Up the Amazon

Aidan expands on our disappointing experience whale-watching off Dominica:

Before whale watching we prepared with binoculars and whale watching eyes. But it was a disappointment. No whales. We almost saw a mature male sperm whale but we did not. We kept hearing whales (ed: this was on the ship's echolocator) but we could not tell where they were. After a few hours we gave up and went back to Dominica. That day the ship took off on the way to Brazil. When I wrote this we were still going to Brazil.

Aidan's sketch of whale watching, with him in the catamaran and the whale laughing at us on the other side of Dominica

 Living on a ship is easy. But not easy peesy lemon squeezey.

 Waves: you have to do a lot. So don't look at waves, they will hypnotize you:

Aidan's drawing of two passengers being hypnotized by waves, and one already hypnotized and in bed.

John: We have been on the Explorer for several consecutive days now, chugging up the Amazon as we head toward our Brazilian destination of the city of Manaus. We arrive in the morning there, and have outlined some sightseeing and also an overnight trip to an "ecolodge"--a lodge just a few miles upriver from Manaus that is said to offer both interesting views of the rainforest and comfortable accommodations.  Sounds good to us.

The transition to the Amazon was notable mostly for the change in the color of the water, from blue to a muddy greenish-brown. At first, the river was so wide that we could see neither shore.  But for the last couple of days, we have been in the midst of a lush, almost uninterrupted rain forest, streaming by us hour after hour. It looks sort of like this:

Imagine that picture extending the length of your vision as you look either to the right (starboard) and left (port). But it's not boring, at least not yet; it's hypnotizing, as Aidan suggests, in its own way. There are interesting birds to spot (one serious birdwatcher on board managed to strike a particularly elusive quarry off his list the first day), the occasional village, and small boats.

Maeve wanted to get a closer look:

More in a couple of days, after our Manaus visit. In the meantime, Aidan and Maeve are enjoying their cabin:

Time changes

John: We remain at sea, making our way at a stately ten knots or so to our next destination of Manaus, Brazil. The television in our cabin has a schematic view of the ship's position, which is currently off the coast of Venezuela. That coast remains something of an abstraction, as we cannot see any land, just the wide expanse of ocean in every direction. For landlubbers like the four of us, that view has not lost any of its novelty; indeed, the sight of blue seas in all directions serves for me as a pretty good illustration of the sublime. If I read the schematic right--and give the odds at 50/50 for that--it also looks like we're staying above the continental shelf, avoiding the deeper waters of the Atlantic, which are bound to be choppier. So far, so good on the seasickness front for all of us, but my sense is that we haven't really faced a rigorous test yet; the ship's rocking remains mostly gentle, posing some modest challenges to balance and manners (you have a tendency to bump into people unexpectedly in the corridors), but nothing too dramatic. We're still wearing our Sea Bands, and maybe they're helping. We start taking our malaria medication today, preparing to enter the malaria zone, where we will be for many weeks to come.

We set our clocks ahead another hour last night; we're now two hours ahead of US Eastern Standard Time. We will of course make many such advances over the course of the voyage, and it's going to be grueling, surely, when we're doing this every other day or so on the ocean crossings. This morning, I neglected to set an alarm to wake us up, and we got up just in time to get ourselves dressed and off to breakfast before it closed. Grumpy as he was at being awakened this morning (though from my point of view, this kind of turnabout is pretty much fair play), Aidan knows that he is the great beneficiary of all these time shifts, since it means that he has two birthdays.  We cross the international date line on his birthday--April 20--which means that he gets to experience it twice, once on each side. I imagine that he also thinks that this means he gets two cakes, two rounds of presents, and so on. We'll have to see about that.

It rained last night, soaking the outside decks, the first rain we have had since departing a week and a half ago. And at this writing, it looks like we're head into into more rain. When I mentioned this to a waiter at breakfast, he said "Brazil." The ship was there a month ago and it was raining; it's still raining. I guess we're putting the rain part in "rainforest."

January 24: Dominica

Aidan:  We went whale watching today, but it was not worth it. There were no whales and we were also supposed to look for dolphins, but there were none of them, either. 

