Last Few Days of the Spring Voyage, and a New Enrichment Voyage

Pre script: I wrote this blog posting a couple days ago but had trouble posting due to connectivity issues (alas, life on a ship), so here it is a few days late.

Today's Saturday April 27, and the students left the MV Explorer two days ago when we reached Barcelona, Spain. We're still in adjustment: I miss the students, professors, and faculty, and it's a different atmosphere on the ship. Some things are quite different: fancier food, sit-down meal options, and a new room for the Ramseys on the third deck portside rather than fourth deck starboard.

Ellen, Jasper, and I both have been processing the mourning period of the friends we've made leaving the ship. I waved to a few students as they left and repressed some tears. I got to say goodbye to quite a few and hope to see folks when we travel or when they happen to swing through Virginia. We've got plans to visit some of the fellow families when we go to Williamsburg, students in California (where Ellen's sister will be moving at the end of 2013 to the University of California–Davis), and a trip to Charleston, South Carolina if we head further south this next year for spring break.

So, right before the students departed, we had our last day of class on April 23. I would have taken my Women Writers Around the Globe exam that day, but the professor and I agreed that I wouldn't take the test since I'm not getting college credit by auditing and she was pressed for time to read through everyone's essays in the last day and a half of the voyage. We also attended the Alumni Ball that day; everyone was graduated and officially an alum of Semester at Sea. Jasper, Ellen, and I look dashing with our lapel pins. We also got to see our adoptee student Amy get her college commencement ceremony, Zak got named to the Dean's list, and the commencement was touching.

And then we packed. For us, it was a bit different than the students having to pack because their luggage was on planes home, stored away in hotels in Barcelona, or even shipped home (at a hefty cost around $7+ per pound; yikes). We basically had to throw our things into our bags and label them with our new room number as we got off in Barcelona around 11am. Students were already gone by that point, and the ship was shockingly quiet, lonely. I was quite a bit melancholy.

Barcelona was pretty and I got a little time to see the city that we had visited in July 2002. We went out to have lunch and gelato before Ellen had to get back aboard to prepare for the Enrichment Voyage (more detail on that later). I saw a few students as we ventured into Barcelona off La Rambla, and oddly I felt elated. I think it hit me: this is the first place I've flown internationally that I've returned to visit. It was beautiful to see what I had seen when Jasper was just a speck. We found out literally when we left for the airport that Ellen was pregnant, so Jasper technically made his second visit but never got to see Barcelona the first time.

With a fairly limited amount of time, we plunked down some Euro for one of those chintzy double-decker tourist buses, but it worked well for Sandy, Jasper, and I. We covered a lot of ground on the bus and stayed mostly on it after the skies got grey and rain fell. Good thing I had my raincoat and followed the fashion lead of the Europeans by overdressing since the temperature dropped. We all got cold at the end of the first day in our soaked state, so we headed in after getting some more tapas right before getting aboard the quiet ship.

On the next day, we hit Barcelona later than we should have, but it was nice to sleep in. We rolled out for breakfast at 9am, which is later than breakfast is served on the academic voyage. It was different, too: glass drinking glasses rather than plastic, lox and cream cheese on the buffet, and more waiters. Also, there were new faces in the 6th floor dining hall. Even the towels seemed different, softer. Hell, we even ate breakfast in Classroom 1 where the Unreasonable at Sea entrepreneurs were stationed and I rarely ventured.

That second day in Barcelona, we were expecting rain but it didn't arrive. Our game plan was to hit Parc Guell first before any rain, and we got there with Jasper expecting to see it as I described it: sort of like Dr. Seuss designed the park. We also saw a few more SAS students up on the hill, and it made me happy again to know that our friends are out in the world, enjoying life, having fun, seeing new things with eager enthusiasm. It's hard to describe in text what we saw, so I'll let the pictures speak.

