Accra, Day One

February 13

John:  Our arrival in Ghana was timed, as usual, for the breakfast hour, and this meant that at the end of breakfast, a group of twenty or so Ghanian customs officials arrived at the Garden Lounge--our usual breakfast spot of choice--just as we were finishing up. They were a cheerful and friendly bunch, eager to have their pictures taken with students; maybe they were happy not to have to look at passports, visas, and entrance forms any more, having spent the last couple of hours going through the paperwork of everyone on board. Aidan met one of the officials and learned the Ghanaian handshake--a Western handshake that ends with a snap of the index fingers (it's tricky).  

Ghana is also tricky logistically; it's not particularly easy to get around.  We're docked in the city of Tema, which is essentially an enormous port and industrial area, located 25 km or so from Accra. But that distance is enormous around here, since the infrastructure is so poor; since the roads are completely inadequate to the amount of traffic, the trip from Tema to Accra takes anywhere from one to two hours on a bus. Still, we braved it, and boarded the bus outside the ship for the trip to Accra. 

The trip was already fascinating; since the traffic is slow, people come up to cars, buses, taxis, and "tro-tros" (vans that act as a kind of informal private bus service) selling anything they can:  water, snacks, but also socks, books, wiper blades--whatever.  And the way to and from Accra is lined with small shops, most clearly fabricated by hand from whatever building materials that were available-- that again offer almost anything imaginable. It seems that one of the ways that Ghanaians are dealing with the massive un- under-employment of their country is to in effect create their own jobs by finding something that they can sell to each other. Life is clearly difficult, but everywhere you see Ghanaians working hard to get by.

Speaking of buying and selling, our main excursion on this first day was to what is formally called the Center for National Culture; informally, it's known as the Arts Center. But even "informality" seems too shapely a word to describe the rambling warren of stalls here. There must be hundreds of them, arranged in narrow aisles, each one staffed by one or two people urging--politely but insistently--that you come in and have a look at their merchandise. Clothing, carvings, leather goods, brass goods, paintings, and so on are the staples here.

Vic, Aidan, and (not cooperating with being photographed) Maeve outside the Arts Center

We ended up with some clothes (a pretty dress for Maeve; a snazzy shirt for me), which you will probably start seeing in pictures in the blog soon. You have to haggle for everything--we're not particularly good at this, but we did manage to get some prices down from opening offers that actually weren't all that bad, really, at least by our standards. 

Our best score today was a drum for Aidan:

Many, many drums are going to be on board this ship by the time we leave on Friday night.

More to come over the next few days as we catch up on writing about our experiences here.

Bitter pills

Maeve: I have a chocolate treat every morning!  I don't like honey medicine.

John:\:  As we approach Ghana, where the ship will be staying for most of a week, the topic of malaria prevention starts to seem even less hypothetical than it was in Brazil. Malaria remains a real concern here--our Lonely Planet guidebook says that getting malaria at some point is simply "a fact of life" for many Ghanaians, and a Ghanaian student who is on this leg of the voyage stated last night--"there's a lot of malaria." (This fact alone must account for some not insignificant proportion of the country's poverty--the human cost of widespread malaria is enormous.) We'll be going through a lot of countries where malaria is a threat over the next couple of months--Ghana, India, Vietnam. 

There's no vaccination against malaria, so like just about everyone else on board, we are carrying prescriptions for pills to prevent contracting malaria in case we are bitten by a mosquito, which we started taking just before we reached Brazil. A common topic among the parents of children on board is how to get the kids to take the pills, since there's no such thing (apparently) as a suspension form for the medication.  Most little kids can't swallow a pill, which also taste terrible if you try to chew them. And Maeve has decided that anything that resembles medicine is inherently evil. Everyone is trying to figure out how to get the kids to take the medicine, since if they don't, they really can't leave the ship in a place like Ghana--it's just too risky. Various solvents to get the medicine down have been brought along: maple syrup, lemonade, honey.

