in a row, but these penguins are more individual and we saw several loners all by themselves.  I’m not sure whether that’s developed because of the protected habitat or whether it’s characteristic of the species.

At the penguin colony, we also saw a mongoose.  Good for us, not so good for the penguins, as they steal the eggs. 

We finally saw our baboons, just lolling by the side of the road.  These are all female.  On another trip, however, a shipboard friend saw a pair copulating just off the road. 

Whatever it takes to keep them from a life of crime…

On safari, you are hoping to see “The Big Five” (lion, buffalo, elephant, rhino, leopard).  These are my little six.  

Robben Island repurposed

One of our guides said that in four days, we had experienced all four seasons this week.  Wind, rain, heat, fog.  You can find it all in one day; Cape Town weather is unpredictable and unstable.  Today was windy and the sea was choppy, and we were fortunate that the weather did not prevent our trip to Robben Island, which lies 13 km from Cape Town. 

Table Mountain from the lighthouse on Robben Island

The trip out was bouncy as we crossed the waves.  Those of us from Semester at Sea smiled knowingly as we went over the crests and into the troughs, as the tourists who had flown or driven into town gasped on our thrill ride.  The way back (going into the wind) was much worse, with the spray of waves hitting the windows of the boat.  We stopped our silent gloating and got about the business of grimly bearing it.  My stomach stayed put, but I developed a bad headache and broke into a sweat.  The waves weren’t high compared to a day at sea, but you feel them much more intensely in a smaller boat.  I was very happy to be back on land.

Robben Island (Robbeneiland in Afrikaans) is the famous prison island where Nelson Mandela and other political prisoners were held until the 1990s.  It started out as a prison island for the Dutch, and the name means “thieves’ island.”  This is kind of obvious when you already know about it, but until it’s pointed out, you might think it was named after someone named Robben.  On my first tour, I learned that convicts from the prison had quarried the stone for the Castle of Good Hope, which means it was a prison island back in the 17^th century.  Later, it became a leper’s colony, and then was repurposed as a prison holding both political prisoners and garden variety criminals.  (Well, not garden variety because it was a high security prison.  Also because it’s pretty much a desert out there.)

Like Alcatraz, Robben Island is in sight of the city, surrounded by water that’s freezing cold and treacherous to swim in.  No one escaped.  Because of the distance from the mainland, there has always been a residential village there.  They gave up their school last year because there were only about a dozen kids in town.  Sports were hard, because at best you could only make up one team.  Now the kids take a ferry in to a mainland school every day (that weather permits).  It must be a lonely place.  

The houses are tidy, but stark, and there is nothing but sand in the yards.  Every one has a rain barrel, a mute testimony to the scarcity of fresh water.  Every one also has a satellite TV dish, a more recent addition.

The tour is broken into two parts, a bus tour covering the town, cemeteries, and outbuildings, and the tour inside the main prison, which is led by a former political prisoner.  Our guide was a gun-runner whose unit was betrayed by an agent inside the ranks.  He got 25 years, but served only 8 before the apartheid government fell and all the prisoners were released.  He’s been giving tours for ten years, living on the island with his family.  When asked what motivated him to come back to the place where he was imprisoned, beaten, and forced to labor under inhumane conditions for so long, he said, “Free place to live and I needed a job.”  Financial reality trumps ideology.

The leadership of the ANC was kept on A Block, and those cells are locked.  Mandela's cell is furnished as it was when he was there, and the others are empty.  On C Block, the cells are open, and most have narrations in them written by the prisoners.  Some are mundane, some harrowing.  One I couldn't make any sense out of.  All are touching in their own way.  It's a tour that really gets to you.

My companion for the day was Louise, a multi-talented woman who is teaching courses in bioethics, sociology of education, and philosophy of religion aboard ship.  (Back home, she teaches at a law school.)  She said she’s been to worse prisons.  Without taking anything away from the obvious hardships, I was surprised at some of the routines. 

Kids outside Mandela's cell

The cell doors were left unlocked and the prisoners had access to each other for much of the day.  Each cell block had a recreation area, and they could choose what playing fields to have.  Each cell block had a tennis court, and they sent tennis balls with messages in them over the walls into the neighboring cell block.  They cells had windows, so they had light and air.  They had access to books and received visits from family.  They called the lime quarry “Parliament,” because they drafted the constitution there, and the cave they used as a toilet was called “The University” because they hid books in there.  The leaders of the movement were housed on the same cell block, which made communication easier (but of course made surveillance easier, too).  

It was also freezing in the winter, starvation diet, with torture and intimidation.  All black and mixed race prisoners, all white guards.  It was a horrible place, no disagreement there.  But the men at Robben Island formed a community and then the essentials of a constitution and a government.  

South Africa is still a very segregated country.  While there are no laws forcing the black South Africans to live in specific areas, they still live in the townships.  

Or, to use their chosen verb, they "stay" in the township.  As is in, "Where does your daughter live?"  "She stays in the East Cape."  It's a bit of a contranym.  We would use stay to mean a temporary stay, as in a motel, and they use it to mean a permanent residence.

High unemployment keeps a lot of them there all day long.  They don't even visit back and forth between the townships.  The townships are generally remote, and the transportation system moves people from township to city, but not from one township to another.  It's a kind of village life, very supportive of one another within the village, but with horizons that often don't extend outside of the village.  