At this time, we're traveling slowly through the waters after leaving Barcelona and headed to Monte Carlo, Monaco. I hear it's glorious, fabulously wealthy, and tiny. We're planning to take an SAS trip into nearby France to Eze rather than hitting up the casino and hobnobbing with royalty and the fabulously wealthy. Everyone is aboard the Explorer for the Enrichment Voyage, which hits ports at a faster rate for shorter visits compared to the academic voyage. There are by my count three of the Spring Semester students aboard, and the demographic is much older. One of the families has stayed aboard so Jasper knows the three Kembel boys, and there are perhaps about 20 new kids on the ship for Jasper to meet and play with. It's a little easier, too, with relaxed schooling, sort of like summer camp with a bit of journal writing and science stuff.

I've missed my classes, so today I signed up for a formal ornithology course with Charles Clarkson. He's my next-door neighbor on floor three, and small world: he used to live in Cville when he got his doctorate at UVa, and we raced each other. It's cool to have one of my cycling peers aboard so I can talk bikes and riding with him. He told me there's not too much math in the ornithology course, so I'm all in.

New room, new passengers, a new feel for the new part of our next portion of this big voyage around the planet.

Ciao.

I thought BURN energy drink went extinct a few years ago even though the BURN 24-Hour Race still lives on in in Wilkesboro, NC.

Bird fight! Action at Parc Guell where some of these birds (Perhaps I can learn what they are in ornithology) were squawking up a storm.

 Classical side of Sagrada Familia.

Contemporary side of Sagrada Familia.

Even the tugboat in Barcelona was artistic.

 

Ellen and Vaughn in their Alumni Ball formal wear. Vaughn is one of our favorite students and hung out quite a bit in the library.

 

Gaudi architecture abounds.

Beer selection in Barcelona. I had heard there was actually a Duff Beer that looks like what Homer drinks in the Simpsons. Me, personally, I'm a Fudd man.

 

Tile artwork on the benches at Parc Guell.

 

Nice ship in the Maritime Museum.

 

Whoo! Rally, rally, rally!

 

Parc Guell is like Disneyland for adults.

 

 I didn't remember much about the rockwork at Parc Guell, so I got a refresher seeing these sights.

Spire in the Parc Guell. The MV Explorer is barely visible in the port in front of the much, much larger cruise ship.

 

Here's the hotel where we stayed in our 2002 trip. I remembered it once we rode past it, so I captured it in a photo.

 

 Me and the Catzes at the Alumni Ball.

Lady with blue hair and her guy on the Turistica bus.

Morocco, Morocco, Morocco

It’s been a bit of a whirlwind in the past few days, so I owe Morocco a blog posting. I’m almost recovered from sleep deprivation in that country, but I’m now missing out on sleep aboard the ship because there are parties, alumni balls, goodbyes to be said, and the realization that so many of the folks aboard the ship are leaving in two days. The Spring 2013 semester ends on Thursday April 25, and almost all of the students are hopping off in Barcelona and dispersing into Europe or heading home. Ellen’s library assignment continues on the ship, so we’re staying aboard for the first two portions of the Enrichment Voyage. There won’t be college classes, and I’m already missing my Women Writers Around the Globe and Biomedical Ethics classes. The Enrichment Voyage will have a wider mix of ages, seminars rather than college-credit classes, and a more rapid-fire schedule with fewer days of sea travel and lots of short single-day visits to European ports.

I learned an acronym in Morocco that fits the country well: FOMO, the Fear Of Missing Out. Travel so far has been essentially FOMO. There’s far more to do than is possible, so you try to make the most of each port as well as life aboard the MV Explorer. It’s quite a balancing act to see as much of each new culture as possible along with maintaining equilibrium in family, work, exercise, sleep.

So, Morocco. I got to see a small slice of the country, and what I experienced was nice and amazing in ways unexpected. We were all a bit frazzled after Ghana: lots of work to wrap up the Spring semester in the library, classes ending (I wrote my papers but skipped final exams), anticipation of another country with hard-core haggling, and some unexpected family drama. See, we all signed up for a four-day hike in the Atlas Mountains to see the Berber villages, and the morning we landed in Casablanca, Sandy fainted in the immigration line. Standing around in hot conditions seems to exacerbate his low blood pressure, so after about a half hour he felt faint and I caught him as he dropped. Recovery was pretty quick, but I talked him out of the hike. Basically, once we all got through the immigration line and had our passports, we had a handful of minutes to figure out from the vague description of the trip how much hiking there would be, what altitude, how hot during the day, how cold at night, how far, and if it would really be doable. Ellen and I encouraged him to err on the side of being conservative and not attempting a long hike. So, on the spot, we decided that Jasper and I would go on the hiking trip and Sandy and Ellen would do some single-day trips in Morocco. I think it was a good call.