Aidan in a futile search for a whale

John: Aidan is right; the whale watching was disappointing. We went out in a fairly cool catamaran with a group from our ship, and after we were a few miles out to sea, they dropped an echolocator. They picked up signs of whales, including a characteristic sperm whale call (who call to each other, apparently, in a pattern that goes beat, beat… beat, beat, beat), but at no point were they able to figure out exactly where they were. So we came into port without seeing any marine mammals--too bad!  And rare, apparently; the captain of our boat said that they see whales 85-90 per cent of the time, so we were definitely unlucky today; less lucky, for example, than the group that went out in the same boat yesterday, who saw many whales and dolphins. 

Maeve: Mommy and I took a taxi to the lovely Emerald Pools, where you can swim and there are waterfalls. When we were leaving the ship, some women in the port area offered to braid my hair. Mommy lifted up my hat to show them my head, and they fell over laughing.

Maeve at the Emerald Pool

Dominica

January 23: Dominica 

On a bridge over a gorge in the rain forest in Dominica

Aidan: We arrived in Dominica early this morning, docking around 7:30. After breakfast, we took a van into the middle of the island, where we got on a tram for a ride into the rain forest. I am studying the rain forest in second grade, anyway, and it was amazing to see it in person. I got to swing from vines. The path was hard to walk on, which made it fun. I was surprised that there were so few animals. (ed.: Our helpful guide pointed at that because Dominica is an "oceanic" island, one that has never been part of a mainland, it has no native mammals, but also no poisonous snakes. It has many species of birds.)

In the afternoon, Mom and I climbed a mountain.  I was the first one to get to the top. It was half worth it; there was a huge cannon, a place for religious people to pray, and the President's House. Other than that, there was only trees and grass.

I really like Dominica. I feel like I live here already.

John: The rain forest tram ride was one of a number of tours arranged for the voyage by the Institute for Shipboard Education, the entity that founded and continues to run the logistical side of Semester at Sea. We went as a family, and it was indeed a wonderful experience. The tram took us up to the emergent layer of an incredibly lush forest. From the top, we hiked part of the way down, and our informative guide gave us short lectures on some of the local flora. The rainforest gets about 400 inches of rain a year--the guide offered what is surely a well-worn joke about Dominica having two seasons "wet and wetter"--but it did not rain during our trip, though the temperature was a good 25 degrees cooler in the mountains than it was down at sea level.

Dominica (which takes it accent on the third syllable) is a beautiful small island in the Caribbean. It is almost unique in the Caribbean for still having a considerable amount of pristine rain forest. Almost all of the other islands saw their rain forests largely or wholly cleared for sugar plantations centuries ago. But Dominica is hilly, rocky, and volcanic and was thereby spared that kind of ecological catastrophe. It also has, again uniquely among these islands, a population of the indigenous people, the Caribs, who were decimated everywhere else by the diseases that Europeans brought with them and to which the native people had no immunity. It is not a large population--only about 3,000 or so on an island of 70,000 people--but it is remarkable that it exists at all.

Dominica also does not seem to have a tremendous tourist industry--certainly nothing compared with the Bahamas or some of the nearby islands. And again, this is probably a consequence of topography--the island has beaches, but the sand is dark and volcanic, and they are largely shallow rather than the kind of broad beaches on which you could imagine hotels and sunbathers. After seeing Nassau and its tourist-oriented downtown, I'm inclined to think of this as a happy accident, but there are probably people on Dominica who would disagree. According to the guide in the van that took us to the arial tram, the main industry on the island now is agriculture, particularly bananas, which are exported to the United Kingdom in particular, and other fruit that is exported to the neighboring islands.

In the evening, we all took a shuttle to the center of Roseau, the capital of Dominica. We ran into Ronald Bagel and Margaret O'Brien, other Semester at Sea people (she is working as the coordinator of the in port Field Programs, which looks from the outside as a challenging job involving many moving pieces), who pointed us to a restaurant/patisserie. We had dessert there, some chocolate rum cake that was less exciting that we hoped, given where we are. We all got back to the ship pretty exhausted, but somehow Maeve managed to stay up quite late. She's made the fascinating discovery that she can turn the lights in her cabin on and off from her bed, which is not helping the going-to-sleep process.

