Home

John: We're home--back in the US, and, as I write, back in our house in Charlottesville. The Explorer arrived in San Diego at about eight am on Wednesday morning, May 2, greeted by hundreds of parents lining the pier on both sides of the cruise terminal.  For the parents who had been waiting since an early hour, it must have been an exciting thing to see the ship, which they last glimpsed departing the Bahamas, coming over the horizon, having gone more than 25,000 miles since January. For us, it was a morning of mixed emotions: we're excited to be home but it's also sad to be leaving a ship that has come to feel like another home over the last three and a half months, and also all the people we have come to know in that time. In a lot of ways, Semester at Sea is a crazy thing--why in the world would anyone think it was a good idea to put 600 college students on a cruise ship and send them around the world? But it's also an incredibly intense experience, unlike anything we have ever done before. Every place we have seen has been interesting and incredible in its own way, and we've gone to places that we would never have imagined seeing; I suppose it is conceivable that we might have gone to Japan, China, or South Africa, but the odds of our ever visiting Accra, Saigon, Mauritius, or Cochin are long indeed, and we're deeply grateful for the chance to have gone to these places. And the business of doing it on a ship with a whole community that's been assembled for the purpose is comparable to nothing else I can think of, and you kind of have to have gone through it to understand it fully. Which is something that you come to realize in the final days, and that makes even the annoying people on board (of which there were not too many, actually) gain a sheen of sentimental association, since you have shared a unique experience with them. Aidan has made good friends here, and Maeve was called by more than one person the "star' of the voyage--she has  gained a lot of new fans.

So there were lot of teary faces as we got off the ship in something of a mad rush once the ship was cleared to let passengers disembark.  Various sectors of the shipboard community were called in sequence; we hugged the line up of deans and residence advisors assembled at the gangway; we assembled all our luggage--an enormous pile, but smaller than some others (we've generally come to realize that we can live without a lot of the stuff we have gotten used to having)--and piled into cabs to go to our downtown hotel. We decided to stay in San Diego for a couple of days before making the full re-entry home. 

Surely the highlight of our time in San Diego was going to Legoland, which is kind of wonderful and bizarre. What's nice is that unlike other amusement parks, it doesn't have scary thrill rides; it sort of builds rides out of the various categories of Legos that have become a big part of our lives the last few years.  And it has hands-down the best food of any theme park I've ever visited; fresh pints of strawberries on offer, for example, which we ate up greedily, having not seen a berry of any kind since January.

Aidan in Lego car; Maeve at Lego New York

And so Semester at Sea is over. It has been a great and rich experience, one that we will be chewing on for a long time. We can readily see why some people have gotten a little addicted to it and have done it over and over again; Bob Viera, the executive dean on this voyage, has now done the round-the-world trip five times, and many other people on this voyage were repeaters as well. For the moment, we're staying put, and hope not to bore people too much with our stories. If anyone is interested in doing SaS, we'd be glad to fill in the gaps, and it's worth noting that there are lots of people going on the voyage who are neither students nor teaching faculty. The program in effect creates an entire small college every semester, and for that, they need residence life directors, librarians, people to staff the field office (which puts together the off-ship trips), administrative staff--even a communications person, a videographer, and a photographer. Children travel at an incredibly cheap rate (because she did not turn three until five days after the end of the voyage, Maeve traveled for free). Maybe we, too, will have to do this again.

And with the end of the voyage, so too the end of this blog. It's been interesting, and fun!  I won't miss trying to upload pictures on the incredibly slow and frustrating internet connection on the ship, but I'm happy for the chance to document the voyage this way. The blog got close to 2500 hits in the last three and a half months, and while I know that some of those were accidental (we were getting hits from Russia for a while--I'm guessing from an automated site of some kind that was probably up to no good), I'm gratified by the attention.  Many thanks to all the readers, and commenters, wherever you are.