 Jasper in front of a car wash. It's French, no?

 

Jasper with a headwrap above. Here he's on the donkey with Hassan and Mohammed, ready to head up into the hills.

I'm in front of some ruins at the start of our hike, holding two clover flowers that Jasper picked.

Medina by day...

Medina by night.

Medina stall with vibrant colors of fruits, veggies, and olives. 

Mountains where we hiked. Snow covered peaks that hit close to 14000 feet are in the background. We hiked to about 5000 feet.

 I got a henna tattoo at the first house. It lasts a few weeks.

Street festival in Marrakesh. Jasper liked that KFC and McD's were in Morocco.

 

Prickly pear cacti were prevalent along the hike. According to our guide, they're tasty but constipating if you eat more than, say, four. Good to know.

 

 Dusty singletrack.

Rooftop of the first house we visited. We slept up here under the stars.

 

Fields at the start of the hike. I think that the thorny brush in the foreground is placed there as fencing, and it seems pretty effective.

 

 Writing on the wall in the second Berber village we visited.

It was a little stressful to be away from Ellen and her dad while Jasper and I went off into the middle of nowhere with no phone or way to check back in on our family, but we figured if Ellen needed to reach us she could contact the tour company. I alluded to the family drama, and it was a culmination of events that was stressing us out as we approached Morocco: the attack at the Boston Marathon, homesickness, difficulty with homeschooling, being cooped up with little private time after 100 days at sea. Really, what we needed was to get off the ship and make it back in one piece. So, Ellen and I said a quick goodbye and she asked me to take it easy and be patient with Jasper.

Yeah, it was a bit of an unexpected twist to split up, but Jasper and I had a great time on the hiking trip. I’ll post pictures to help describe what we did and saw. For this particular trip, we caught the bus at our dock in Casablanca and didn’t actually get to see anything in Casablanca other than the train station. We rode first-class in a non air-conditioned compartment for a three-hour ride to Marrakech; a bit hot with the AC on the fritz, but I caught up on some sleep. Jasper and I got our room key and threw our bags into our double hotel room with a full bed, and he did what he always does in any hotel room–clicked on the tv and found a channel with cartoons.

We got to see some of Marrakech that afternoon, including a few mosques, a town square with a parade going on, and the medina. I was a little battle-scarred from haggling in Ghana and was expecting medina vendors to be difficult, but we looked without getting pestered or cornered. Jasper gets a little spooked by crowds, and I guess I do as well, but it was nice to wander around and look at the snake charmers, henna artists, and stalls at our own pace.

I liked seeing the medina in both daylight and night. Next up on the itinerary was dinner with a belly dancer at 8pm, and I got a snack before dinner and watched the sky go dark around the medina as I had some olives and bread. Dinner at the restaurant was passable but really not as tasty as the simple snack I had a few hours earlier, but it was fun to share the plates with the students at our round table. Jasper ate a little bread and that’s all. The restaurant was touristy with somewhat abrupt waiters and lots of French people at the other tables, but it was a blast hanging out in the lavish open courtyard, and then the belly dancer showed up.

Jasper about had a conniption when he saw the dancer pulling folks out to dance, so he hid under the table. She danced with a portly French or perhaps German tourist then two female students at the next table. Then she came over to our table and grabbed Michael’s hand and then my hand to lead us out to the courtyard. We did the bump and tried to mimic her moves, but mainly I was transfixed by her skimpy top straining to contain her buxomness. Awesome.

Next day we took a short ride to the hilly desert outside of Marrakech with our guides Hassan and Mohammed to drop us off for our hike. Jasper and I brought our backpacks and handed them to the mule drivers who put everyone’s bags on the backs of the animals, and we set off on our hike through dry riverbeds and through olive groves. The terrain was a beautiful mix of arid and green areas, and Moroccan farmers are incredibly skilled at irrigating fields with runoff from the snow-capped mountains far off in the distance. We had lunch in an olive grove–Jasper ate some bread–and then we reached our home for the evening a couple hours later.

