Saigon for kids

ohn:  With Vicki gone to Hanoi for a couple of days--she left at 4 am on our second morning here in Saigon--the agenda turned to chlldren-friendly activities. Of which there are a fair number in Saigon, fortunately. We had read that Vietnamese people love children, and that seems to be true; Aidan and Maeve get a good deal of attention when we are out and about, and it seems like we cannot go into a store for more than a minute before they have candy in their hands (one place, surprisingly, had Lindt truffles--how about some for me?). At the same time, I've also been a little terrified to see children standing in the front of a motorbike hurtling into the traffic--the anxiety over children's safety that is so much a part of our experience with carseats and bicycle helmets is completely absent here.

First stop, the Saigon Zoo. It's fine, though even if we had not been so impressed with the Singapore Zoo just a few days ago, I think we'd sense its limits quickly (though I appreciate its cheapness--admission was about 40 cents apiece, and Maeve was free). It's an old-fashioned zoo, originally laid out by the French in the nineteenth century, with most of the animals in fairly spartan enclosures. I don't get the sense that they're neglected, and they have space, but the environments don't make much effort to replicate their natural habitats. The grounds, though, are nice, functioning as a quiet botanical garden, with specimen trees from all over Asia.

Aidan and Maeve mostly enjoyed the children's playground, which had kiddie rides, a bouncy castle, and one of those enclosures filled with plastic balls:

So yes, we have travelled about 18,000 miles by now to play in plastic balls.

The next, Tuesday, was a case of plans frustrated leading to something surprising and amazing that we could never have anticipated. The plan was to go to a children's amusement park located on the outskirts of Saigon that we had read good things about in the Lonely Planet guide. Our friends Victor, Elizabeth, and their son Josiah were going, too, so we hired a cab and squeezed in. But when we got there, the amusement park was closed; I'm not sure, but it seems as though someone was telling our driver that all of the parks in town were closed on Tuesday. The driver suggested that he take us to another place, the Suoi Tien amusement park, which he said was much better. (All of this sounds a good deal more transparent and fast than it was in reality, since our driver spoke almost precisely no English, and we no precisely no Vietnamese. What he died was write "Soui Tien" on a piece of paper, drew a map, and pantomimed that it would be a place the children would like.) We went all in, and he took us to the Soui Tien park, about an hour's drive outside of town.

Here, in no particular order, are things that are at the Soui Tien amusement park, which is probably about the size of Disneyland:

• a giant roller coaster

• a Ferris wheel

• enormous statues of dragons

• a gorgeous, and active Buddhist temple

• a snow palace (more on this below)

• bumper boats

• Hindu statuary

• a place where you can dip your feet in the water and have fish eat the dead skin off

• a paint ball center

• a water park with slides

• an artificial lake filled with real crocodiles.

And lots more stuff, too. Soui Tien is a Buddhist amusement  park, a genre that none of us had ever imagined before. It's kind of great, but of course deeply weird to our eyes. Since it was a weekday, it was not crowded at all--apparently it is very busy on the weekend. But this is clearly not a place designed for the likes of us--unlike central Saigon, which has a lot of foreign tourists and expatriates, this place is designed for local interests and tastes. The juxtaposition of a Buddhist temple, one in use, with people praying and lighting incense, with amusement park rides, stands selling t-shirts and ice cream, etc., is more strange than anything I could ever come up with on my own. 

Inside one of the many Buddhist temples at the Suoi Tien Amusement Park

Maeve at the entrance to the Suoi Tien amusement park. She was amused quickly.

Surely the moment of greatest surprise, hilarity, and absurdity was the snow palace. We had gotten a tram to take us around, since it was hot and we figured that with limited time, we wouldn't get to see much otherwise. When the tram driver stopped there and gestured that we might like to go in, we figured that it might be interesting.  What would it be? A winter-themed funhouse? a "matterhorn" style ride? We were led to a place where we were given orange coats, white boots, and cloth gloves, and then taken to the heart of the thing--an enormous room, maybe 50' by 50' that was filled with several inches of snow.  Essentially, we were in a giant freezer compartment, minus the frozen food. They had built up a hill, decorated it with plastic snowmen and penguins, and provided tubes for sliding purposes:

Aidan playing in the snow in Saigon. Note the plastic snowmen.

This may be the single strangest thing we have see on this entire trip. But of course it makes sense: Vietnam is tropical, and never sees snow--what could be more fun for Vietnamese children than to get to play in the snow for once? I can't say, though, that this is anything we would ever have expected to see.