Hawai'i

John: We arrived in Hawai'i on the 24th for an unusual two day stay. Unusual because the Explorer was docked in two different ports in that time--Honololu, on the island of Oahu, and Hilo, on Hawai'i, known as the big island. Unusual, too, in that we were not allowed off the ship when we were docked in Honolulu--it was strictly a refueling and resupply stop, even though we were there for most of the day. The reasons for this were never made clear to anyone on board (why not let us off in Honolulu? why not refuel in Hilo?), but we figure that one way or another, it came down to money, and it was simply necessary to do this to stay within our voyage's budget. The cost of fuel alone for this voyage must be astronomical and rising by the day, and it's not surprising that corners need to be cut somewhere. So what I can tell you about Honolulu is that it looks great from the vantage point of a cruise ship in the harbor, but I have no idea of anything about it beyond that.

Honolulu, early morning as the ship approached the dock. Too bad we couldn't get off to see more of it.

But, look, it's Hawai'i, which is pretty exotic and interesting! We've gotten used to the exoticism of foreign ports, but this is a part of the United States that we've never been to before, and that we didn't have plausible plans to visit in any other way. And, because it is part of the United States, we're also home in some important ways. We went through US immigration on the ship on our morning in Honolulu, which means that we don't have to do that when we arrive in San Diego (though we do have to go through customs). And we can stop the mental exercise of translating local currency into dollars (an exercise that is particularly tricky when you're on your third or fourth local currency this month). And, happily, our cell phones work again; it was satisfying to see the familiar letters ATT in the upper left hand corner of my phone.  All morning long, the ship was filled with people walking about with their phones clapped to their ears. That's become a familiar sight, I realize, on most college campuses, but not here until now since we have long been out of range of US cellular service, and trying to make calls abroad is astronomically expensive.

So our time in Hawai'i really was limited to one day, a day docked in Hilo on the big island. The island of Hawai'i is actually not all that big--you could drive around the whole thing in a day. We rented a car and set out for the Volcano National Park, which seemed to be a good thing to do for people who only had one day. And it was! Kilauea, which is the largest active volcano in the world, is amazing--vast, really, with areas of relatively recent lava flow all over the place. You come to realize that basically the whole island is an enormous volcano, with a couple of main openings where gas and lava are still coming out but with tremendous amounts of activity going on under the surface. It's active now, but you can't get close to where lava is present unless you're a professional, and the park service also monitors the presence of sulfur dioxide gas.  Occasionally on the road while in the park, we'd see signs instructing us to close our car windows because the air had high levels of that gas. There's no danger of a big eruption right now, but the volcano really is very active, with lava slowly oozing out of several places--places that the likes of us are kept at a safe distance from.

What you can see is steam, which is rising in great quantities in the large caldera, the innermost crater:

Maeve is standing in front of the innermost of a series of concentric craters that marks what used to be the sides of a mountain that is much taller than it is now; about five hundred years ago, the top of the mountain collapsed into itself (that must have been an exciting day!), and the crater has slowly been filling up with lava ever since. 

There are old lava flows everywhere, with signs on them marking when they occurred.  This one that Aidan is climbing on dates to 1974:

A vast, recent lava flow. Aidan is the red dot in the background.

The whole thing looks like an unearthly, science-fiction landscape-it's unearthly, or at least unfamiliar to our usual ideas of what earth looks like.

Ater hiking across lava flows and through lava tunnels (way too dark for pictures), we made our way to the coast, where we saw some very old petroglyphs, symbolic carvings in some very old dried lava:

This site is considered sacred by the native Hawai'ians, who brought the umbilical cords of their children here to place in the round holes. It's a pretty stark landscape, all old lava flows with volcanic cliffs rising a couple of miles away and the winds off the ocean being very strong. The ocean front is beautiful, but there's no development or settlement in site, probably because the area is too imperiled by the possibility of lava flows that no one would ever want to build on it. The area is in fact also now the end of the line for the road we took, which beyond this point was covered over in lava a few years ago. 