The solution for Aidan, who needs to take something called Malaron twice a day, is to grind up the pills and mix it in a lot of honey. We arrived at this after a number of attempts--some successful, but most of them not--to get him used to the process of taking the pill with water.  At least with honey, he can get it down.

This is the "honey medicine" to which Maeve refers above. She can't abide it--either the honey can't sufficiently mask the terrible taste of the medication, or she simply doesn't like honey, but in any case, that was a disaster. Mixing it in milk and having her drink it? No. Mixing it in milk and giving it to her via an oral syringe (which she's often fine with for other kinds of medicine)? Emphatically no (I'm leaving out a lot of details here). 

Chocolate--that's the ticket. And subterfuge--that's key, too. Having failed with everything else, we bought some chocolate syrup in Manaus, and started secretly mixing that with the medicine, and then offering it her as her "chocolate treat," which she gets in the morning. Chocolate is bitter, like the pills, so maybe that helps. Or maybe chocolate syrup is just powerful enough to overcome anything.

One interesting fact learned on this trip is that malaria, which we now think of as a disease of the tropics, is actually a European disease, and was in fact widespread in seventeenth and eighteenth century England. When the fens were drained to create new agricultural land in the southeast of England in the early seventeenth century, it disrupted the tidal patterns that swept mosquitos out to sea. Pools were created that were great breeding grounds for mosquitos, leading to "chills," "agues" and "fevers" (described by, among others, Defoe, who witnessed this when visiting the area) that are now believed to be malaria. 

Now we just have to hope that our supply of chocolate syrup lasts.

February 8--Neptune Day

On the schedule that the students got before the term started, today was referred to as something like "Procedural Protocol Day." This was a ruse, designed to hide from them that fact that today we would be celebrating (if that's the word) Neptune Day, the day we cross the equator. (Actually, we crossed the equator back in Brazil, while on the Amazon, but nevermind.) Traditionally, this is a day of revelry, when the "pollywogs" like us who have never crossed the Equator before get initiated by the "shellbacks" who have. Neptune Day, in one form or another, is a tradition that goes back a long way, and I suppose it got fairly rough in, say the British Navy in the 18th century.

It's hard to keep something like this a secret; the students knew that this was coming, but apparently most didn't know exactly what was going to happen. On our ship, Neptune Day took the form of having some of the crew march through this ship banging drums to wake everyone up at 730, followed by a ceremony at the Pool Deck, where students (and a few others) had their heads dowsed with green slimy fluid (symbolizing, I think, fish guts) before jumping into the pool.

A fair number of the students, male and female, went on to get their heads shaved. This has particularly fascinated Maeve, who is just one step beyond a shaved-head look herself.  

Though it seems like the undergraduate students enjoyed themselves, none of us participated, and Aidan and Maeve passed harsh judgements: 

Aidan:  "it was gruesome." 

Maeve: "It was scary."  

A fellow faculty member, who shall remain unnamed, : "It turns out that you actually can see too many women in bikinis."  And too many male scalps, too.  We hope that they've got good sun hats for when we get to Ghana next week.

Unnamed students getting dowsed with something green and disgusting for Neptune Day

At sea

Monday, February 6

John: Faithful readers of this still-young blog will recall that I mentioned earlier that, while none of us had been seasick, the odds were good that neither with nor the rest of the ship had not faced a real test yet.  That test arrived today, our first full day on the open Atlantic after leaving the Amazon yesterday afternoon. 

The transition from the smooth if murky waters of the Amazon to the open Atlantic was abrupt; in the middle of Sunday afternoon, it was clear that we were back on the open ocean simply from the increased rocking of the ship. With this came widespread seasickness on the ship, all the moreso on Monday as we hit a legitimately rough patch of ocean, with ten-foot swells.  Many students had a characteristic pale "I'm really trying to keep it together" stare, but they were the ones who were able to get out of their cabins at all; Vic had only about half of the students in her class present, and the lines at the dining hall were noticeably thinned out.