Today (Wednesday) we went to the Jade Emperor pagoda, a Taoist temple located north of downtown. It's a cute little temple, with a nice quiet courtyard that is a good respite from the busy commercial neighborhood around it, and a charming statue of the happy Jade Emperor, a key Taoist deity. It was built in 1909 by Cantonese immigrants

The key feature of the temple, though, and the drawing card for us, were the turtles. Turtles are considered to bring good luck in Vietnamese culture, and this temple gives you the chance to "liberate" turtles into a turtle pond. You buy the turtles from a seller at the gate and set it free, after having painted your name on it:

Aidan named our turtle "Castor." We released him into the turtle pond, where we hope that he is set to enjoy a happy life, tended by the temple monks.

Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam

John: For the first time on our voyage, we're splitting up for a good part of the week we are spending in a port. Vicki is leading a Semester-at-Sea trip to Hanoi in the middle three days while John and the kids are staying here in Ho chi Minh City.  Or Saigon, which is what people still call it except when they're being official about it. Being in Saigon and Hanoi is remarkable enough to us, who still have vivid memories of the time when Vietnam figured in the news as a place of seemingly-constant and intractable warfare. That we are here as students and tourists  amazes, even though we know that this is not at all unusual now; Vietnam has opened itself up to the world in the last twenty years, and it has become a regular stop for the hectic Asian swing of Semester at Sea; a good number of the faculty and administrative staff have been here a couple of times before. Still, of all the places we are visiting, the very fact of being here boggles the imagination most.

So, what's it like? Modern Saigon was largely laid out by the French, and it still shows in the broad boulevards, wide sidewalks, roundabouts, and a number of nineteenth-century monumental buildings that would look at home in Paris. And that makes it very navigable in some ways; the central part of the city, where most of the landmark buildings are, is fairly easily to negotiate, though the city sprawls out in all directions for miles. There's construction everywhere, as modern hotels and office buildings replace older structures; there's a lot of outside money coming into the city as multinational corporations set up shop. There are plenty of symbols here that remind you that the Communists won and are in power here--flags, posters, party buildings, guards in uniform--but there's also a lot of capital coming in from outside and local entrepreneurship; most businesses, a guide told us, are privately owned, but I'm not quite sure that that means the same thing here as in the US. In fact, I really have no idea about how all this works and where the lines of pressure are between the government, business, citizens, etc. Much less do I know how the division between North and South works; this place feels very Westernized in some ways, surely because the decades of French and American influence, but the North has got to be different.

Most of all, Saigon is very busy and active, a fast-moving place. The streets are thronged with motorbikes, the drivers of which seem to be trying to make some kind of massive illustration of quantum mechanics; surely they have some direction, but it feels pretty random. Which makes crossing the street a thrill, and not in the good sense; there are not a lot of traffic lights, and marked crosswalks are treated casually by the motorbikers. You sort of plunge in and expect them to be able to navigate around you, but it's scary.

On the first day, we took a city orientation tour that introduced us to some of the major landmarks in town, like the Notre Dame Cathedral and, interestingly, the Post Office, which has both an enormous painting of Ho Chi Minh and a counter for the US Postal Service. The most interesting of these sites, surely, was the building now known as Reunification Hall. Before the north defeated the south in 1975, it was the presidential palace. It's a beautiful example of modern architecture, but its modernity owes a lot to the instability of the South Vietnamese regime: it was built i 1962 to replace the previous palace, which was bombed by the South Vietnamese air force in its attempt to kill President Diem.  Who survived the attack but didn't live to see this building completed, since he was assassinated for good the next year.

Reunification Hall, the former Presidential Palace for the South Vietnamese President. Tanks famously crashed through this fence in 1975, ending the war.

Perhaps the highlight of the day was going to a restaurant that is staffed by former orphans and street children; the goal is to teach them both English and how to run a restaurant.  They fell in love with Maeve, and basically took her over, passing her from person to person. 

Maeve makes some new friends.

They gave her a manicure, and then finally let us have her back so that we could leave. And the food was good, too.

More posts to come. 

Saigon

Tired after a day in Saigon.

