Michael's Semester at Sea

2010-04-25T08:16:00.000-07:00

        We arrived into the port town of Tema, Ghana which is the closest city to 0’ 0’. We never actually passed through the point where the equator crosses the prime meridian, but we came really close on the ship. Tema itself is at 5 degrees, 40 seconds north and 0 degrees 1 second west. We pulled into the port around 0800, and looking over the port itself, I was very unimpressed. It was a dirty, industrial looking port with lots of cranes and trucks. I met up with Carson, Isaac, and Simone for breakfast where we discussed what we were going to do that day. We heard about a cool lighthouse in Jamestown, on the western part of the capital Accra, about 45 minutes away. There is almost nothing to do in Tema itself, but it is the closest deep water port to Accra. SAS provides a free shuttle to Accra, but it only runs once an hour, and Accra is a very spread out city, so you need to get a cab once you get downtown. We knew we weren’t going to get on the first bus because there was already a huge line off the ship. We waited and got ready for the second bus, but we got down there and there was still a huge leftover amount of people from the first bus an hour ago. We knew we weren’t going to get on it, so we started asking around for other options. We heard taxis were really expensive so we didn’t want to do that, but then we heard that if we walked about fifteen minutes to the entrance of the port, we could skip the line and get on there. We decided to do that and we walked to the main gate of the port. We were immediately swarmed by taxi drivers that were all offering their services. We fended them all off and asked a port official about when and where the bus comes. He told us the bus never stops at the gate. Someone had told us the wrong information. We decided to ask about taxis, and we started talking to this man who said he would drive us around all day wherever we wanted for the same price as all the other taxi drivers were offering for just one way to Accra. We decided to go with him, his name was Augustine, and he asked us what we wanted our first stop to be. We told him about the lighthouse in Jamestown and we hopped in his car and took off. He took us along the scenic road that went along the coast to Accra. On our way to Jamestown he answered all of our questions about culture and Accra while telling us about interesting sights along the way. It took about 45 minutes to an hour to get up to the lighthouse. They way up was a lot prettier than I expected, with beaches and palm trees on one side with fields and small towns on the other. We got to the lighthouse and it wasn’t as big as I had expected. It was probably as tall as a three story building. But, down below the lighthouse along the beach was a small fishing village, with hundreds of boats and shacks. We asked Augustine if we could go down there and he drove us down to the beach. We got out of the car and immediately two men came up to us and shook our hands and introduced themselves. At first I thought that they were going to try and sell us something or ask for our money, but they just started asking us where we were from and what we were doing in Ghana. They told us to follow them and they would show us around. They headed off through the boats and we followed them, finding small gaps through the densely packed boat lot. They took us onto the pier that came out from their village. There were people everywhere along the way. There were about a hundred kids playing in the waves and the adults were all outside hanging out or working. Kids would come up and shake our hand and say hi, just like a lot of the adults. Also, the people of Ghana are very proud. In Vietnam, India, and other countries, when we went to the slums, people would run up to us and ask for our money right away and only be nice because they wanted something out of us. Here, the adults never asked us for money, and if a kid asked and an adult heard, they would get mad at the kid and tell them to go away from us. Also, these people loved having their picture taken. They would come up and want a picture, then a picture with us, and they would get really excited when we showed them the picture after we took it. We headed out onto the pier where there were lots of kids jumping off and adults working on nets. There were miles of nets along this pier. It was stretched out and put into piles; you couldn’t walk along without stepping on the nets. At first I felt bad, but then I saw that it was acceptable to just walk all over them. We got to the end of the pier, and our two friends showed us how the workers were repairing the nets. We didn’t see many fish on the pier, but there were hundreds of crabs lying in neat rows drying out. At the end of the pier, we got an amazing look back at the shantytown fishing village and up and down the coast. We asked our friends where they lived and if it would be ok if we saw their house. They were happy to show us and brought us back into the village. The village was built on the beach and up a small cliff. We wound through the shacks on the beach and walked up a set of steep steps. At the top of the steps, we turned through a small door into a dark hallway, where we passed a few doors, like we were going through an apartment building hallway. Down the hallway there were two fairly small windows that had an amazing view over the village and into the ocean. We continued down the hallway and exited through another small door into a cramped courtyard with laundry lines hanging throughout it. There was a group of about eight children playing in the courtyard they got excited and came over. They came over and shook our hands and they asked what our names were and we asked their names. They all had very English names, such as George, James, and whatnot. They also were fascinated by our cameras and loved having their pictures taken. We spent a long time just playing and taking photos with these kids. They were climbing all over each other, jumping, dancing, and just having fun in these photos. The thing that surprised me was how happy most people were in this little impoverished fishing village. In other countries the people in the poorer areas were not very happy and looked pretty angry, but everyone in this village was smiling and happily going about their lives. We finished playing with these kids, said goodbye, and went up another flight of stairs to the top of the village. This was where our friends lived. They had a small almost empty shack at the