Hi everyone! Sorry I didn’t start my blog until now, but we have very limited internet on the ship and I had to wait until Hawaii to set it up. I will try and post photos at internet cafes but I don’t know how often that will be. This first entry will recap my experiences from leaving San Diego up to today, the day after we have left Hawaii.

 

My trip officially started at 10am on the morning of January 17^th, which is when I boarded one of the Semester at Sea busses leaving from the Sheraton in San Diego and headed to Ensenada, Mexico. From San Diego it is only a couple miles to the border, and after we crossed into Mexico it is about 80 miles to Ensenada. The border crossing was fairly uneventful; we stopped, had an armed guard walk up and down our bus, and then we were allowed through. Other busses had drug sniffing dogs and guitar players come onto their bus while at the border. It was a beautiful day in Mexico and it was a nice drive along the coast. We had scattered views of the ocean and some interesting views of small Mexican towns. We had to stop a few times at security checkpoints where an armed guard would come on the bus, walk up and down the aisle, and then let us continue on our way.

When we arrived in Ensenada, I saw two ships. There was a giant Carnival ship, the Carnival Elation, and behind it sat the quite smaller MV Explorer. At first glance, I was surprised how small the ship actually was. The Explorer is 25,000 tons, and according to my friend from the military academy, you don’t want to cross the Pacific in a ship less than 20,000 tons.

The bus pulled up to the pier and we all piled off the bus into a security line. There was a relatively painless check-in process and before I knew it I was free to do what I wanted on the ship. We had the opportunity to go into the town of Ensenada, but I have been there before and I was too excited to explore the ship. The first thing I did was eat lunch with three of my friends (Christina, Corina, and Eric) whom I had met on the bus ride down. It was taco day that day, and I thought that it was pretty good. After finishing (and after the waiters cleared our plates for us), we decided to just walk around, going floor by floor to see the ship. We started out at the back of the ship on the 7^th deck which is the top deck. For reference, a lot of the bigger Carnival ships go up to 14 decks. We got to the top of the ship where we saw the pool and lounge area. It looked beautiful. The pool is very small, probably only about 10 feet by 15 feet, but there was a big white tent over a lot of the back for shade and there were plenty of tables and chairs to relax in. After checking out that area, we started making our way to the front of the ship, and to get there, we had to pass through the spa. The spa was amazing. It has a workout room, hair salon, massage tables, private hydrotherapy baths, a steam room, and a sauna, all for an extra cost of course. We made our way to the front of the ship where there was the Observation Deck and the Faculty Lounge. The Observation Deck is on the front of the ship overlooking the bow. This area is only really open while the ship is at port or going slow because it gets too windy for people to go out there. The Faculty Lounge was very classy, and that day was the only day that students were allowed in there. After exploring in there, we made our way throughout the rest of the ship, going floor by floor covering most of the areas. We found the other dining room, the small library (that actually has 9,000 volumes, mostly travel books), the computer lab with about 20 computers, the Union (which is the big room in the front of our ship that would be the showroom if this were a real cruise ship, it is where we have pre-port meetings and Global Studies), and Timitz Square, which is the 2 story atrium where the pursers desk is and the excursions desk is. The rest of the ship is mostly rooms and classrooms.

I didn’t even meet my roommate until after my whole ship exploration. His name is Andrew, but he goes by Drew. He is originally from Maryland but he goes to Penn State. He is really cool and we get along well, but neither of us really spend any time in the room. We unpacked together, decided who would get what drawers and closet space (we are boys so neither of us fought or really cared what drawers we had), and I put up my big world map on my side and Drew brought a big Maryland State Flag that he hung up. After we got settled, we went up to the back of the ship and watched us as we sailed out of Ensenada toward the open sea.