Singapore

John: We had only one day in Singapore, not nearly enough to do more than scratch the surface. Which is sort of liberating in a way; when you know in advance that you can't get all that far, you might as well pick something that looks like fun and just enjoy. So we decided to go to the zoo, which is widely billed as the finest in Asia, and one of the best in the world. After some frustration trying to figure out the mass-transit system (the system itself is very efficient; the ticket offices much less so), we finally made it out there via a combination of metro and bus, helped enormously by a local gentleman who showed us how to get from one to the other--we'd still be looking for the bus stop if were left on our own. 

The Singapore Zoo lives up to its billing--it's great! The animals are close, and in large habitats stocked with natural flora. Highlights included lemurs, gibbons, orangutans, white rhinos, and pygmy hippos. For my money, the real standout was a trio of white tigers:

Aidan and a white tiger over his shoulder, as if it happens every day.

The white tigers are not a separate species; they're a sport of nature, all descended from a unique white tiger born in 1951. They're beautiful, and they roam very close to the spectators. Usually when I've seen tigers in zoos, they're resting or just sleeping, but two of the three tigers in this group were exploring their lair energetically, and you could really get a sense of their size, beauty, and strength

It's too bad we can't be here at night; the Zoo has a night safari, where you travel through the Zoo in the dark on trams; since you can't see the low walls and moats that separate you from the animals, it's apparently a little scary to be that close, and many of the animals are more active at night as well. From the point of view of parents, perhaps the Singapore Zoo's signal innovation is that it rents Flexible Flyer wagons out so that you can wheel kids from place to place. This was a big hit, and spared lots of the kinds of cranky walking that ultimately leads to carrying, something that was particularly likely to happen in the hot and humid temperatures here. We'll have to put this idea in the suggestion box at other zoos.

We went next to Chinatown. (Warning: brief history lesson to follow.) Singapore was sort of invented by a guy named Stamford Raffles, who was an employee of the British East India Company, charged to find a place that could serve as a trading spot for the British in this region (in particular, a place strategically located to counter the Dutch, who had a lot of influence in nearby Indonesia.) This island, off the southern tip of what is now Malaysia, was perfectly positioned, with a big harbor and a wide river, and not much developed or populated (there were, though, apparently a lot of tigers; the three in the zoo are the only tigers on the island now). So (making a long story short) Raffles made a deal with the local sultan and the Company took over the place, and then started moving in a labor force of Chinese, Malays, Indians, and British administrators. Raffles sat down with a map and laid out the city's neighborhoods by function and ethnicity: warehouses and export businesses in this place, Chinese over here, Indians over there, colonials housed down here. And while Raffles wouldn't recognize a lot of modern Singapore, the plan he drew up is still more or less how Singapore is laid out; there's Chinatown, Little India, an area of older colonial buildings, and the big business district, now dominated by one skyscraper after another. We picked Chinatown not quite at random; there were some temples that we wanted to see there, and we figured that the food would be good, too, but we could just as easily have spent time in other parts of the city and gotten a very different kind of experience.

The first temple we saw in Chinatown was actually a Hindu temple, built originally in 1827. It's very ornately decorated:

Interestingly, there's a modern building nearby that seems to be emulating the shape of the temple's facade:

While we were there, a thunderstorm struck, so we took cover in the nearby Maxwell Food Market. It's a covered area filled with what are known here as hawker stalls--small shops selling Singaporean fast food. We had mango and kiwi smoothies:

And then the local specialty, chicken with rice, which really depends on the variety of the hot sauces that you have with it.  Delicious--and cheap, about the equivalent of $3.50US.

The final sight was the Buddha's Tooth temple, which is amazing. I don't think that there's an actual Buddha's Tooth there, though.

Finally, some wandering around the streets of Chinatown. This is one of the few places left in Singapore with old buildings; the government has torn down many blocks of older buildings to make way for modern construction. These shophouses, with shops on the ground floor and housing above, date from the early colonial period, and are still in use as shops for clothes, toys, electronics; not sure if anyone still lives upstairs, though. Then back to the cruise center to dispense our remaining Singapore dollars (they've thoughtfully provided shops designed for that very purpose), then back on the ship, trying to beat the on-ship time of 8:30; there's always a frenzy of people getting through immigration and security at the last moment, since the penalties for being on the ship late are pretty $evere. We pulled out around 11:00 pm, on our way to Ho Chi Minh City, a/k/a Saigon, where we arrive on Sunday.