The village was small with perhaps a dozen buildings including a few homes and barns. We stayed in a home with a courtyard and had a really tasty meal with bread, olives, and tagines.  Tagine is a Moroccan dish made in cone-capped ceramic pots that steam couscous, veggies, and meat. After dinner, we walked around a bit, played some games with the students (mafia, big booty, etc.), and set up our beds on the rooftop. I guess it’s a touristy thing to do, but I sure wanted to sleep under the stars, so I picked a spot and grabbed one of the taller mattress pads that Mohammed passed up to the rooftop from the courtyard below.

Well, I sort of slept. The donkeys brayed back and forth every 20 minutes or so, and then a loudspeaker blared out a call to prayer at 3:50am. Yep, I checked my watch.

Our hike the next morning was at 8am through another dry riverbed and up the mountainside. The terrain was loose and shale-strewn, and it was hot in the open hills. Once we got above 1500 meters, there were no trees, so it was hot and exposed. Lunch was in the last grove of pines that we reached, and we had an hour nap afterwards. I could get used to that. A couple more hours of hiking and we reached the second Berber village.

The second village was similar, and we stayed in another home with a courtyard. Dinner was fantastic, and I know I was starving after about 7 hours of hiking, but the chicken tagine and vegetables were beyond delicious. Accommodations were rough, and we had no running water. I didn’t mind, because the rooftop view was spectacular, stars were out, and no cars were in the village, no planes overhead, and the only traffic was goats and sheep being herded back to the barns. We got even less sleep this night because the donkeys were braying extra loud (I think there was some unrequited love between the donkeys separated and tied to short ropes), there were two calls to prayer, and the chickens and dogs got in on the symphony of noise.

Probably the most tired I’ve been at the end of a port, and I’ve been napping off-and-on since getting back aboard the ship. Ellen and her dad had some really nice day trips into Casablanca and Marrakech, and we’ve all caught up on our stories and pictures. Tonight is the Alumni Ball for everyone aboard the ship; it’s the last day of class, so everyone is an alum at this point. We passed through the Strait of Gibraltar and refueled yesterday, and we’re making the short trip slowly to Barcelona in two more days. I know I’m going to be sad when so many of the people that we know so well after out spring semester disembark, but we’ll be aboard another month and get to see lots of ports in Europe.

I’ll blog about Spain and points afterward starting in a few more days. Hope everyone at home is well and peaceful.

The Gambia

So, I'm siting in the student union, aka deck 6 stern, camped out to watch the drag show in about an hour. Today we docked for about half the day in The Gambia to refuel. I had always called the country Gambia, but it's the Republic of Gambia, aka The Gambia.

Flags aboard the MV Explorer as we're sitting docked in Gambia, aka The Gambia. SAS flag on the left, two maritime flags in the middle, and The Gambia flag on the right.

Looks like we're in Gambia. It's a tease because we're here for a few hours to fuel and can't get off the ship.

Dock view.

Here's our fueling ship the Majorque loading up the MV Explorer with diesel by the metric ton.

Not a whole lot to say. We docked, no one gets off, and we have a pilot come aboard to guide the ship into the local harbor where we refuel. We also refueled in Honolulu, Hawaii. It's sort of a tease, because we have a great view of the immediate port but can't leave the ship.

A nearby ferry ship with lots of people.

With that said, that's about all there is to say. Here's a few pictures of today's brief stop in the The Gambia. Next up is Morocco.

Ciao.

Whatchu Ghana Do?

Whew. We are departing from Ghana after a five-day excursion further north on the African coast. South Africa was beautiful and had weather in the 70s, but we crossed the equator (more on that later) and docked our first day in Takoradi where temps hit around the high 90s. Sort of like summer in Virginia with heat and humidity, but factor in the direct equatorial sunshine, and it was hot.