With more time, we would love to see more of the island; others on the ship went snorkeling and took surfing lessons. That's for another day. As we boarded the ship, lots of the students were taking pictures  of themselves and their friends at the gangway--it's our last time boarding the Explorer before we disembark for good in San Diego on May 2. We're back on the seas, headed to the mainland. Our cell phones once again get a rest.

April 20/20

John: And so we continue our long trudge across the Pacific Ocean back to the United States. We've been at sea for what seems like forever and a week or so since we left Japan, but we still have a long way to go until we reach Hawaii, much less San Diego, where we get off the ship for the last time. It did not help that the first few days after we left Yokohama were marked by some very rough seas, and then by chilly and rainy weather. We basically spent an entire day sailing through fog, with visibility reduced to maybe a couple of hundred feet in any direction. I don't envy the bridge crew trying to navigate the ship under those conditions; on our tour of the bridge a few weeks ago, Aidan, Maeve and I learned that the ship has every electronic device there is to pinpoint our position and locate other ships and underwater hazards--sonar, radar, GPS, etc--but still, it's got to be easier to be able to see where you're going. We had been so accustomed to the tropical temperatures we have largely been traveling in that the chilly weather came as a surprise--we're not used to it, and do not really have a lot in the way of warm clothing. Also adding to the length of the crossing is the fact that we are crossing the international Date Line from west to east, which means that we are going through April 20 two times, once on each side of the line.  Weird!  The analogy to the movie Groundhog Day  was reinforced when the loudspeakers on the ship started playing "I Got You Babe" (the song that Bill Murray wakes up to in that movie) at alarmingly early hour on the first April 20.  It also means that we go from being seventeen hours ahead of the east coast of the United States to seven hours behind, which hardly seems fair (I have to think that there must be a way of gaming the stock market or picking horses in moving in effect from the future to the past, but can't quite figure out how to do it). It's a little boring.

But the weather has cleared and warmed up in the last two days, which helps a great deal. And, by a happy coincidence, the day we cross the International Date Line happened to be April 20, which is Aidan's birthday! Which means that he gets to celebrate it twice, a fact that has led to a number of questions in the course of the voyage.  I thus offer a list of frequently asked questions:

Q: Does this mean two birthday parties?  A. Yes: one small party with family and closest friends on the first April 20, then, on the second April 20, a larger party for all the children on board during the afternoon kid's program.

Q: Does this mean double the number of presents?  A. Not really, though there were two present-opening ceremonies, one on each April 20 morning. We had neither the foresight in January nor the space in our luggage to bring presents with us, but Vicki was able to shop for toys at the Toys 'R Us in Hong Kong, and I got him an interesting chess set carved of stone in Saigon.

Q: Is Aidan now two years older, since he had two birthdays?  A: No; he simply turned eight twice.

Contemplating his wish.

As a grand finale to the two-day-having-a-birthday-while-crossing-the-internatonal-date-line celebration, we hosted the kids on board for a showing of WALL-E in one of the classrooms. This was Aidan's choice, and it could hardly be more perfect for our situation. It's about the degradation of the environment, which has been a theme of the Global Studies class on the voyage, and much of it is set on a ship that is on an interminable cruise. Everyone had a great time. Aidan's birthday as a whole was a joyous way to get us over the hump of our long voyage home.

Yokohama

John: The port of Yokohama is not far from where Commodore Perry showed up in 1853 with a fleet of American gunboats and demanded that Japan open itself up to the world. Our ship, also filled with Americans, arrived more peaceably. But we were also determined to trade; I bought this reproduction of a nineteenth century Japanese wood block print showing an American vessel in Yokohama harbor, sometime in the 1870s or so:

Yokohama is now a very large port; odds are that everyone reading this blog owns something that was once on the docks of the port of Yokohama. And it's a big, interesting city--more modern and lively in many ways than either Kobe or Kyoto, though I can't say that I'm basing this on vast experience, since we were only in these places for a couple of days. But like a lot of people on the ship, we found Japan surprisingly difficult to navigate in some basic ways. ATMs, for example, are very hard to find. And they frequently don't work with American debit or credit cards. Many businesses don't take credit cards of any kind--it's a very cash-oriented society. It's hard to find restaurants that aren't either noodle shops or American chains (as is often the case around the world, the chain you come across the most frequently is KFC). Nothing against noodle shops--we enjoyed several--but we hoped for more variety. it was in some ways easier to navigate in Ghana, where debit and credit cards are accepted in places you wouldn't expect, and where ATMs can be seen in distant villages.

