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.

Mauritius, we hardly knew ye

March 4

It looks like the most significant casualty of the very rocky seas that we continue to encounter will be our day in Mauritius. News came yesterday that at this point, we are so far behind schedule now--we've been going more slowly than planned, and the captain has also diverted us off course to avoid a tropical storm--that we are not going to have time there to disembark.  We'll refuel, then leave immediately so as not to be late on arrival in Kochi, India, our next stop.

Which is too bad, and apparently there has been some grumbling among the students. Mauritius was a short stop--a single day--but it has lovely beaches, apparently. And everyone is eager already for a day off the ship. But this really does fit into the category of things beyond our control; there's a cyclone to the west and the tropical storm to the east kicking up the waters, and we're threading a needle between them. Last year, the spring voyage had a much larger diversion when they had to scratch Japan off the itinerary due to the earthquake there (they went to Taiwan). Given that history, our slight diversion seems pretty minor.

Cape Town, Day Four

February 27

Vicki:  Today Maeve was showing signs of exhaustion. She was screaming like a maniac when things didn’t go her way, and she was averting her gaze in irritation when people smiled their greetings. If you know her, you know that this kind of thing is highly unusual.

She stayed home – or, rather, on the ship! – with John while Aidan and I ventured out to visit the Iziko South African Museum, which sits on one end of the gorgeous Company’s Gardens in the middle of the city. It’s the nation’s natural history museum, featuring life-sized dioramas of extinct animals and taxidermied tableau of still-existing species. They have a couple of fossilized skeletons, too, including that of a mid-sized Apatosaurus (still massive) and a blue whale. Aidan determined our route, and he was scrupulous that we didn’t get distracted by the shiny exhibits in any other section of the museum before we had finished viewing the section we were in. Kept us on track, he did.

 We each found exhibits we enjoyed:

Aidan: I can’t really decide what my favorite part is between the mammals and water world exhibit. They both had animals, which I really like, and I just got really interested in both of them. In the mammals exhibit, the interesting thing was that you get to see what the animals look like, but it’s not dangerous. The monkeys all had walking sticks, so I think it was kind of funny. I’d always thought that monkeys were things that wouldn’t really have walking sticks. I guess they had walking sticks because people wanted them to look like humans, because they’re our old ancestors. In water world, you get to see the animals without being in danger of drowning. I got interested because I didn’t know that there were so many different kinds of dolphins. It turns out that there are quite a lot. I only though that there were two or three kinds. In the whale part, I stood in a whale jaw. I wasn’t scared of being in the jaw, but I was scared because there was a gigantic whale skeleton right above me, and I was scared it was going to fall down. I saw quite a lot of things. There was a penguin exhibit. The water exhibit was pretty much, “Name a sea creature, and it was there.”

Vicki: I was amazed by the exhibit on the rock paintings of the southernmost part of what is now South Africa. The most ancient examples were mind-boggling by virtue of their sheer and practically incomprehensible antiquity. Recent evidence – genetic, and linguistic, and archaeological – point to southernmost Africa as the probable location where modern humans first developed a little over 100,000 years ago. The piece of evidence I got to see with my own eyes was an archaeological find, made in 2008, of the oldest known painting kit found close to the scene of the oldest known rock paintings. The kit is stunning in it’s completeness. It includes a mollusk shell used to hold the paint, various flints used to grind the pigments, a small stirrer used to mix the pigments with animal fat and blood, and a seal scapula that shows signs of charring on one side and pigments on the other, suggesting that it served as a surface for cooking the ingredients together into a batch of paint. It was also stunning in its age – 100,00 years old. A sandstorm that filled the cave soon after the painting kit was left preserved it almost perfectly.

The cave paintings found near it are the oldest physical evidence of humans rendering ideas or concepts in symbolic form. The practice of rock painting with ochre in this area of the world, though, continued until very recently. The museum had examples from a mere 200 and 300 years ago, one depicting a British soldier pulling a cart. The displays included late-nineteenth and early twentieth-century testimonials explaining rock paintings from some of the Khoisan people (the current name for a diversity of  aboriginal groups of southern Africa), who were shown both ancient and recent paintings. It’s hard to generalize, but a number of testimonials described the paintings as renderings of the visions experienced in shamanic trance states, during which the entranced people caught animals capable of bringing the rains and brought them to places in need of water.