It would have been great to spend more time in Singapore. Unlike many places we've been, though, a lot of Singapore is very familiar--many modern buildings, with ethnic enclaves with older structures, freeways, tourists. It's a very cosmopolitan place, with people from all over the world working or visiting here. The international brands are also ubiquitous; within ten minutes of getting off the ship this morning, a fair number of students had outfitted themselves with Starbucks frappaccinos (thereby ending a long drought), and the Zoo has not one, but two Ben and Jerry's shops (we checked one of them out). The place feels sort of like a cleaner, more humid Los Angeles. 

Clothes, nets

Maeve: I've grown out of my clothes, so Mommy is buying me more as we go. Here is one of my new shirts from India:

John: Many people on the ship have commented in the last couple of weeks about how much Maeve has grown since our voyage began. And they're right; she has, as she says, grown out of at least half of the clothes we brought with us. (And, too, traveling in various rainforests, cities, and rivers has been hard on all of our clothes.) We ended up donating a lot of Maeve's old clothes to an orphanage in Kochi, and have been buying new things for her as we go. India has a long tradition of making beautiful textiles, and clothes here are often gorgeous and inexpensive. 

Aidan: In India I saw Chinese fishing nets. Unfortunately, I did not see any fish in them when they pulled them up from the water. It looks ilk the world's biggest see-saw with a prize at the end if you do it right. 

Backwaters

John:  Our last major excursion out of Kochi was to an area known here as the backwaters--an enormous system of lakes, rivers, streams and canals that are a much-beloved natural feature of the Indian state of Kerala, where Kochi is located. Indian tourists, and some foreigners, flock here for the chance to spend a few days or even a week or two living on one of houseboats that cruise these waters, going from village to village and and eating fish fresh out of the water (the ships generally come with a cook/pilot):

A houseboat on the backwaters. These are now all for tourists; they get quite elaborate, with multiple bedrooms, kitchens, and air conditioning.

We went to Alleppy and got a mini-cruise of a couple of hours on a passenger boat; a longer trip that would go to more remote parts of the backwaters would get even more scenic and rural, we imagine. Even so, I can't say that this is a the kind of vacation that appeals all that much to us; I think we'd get bored quickly. But for people who live in a  crowded city like Mumbai or New Dehli, a week in a houseboat cruising the quiet backwaters of Kerala might be just the ticket.

On the way to Alleppy, our bus passed an elephant walking along the side of the road, about which Aidan has more to say:

Aidan's account of the elephant

Aidan: This is an elephant that I saw in India. I was scared but I touched the elephant. Wow! Elephants are fuzzy. The elephant was walking down the road to a temple.

Meeting the elephant, who was, we were told,
probably on the way to a temple

---

John: We have been told many times by both Americans and Indians themselves that the state of Kerala is very different from many other parts of India, particularly the crowded northern cities. Kerala is tropical, green and lush, and while hardly underpopulated, is less crowded and hectic than many other places in India. Kerala also has a strong social safety net, which has led to it's having near-first-world rates of literacy, life expectancy, and infant survival rates. There are a lot fewer beggars on the streets than in other places. Part of the explanation for this is that there has long been an active Communist party here that pushes the political system in the state to the left--we drove by an open-air meeting of the party, with hundreds of people in attendance, on our way back from Chendramangalam village on our first day, in fact. The Communist party undertook a land-reform movement here in the 1950s that redistributed land and wealth in a way that has prevented some of the incredible inequalities of means that characterize much of the rest of the country from taking hold. And the fact that they've had to alternate power with more conservative centrist parties ever since--and thus compete for votes--has kept them from turning authoritarian, as has been the way so often in Communist regimes. You see a fair number of Communist flags and posters--it's been a long time since I saw a heroic image of Lenin, but I saw one here. At the same time, Kerala's way of life is fairly traditional; most of the state's income comes from fishing, agriculture, and tourism, and about 80 percent of marriages here are still arranged--something that is no longer the case in many of the bigger cities. Kerala has not participated much in India's high-tech revolution, which has shielded it a bit from the swings of the global marketplace, but unemployment is apparently very high. So it's not a utopia, but it has been an excellent place to get a short glimpse of India for first-time visitors like ourselves, and we have come to like it well enough to muse on finding a way to spend more time here. Maybe a Fulbright someday….

Getting around

John


None of the cities we have visited--Manaus, Accra, Cape Town or Kochi--have much in the way of a public transportation system, except in some places for busses, which are usually in my experience inscrutable except to people who have lived their entire lives in a place. (And I have rarely managed to figure out much of a bus system even in places where I have lived). Anyway, this puts us at the mercy of cab drivers to get around, and we've had a crash course in the mores of cabs and local transportation. Except for Brazil, cab drivers in these places basically refuse to run the meter for foreigners like us, even if they have one. So you haggle before you get in, as you tend to haggle over everything. We have gotten fairly good at this, I think, from experience.

