Cape Town, Day 2

February 25

John: This is the first time that we've been in port on a weekend, so today we got to do a weekend thing--go to the weekly market held at what is called the Old Biscuit Mill in Cape Town. It's an area that used to be industrial, but that, in the manner of such things elsewhere, has now been converted to trendy designer studios and, on Saturdays, an enormous food market. It's clearly a scene, with mobs of people, locals intermixed with tourists, and everyone looking suitably bourgeois. The thing is, the food is really fantastic--we had dim sum, bagels, curry, and ice cream (four major food groups right there!) and everything was delicious. In fact, all the food we've had in Cape Town so far has been incredibly good. Maybe our taste buds are particularly eager after the more-than-adequate-but-pretty-bland food on the ship, which has left us all starving for fresh ingredients, but everything we have eaten here has been extremely flavorful.

The crowd at the Old Biscuit Mill food market. Charlottesville's City Market could be like this!

Speaking of which, this evening, we went out to Emily's, a restaurant with a good recommendation in a couple of guide books. And it, too, was great! We met the chef, who looks like he just came out of a Dutch Master painting, van dyke beard and all. The food was South Afirican--I had a springbok carpaccio appetizer (delicious--springbok is a gazelle that abounds here and is the South African national animal). And the wine, also of course a South African vintage. was terrific. We got Maeve dressed up in a pretty dress we got in Ghana that she had resisted wearing to this point:

Maeve's dress from Ghana--the picture doesn't do it justice.

Astute readers of this blog (that is, all of you) will likely have noticed that to this point we have made no mention of the kinds of things for which South Africa is perhaps best-well known to Americans of our generation, namely its history of racial segregation, apartheid, political conflict, and the events that led to Nelson Mandela becoming President in the 1990s after his dramatic release from captivity after twenty-seven years as a political prisoner. To me, it's sort of astonishing to be here at all; when I was in college, the divestiture movement was in full force, and there were frequent student agitations for Williams to divest itself of its holdings in a big mining company here, for example. All of that is quite ancient history to the college students on the voyage--almost all of whom were born after Mandela was released from prison in 1990!--and South Africa has opened itself up to the world in a way that one could never have imagined back in the 1980s. 

Yet the casual visitor to Cape Town could readily come away from a short visit of a few days with absolutely no awareness of any of this history. Indeed, it would be quite possible to leave here with the impression that South Africa's population was overwhelmingly white and very prosperous. It's almost as if there had been a systematic attempt to divide the races, to make it possible for white South Africans not even to see most of the non-white people who share the land with them, much less to see the conditions in which they lived….  Oh, wait.

Apartheid came to an official end in 1994, but it was so deeply entrenched, socially and economically, that there's a surprising extent to which at least here in Cape Town, it certainly feels as though the system were still in place.  The majority black population overwhelmingly lives in "townships," shantytowns that are out of sight of the central areas of the city, and come into Cape Town only to work, mostly in the lower rungs of the service industry. We'll start pursuing this more fully, starting with the next post.

Cape Town, Day 1

Feburary 24

John:  Our arrival in South Africa was anticipated in a way the day earlier with our roughest seas to date on this voyage--ten- to twelve-foot swells that sent the ship rolling side-to-side in a very dramatic fashion, with the occasional truly remarkable jolt that would send chairs tipping over, people crashing into each other in the halls (with the sound of a collective "Whoooooa!"), stuff falling off shelves. We heard the terrible, terrible news that some of the liquor and a lot of the stemware in the Faculty Lounge bar was destroyed when it fell to the floor in a particularly big swell. Fortunately, no one in our group got seriously sea-sick, and we simply battened down the hatches and stuck together while stuff went flying all around us. Apparently rough seas are pretty typical as you approach the southern tip of Africa, where the Atlantic and Indian Oceans meet; a couple of years ago, the ship was delayed for two days by winds so high that they made the final approach to the docks impossibly risky. 

But we woke up to a view that made it immediately clear that the ride was worth it. Out on the ship's observation deck, we could see the amazing sight that distinguishes Cape Town, the view of the beautiful Table Mountain, the backdrop to the city and the entire Cape.