 

The trip from Ensenada to Hawaii was pretty crazy. The first day was orientation, which was fairly boring. We crammed all 584 students into the Union and spent all day going over rules, policies, and everyday ship operations. A LOT of people got seasick that day, mainly from being in a crowded room, reading PowerPoints, and watching the horizon fly up and down through the windows. That day we had big swells, and it wasn’t even the worst of it. At night we had a floor meeting where we met our Living Learning Coordinator (LLC), which is like an RA or a prefect, and w got to meet other people from our hall. Everyone went to bed pretty early that night, we were all tired.

 

The next day classes started. We have two different class days, A days and B days. On A days I have History of the Nuclear Age from 8am-9:15am (0800-0915), Psychology of Masculinity and Femininity from 9:30am-10:45am (0930-1045), and Global Studies from 2pm-3:15pm (1400-1515). We go by military time on the ship to avoid confusion. On B days I have Architecture of Sustainable Communities from 11am-12:15pm (1100-1215) and Global Studies at the same time as on A days. Everyone is required to take Global Studies and it is on both A and B days. All of my classes are really good. In my Nuclear Age class, there are only 6 people in the class, which is a lot nicer that the 360 students that were in my math class back at Santa Cruz. The teachers are really really nice and helpful, and they are all really enthusiastic about being on the voyage with the students. My other classes have about 20 students in them, except for global studies, which is at 2 different times each day and has about 300 students in each one. All my teachers are very smart and love being here, which makes class a lot more interesting.

The trip to Hawaii was fairly uneventful except for the swells. The huge storm that hit the west coast never hit us because the Capitan shot about 300 miles south of our scheduled course at about 22knots (1 knot = 1.2 mph) so we could get around the rain. It was very warm and sunny, but all of the swells coming from the north hit us hard. Since the Capitan went so fast to get around the storm, he had to slow down to about 10 knots to get back on schedule. This was fine except the slower a ship goes, the more unstable it is, and this is when the swells hit us the hardest. There were constant 15-20 foot swells all the way to Hawaii. The ship would rock at a good 15 degrees, which makes it awfully hard to conduct class. It got so bad at certain points, that they had to put away all of the tables and chairs that were on the outside decks because they were sliding around and hitting people. I witnessed our ping-pong table slide across the deck and hit one girl right in the hip. The swells even seemed worse at night. All of our drawers would open and close throughout the night and if we had anything just sitting on the desk it would fall off. Drew and I just threw all of our stuff on the floor at night so we could sleep. One night, my bed detached from the wall and slid across our room while I was sleeping in it.

To me, this was all extremely fun. Not too many people agreed with me.

 