In Kochi, there are some cabs. But by far the most common form of ground transportation is the auto-rickshaw, known as the "tuk-tuk."

An auto-rickshaw, or tuk-tuk, in Mattanchery.

Getting anywhere in Kochi costs on the order of 20 to 40 rupees--40 to 80 cents. In such a context, it seems almost comical to haggle over, literally, pennies. The other day, we were part of a large group that divided itself between a couple of tuk-tuks to go to a restaurant that was only a few blocks away, and we were waiting for one to come along, when Vicki approached a cab driver who was taking a rest in the shade. She asked him how much it would cost to get there in the cab, and he asked, how much do you want to pay? 20 rupees, she replied (an opening gambit). Surprisingly, he immediately said sure, and we hopped in. A couple of minutes later, he handed us a 100-rupee note, and asked us to give him this, folded around the 20 rupee fee, in such a way that the tuk-tuk drivers could see it and think that this is what we were paying. He didn't want them to get mad at him for undercutting their rates. Vicki made a big show of paying him an exorbitant 100 rupees--$2.

Tuk-tuks are not exactly the safest form of transportation, and we're conscious of the fact that while, at home, we don't dare go down the block without putting on seat belts and getting the kids into their car seats, here we're tossing them into these rattling contraptions that have no safety equipment whatsoever.  But walking down the crowded streets is not particularly safe, either--there is no such thing as a sidewalk here. And it's fun!  Fingers crossed.

Kochi

John:  The area called Kochi is actually a lot of different smaller places on islands and peninsulas arranged around a large harbor--in that way, it's not all that unlike the New York area.  There's the town of Fort Cochin itself, which is really a small island, and has both a nice beachfront and the original church that the Portuguese built here in the early sixteenth century. Next to that is the peninsula of Mattanchery, which has a 400-year old synagogue, the oldest in India, and a palace built by the Portuguese in the sixteenth century for the maharaja. Across the bay on the mainland is Ernakalum, which is the commercial center, with shops of all kinds facing on to Gandhi Road and the streets radiating off it.  Finally, right in the middle is Willingdon Island, which is largely a port center developed on landfill by the British in the 1930s, the last years of the Raj. That is where our ship is docked. 

The comparisons between Kochi and New York more or less end there, of course--Kochi is tropical, and while it's built up and not uncrowded, there are only about a million and a half people here, so it's the rare place in India that is less densely populated than similar square mileage in the US.  We've spent our time here seeing the sights:

• Fort Cochin is where the Portuguese in the person of Vasco de Gama and his crew showed up in the late fifteenth century and decided that they owned the place, in spite of the fact that there were already a lot of people here. One thing we've been reminded of on this trip is that the Portuguese really did get around back then, and were often the advance party for the Europeans who followed and established more permanent colonial rule. Brazil, South Africa, Mauritius, and now India--the Portuguese showed up in all of these places, often in the form of Vasco de Gama himself, although of course now Brazil is the only one of these countries where the Portuguese relationship is inescapable. The Portuguese did dominate here in western India for about a hundred years, though, and there are still some ruins of the Fort Emmanuel that they built right at the tip of the island. The most prominent building from their time here is St Francis of Assisi church, where Vasco, who died in Cochin,was first  buried:

St Francis of Assisi Church, with its Portuguese facade intact

Vasco's body was moved back to Lisbon a few years later, but you can still see where they buried him in the church.  The outside is largely original, but the interior was remodeled in the eighteenth century by the British when they converted it to an Anglican church, which it still is today. An odd experience just after this picture was taken; a young Indian woman traveling with her boyfriend or husband came to us and said "picture, please," which we interpreted that she wanted us to take a picture of her and her companion in front of the church. But no, she quickly got next to Maeve and her partner took their picture together--then she moved on. Maeve gets a lot of attention here--with her blond hair and blue eyes, she stands out. A lot of people want to touch her, about which she feels ambivalent.

Fort Cochin has a lot of old, quaint architecture; clearly a lot of British institutions were here at the time of the Raj--there are cricket grounds and hotels with a slightly mock-Tudor feel. There are also a lot of clothing stores catering to affluent Indians and Westerners, though they're not exactly in Western styles. People have been wearing them on the ship, and you'll start seeing some things in these blog posts. 