Cape Town is a beautiful city, with the mountain in the background and the ocean at its front door. We're not the first people to make the comparison to the Bay Area in the US--you get the same combination of ocean, cliffs, and urbanity that you can get there. If anything, it looks and feels a little nicer, since it's less crowded and the infrastructure is therefore less strained. The waterfront, named for Queen Victoria and her son Alfred, who did the initial development of the port as early as the 1860s, is reminiscent of the Inner Harbor in Baltimore, with shops, restaurants, and entertainers--though again nicer, with a mix of Victorian and modern architecture, and, again, Table Mountain as the backdrop. We had lunch at an outdoor cafe on a street turned into a pedestrian mall that felt a lot like Charlottesville. The contrast with Ghana, where we were last week, could hardly be greater. 

Aidan:  Well, Cape Town is a magnificent place. It has tons of fun stuff to do.  It's a very big place, so it takes a long time to walk from place to place. And the sidewalks are made out of bricks so it kind of hurts your feet. I'd recommend the company gardens. It's a big garden, which is really beautiful. 

There was a Castle, the Castle of Good Hope. It's  a really awesome thing. It's the shape of a star, so if somebody is at a corner, they can see different ways. There are tons of cannons, and there's this military museum, which has a lot of really awesome things in it. It has actual rifles! it has pistols and swords and shields. We saw an actual cannon fire--except that it didn't have a cannon ball in it.  Because if it did, it would blow up some of the Castle--they didn't want to harm the Castle.

The signal cannon being fired at the Castle of Good Hope

John: Aidan is describing the sites of our first-day's sortie.  First, we went to the Castle of Good Hope, built by the Dutch when they arrived here in the middle of the seventeenth century, and then expanded and refurbished by the British when they took over the place. We explored the ramparts, and let the kids--we had gone out with our friends Victor and Elizabeth and their son Josiah, and with Lori and Ridge and their sons Charlie and Sam--run around in the castle grounds. 

Outside the castle is the city hall. The area in front of it was a green space and parade grounds when the Dutch were here, and is also the space where the crowd gathered to hear Nelson Mandela give his first address after being released from prison in 1990.  May be someday it won't be a won't be a parking lot, but that's what it is now.

In the afternoon, we walked around the town, and once again let kids run around, this time in the "Company Gardens," a lovely botanical garden on the site of the first farmland that the Dutch used when they founded Cape Town. The idea at first was that Cape Town would be a supply post for Dutch ships traveling to India and China. 

After our day of rough seas, I had to wonder about what it was like to be sailing for months in those small wooden vessels, with no idea, really, where you were, and no good idea about when if ever you might get to where you were hoping to go, and what you might find there. Add in scurvy, rats, storms, sharks, and so on, and it must really have been quite an experience. We retired to our ship, a virtual luxury hotel, now calmly moored at the dock near the V & A Waterfront.

Ghana: National Museum and roadside shopping

Vicki: While John visited the slave dungeons on the coast, I went into Accra with Aidan, Maeve, and our friends Josiah and his mom Elizabeth. We visited the National Museum, which has artifacts and displays providing a window in the long history of human life in this part of Africa. We saw prehistoric stone tools, tribal carvings both ancient and recent, and displays about encounters with the Europeans. Portuguese sailors first landed here in 1471. They brought home reports about the apparent abundance of gold possessed by the elites of the coastal kingdoms, prompting Portugal to establish a trading operation intended to put gold into their cash-strapped coffers. One of my favorite displays was of the bronze weights used in Ashanti territory to measure gold and gold dust. They were crafted into whimsical shapes – laughing people, animals, warriors, and dancers. I wish I had taken a picture, but chasing Maeve kept me busy. She thought of the space less as a museum than as a race track.

As John’s post on the slave dungeons shows, however, this early trade paved the way for one of history’s greatest catastrophes, the slave trade. When the gold ran thin on the coast, Europeans starting purchasing slaves to use as forced labor in the New World. Enslaved people brought to the Americas had an average life-span of less than 7 years, if they made it there at all after their dangerous trek to the coast, brutal imprisonment while waiting for the slave ships, and the trip across the Atlantic in conditions that can only be described as murderous. The European demand for slaves turned slave-raiding, which had been a historically brutal but also occasional practice connected to war, into a regular business serving a seemingly bottomless demand for slaves. People from the inland areas were captured in mind-boggling numbers – 12 million or more. At the museum, we saw displays about the slave trade, including the irons used to confine small children and the documents passed among Europeans showing their means of accounting. The museum had a model of the Cape Coast slave castle that John and later I visited, but miniaturizing the slave castle had had the clear disadvantage of making it look very cute and fun to play with. The kids loved it.