Starring in Global Studies

January 22: At Sea, en route to Dominica

Aidan: I was the star of the Global Studies lecture today!  The reason that Alex Nalbach asked me to answer the question about the Caribbean on film for him is that he was gathering answers to play in his first Global Studies lecture (editor: the Global Studies course is in effect the core course of the Semester at Sea curriculum for the undergraduates; everyone on board attends Alex Nalbach's lectures, which will continue throughout the course of the voyage). When he got to my answer to the question "What's the first thing that comes to mind when you think about the Caribbean?" the film paused and the screen read "that's the Caribbean tectonic plate." And then, later in the lecture, when he was talking about the geography of Dominica, he thanked me for mentioning the Caribbean plate, because it is so important to the history of the island, which is a volcanic island formed because it sits at the meeting of the Caribbean plate and the North American plate. 

This afternoon, I made very sophisticated paper airplanes with my friend Josiah during the time for kids' activities.

First full day at sea

January 21, At Sea, en route to Dominica:

John: Today was our first full day at sea. It is a day later than expected, because a small number of passengers--a combination of students and the "life-long learners," people who are on the voyage but who are neither teaching nor receiving college credit, were delayed because of issues with their visas for Brazil, without which they cannot board the ship. But they all finally were able to reach Nassau and to board last night, to great applause. We set sail at about 8 pm last night, leaving Nassau, which, as Aidan indicates, was underwhelming. But we all did enjoy a little while at Junkaroo Beach, and cannot complain about the weather, which is pleasant.

The doctor on board urged everyone to take preventative measures against sea-sickness, and we're listening; we're all wearing Sea-Bands around our wrists, which apply accupressure to a point that is supposed to work against nausea, and we're also taking medication. So far, so good; the sea has been pretty gentle, but you are aware all the time that you're on a ship on the ocean, and there have been a couple of reports of people feeling very queasy already, so we're not going to make an experiment to see what happens when you  don't take preventative measures. We're also hungry a lot, which, one passenger who has spent more time on ships than we have says is typical because it turns out that you're burning a fair number of calories keeping yourself balanced. One of the challenges for all of us, but particularly for Aidan and Maeve, is that there really is not all that much food available outside of the set meals of breakfast, lunch, and dinner; there are a couple of places on the ship that serve snacks, but there's nothing much that is very healthy or very filling.

At least the ship's food is on the whole pretty good. Mealtimes have become social hours, particularly as other families with children arrive in the dining halls and we join them, or they join us. We're not missing the daily chore of figuring out what to eat, shopping, cooking, and cleaning up.

We are settling into some rhythms. Aidan and the other school-age children have home-schooling in the main dining room in the morning. Maeve and I usually investigate areas of the ship, perhaps go outside to the basketball court, which is the area of the ship that is most protected and safest to run in, or read in the cabin. Then in the afternoon, Maeve naps while Aidan joins the other children in activities--they're just brainstorming what they want to do now, but they'll come up with various activities for the kids in the afternoons. Then dinner, some reading, and bed--we're all sacked out pretty early, though it's been taking Maeve a long time to settle herself in to sleep. Sometimes close to three hours, which is exhausting for her parents. We're not sure how she's doing this, since she must be hours behind in her sleep on the whole, but she is frequently lively and jokey and simply resistant to sleeping at night.

Today is Vicki's first day in the classroom, and she reports that the students are game and responsive. One source of confusion and frustration are the faculty-directed practica, the "fop"s that are required of the students for all courses; the rules concerning these have changed from previous voyages, and lots of students are misunderstanding what is required of them, and faculty have to set them straight.

Nassau

January 20

Aidan: We spent yesterday in Nassau, in the Bahamas, and found a nice beach. I built a mountain of sand on the beach with my friend Josiah, and put hidden treasure in it. Then we were back on the ship, the Explorer, which is our home for the next fourteen weeks. During the day, the college students got on board, and now everyone is on board. Other than the beach, I did not like Nassau at all.