• The Portuguese were followed by the Dutch, who,among other things, renovated the Mattanchery Palace, also called,  the Dutch Palace n the seventeenth century. (It was actually built originally by the Portuguese as a form of compensation to the local maharaja for a raid they had undertaken.) This was where the local maharaja lived for the next couple of centuries; it's now divided between a temple, which is on the ground floor, and a museum on the second floor:

The Mattanchery or Dutch Palace--it's a little run down, but trust us, the inside is pretty spectacular.

The real treat here are murals on the second floor walls depicting scenes from the Ramayana and Mahabbarata, which are truly amazing. No pictures allowed, though, and as far as we can tell, you can't even get reproductions of them--we looked for books or postcards, but came up empty.

• But before the English, the Dutch, or the Portuguese, the area was home to a substantial Jewish population. Right near the Mattanchery Palace is an area called (alas) Jew Town, which has a beautiful synagogue built in 1568, the oldest synagogue in India. It's richly decorated with Belgian chandeliers and hand-painted Chinese floor tiles--clearly the congregation spared no expense in making this as lovely a place as they could. Again, there were no pictures allowed, and no reproductions available. 

Our own global citizens in front of the synagogue complex.

Unlike the European conquerors, whose arrival here can be dated precisely, no one really knows when the Jews arrived in Cochin, though it was surely centuries earlier than the synagogue was built--there's a gravestone in a nearby village with a headstone dated (incredibly) with the equivalent on the Jewish calendar of 1269 AD. And it's clear that this area of India was known for long before that because of the spice trade; this part of the world is mentioned in the Old Testament. Near the synagogue, there are a series of paintings depicting the history of the Jewish population here, starting with the purported arrival in 72 AD of a group who were exiled after the destruction of the second temple in Jerusalem in 70. It's completely fanciful, but charming--a group is getting out of boats, and the maharaja and his court are cheerfully welcoming them. Also unlike the Europeans, the Jews never tried to rule, convert, or conquer here; they primarily worked as merchants and traders, which is probably how they developed the relationships that enabled them to import things like Belgian chandeliers. 

The last of the paintings is also charming and a little poignant; it shows the maharaja addressing the congregation in the synagogue in 1947, at the moment of India's independence. The event depicted there marks the end, both of his power, and in some sense of the congregation. The new state of India ended the rule of the maharajas. And of course the next year, 1948 was when the modern state of Israel was created, and much of the congregation emigrated there. Now, there are only nine members in the congregation, which is almost surely in its last generation, the end of at least half a millennium of a remarkable community of global citizens.

Kochi, Day One

John: We’re spending this entire week in India, yet another place we never realistically expected to be able to visit. The ship docked this morning in the port of Kochi—also known as Cochin—on the southwest coast. Many people on the ship have elaborate trips planned to explore more distant parts of India; from here; a good many are going north, to Agra, to see the Taj Majal, with some continuing on to the Ganges River, while others have been trying to figure out train schedules for trips to one place or another. (One component of figuring out train travel in India, clearly, is trusting your eyes when you see how cheap fares are—you can travel clear across the country for the equivalent of about four US dollars.) But we’ve never been to Kochi before, and there’s lots of stuff to do in the city and nearby in the rest of Karala, the Indian state in which Kochi is located, so we don’t feel a lot of wanderlust; we’ll use the ship as our base and make excursions from here.

Practically our first sight as the ship rounded into the harbor here this morning were the enormous fishing nets that are the virtual emblem of Kochi:

"Chinese" finish nets in Kochi Harbor

They’re elaborate spiderweb-type things that use a complicated system of counterweights to lower the nets into the water. They’re called “Chinese fishing nets” because they were introduced here when Kublai Khan invaded in the fifteenth century. That might be long enough to call them "Kochi fishing nets" in most other places, but that doesn't count for long enough in a culture like this, I guess.

The ship was greeted with drummers and dancers:

Drummers on the dock outside our ship. We have no idea who set this up.
We were then all anointed as we disembarked.

We all took a field trip today to a rural village; it was a trip organized in coordination with Vicki's class on women's fiction as well as another class, taught by Sandra Hinchman, on political and economic development. The goal was to see how the women in this village have worked together with NGOs over the past couple of decades to establish businesses of their own. As an exercise in learning about the politics and economics of micro-financing and women-led village cooperatives, the trip didn't work perhaps as well as we would have hoped.  It was only at the end of the visit, in the late afternoon, that we got to see one of the businesses, a small factory filled with hand looms, where weavers make beautiful cloth. And it's hard to figure out how anyone could make that a going concern--these looms were vintage 1750 technology, and they can't be competitive with machine looms, unless there's a guaranteed market for this kind of thing. Or there is some other angle that was never explained.