After the museum, our gang went to a store called Global Mamas that sells goods made by local women according to fair trade principles. Ghana is a cash-strapped nation were people work very hard but on average earn less than $2.00 a day. As a friend on the ship who taught a unit about fair trade in Ghana explained to me, many of the women of Ghana are skilled seamstresses without a market for their goods. They make for themselves the beautiful clothes crafted from gorgeous textiles that we could see everywhere we went. But since so many women can sew and so very few people have enough money to buy ready-made goods, there’s not much of a local market for their skills. Global Mamas employs them at a decent wage to make clothes for the western market. The organization provides the dress patterns suited to western. The women decorate and dye the fabric and sew it into dresses, shirts, backpacks, all kinds of bags, table linens, and more things than I can name. The women also make beads from clay, glass, and stone, which they string into jewelry. Women working for Global Mamas can make as much as 1000% of their usual salary, which sounds like a lot until you realize that it amounts to about $60 a week and that they use the money to support their extended families. The operation does, though, help lift people out of poverty. I purchased largely, even though I can’t pretend that doing so gives any evidence of my virtue any more than it does of my pleasure in buying pretty things.

Global Mamas is a pretty cushy shopping experience for Ghana – it’s enclosed, air-conditioned, and the fixed prices relieved us of the (for us) burden of extended bargaining that typically characterizes commercial exchanges here. By contrast, great deal of shopping in Ghana occurs alongside and even on the roads, which are lined with stores from one end of Accra to the other. A colleague on the ship, who’s spent a good deal of time in Ghana, told us beforehand that you can buy anything you want from your car in Ghana, and she wasn’t exaggerating. The stop-and-go traffic is threaded with merchants selling their goods from car to car, always from containers balanced on their heads, according the local custom. You can reach out from your window and buy not only the water and snacks intended for hungry commuters, but also jumper cables, fan belts, sunglasses, underwear, kitchen goods, and cell-phone cases. Most of the stores along the road are housed in decaying cement buildings and shacks that were probably constructed by their operators. For a westerner, it’s odd to see refrigerators, couches, office chairs, and glass coffee tables sold by the road, block after block and mile after mile. I found the mismatch between many of the goods and the spaces in which they’re sold jarring:  flat-screened televisions, for instance, are stacked up in a dusty, ramshackle stands without electricity or running water. I took pictures, often at random, from the bus, but none of them captures the impression made by miles and miles of stores.

Last day in Accra

February 17

John: We made one last sortie into Accra, braving the hour-and-a-half bus trip into the city with the goal of seeing the Makola Market, the central shopping place for the citizens of Accra. Unlike the Arts Center, which caters to tourists, the Makola Market is where the locals shop for everything from groceries to appliances. It's an enormous, sprawling place, and it really resists description. We only saw part of it--it would be impossible to see it all in a single day. Streets lead into labyrinthine alleyways, goods spill out in every direction, stalls selling pots and pans juxtapose with stalls selling cloth, food, toys, oh and over there is a guy butchering a cow's leg with a machete. It's completely disorienting--within 50 paces you have no idea where you are, and how to get out--you just have to keep going. We clutched Maeve tight and waded in.

The biggest surprise was the kind of reaction that Aidan got. The day before, I had bought him a Ghana soccer team jersey from one of the fairly ubiquitous stalls, and people all around as we walked through the market called out to him "Ghana boy!" "Ayew" (the name of the Ghanaian soccer player on the back of the jersey--he's apparently the team's star) which we initially took for "hey, you!" Soccer is big here, and the Ghanaian team a source of pride, since they've played above their heads lately in international competition.  Most of all, it seemed that people were genuinely pleased and charmed that a little boy obviously from outside the country was expressing affinity for their team--everyone was very nice about it all.  We were glad to go to a non-touristy place--we were the only outsiders around, clearly.