top of the village near the road we came in on. There were more children up here and they all immediately ran up. We talked and took photos with these kids too. There was also a huge speaker set up and they were playing music. We danced with the kids for a little bit before deciding to head back to the car. We walked around the side of the buildings and were followed by a group of teenagers who talked to us as we walked down the cliffs. At the bottom, we wound back through the shacks and hopped back in the car. From there we said bye to our friends and headed back onto the road. We asked our driver what else there was to see in Accra, and he then drove us about ten minutes down the road to the mausoleum of Kwame Nkrumah, the first president of independent Ghana. The mausoleum was a big plaza that had gardens surrounding the main walkway. They had trees that were planted by various important people with placards in front of them describing the trees and people. The main walkway was a light grey stone path between two pools with statue fountains placed all throughout. The statue fountains were bronze figures of people playing tusk-like horns. The water was shooting out to the side from their horns and from the sides of the pools. The main walkway led down to a big statue of Kwame Nkrumah himself. Behind him is the building that encases his burial site, which was a beautifully designed granite tower. It is about two-three stories tall and is made up of four towers surrounding the central piece. Inside is where the tomb was, on the ground in a fancy white marble casing. We walked around here for a while before exiting the park and hopping back into the cab. Augustine then took us to the Crafts Market, which is a huge market made up of a whole bunch of different booths and stands selling all types of Africa paraphernalia. These were the most aggressive salesmen I have ever met. The second we stepped out of the cab we were swarmed by a group of about eight of them. These people pretended to be just as nice as other people we had met, but they were only nice because they wanted our money. They would try and drag you to their stand and they would all argue with each other over whose stand you went to. We went with one of the guys to his stand where he had a whole bunch of wood carvings and trinkets. He showed me how to play a traditional African mancala game. We played for a bit before I looked around his shop. Our driver was very nice and he told us reasonable prices to get these items for. He even helped us bargain a lot. I got a whole bunch of items at like 40% of the price he had originally offered. Augustine almost got in a yelling fight with one of the salesmen over his ridiculous prices. We walked out victorious. After shopping around here for a while we walked back out to the cab, trying not to get pulled away by the overly aggressive salesmen. We hopped back in the cab and some guy was trying to drop masks through the window of the cab and getting us to buy them. We kept having to shove them back out until we finally left the area. After this market, we went out to lunch at a place called Frankie’s, which was like an American diner. It was one of Augustine’s favorite places to eat in Accra. We got burgers, sub sandwiches, and milkshakes which were all delicious. Once we finished here, Simone and Isaac were ready to head back to the ship so we drove back to Tema. We dropped off Simone and Isaac and we also gave them our big bags of goodies to take back onto the ship. Carson and I weren’t ready to head back yet, so we asked Augustine to take us out somewhere in Tema. He said he knew of a hotel that had live African music every Sunday, so he took us there. It was the Hotel Marjorie, and when we got there, he asked the parking assistant if the band was today, but he said no. We were slightly disappointed, but we decided to look around the hotel anyway. It had an amazing pool area with a fake waterfall and bar area. We walked around wishing we had our swimsuits on. We spent a little time here before heading back to our car. Augustine said there wasn’t much open at this time on a Sunday, but he could pick us up later that night at 2000 and take us to a nice restaurant. We decided to do that and we went back to the ship. We went for a quick swim to cool off, showered, and got ready and by then it was time to head back out. We walked out to the entrance to the port where all the cabs were waiting and we looked for Augustine. We, of course, got swarmed by taxi drivers and I tried fending them all off by saying we already had a driver. Their response was always, “I am your driver! Right here! I will drive you.” I would say that they weren’t our driver, and kept looking for Augustine. I asked one or two of the more calm ones if they knew where Augustine was and they would just respond with, “I am Augustine, I will drive you!” After working my way through over half of the drivers, a man ran up to me and said that he knew Augustine and that they were friends. We decided to follow him because he wasn’t claiming to actually be him. He brought us to the other side of the parking lot and I was greatly relieved to see Augustine’s white car sitting there. It turned out that Augustine had just been taking a nap in his car, and just now woke up as we walked up. We hopped in his car and he took us about twenty minutes away to a very nice rooftop restaurant that looked over the lights of Tema. I had a delicious meal of beef with mushrooms sauce and Carson had a chicken dish. The service was really slow, which was actually kind of nice. It was the perfect temperature now that it was dark and late and it was nice just sitting on the roof overlooking the city. We finished and paid our bill, and then we headed downstairs where there was a bar with pool tables and a dancing area. We went into the dance area, but there weren’t very many people there. We saw some SASers and they came over and told us that there was a lot more people at the club next door. We walked out and down a couple buildings to a club called Manila, which was very nice. It was all outdoors, with a covered bar area with pool tables and showing a soccer game and a big dance floor with lights and a disco ball that was in an open air courtyard. We spent the rest of the night dancing and hanging out with people until we went back to the ship. There were a lot of really nice locals there that would come up and talk to you. It was a lot of fun, but we had to leave fairly early because we both had to wake up early the next day.