The good news is that no in our little traveling party succumbed! I felt a little queasy, but medication helped. Vic was fine, as were Aidan and Maeve. What fine sailors!  

And we're reassured now that we can handle some pretty rough seas; we might still face what our colleague Paul Muldoon described as "the real Master and Commander stuff," but we're made of fairly stern stuff here in cabins 5008 and 5010.  

Farewell to Manaus

February 3--Last Day in Manaus

John: Our last day in Manaus was filled with last-minute sightseeing (I got to the see the Teatro myself, which was great in part because it is almost exactly the same size as an eighteenth-century British theater), shopping for snacks to have on the ship, and rest--we're beat.

Aidan has more to say (and a picture) about his encounter with the caiman the other night (you'll remember that he held one on a late-night boat excursion):

Aidan:

This is the caiman I held on my adventure into the rain forest. He felt scaly; well, what do you expect? He's a reptile. I miss that caiman; I think he liked me.

John:Manaus is a very interesting place; its situation alone--well up the Amazon River, far from the next nearest large place--is enough to make it unique. In the city are signs of its history--in the form of the classically-designed  buildings that were constructed at the time of the rubber boom--and also signs of the nature that surround its.  Here is a picture I took of some long-abandoned warehouses in the port area, built, by the date on one of them, around 1900, and now slowly being overtaken by vines:

The ship departed in the evening, reversing our course up the Amazon. We'll be traveling on it for a couple of days (making better speed now, since the current of the river is with us), then across the Atlantic to Ghana. We feel a little apprehensive about this; we'll be at sea for ten full days, by far our longest time without stopping at a port (and the longest stretch until we leave Japan for Hawaii in April). Among other things, this means ten consecutive days of teaching for Vic and of schooling for Aidan. Among the disorienting things about the Semester at Sea experience is that our schedule is set by the itinerary of the voyage rather than by conventional marks such as the days of the week; if we're not in port, classes are held on Saturdays and Sundays, for example. That and the frequent time changes enhance the sense of being in a very separate world.

Rainforest

Manaus, day 2 and 3:   Maeve woke up feeling much better, testimony to the resiliency  of the very young. And this was good news for all of us, because we were able to go on our major planned expedition in Brazil, an overnight to the rain forest. Yes, we became eco-tourists, which put us in good company in Manaus, which clearly has a fair number of tour operators setting up visitors with excursions of varying degrees of rigor.  We did not exactly rough it or go too deep into the rainforest; our "ecolodge" was only about six miles downriver -from Manaus, and close enough to Manaus's sprawl that we could see condominiums across the river from the lodge's main building.

Aidan at the Tiwa Ecolodge

Still, we got to see quite a lot. Our first stop was a nineteenth-century rubber plantation, preserved for tourists to show how the incredibly brutal system of rubber extraction worked. It was a system of slavery, really, with local people lured by rubber barons with the promise of money, but everything worked to keep them in bondage, starting with the difficult process of extracting rubber from the trees themselves. 

In the evening, Vic and Aidan joined other members of our group and went piranha fishing.

Aidan didn't catch a piranha--this is the one that got away.

Aidan got to hold a caiman:

The next day, we all took an hour-long hike in the jungle. An hour in the jungle is plenty long, actually, particularly when you're carrying a two-year-old, as Vic and I did in turns on the hike, a highlight of which was seeing monkeys in the trees. Unfortunately, the monkeys didn't stay still long enough for us to take a very good picture.

Maeve bravely facing the jungle.

Then, another sortie by boat to a floating restaurant for lunch, and  a visit to some giant lilypads:

And, finally, our boat went to the famous "meeting of the waters" where the Rio Negro, the tributary that passes by Manaus, comes into the Amazon proper. It's a remarkable sight, one not fully captured by the camera; the dark waters of the Rio Negro (it's well-named--the water is dark and very reflective, particularly at night) and the brownish waters of the Amazon run side-by-side for miles, not merging together as you'd expect. Differences in temperature, speed, and acidity keep the waters apart until, I guess, they find an equilibrium point downriver.