After that, we stopped at Nkrumah Park, the memorial to Kwame Nkrumah, the founder of modern Ghana--there's a memorial park with fountains and a statue, his mausoleum, and a small museum. The park is lovely, the mausoleum more or less what you might expect (OK, maybe more modernist than you might have expected--it's nice), but we found the museum to be a little sad and run-down. It's a block building, with a main interior space not much bigger than a classroom, with pictures on the wall in mismatched and beaten-up frames documenting Nkrumah's career.  About which I knew pretty much nothing before we arrived, and it was a good, quick lesson, one clearly biased but not hagiographic--his flaws were in sight as well as his strengths. Nkrumah was clearly brilliant at the task of unifying what was then the Gold Coast in the 1950s so that it could put itself into a position to gain its independence from Britain--Ghana is still proud, clearly, that it was the first sub-Saharan African state to put the post in post-colonial, gaining its independence in 1957 and its full sovereignty in 1960. But Nkrumah was also clearly deeply flawed at actually running a new state, and he was deposed in a coup in 1966 and spent the last six years of his life before he died in 1972 in exile (one interesting exhibit outside the museum is a statue of him with his head cut off, a relic of the day of the coup, when the statue was vandalized). The story that the pictures told, though, was on the whole an exciting one--there is Nkrumah with the founders of the party organizing for a free nation!  there he is declaring the state independent! there he is with Kennedy! with Kruschev! with Nasser! with Mao! It gave the picture of an exhilarating, if very brief moment, when people here could feel that history was on their side, that they were doing something memorable and important that they could be proud of. It all seems a lot more interesting than today's mission of pleasing the IMF and the World Bank. 

We'll be processing our trip to Ghana for a while--it was kind of overwhelming. The country has enormous challenges; there are elections scheduled for this year, and while Ghana is a success in that it has had peaceful transitions of power for years, it's still clear from reading the paper that the country is deeply divided by partisan lines that surely cut across regional and ethnic divides as well. We are very glad that we were able to spend some time here with Semester at Sea--it's hard to imagine that we could come here any other way--and we'll be rooting for Ghana in soccer and everything else from now on.

Waterfalls and Monkeys

February 15

Aidan: I fed two monkeys. Three, if you could the baby monkey who was holding on to his mother. At the waterfall, I couldn't believe that people weren't being knocked over by the water. The waterfall was the best part of the trip so far!

Maeve:  Hello, monkey! Monkeys don't wear clothes. People wear clothes, but monkeys don't.

John: We took a bus trip, one organized by the Ghanaian tour operator contracted by Semester at Sea, to the eastern part of the country, with two destinations: the first to a waterfall near the village of Wli, billed as the largest waterfall in West Africa, and then to the nearby village of Mona, where the villagers traditionally held the monkeys in the area to be sacred, which means that they have come to be very tame, and roam freely. 

Both sites turned out to be beautiful and exciting. The waterfall was indeed spectacular; we put on bathing suits and waded into the pool at the bottom, which is shallow and refreshingly cool. Some of the students got under the waterfall, which, from the sounds they were making, was a bracing experience. The big surprise was the bats--they line the hills around the falls and fill the air above--there must have been thousands of them:

The Wli Waterfall

Bats!

Maeve and Vic looking up at the bats

The walk to the waterfall--a 45 minute hike from the tourist station where the bus let us off--was also interesting, as it took us to a totally different natural environment than that around Accra; here, very close to the border of the neighboring country of Togo, is a rainforest, with bananas growing wild. Our third rainforest, on three different continents, in three weeks.

Aidan did indeed get to feed monkeys. They'll come right up and take bananas that you hold out--a transaction too quick to be recorded on camera. There are about 400 monkeys in the village, and while we didn't see that many, we got remarkably close to them.

The bus ride out to these sites was a long one; traffic and the poor state of the roads meant that we didn't return to the ship until after 8 pm (the dining room staff, always incredibly helpful, put on a late dinner for us). But all of the kids on board--and this was a trip that attracted a lot of families--did great. And it was a great opportunity to see some of the countryside of the east of the country, the Volta river, and the villages along the way. Maeve tried her best to make friends with the monkeys:

Hello monkey!