Takoradi is an industrial port, so nothing fancy there, but a duty-free shop with no frills stood literally about 50 feet from the off-ramp of the ship. We missed out getting some South African wines in Cape Town, so we scored some here. I've been to a few places in my travels that had decent wine: Oregon, a smidge of varietals in Germany, and quite affordable liters of wine in Greece–even the pine-tinged Retsina grew on me. South African wines are really accessible, so I'm glad to have gotten a few bottles for the next few weeks. Oh, on the way from South Africa shortly before landing in Ghana, we crossed 0' 0' 0' 0' at the intersection of the equator and prime meridian; this made the crew excited, the scientists among us stoked, and all of us Shellbacks who crossed the equator shortly before Mauritius are now Emerald Shellbacks.

Aft of the MV Explorer. Oddly, I haven't gotten to see much of the backside.

Here's another Explorer that was docked directly behind the MV Explorer. Nice ship with about 125 passengers. I had a talk with a British lady who was aboard and knew the Kimballs on our ship.

Lots of mini buses travel around picking up passengers and dropping them off anywhere. These are called tro-tros and are usually packed full. Religious faith shows up everywhere in the names of stores and mottos on cars, taxis, and tro-tros.

We (i.e., Ellen, our master planner) weren't really sure of all the logistical planning for independent travel in Ghana, so we took a number of Semester At Sea trips. First day was a visit to slave dungeons near Cape Coast. Sounds ominous, so I'm in. There were small underground rooms below marketplace courtyards; each of the rooms held up to 200 potential slaves awaiting travel to countries where slavery was practiced, including the US, Spain, Portugal, and other European destinations. I'm still struck after the visit that about 3 of 10 of slaves died in the extremely cramped, hot, unventilated conditions, and another 3 or 4 would die on horrendous conditions aboard the ships, so only about 30% of slaves would make it to the new world alive. Perhaps it was a weeding out of the weak process, but the harsh reality is that livestock were treated far better than slaves in the African slave trade.

Slave dungeon. This room held the prisoners who were executed for attempting to escape. Some didn't even make it out of the holding room alive because of the cramped, unventilated conditions.

Here's the ocean outside of the slave dungeons. Ghana had lots of coastlines.

The second day was a trip to a water village. Our plans were to travel on a bus through rubber tree plantations to Nzulezu, do a short hike, travel by dugout canoe to the village, and then return. Bus trip, check: the 2-hour-long ride described on the brochures was really more like 3 hours, and the journey through the rubber tree plantations was really a dusty road adjacent to a couple farms with rubber trees. Short hike, check: about two miles through the savanna fields to the river, in the noon sun, with a mix of students and older life-long learners, and we weren't smart enough to bring water. Whatevs. We all made it across the field to the dugout canoes, each of which held about 4 riders and a paddler. The canoes also leaked, so we got to bail as we traveled across the river to the water village. It was interesting in that the small village was so inaccessible yet was home to about 400 people living on stilt houses and bamboo walkways. 

Water village self portrait.

 

Jasper and Keani walk through the door at the water village school. The sign on the door says Reading 

builds

intelige

nce.

We were a bit fried from the heat and long hiking–not to mention dehydrated–upon return to the MV Explorer. There were some positives to the water village trip. We all made it back, we had a tasty lunch (even though it was 3pm before we made it back), and there was a beautiful beach where we at. So, we had run over schedule, which isn't unusual for African time, and we eventually made it back to the ship before departing that evening for our next Ghanian port of Tema.

On day three we landed in Tema after sailing overnight. Tema is about 20 kilometers from the capital city of Accra, so it was a bigger metropolis but the port was again an industrial port. Quite a contrast to modern new ports focused on tourism like we saw in Yokohama, but I like watching the container ships loading and unloading and all the bustle and stockpiled goods. SAS offers city tours as a general intro to each new city, and this is the first one that the Ramsey-Catz extended family signed up to do. Basically it's what you would think a city tour is: riding around in a bus, visiting a few sights, eating at a local restaurant, and heading back in the evening. Yep, that's what we did. We also visited the W.E.B. DuBois memorial and then later the Kwame Nhkume memorial. You get to see a lot of the city on these tours, and we saw industrial areas, residential neighborhoods, colleges, billboards everywhere, and lots of small shops with names proudly bearing the heavily Christian faith on the signs out front for places such as God is Great Hair Salon and Infant Baby Jesus Tyre Vulcanizing Stop.

Casket shop as photographed outside the bus as we drove around on the Accra city tour. We really wanted to stop and see the caskets up close. Not sure if I'd want to be buried in a cell phone, frog, or even a beer bottle...