Our first port was the town of Hilo, Hawaii. We had to wake up at 0600 to go through immigration. We had to do this because we left from Mexico instead of the US. After showing my passport to the immigration officials on the deck, I went back down to bed and slept until about 0900. Most people had gotten off the ship by this point so I had a nice leisurely breakfast and while I was eating I saw about 8 whale breeches and a sea turtle. The reason I didn’t jump off the ship immediately was because I was scheduled to go on an excursion to the observatories on the top of Mauna Kea at 1100. When 1100 rolled around I got into a van with about ten other SaS kids and we took off. To my surprise, the first place we stopped was a waterfall. The waterfall was called Akaka Falls and it is about 10 miles north of Hilo. Akaka Falls is a 400 foot waterfall that drops into a deep pool in a jungle valley. It was beautiful. There was a trail going to the waterfall and to do the full loop took about 25 minutes. My friends and I took pictures at the falls and found a small path into the jungle where we climbed and swung on tree vines. I felt like Tarzan. After spending about an hour there we hopped back into the vans and started to head up to the summit. We stopped about half way up the mountain at a dried lava flow because we had to acclimatize. The summit of Mauna Kea is about 14,000 feet, and if you go from sea level to that altitude too quickly, you can get bad altitude sickness. After about 30 minutes of acclimation, we continued up to the visitor center, which was about ¾ of the way up. This is where we stopped, had lunch, and there is a very rare plant that lives there called the Silversword that only grows on the summits of the Hawaiian mountains. It is a spiky looking plant that looks like someone spray painted silver. From the visitor center, the rest of the way up is a dirt road that requires 4-wheel drive, and only two out of the four vans could make it up. Fortunately for me, I was in one of the vans that was able to go up, so I got to go up with the first group. It was a steep windy road that took us up to the observatories. There are a total of thirteen observatories on the top of Mauna Kea, but the main two are the Keck I and Keck II telescopes. They are the ones that look like giant golf balls and the most photographed of the observatories. We got to go inside of Keck I and look up to the bottom of the telescope. The mirrors on the Keck telescopes are 10 meters across, and made up of 36 smaller hexagonal mirrors. After looking around the telescope we went back outside and most of the kids took a brief nap while we waited for sunset. The high altitude made everyone very weak and some people were having some trouble adjusting. Sunset finally came around and it was the most beautiful sunset I have ever seen. We were high above any clouds and vog (volcanic fog, the volcanoes on the big island have been very active this past week, so the air below us was very voggy). We were so high above any clouds, I felt like I should have been in an airplane. The only other land you could see emerging from the clouds was the tip of Mauna Loa on the other side of the island and Haleakula on Maui. The sunset turned all the white telescopes a beautiful orange-gold color. It was amazing. After sunset, it got cold fast, easily in the 30’s. We headed a quarter of the way down the mountain to a warmer spot where we got a private astronomy lesson from a telescope operator. We didn’t use any of the summit telescopes because astronomers sign up years in advance for their chance to use them, so we used Dave’s (the telescope operator) personal telescope that was actually quite good. We looked at Jupiter, Mars, the Orion Nebula, some colored stars, and the Moon. After looking through the telescope, I hopped into the only van that wasn’t going straight back to the ship, and instead the driver of that van took us to a restaurant in downtown Hilo called Ken’s. There they served a whole bunch of really good home-cooked food. My friend and I split a Sumo Loco Mocco, which is six scoops of rice, meat of your choice, three eggs on top, and covered in gravy. The meat we chose was spam because it is a Hawaiian tradition to get this with spam. Yes, this dish probably took about 5 years off of my life, but it was delicious! After dinner we all went back to the ship and crashed.

The next day I woke up early and did a necessary Wal-Mart run with my friend Erin. I bought snacks that would last me a long time because there are very limited eating hours on the ship (0700-0830, 1130-1330, and 1730-1930). After the Wal-Mart run, Erin and I decided to split a taxi and head to Rainbow Falls because we heard there was a really cool pool to swim in below the falls and lots of rocks to jump off of. We got there and ran into two other SaS kids at the waterfall lookout. We walked with them down to the pool and we saw about fifteen SaS kids already there. We jumped off rocks that were about 20 feet high into the pool. It was really fun! We spent most of the day there swimming and jumping, and called a cab to take us back around 1500. We ended up leaving with five more than we arrived with and decide to go to a Kava bar. Kava is the root of a plant that is ground up and mixed with water. The Hawaiians drink this because it is a muscle relaxant and it calms you down and makes you tired. It somewhat tasted like water mixed with a little dirt, but it is a tradition! Afterwards, I got a Chocolate Macadamia Coconut ice cream to wash it down. By this time we had to head back to the ship because it was time for it to leave Hilo and head for Honolulu.