Slave dungeons

Tuesday, February 14

John: I took a solo trip today, a tour with a group from the ship to visit two of the slave trading castles along the coast. What is now the nation of Ghana was one of the main portals through which Africans who had been kidnapped in the interior were shipped to the new world, and the coastline is dotted with the remains of the enormous fort/castles that European governments built in the fifteenth through the seventeenth centuries. It's awkward to do this kind of thing as a tourist. It's much the same kind of awkwardness, I suppose, as tragedy prompts with deliberation; you're putting yourself in the position of witnessing something awful happening to other people, and forced to reckon with whatever pleasure you're taking from the experience. And of course this tragedy--if the analogy holds-- was real, incomprehensibly enormous, and has had effects that continue to the present.  I live in Virginia, where African and African-American slaves were held for hundreds of years; I can walk to the site of the old slave auction block in Charlottesville, and live in sight of Monticello, home to the slave-owning Thomas Jefferson, whose Notes on the State of Virginia I'm co-editing.  My colleague Victor Luftig pointed out that we both work at a university that was built by slaves. It feels important, then, to go to these places since I'm here. I'm going today and Vic is leading a trip of her own to the same castles on Thursday; we both felt that this would be too difficult a trip for the children.

Many of us on the bus felt some moral discomfort on a smaller scale as we started our three-hour trip to the Cape Coast region, well west of Tema. As we pulled out of the port area, we were joined by a police escort in the form of a uniformed motorcycle driver, who cleared the traffic ahead of us. It might have been a five-hour drive if he hadn't done so, but the sight was kind of entertaining, scarifying, and appalling all at the same time--he pushed through traffic ahead of us, directing drivers into the shoulders (at times kicking cars) to create in effect a middle lane for the bus, then holding up traffic at roundabouts and intersections to speed us through. He seemed to get annoyed at our driver for not being aggressive enough in pushing through the narrow spaces he was creating, but to my eyes, we had some pretty close calls. The police escort is a service that you can pay for, apparently, and our tour operator does so since Accra traffic is so terrible, but still--the message about the relative importance of us and the ordinary Ghanaian drivers was pretty clear. And it was also pretty obvious that the police have a lot of authority here. Ghana is considered a success in that it has had democratically-elected governments and peaceful transfers of power for twenty years, which is something that most west African states can't say. But the military still has power here, clearly; you pass through the occasional military checkpoint on the road, and while our buses have always been waved right on through, we were reminded to bring copies of the information page of our passports with us at all times, just in case they decided to check that kind of thing. 

Our first stop was at what is called the Elmina Castle. It is the oldest European building in Africa, built originally in 1482 (pre-Columbus!) by the Portuguese as a warehouse for storing gold and the other stuff that they were after from Africa. More than 100 years later, the Castle started to be repurposed to hold a commodity that had by that time become very valuable because of the demand for labor in the New World plantations:  slaves. Some pictures:

Elmina Castle

The "Door of No Return"--the exit from the castle to the beach, where slaves would get on small boats to be taken to the slave ships

Interior of the female dungeon

It's a lot to process, and I'm still working on it. Our group had, though, a remarkable guide, a man named Atu  tk, who somehow struck what seemed to me to be a pitch-perfect note of candor and grace throughout his presentation. I can't recall his exact words, but it was very clear that his relationship to the site, to the history it represented, and to our presence there was anything but facile or willing to settle into cliche--it was really impressive. At the end, he said that he believed that there was no justification in visiting a place like this but to be reminded of the potential scale that people's inhumanity to other people can assume, so that we can be vigilant against its reoccurrence.

One of the most jarring things about this castle is that it is in an incredibly beautiful site, positioned out in the ocean with gorgeous beaches on all sides. The incongruity reached what are almost comical proportions at the lunch that followed. We were taken to a resort called the Coconut Grove--a pretty swanky place even by US standards, situated right on a spectacularly pristine beach, within view of the castle. They had a picture wall of famous people who had stayed there; I recognized Kofi Annan (who is Ghanaian), but it felt fairly profane to be enjoying lunch on a lovely beach.

Back on the bus, and down a few miles to the Cape Coast Castle. This was built by the Dutch in the early seventeenth century expressly for the slave trade,and it shows--the dungeons are now underground, and even more awful than those at Elmina. The British ended up in control of this by he middle of the seventeenth century, and held on to it for centuries; it was the center of the colonial government until the 1870s, when the capital was moved to Accra. 

Our time here was shorter, since we had lingered over lunch. Our guide was great, but not quite up to Atu's standard. What impressed me most was that this castle was on a considerably bigger scale than Elmina; the size of the operation had gotten much bigger by this time. I had gotten tired of taking pictures (and many of the places inside the building are too dark for good picture-taking), so I don't have any of this castle/dungeon.

A long and morally exhausting day.

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.