The township system started almost 100 years ago.  It will not be dismantled quickly.  

It's time for Africa!

It stayed sunny all day, and it stayed just as windy, too.  What a glorious day to be on land!

My time in South Africa is largely taken up with Semester at Sea trips.  I had signed up for three of them, and then was asked to lead a trip where there were no faculty or staff members, so now am committed to running three trips and participating in a fourth.  It will be an intense week, but so much fun.

Today's trip was the City Orientation tour, which turned out to be largely history, with a bit of politics and geography thrown in.  Our tour guide, Buz, has an infectious enthusiasm for his native country.  And he is, of course, full of interesting information.

First off, he said, Table Mountain is absolutely the reason for Cape Town's location.  In every other way, Cape Town is a lousy port, the most dangerous in the Southern Hemisphere.  Unpredictable weather, terrible storms, crazy winds, dangerous ocean currents.  But Table Mountain acts as a giant cistern, and an early shipwrecked sailor saw streams flowing from it and realized that good water and good land allowed for restocking ships' provisions on the way to India and the Far East.  So Cape Town it was, the only green spot in southern Africa.

Our first stop was the Castle of Good Hope, the oldest building in Cape Town.  Originally built by the Dutch trading company, it later became the headquarters for the English governor.  Buz told us the stone for it was quarried on Robben Island, which was a prison back in the 1600s as well as more recently.  The yellow brick came from the Netherlands as ballast in the ships and was repurposed.  You can see it all over town in historic buildings.

Afternoon sundial at the castle.

Highlights of our castle tour included the small of freshly cut grass (ah, small pleasures of being on land!) and seeing the parade ground in front of the city hall building, where Nelson Mandela addressed the public after his release from prison in 1990.

The smell of the land, specifically, grass!

It's an unimposing space, but it was the only space where the thousands of people could be accommodated.  Tensions were running high, he said.  White South Africans were terrified of losing power and terrified of the Other.  For years they had been told that blacks and coloreds were going to ravish their daughters, run wild, and so on.  Blacks came with arsenals in the boots of their cars.  And Mandela said, "Put away the guns."  His message was one of peace.

And it was one of strategy.  As Buz told us, the whites had been preparing for the eventuality of armed insurrection, and they would have overwhelmed the opposition forces, with great loss of life on both sides.  He told us of a colleague who said, "We were gobsmacked" by Mandela's announcement.  But peace was the possibility that had not been tried.

Mosaic bench in the Company's Garden, depicting community watch

Parade ground outside the Castle, with City Hall in the distance.

It's a rocky peace.  There are still huge disparities of income, there's 40% unemployment, a miner now makes about $10/day after a recent 50% raise.  Cape Town has the highest crime rate in Africa.  But they are doing some things right, too.  South Africa has a flag that was designed as a result of a public competition, truly representing the people.  Children are taught in their native language, and college students can take their exams in the language of their choice.  (Imagine that in the US!  Perhaps that's operationalized by having only objective tests.  Otherwise, what a grading nightmare.)  The staid colonial building that houses the art museum has vibrant native art front and center.  Land seized from the colored population is being developed to benefit all, and some compensation is being offered.

The second stop on our tour was the Company's Gardens.  Originally the vegetable gardens for restocking ships, it has been a botanical garden for over 100 years.  We stopped there for "a bit of something," tea (or other beverage) and scones.  Scones on steroids!  The scones themselves tasted more like shortbread, cut open and served with a large dollop of jam and a generous portion of whipped cream.  Ohmigawd good.

Not just for breakfast.

We spent about an hour in the natural history museum.  (No photos allowed.)  Possibly the most remarkable thing about this museum is that it does not have a gift shop.  It has a locked cabinet of things you might buy, outside the cafe.  A couple of pieces of jewelry, a few books, some souvenir keychains.  Probably a dozen items, total.  A four hour tour with no opportunity to fill the coffers of the host country, no opportunity for kickback to the tour guide.  We were gobsmacked.

In addition to the usual dinosaur skeletons and jaws from whales, there was an exhibit of rock art--paintings and carvings from caves and outdoors--mostly depicting shamanic healing and trance dancing.   That was amazing.

Intense colors of the Malay Quarter

There was also an installation on rats, throughout the museum.  It is supposed to challenge the way we organize and present information.  A brochure on the exhibition says rats are closely connected to humans, but they are rarely shown in natural history museums.  So here they are incorporated into the history of mankind:  their skulls compared to the skulls of other animals, their contributions, positive and negative, on museum cases and display cards.  In one diorama, a pair of mice is being expelled from paradise (an allusion I don't get even with the explanation).  There is an exhibit of newspaper headlines about rats, and a display of rat movie titles.  It is all beautifully done, but I found the brochure vital to interpret what I saw.  Sneaky little critters!

Leaving the rats behind, we made our way back to the ship.  I had planned to go out to dinner on shore with a friend, but reports of salmon aboard ship kept us home.  In deference to the parents who are visiting, we get fancy food.

With the parent trip, the open ship event, and being in a beautiful city where English is spoken, we have a lot of visitors.  A surprisingly large number of students have family living in Cape Town.  There are over 100 visitors on the manifest, and more who will not come aboard.  As I walked back from the dining room, I was acutely aware of being a solo traveler.