        The next morning I woke up at 0600 and got ready for the day. I packed up a bag and went off to a quick breakfast before disembarking the ship and waiting for my trip to leave. The trip I was going on was an FDP to castles and slave dungeons built by Europeans to house slaves before they were shipped to the Americas. We were going to visit two castles; the first one was Elmina Castle, built by the Portuguese the captured by the Dutch, then British. The second was Cape Coast Castle, built by the Swedes, then captured by the Danish, then British. The trip was supposed to leave at 0700, but only one bus had arrived. We had to wait for 45 minutes until the second bus arrived, which put us behind schedule. The busses finally left around 0800 and it was about a three and a half hour drive just to get there. The roads in Ghana are very poorly kept and very bumpy, although the bus driver didn’t seem to notice. He sped over every pothole in the road and drove straight through any speed bumps in the way. I wanted to take a nap on the way there, but that was next to impossible. Also, in addition to the potholes, every town we passed through, there was a set of three speed bumps every fifty yards to slow traffic. Unfortunately, it did not slow the bus. After our very long drive across hazardous terrain we finally arrived at Elmina Castle. This was a beautiful white castle perched on a small peninsula. It had high walls, moats, and lots of cannons surrounding it. We got off the bus and we were swarmed by people trying to sell us trinkets. The tour company ushered us quickly inside the safety of the castle’s walls. I took out my camera to take pictures and I thought it was slightly lighter than normal. I flipped it over and opened up the bottom and, of course, the battery is missing. I then realized that I was charging it during my shower in the morning and I never put it back in. We all gathered in the main courtyard of the castle where our guide gave us a description of when and why the castle was built. It was built in the early 1600’s by the Portuguese during their reign over the sub-Saharan portion of Africa. The castle is called Elmina because in Portuguese, “el mina” means “the mine.” In the beginning their main export was gold and other minerals. The Atlantic slave trade didn’t even begin until about a hundred years later. We walked through the main courtyard where there was a small Portuguese church. We then walked through a small passageway that led to a smaller sub-courtyard where they kept the slaves. In this courtyard there were two dungeons. One was for the men and the other was for the women. The people were cramped in small dark cavernous rooms with hardly any food, water, or ventilation. They were horrible conditions. When the ship came to pick them up, they would travel back through the main courtyard down to a smaller dungeon room where they were kept for the final month or two while the ship was restocked and reequipped for the trip back. They were then led one by one straight from the room onto the ship, back in those days, the water came right up to the castle walls, but now due to changing silt deposits and sand banks, there is a beach separating the castle from the water. After we saw this room and we got to look for the narrow door that the slaves exited, we went up to walk along the wall of the castle and into the governmental rooms of the castle. There were some spectacular views from the walls. We could see all over the small town of Elmina and across the little fishing harbor and all the way down the coast. We got a good look at the cannons and beaches surrounding the castle. We then went inside and walked through the emptied out rooms above the dungeons, which were very nice. We slowly made our way down through the castle yet again and out across the drawbridge over the moat. Once out of the safety of the castle we were again swarmed by the salespeople, so we quickly walked to the bus. Once we were all aboard the bus we made our way to our lunch destination. We drove about fifteen minutes down the coast to a very nice resort where we ate on a beachfront patio. We had a lunch of chicken, fish, potatoes, and rice. It was really good. We had to eat rather quickly because we were behind schedule from our late departure. We finished lunch and boarded the bus again and drove about thirty minutes to Cape Coast Castle. Cape Coast Castle was another castle used first for the trading of minerals and other goods before becoming used for slave storage in the slave trade. This castle was first built by the Swedes, after a while it was then taken over by the Danish and later on the British. This castle was more open to the sea with a big wall with about forty cannons all facing out over the ocean. The dungeons in this castle were actually underground. We went through a steep dark tunnel that went down from the main courtyard in the church where we entered a multi roomed dungeon. It was incredibly dark and humid down there, and still a lot hotter than I would expect. We went throughout the rooms where they showed us holes in the walls where the chains used to be and canals through the floors where the excrements of the prisoners