But, as a first-day introduction to village life in Karala, this was almost perfect. The villagers were almost unbelievably gracious and hospitable.  We were greeted, once again, with drummers, anointed, given necklaces made of jasmine flowers, and then served an extremely good lunch in the front courtyard of the home of the woman who seemed to be the group's leader. 

Lunch, served on a banana leaf

We toured the village. What was maybe most impressive were the houses, which were often architecturally impressive, and frequently painted in bright, cheerful colors:

One of many really nice houses in the village

These are family homes, often with large extended families living in them, and they're often quite beautiful. The last item on the program was a dance performance by some of the women in the village:

As I say, everyone was extraordinarily friendly, eager to get to know this group of college students, pretty well charmed by Aidan and Maeve, and hard to leave. They told us that they get a group like us about once a year, so this was kind of like a festival for them.  And for us, too.

So I actually couldn't tell you all that much about how micro-financing and collective decision making have made the lives of women in this village better. But we did have perhaps an ideal introduction to the people of Karela; it left an impression that the aggressive taxi drivers we're sure to encounter will not erase. 

There is, as often, something verging on the surreal about these experiences. At 8 am, we pull into a new country; by 1 pm or so we're sipping coconut in a country village, and chatting with people; in the evening, we're back on board in our rooms that look like they're in an American hotel. Weird. We'll make a sortie into town tomorrow.

On the MV Explorer

John:  Most of our blog posts have been about the exciting places we've been--Brazil! Ghana! South Africa!  And there will be more, much more of that to come, as we go to India, China, Vietnam, and Japan. But more than half our our days are spent in transit from place to place, on our ship, the MV Explorer. So, what's the ship like?

Maybe the first and obvious thing to say about the Explorer is that it's quite nice--we're not roughing it on any converted cargo ship or old navy scupper here. It was built as a cruise ship in 2002 for the Royal Olympia cruise line, which went bankrupt in 2004--apparently because they couldn't pay for this ship and its sister ship, the Voyager, which was built at about the same time. (I'm going by what I can figure out from some archived stories on the web. The whole thing is pretty murky, in part since Royal Olympia was a subsidiary of the still-ongoing Royal Olympic line, and in part because, as far as I can see, this whole ship-going business is filled with weird legal subsidiaries, shell companies, and tax shelters. There is still lots of Royal Olympia stationary, etc. on the ship, and a lot of the crew worked for them back in the day.) After Chapter 11 proceedings, the ship somehow ended up in the service of the Institute for Shipboard Education, the non-profit corporation that runs the logistical side of Semester at Sea, with the University of Virginia running the academic side.  

So it's a pretty swanky cruise ship--they were going for a smart set here, and the air of the place is reminiscent of a nice Marriott  hotel or the like. But it's not all that big--we were dwarfed by the enormous Carnival and Disney cruise ships that docked next to us in Nassau. Part of this may be that this ship, unlike those, was probably not intended for family cruises--there are no watersides or that kind of thing. The Explorer was clearly intended as a fast ship, designed for longer-distance voyages than the Caribbean, though i don't imagine that the shipbuilders imagined its use as a round-the-world cruiser, which is what it is now. Our rooms are actually pretty big--bigger than we expected, I think--and the common areas are nicely decorated in a kind of international corporate style. Most of all, the ship is always spotlessly clean; the crew works very hard scouring every inch of the place every day. Our room is cleaned, not once, but twice a day by our kind cabin steward Armando. 

One thing is certain:  this was never intended as a floating campus.  Classrooms have been in some cases jury-rigged by putting up room dividers. And you can still see the signs of the original purposes to which parts of the ship were intended. There's a space stilled identified in places as a "casino" that is now the computer lab and library. Smoking lounges and "card rooms" are now classrooms, and the shop that was surely designed to sell high-end duty free merchandise now sells a seemingly endless variety of Semester at Sea sweatshirts, tee-shirts, headbands, and other branded swag. Almost comically, there's a spa, offering all sorts of massages, facials, treatments, and so on. Surely this is not something that we need, but it's still kept going as a money-making venture. Aidan and I have both used the well-appointed beauty salon for haircuts.