 

Statue of President Kwame Nkhume at the memorial park we visited. It was vandalized in a coup a few years after his death in 1972, with the head returned to the state in 2009.

Here was a peacock outside of the Nkhume memorial. He squawked, so I investigated where the sound was coming from when another person wondered what the heck the noise was. I knew it was a peacock because some farmers keep them around since they squawk when foxes or other predators come around.

Day four, and we set out for a trip to a game preserve followed by a visit to the Akosombo Dam. Not the most logical pairing, but it worked well since both were close together on the ride two hours away. The game preserve had a few animals including baboons and ostriches in fenced areas. Good thing the ostriches were penned because they were aggressive and tried to nip each of us through the chainlink fence. Jasper and the Harden boys saw a tiny little scorpion, so after that we all watched carefully where we stepped. We saw a few antelope, too; nothing as exciting as our South African safari, but still pretty cool for a short little stop at the preserve. The dam visit followed lunch at a nice riverside resort where there were lizards everywhere, and Jasper and the other boys ran around trying to catch them. Our guide Steven told them that he caught them when he was a little boy, but he didn't tell them what he told us: the captive lizards were flung with catapults, which sounds funnier and funnier the more I think about it.

I call this shot the baboon Rodin. He looked deep in thought, and it was spooky to see him scratch himself, oddly human-like. How do I know it's a he? Well, I had to position the camera to get a decent angle to hide his, um, manhood.

Extreme closeup of an ostrich on the game preserve. I was hoping he wouldn't pluck my camera from my hands.

Today is our last day in Ghana, and we did a partial day program to a drumming workshop. Fatigue from travel and the heat seemed to affect everyone in our small group, so we were stoked to hop aboard a smaller bus with really strong A/C and cloth seats that weren't covered in plastic like some old great-aunt's living room furniture. Even more surprising, the ride to the workshop was a short 15-minute drive a few miles from port by the oceanside. We got lots of drumming instruction, no actual hands-on drumming ourselves, but lots of detail on how the drums are made, how they sound best when paired or partnered with other drums, and traditional types of music. We also got to dance and sing a traditional Gha song. I had a hell of a lot more fun than I expected.

Dancer at the drumming workshop.

Jasper and I dance with tassels. We were amazed we got Jman out on the dance floor.

We wound down the drumming excursion at about 1400 (2pm) and got back to the ship about 4 hours before onship time. Normally I'd have taken advantage of the extra time to spend the last of my local currency, but in this case I hung onto my Ghana Cedi rather than spend it at the vendors set up outside the dock. I had a few difficult experiences with bargaining and negotiating on this trip: day one I found out that some entrepreneurs will ask your name and then make bracelets, painted shells, and other nicknacks and then guilt you into buying them. On the Accra city tour we stopped at a market and I had some hawkers steer me to their drum store; no biggie since I wasn't in the market for a drum but asked to look at shirts. I liked a few t-shirts and traditional kinte-cloth formal shirts, but the bargaining was fast and furious and I ducked out when I felt cornered. No real threat, but I don't deal too well with lots of commotion and fast-paced back-and-forth bargaining. So, since we were back at the ship after a good day with positive fun experiences of the drumming seminar, I figured I'd keep the image of Ghana on a positive note by not dickering over touristy trinkets that I really don't need anyway.

The country is beautiful with sea, small rolling mountain ranges, tropical vegetation, and flatlands. The people are friendly but I think it would take me a few weeks to get a feel for negotiating for most commercial items, and some rules are a bit confusing such as don't take pictures of government buildings (understood) but you can take pictures of tourist towns with a camera fee that covers buildings but not people unless they're children. There are incredible mineral riches including manganese and gold but there's drastic disparity between the poor and affluent. Simple corrugated homes and buildings reminded me of Burmese or Vietnamese homes or even the South African homes minus the barbed wire–very basic living conditions but a general lack of stress that was initially hard to pin down but eventually helped ease the tension of immersion into a new country.

So this is Africa...

Next stop is Morocco. Should be quite an experience in the marketplaces there. Looking forward to it and writing about my adventures. Thanks for reading.