flowed. There was also one big window over the main dungeon where a guard used to stand with his rifle, scaring the prisoners. There was also a small window hidden way up in the shadows that you couldn’t see unless you had a flashlight. This hole was used to eavesdrop on the prisoners to see if there were any plots forming of rebellion or escape. We exited this dungeon and walked back into the main courtyard. We looked back above the dungeon where there was a small church. They thought that by putting the church above the slaves would make it easier to convert them. We then saw some graves in the center of the courtyard that was of a sea captain and other workers of the castle. They don’t know why these three people were chosen to have fancy tombs in the middle of the castle, but they put them there because they want to be buried close to the church. Also, they didn’t want to bury them outside the walls of the castle because if they were buried outside, the angry locals might dig them up and mutilate the remains. We then walked to the opposite side of the courtyard where there was a slanting ramp that went down towards the water. Down at the end of the ramp by the big door was a set of two smaller dungeons that were the women’s dungeons. They kept them separate so there would be no pregnancies while in the dungeons. We walked out the big wooden door that was dubbed the “Door of No Return.” Once slaves went through this door they were shipped off to the Americas, never to see Africa again. We walked down onto the end of the ramp where the slaves were put on the ships and it was weird to see people fishing and fixing nets on the same spot where they were once shipped off as slaves. When we went back through the door, and on the outside above the door, there was a plaque saying, “Door of Return.” They renamed the door when they brought back a descendent of a Ghanaian slave just so he could walk back through the door his ancestors had dubbed “The Door of No Return.” We walked back up into the main courtyard and concluded the tour. We hopped back on the bus and went back along the coast back to Tema and the ship. This drive took about four and a half hours because we hit really bad traffic going through Accra and we were pretty much stopped for a really long time. When I got back to the ship I went straight to the dining room for dinner that they were keeping open late because we got back late. During dinner I made plans with my friends Alessia, Brooke, Mike, and EJ to go out that night. We all showered and met back up in Timitz Square and decided to go to Manila again. There isn’t much to do in Tema and the night options are very limited. We walked down to the shuttle hopped in with about eight members of the ship’s crew. They were going to the same place and we all convinced the driver if we paid him 1 Cedi each (1.41 Cedi = 1 US Dollar) then he would take us straight to the club. We spent the night hanging out and dancing, and went back to the ship around midnight and went to bed.
        The next morning I woke up at 0600 and got ready for the day. I double checked to make sure my battery was in my camera. I had breakfast and went down to the gangway and got off the ship and waited for my trip to leave. My trip that day was to the Wli Waterfall and village visit. We hopped on a bus at 0700 and departed around 0715. The drive was about four hours again; nothing is really close to Accra. This drive was pretty though, we saw Ghana’s largest suspension bridge and went through rolling hills and big plains. The bus stopped at a small village around 1130 where we all got off. We grabbed a bag lunch and a bottle of water from our guide and waited for everyone to group up. We had to walk to Wli Waterfall, which was about 45 minutes away up a large canyon through the jungle. We headed off on a small trail that wound along a small river going through the trees. The walk was beautiful, although very hot and humid as one would expect an African rainforest to be. The trees were thick and very tall, not a lot of sunlight got through. We crossed the river multiple times on little wooden bridges. There were a lot of big centipedes crawling along the path and a lot of butterflies flying through the trees but I didn’t see many other animals. We eventually heard the rushing sound of the water of the waterfall crashing into the pool below it. We came around a bend and we saw the 350 foot Wli Falls, tumbling over a beautiful stone jungle cliff with a small water pool at the bottom. I immediately threw my backpack down, changed into my swimsuit, and hopped in the water. The pool never really got that deep, on average I would say that it was about waist deep. I walked out to the falls, tripping and cutting my foot on a few rocks on the bottom, fighting the fierce winds near the bottom of the falls, and finally stood under the crashing water. It stung a little bit, but it felt good. Also, the water would come in surges, so it wouldn’t be bad, but then a lot of water would suddenly come crashing down on top of you and almost knock you over. After spending about ten minutes showering in the Ghanaian waterfall, I walked back out of the pool, slipping on more rocks, and dried off and ate my lunch. I then walked around, taking pictures of the stunning waterfall. That is when I noticed a whole bunch of bats clinging to the rocks at the top of the waterfall and occasionally flying off to capture some bugs. After taking some more snaps, I hopped right back in the pool and joined my fellow SASers for another swim. We swam for a while, taking pictures with some people’s underwater cameras before the guides called us out and told us it was time to go. We hopped out and I dried off and changed back into my shorts for the hike back. The walk back seemed much longer. 