What stands out perhaps most of all here are the crew, who are unfailingly helpful and hard working.  There are also lots of them--cabin stewards, waitstaff, engineers, deckhands. It's a multicultural group--the captain is Croatian, the staff captain is Greek, the chief engineer is Russian; many of the cabin stewards and cooks are Filipino, many in the waitstaff are from the Caribbean.  The sommelier (yes, there is one) is Indian, and this is actually his last day on the ship for now; he's from Mumbai, and is going home for a few months. They're an impressive bunch, really--they work long hours, seem incredibly efficient, and make our lives very easy in so many ways.  

Next time, first reflections on India.

Mauritius!

John: It turns out that we did get to disembark in Mauritius after all; after what must have been fraught and complicated calculations, the Captain managed to get us into port in time for everyone to disembark for half a day.  Less than originally planned, but more than we had come to expect after our delay due to rough seas, the half day was a welcome opportunity to get off the ship and explore Port Louis.

We got off and walked around. Port Louis has a lot of contrasts, with decaying colonial buildings and modern waterfront shopping centers reminiscent of the Victoria and Albert waterfront in Cape Town. It's also an incredibly diverse place; you see women dressed in Indian-style saris, others in Muslim hajibs and still others in Western office wear. You hear English, French, and the local creole, a mix of both. Statues of French and British colonial administrators abound in squares on the main streets. Lovely mosques are close to Hindu temples--and also close to a large Chinatown.

Interior of the mosque in Port Louis, with an enormous tree in the central courtyard.

We explored a beautiful mosque with trees in the central courtyard, the gardens planted by the French East India Company, and the market. Then, with time running out, we made it back to the ship via water-taxi across the harbor--a slightly risky experience in loading the children onto a small boat from the pier.

Visual proof that we were allowed off the boat in Mauritius!

Refreshed by getting on to dry land, we're on to India, where we arrive on Monday. Pictures of Mauritius to come if we can get the balky internet connection to work.

Inverdoorn game reserve

February 28: Still catching up on South Africa...

Aidan: At a game reserve, I saw many animals. I saw cheetahs, lions, zebras, springboks, a rhino, buffalos, a giraffe, ostriches, and wildebeests. It was pretty much like a safari that some other people took. The springbok is South Africa's national mammal. We rode around the three reserves in big, unsafe, loud, Jeep-like vehicles. The whole game reserve experience was great!

John: Today's adventure was a kind of safari-lite--a day trip to a game reserve called Inverdoorn, a three-hour bus trip away. This seemed to be about all we could do with a two-year-old in the party; others on the ship went on more ambitious overnights to much larger and more distant reserves. But as Aidan says, the experience was still pretty great; we saw all the animals he mentions, with the best pictures perhaps being of a cheetah:

and a giraffe:

The giraffe was peeved to see us, since she was protecting a week-old calf (which we didn't get to see; hidden too well in the bushes). 

Maeve had a great time, too.

"Look, everybody, I see animals!"

Inverdoorn actually has three reserves, as Aidan says--a large central reserve, and smaller ones, each for lions and cheetahs. The lions that they have have been rescued from places that raise lions for the purpose of releasing them into very small areas so that they can be hunted and killed by foreigners who want to pretend to be big game hunters circa 1895. Since the lions were not raised by other lions, they don't know how to track or hunt (though they are still very much able to kill--we kept our distance), and therefore can't live in the wild or the large preserve, where they would likely be killed by buffalo or rhinos. The cheetahs are also being rehabilitated, though some of them will eventually be released into the larger reserve. Inverdoorn also has begun a program of poisoning and coloring rhino horns, which are frequently poached in South Africa (killing the animal) since rhino horns are believed in some places to have medicinal qualities; poisoning the horn--which doesn't hurt the animal--makes them valueless.

Aidan drew this picture of the animals he saw:

On the long bus ride to the reserve, we got a look at what our bus driver called "informal housing"--the kind of shacks around a central town that most black South Africans live in:

"Informal" is one word for, I guess. Since the mid-1990s, the government has been building small houses to replace these kinds of shanties. They look like this:

Very basic, and not much bigger than a shanty, these buildings have running water, electricity, and sewage, so they're an enormous improvement in the direction of sanitation and public health. The government has built 1.6 million of these since 1994, as a first step toward raising the standard of living for the majority of the population. Cape Town feels like a prosperous western city, but when you pass by these townships, you realize that South Africa is still a developing country.