This morning, Alex Nalbach, one of the professors on the ship, asked me if I would do a one-second interview on film. So he set up his camera, and asked "What's the first thing you think of when you hear the word Caribbean?" I thought for a second, and said "The Caribbean plate!" meaning the tectonic plate that the Caribbean is on, near the North American plate. I think he was surprised.  I had thought of saying "pirates," but figured that it was too boring an answer. 

Maeve: Everyone loves me! I walk down the halls and everyone smiles and talks to me. I share a cabin with Aidan, where I sleep at night. I get to see a lot of Josiah, and also Sam, Charlie, and their dad, Ridge.

Our room

Questions

One of the interesting questions for us is how Maeve is understanding everything about this trip. What is it like to be two years old and to be subjected to so much new experience? We can't really expect her to answer that question directly. But we're beginning to get a sense of what she's understanding and what she is not understanding by some of the questions she has been asking the last couple of days, as, first, our preparations mounted, and now as we are on our way, having arrived last night at the hotel in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, where everyone is gathering before going to the ship tomorrow.

So for example, the other night, as we got to the hotel after a long day of travel, Maeve asked: "Why are we at this place?" Because we're staying here for a couple of days before getting on the ship. "And then we go home?" Well, yes, but it will be a long time before we are home.

We ask her questions, too, like Do you know what we are doing? "Yes." Well, what are we doing? "I don't know." She's of course completely open and guileless about all this, and it's sort of refreshing that she feels no need to pretend to knowledge that she doesn't have.

A few days ago, as we were talking about some of the places we're going, Maeve wondered, "Is China a girl?" No, sweetie, China is not a girl; you'll be surprised.

Adventures begin

As we got on the plane from Charlottesville to begin what will be a round-the-world journey, I gave Aidan a surprise present, a copy of The Blue Lotus, one of the Tintin stories that he got interested in after seeing the movie last month (sort of backwards, I know).  And invoking Tintin is appropriate, I hope, since Tintin, boy reporter, goes in the book to Shanghai and Japan--where we are going as well. The book turned out to be a good diversion during a long day of travel and was, Aidan reports, better than the movie. Tintin generally ends up being captured by bad guys and is at one point in The Blue Lotus, given a "madness serum." I hope we can still have fun while avoiding all that.

Packing up!

Maeve:  We're going on a ship! With Victor! and Elizabeth! and [extra note of excitement here] Josiah! We'll wear short sleeves!


Maeve has been saying this for months now. All of it is true. But it needs some explication.

We are indeed going on a ship on a round-the-world voyage. We will leave Fort Lauderdale, Florida, on January 17, and travel to Dominica, Brazil, Ghana, South Africa, Mauritius, India, Singapore, Vietnam, China, and Japan, before returning back to the US in early May. The ship is the MV Explorer, pictured below, which functions as the floating, traveling campus for the Semester-at-Sea program. We haven't seen the MV Explorer yet, but all the reports from those who have been on it are encouraging; it's a big ship, built about ten years ago as a cruise ship, and then at some point after that acquired by the Institute for Shipboard Education. We hear that it's nice, and that the shipboard experience is one of the highlights of the voyage and the experience.

With Victor! and Elizabeth!  Victor and Elizabeth are our friends and colleagues in the English department, who will be going on the voyage as well. Victor, in fact, is the impresario of the entire venture, as he will be serving as Academic Dean for the voyage. We're all slightly awed at the work Victor has done in putting the faculty and the curriculum together, and grateful to him for inviting us along. Elizabeth will be teaching on the voyage, offering courses in World Theater and World Prayer that should be really fascinating.

and [extra note of excitement] Josiah! Josiah is Victor and Elizabeth's nine-year-old son. He will be on the voyage as well, of course. Maeve adores him.

We'll wear short sleeves!  Well yes, we will. We will be traveling in the southern hemisphere for much of the voyage, where it will be warm and summer-like, even hot in a number of places. There will be sunblock for Maeve's fair skin.