My first day in Honolulu was very relaxing. I went to an internet café in the morning and got reconnected with the world for a bit. Afterwards, I went to Waikiki beach with my friends Erin, Elena, and Corina. We went to the International Marketplace for lunch before heading down to the beach. We went to the Treehouse Café and I ordered a burger with pineapple and teriyaki sauce. It was delicious and Hawaiian! After lunch we went down to the beach and found a spot right in front of the Royal Hawaiian Hotel. My friends and I went swimming for a bit and when we were coming back in, we found a wallet floating in the ocean. We picked it up and saw credit cards and whatnot inside so we spent the next 20 minutes calling all the numbers in the wallet and calling the credit card companies trying to find out where the owner was. After a while, my friend noticed that there was a keycard for the Royal Hawaiian in it, so we decided to drop it off at the reception desk. While my friend was dropping it off at the desk, I looked down the beach and saw someone who I thought looked like the man from the driver’s license. I ran after him, asked his name, and it was the right guy! He hadn’t even realized he had lost it yet! Also, his wife told me this wasn’t the first time this had happened. They were EXTRAORDINARILY grateful and offered us rewards of Mai Thais, but we declined, because we were about to head back to the ship and change and go out to dinner. We went out to a restaurant called Sam Choy’s which is a seafood restaurant not too far from our pier. I got an amazing dish of macadamia encrusted Mahi Mahi with mango chutney and shitake mushroom sauce. It was amazing. Afterwards, we took a taxi to downtown Waikiki and went to a club called Zanzibar where we went dancing. The club was overrun with SaS kids and I had a great time. We headed back fairly early because I had to wake up at 0630 the next day to go scuba diving!

I met my friend Patrick Samsel right outside of the Aloha Tower at 0715 where the Rainbow Scuba van was going to come and pick us up. It arrived on time and took us to a wharf about halfway between Aloha Tower and Waikiki beach. We got fitted at the wharf for our flippers, goggles, BCD (Buoyancy Control Device), and wetsuits, and headed out by 0900. The boat took us out about 300 yards of the Waikiki coast where two ships had sunk within 30 yards of each other. One ship, the YO-257, looked like a military shipping vessel from the 1940’s, and the other ship, the San Pedro, looked like an old frigate from the 1930’s or so. We jumped in the water and descended right above the San Pedro. From there we swam straight to the YO-257 which rested at about 90 feet. We swam all around it, then went inside a window to the inner part of the ship. We swam out the other side and then up to the top where we saw about three sea turtles. After exploring the top, we swam back to the San Pedro which rested at about 70 feet. We swam to the top of it and down into one of the cargo holds where we saw two sleeping White Tip Reef Sharks. Each shark was about 4 feet long, and when we started taking pictures, the flashes woke them up and they started swimming around us! They would come up really close and turn away at the last second. I got within 3 or 4 feet of each of them! They eventually swam out the side of the ship where we followed them. We explored the rest of the exterior of the ship and headed back for the surface. For our next dive, the dive boat took us to right behind the surf, to a place called Turtle Canyon. It’s called Turtle Canyon for a reason; I saw about 15-20 turtles on this dive! They were everywhere! Swimming around, sleeping on the bottom, eating off the coral. Everywhere you looked there was a turtle. This dive was only about 25 feet, and the surf kicked up the sand on the bottom, which made the visibility slightly poor. We still managed to see a Spotted Eagle Ray and lots of fish. It was a great dive, a turtle even got close enough to me to pet it (which I think may actually be illegal!). When that dive ended, the boat took us back to the wharf and let us off. My dive master had an underwater digital camera and took lots of pictures. They should be on Rainbowscuba.com in a few days, so look and see if you can recognize me in a wetsuit! The scuba van took us back to the ship where I grabbed my laptop and headed back out to see if I could steal some free Wi-Fi. I sat under the Aloha Tower with some of my friends and we all just spent the rest of the day on the internet, because it would be the last time we get to use it for three and a half months! We got back on the ship and we all stood up on the top deck as we watched us pull away from Honolulu, and our last connection to the United States.

 

Today is my first day at sea for the trip to Japan. I am getting back into the routine of classes and homework… Hawaii was a very nice break though, and in about ten days I will be in Japan! There is a storm around us, but it is choppy waters instead of the big swells we got on the way to Hawaii, so the ship isn’t rocking nearly as much. We are currently travelling at about 15 knots and I can’t wait to get to Japan! I will write again soon!