The Meeting of the Waters

Vic and I went to dinner at an outdoor restaurant on the square outside the Teatro Amazonas.

Hey, we're back! The interruption was caused by our stay in Manaus, Brazil last week. We'll start catching up now, with posts to come over the next few days as time--and this slooooow internet connection--permit.

Manaus, Day 1:  We arrived in the city of Manaus, Brazil, early in the morning of the 31st of January. One immediate discovery: Maeve had a mild fever, and was generally tired, cranky, out of sorts. A trip to the infirmary (oh, how I long to call it sick bay!) confirmed this, but discounted ear or throat issues, which was encouraging. And she responded well to some tylenol, cheering up under its influence. Still, it seemed best to scale back our plans for the day, and to go out in shifts into the city, with Vicki and Aidan making the first sortie and John and Aidan going out to explore in the afternoon.

Manaus is a big city--over two million people. But it is also a remote place as big cities go, located deep in the rainforest, and about as far up the Amazon as you can take a large ship. Which is sort of the point of locating a city here; Manaus was developed from a small trading post in the late nineteenth century to be a deepwater port from which rubber--at that time found only in Brazil, where the rubber tree is a native species--could be exported. The demand for rubber in the industrialized countries (among other things, to make the belts that powered all that heavy machinery) created a rubber boom that made Manaus rich at the end of the nineteenth century. And then there was a rubber crash as those same industrialized countries developed other sources of rubber by spiriting out rubber seeds and establishing plantations in their own colonies. Manaus became a backwater for decades until the late 1960s, when the government of Brazil established it as a free-trade zone, giving multinational corporations incentive to set up factories here. And so they have: consumer electronics, vehicles, appliances--all of them are made in plants that ring central Manaus, and have made the city a busy and, in its central parts, crowded place.

Our ship docked very near to downtown, so excursions into the heart of the city were easy, either a walk or a short cab ride away. On this first morning, Vic and Aidan were joined by Heather Paxson, a wonderful anthropologist on the faculty, and her six-year-old son Rufus. They visited the city's main tourist attraction, the Teatro Amazonas, an opera house built in 1896 at the height of the rubber boom. It's really quite lovely, though restraint is not one of the words you'd ever think of to characterize it.

The Teatro Amazonas

The Governor's Box in the theater

Aidan was perhaps most impressed by the model of the theater in Lego form, a gift from the Lego Corporation.

The Teatro Amazonas in LEGO form

Maeve: I met the captain! He has red glasses! He asked me how old I was, and said that he was very pleased to meet me.

John: While Vic and Aidan made their initial foray into Manaus, Maeve and I stayed on board what was rapidly becoming a ghost ship as students and faculty headed off to various adventures. While walking the halls, we did indeed run into the captain, a tall, elegant Croatian man named Roman, who does indeed wear red-rimmed glasses. He could not have been nicer to or more charming with Maeve. I'm all the more impressed at his friendliness when I heard later that he and the staff captain had basically been taking turns manually steering the ship through the Amazon over the last three days and nights of travel; the river is sufficiently tricky to navigate that it requires a greater level of attention than is typical on the open seas. We don't see the captain that often--I guess he's busy--but  when we do see him, he inspires confidence, and, after this encounter, some affection as well.

Harlequin even made it to the Amazon, apparently

Aidan with some very dangerous-looking weapons in the Amazon museum

In the afternoon, Vic stayed with Maeve, and Aidan and I headed back into town. Our main goal was a small museum of artifacts from indigenous people, which we both enjoyed--lots interesting things, and artifacts of a kind of that Aidan had been reading about in his school work on the rainforest. We stopped for ice cream, visited a supermarket, and got back to the ship for dinner.