We made several stops: to a craft market, an amusement park (in Asia, these are typically right in the middle of the city, which is nice), and to the Landmark building, which does indeed stand out in the skyline and is the tallest building in Japan:

Yokohama, as seen from the ship as we approached. The Landmark building is the tall one in the middle.

It's built with that wide base in the hopes of surviving the major earthquake that is sure to hit here sometime. The Semester at Sea voyage last spring was diverted to Taiwan because of the earthquake and tsunami then, and while there was no evidence of destruction anywhere that we went, I did see a couple of signs in English urging people to remember the victims of the earthquake. We didn't feel any tremblers while we were in Japan, but there are sure to be more of them in the future.

The Landmark building has an observation deck on the 69th floor that is reached by the world's fastest elevator; it goes up to 750 meters a second. It's very cool, and features some great views in all directions.

On a clear day, you can see to Mount Fuji, the signs said.  But it was not a particularly clear day, and it began to rain in the evening. Then in rained all the next day, heavily at times, canceling the baseball game that I was planning to attend, and generally putting a bit of a damper on what was our last day in a foreign country. We cannot complain, though--we've had remarkably good weather for the entire voyage, and have already seen and done so much that we've been into the bonus round for a while now, as it were. 

Our main outing of the day was to the International Doll Museum. It turns out that the exchange of dolls was a very big thing early in the twentieth century, and there were regular clubs and conferences where Japanese and American people shipped or gave each other dolls as gestures of friendship and peace. That wasn't enough to stop WWII, but the legacy here apparently is that there were a lot of dolls from all over the world that formed the basis of a very nice and well-curated museum. Maeve discovered an affinity:

Maeve really does look like a kewpie doll

Impressed by dolls, filled with noodles, drenched in rain, we headed back to the ship, which pulled out that night to begin our long journey back to the U.S. The Pacific Ocean is big! bigger by far than the Atlantic, and it will take us eleven days just to get to Hawaii, where we stop for a single day before heading to San Diego, where we disembark to make our way to Charlottesville on our own. We've come a long way, but we still have a long way to go to get home. 

Cherry Blossoms

Aidan:  I went to Japan when the cherry blossoms look best. In Japan you see cherry blossoms everywhere. The tree itself is huge but the blossoms are very small. The blossoms were white and light pink as colors. The blossoms were beautiful and I would like to see them again.

Japan: Kobe to Kyoto

John:  Japan is our last stop before heading home to the US; after here, we head across the Pacific to San Diego, stopping only for a day in Hawaii to refuel. So there is some melancholy attached to this port, a sense of a good thing approaching the end. And there is some fatigue as well; if Japan were our first stop rather than our last, we would surely be more excited and prepared with plans for what to see and do. As it is, after being in Singapore, Vietnam, and three different cities in China all in the course of the last two weeks, we are a little wiped out and need to dig deep to summon the energy we need to explore this new place.

Still, Japan! A place that we have never been, never realistically expected to visit, and that has much to explore than we could possibly accomplish in a year, much less a week. That is more than enough to overcome our tiredness. And, too, we are arriving right at the peak of cherry-blossom season, which is a special time of year here. The Explorer is set to dock in two ports, Kobe and Yokohama. We arrived in Kobe on Tuesday morning to some fanfare: the city sent out a fire boat, and we were greeted by a brass band:

Arrival in Kobe, 7 am. That's the fireboat ahead, its plumes of water leading us into the dock. 