Visiting the museum, it turns out, can tell us at least as much about our own current-day practices of representation as it can about ancient ones. As an anthropologist on our voyage pointed out, rock paintings and artifacts from Khoisan cultures more generally are displayed in the natural history museum, with the stuffed dead animals, while European paintings are displayed in the art and cultural history museums. This was very much the way that indigenous cultures were displayed – as part of “nature” rather than “culture” -- in U.S. museums well into my childhood. I remember clearly the ethnographic exhibits in the Smithsonian Museum of Natural history, featuring mannequins arranged around sample huts with sample artifacts. Those are now gone, and as our anthropologist friend told us, South African museum curators are attempting to find more respectful ways to display indigenous cultures.

Rough seas

March 3

We are still catching up on describing our time in South Africa; more posts will be coming over the next several days. Right now, we're on the Indian Ocean, headed to Mauritius, where we will stop for a day, and then on to Kochi, India, for close to a week.

Most of the rhythms of shipboard life have become familiar. What's been dominating our passage over the last three days, however, have been some of the roughest seas to date. We've been lucky; everyone in the group has stayed free of seasickness, something that cannot be said for many on the ship. But the heavy going still takes its toll in tiredness and a general sense of struggle, as every move needs to be calculated; it's just harder to do anything.

We're also learning, though, that there are a wide variety of ways in which the seas can pose challenges.  And it also matters where you are on the ship. Sometimes, the ship is rocking side-to-side, and you feel that more on the upper decks. Most recently, over the last 48 hours or so, the ship has been heading into fairly big swells (how big I'm not sure--at least 10 feet, probably more sometimes), and the front of the ship has been lifting high up and then crashing down.  Since our cabins are in the front of the ship, we feel that a great deal. It's a lot like riding a roller coaster--a slow ascent up, and then a swift descent, ending in a crash, sending spray up past our windows. And you get the same where-did-my-stomach-go feel as on a roller coaster.  All night long.  Looking forward to calmer seas--or land!

Cape Point

February 26

John: We hired a taxicab and a driver today to take us out of Cape Town so that we could see some of the surrounding countryside. Our destination: Cape Point, the southern tip of South Africa, where the Atlantic and the Indian Oceans meet. From there, there's nothing until you get to Antarctica--we had to see it.

Our driver, Raj, was recommended to us by some other people on the boat who had taken a similar tour as the one we intended on the first day here. And Raj was good; knowledgeable and thoughtful, he took good care of us. Raj was born in the Cape Town neighborhood that was known as District SIx. Past tense is in order here because District Six was destroyed in the late 1960s and early 1970s as part of the apartheid regime's program of moving black and colored people away from white areas. It probably also mattered that District Six is pretty prime real estate, close to the center of the city and the harbor. Raj and his family were moved to a township about 25 kilometers away; once all 60,000 residents had been relocated in 1974, the entire area was razed to the ground, with the exception of the mosque, synagogue, and church.

The presence of those three houses of worship, though, serves as an index to what Raj described as the lively, cosmopolitan air of the place. Raj has a binder of pictures in his cab that he shared with us as he shares, I guess, with many of his rides, a binder filled with pictures of District Six in the old days. And it does look like an interesting place, with a mixed population (Raj himself would count as "colored" by the South African racial taxonomy, descended from people who came here from India). Most of the land is still vacant--the government was unable to do much with it, and only in the last few years have some homes been built, given to old people who were displaced. We asked Raj if he would ever be interested in returning if he could, and he said, no, it would never be the same as it was.

We proceeded. Raj drove us down the coastline on the Indian Ocean side of the peninsula, past some of the beach towns there. We stopped at a place called Boulder's Beach, where is colony of 3,000 or so African penguins is in residence:

Boulders Beach is in Simons Town, a very charming little town that was built up in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as the home for the British Navy here; it's now the home for the South African Navy. Which must be a pretty small thing, since Simons Town is teeny--a street along the beach front and a few streets radiating back from it. And, while it's charming, it's also not touristed--it simply is what it is, a small beach-side town with a lot of cute British colonial buildings and a colony of penguins.  It may not stay that way; if you start seeing "Simons Town" tee-shirts and baseball caps, you'll know that its days as a sleepy backwater are over.

Onward to the Cape itself. Here again words will fail. First, the entire area is rich with animal life--we saw baboons just sitting by the side of the road (you're warned to close the windows and lock the doors as you approach the area--they can get aggressive, especially if they think you have food). They're everywhere:

A troop of baboons--that's a big male in the middle

The Cape is a long, thin, rocky peninsula, punctuated at the end by a hill that you can reach by a footpath, or, as we did, via cable-car.  The view from the Cape itself is astonishing. The approach is well-manicured for tourists, and are plenty of other people there, but the landscape feels still raw and untouchedThis is where the Atlantic and Indian Oceans meet, and on a day like this, with clear blue skies, it feels like you can see to Antarctica, here at the apostrophe at the bottom of the world.