We ended up not seeing much of Kobe, though, in the two days that the ship was docked here. And that's too bad; it's a nice city, a port city with a dramatic backdrop of mountains, and it has completely recovered from a very powerful earthquake that leveled a big part of the city and killed thousands of people about fifteen years ago. But the kind of historical monuments that we wanted to see were more in Kyoto, which is not far. So we booked a hotel in Kyoto (about which more later) and took the train there. Not a bullet train this time--such a thing does not run between Kobe and Kyoto--but a regular fast train, which is still a lot faster and more efficient than anything we are used to in the US. We crowded in between the commuters, many of them men in what seems to be the business uniform of dark suit, white shirt, tie; clearly business dress here is pretty conservative. Overall, people dressed here a lot like Americans, although occasionally we saw women in beautiful traditional kimonos.

(Editorial warning: yet another history lesson ahead.) Kyoto was the capital of Japan for centuries until the middle of the nineteenth century, when Japan was forcibly opened to foreign trade (by American gunboats), the shogunate fell, and the capital was moved to Tokyo. The city was never bombed in WWII, so there are still some older structures here, though most of them are on the perimeter of the city; the center of Kyoto is often fairly drab, cherry blossoms notwithstanding. But it's all laid out on a grid, so it's navigable, and in fact we had very little trouble traveling around the city by bus; Kyoto has a good and efficient bus system, and, crucially for us, the best bus maps I've ever seen.  Every stop is announced in Japanese, English, and Chinese, making the bus, for once, a better choice than the taxi cabs we have often been taking.

We headed out to the Kiyomizu-dera temple complex, a Buddhist temple dating to the eighth century that enjoys a stunning situation on hills over the city, and right now is decorated beautifully with cherry trees in full bloom:

The "hondo" or main building at the Kiyomizu-dera temple. This was built in 1633, and apparently it's considered a remarkable example of this kind of construction.

Aidan purifying his hands before entering the temple.

We walked from there as it started to get dark to the Gion neighborhood, which has shopping and nightlife, including Kyoto's geisha district, which is one of the last of these in Japan. And we saw a geisha! She was being led to a black car by an older businessman, and there was a row of similar black cars with drivers outside a building that we took to be a geisha house, a premise confirmed by a check with Wikipedia; there were tourists outside waiting for other geishas to come out with other rich guys. Mostly, the street consists of older buildings that are now restaurants with eye-popping prices. We found a delicious and more affordable dinner a couple of blocks away.

Our hotel in Kyoto was billed as a traditional Japanese-style hotel, which was sort of true; rather than Western-style beds, it had futon mattresses laid out on tatami mats. The clientele, though, was Western backpacker-types attracted by the (for Japan) cheap prices and proximity to the train station. We all uncurled our mattresses and went to sleep together:

Our room in the Sparkling Dolphin Inn, so called, we realized when we turned out the lights, because of the glow-in-the-dark dolphins and stars on the ceiling.

The next day, we went to the Golden Pavilion, another famous temple on the periphery of town. And gold here is not a metaphor--the Pavilion is covered in gold leaf:

The Golden Pavilion.

From there, we went to the Nijo Castle at the center of town. This was the home base of the shogun, who really had the power in Japan. There are no pictures allowed of the interior, and it was pouring rain, so we could not get good pictures of the exterior, but it's a remarkably beautiful and serene building inside. It's easy to see here why and how modernist architects drew inspiration from traditional Japanese buildings--the spaces are somehow impressive without being showy, and the use of natural materials--wood, bamboo, matting--creates a sense of warmth.

On to Yokohama!

Maeve and the Paparazzi

Maeve: People in China and Japan are constantly taking my picture! Every time I stop and sit down, there are a bunch of people standing around with cameras. Sometimes they ask my mommy or daddy if it's OK, but a lot of times, they just take my picture. Most of the time, I'm pretty happy with it. But it's really strange. It's as if they don't see too many little girls with blonde hair and blue eyes like me.

Maeve and the paparazzi in Hanzhou, China.