1. Because we didn’t have the excitement of the unknown in front of us and 2. Because there was no cool, refreshing pool of water to cool us off at the end. We finally got back to the small village and people bought some trinkets and souvenirs and drinks before hopping back on the bus. Once we were all aboard the busses, it was another half an hour drive to the village and monkey sanctuary where we were going. The road was incredibly unkempt and bumpy and it was hard to even sit in the seat. We finally arrived at the small village and got off the bus. Two locals from the village were going to take us out to see the monkeys and then after take us on a quick tour of the village. We split into two smaller groups and headed off into different directions. We walked on a small path through the jungle until we came upon a big tree that was the main house of this one family of monkeys. Our guide had brought a bag of bananas and we each got one to feed to the monkeys. Before we knew it they were all around us. They were small Mona Monkeys, which were pretty awesome. You held out your banana and they would come up and peel it and take chunks off of it. If you didn’t hold it tightly, the monkeys would just rip the whole banana out of your hand and run off with it. Two monkeys actually jumped on my LLC, Stacey, and she freaked out a little bit which was really funny. We spent about ten minutes with the monkeys and then I felt a couple drops of water on my head. I thought it may have come from a monkey, but all of a sudden it started to pour. It was the second time that I had been stuck in an African thunderstorm. Half the group booked it back for the village and shelter while the other half of us stayed in the forest playing with the monkeys. The monkeys disappeared soon after to get out of the rain, so we decided to head back as well. We walked through the soaking jungle on a path that was turning slowly into pure mud. We finally got back to the village and took shelter under a village overhang with the rest of my group and a couple locals. We waited about ten minutes for the rest of the storm to pass and then walked around the rest of the village. There were a lot of little kids that came up to us and wanted to play with us. They would run up and shake our hands and then pose for pictures. We played with them for a while until it was time to get back to the bus, so we walked back to the bus, but the other group wasn’t back yet, so we hung around the bus area. A group of villagers was gathering for a drum circle, so we went over to check it out. They played songs and danced, and it was awesome to watch. Then some of the adults taught some of us how to carry things on top of our heads. It was awesome. The other group returned and then we headed back onto the bus and made our way back to Tema. On the bus ride back our driver put the pedal to the metal. We flew back and made it all the way back to the ship in three and a half hours. Once back on the ship I ate some dinner, and then fell asleep watching a movie.
        The next morning I woke up at 0800 and went up to breakfast. I had no plans for the day, but I was going to just go up to breakfast and see who was there. I ran into my friends Corena, Kelly, and Mike and we decided to all spend the day together. We got off the ship and took the 0900 shuttle to downtown Accra. It took about an hour to get from the ship to the drop off point in the middle of town. Once we got off the bus, we stopped off at an ATM for a day of shopping. There isn’t really anything to do in Accra except visit the markets and just walk around. My goal for the day was to get an African drum so we walked down the street to a small street market, where Mike had bought a drum on the first day. We walked to the same booth where we met the same guy that had sold Mike his drum. I asked him if he had any more drums and he asked me what size. I told him and he told us to wait there then proceeded to sprint down the street and around a corner. We waited for about five minutes and he came running back with a drum in his hands. He offered a price and we haggled for a bit, until I got it low enough and he threw in a mask. Once I had my drum in hand we walked back to the main street and hailed a cab. While I was walking back lots of people came up and just played my drum while I was holding it. They would play an awesome beat for about thirty seconds, laugh, then shake my hand and walk away. A lot of them told me I had a nice drum which made me very satisfied with my purchase. We got in a cab and went to the same market we went to on the first day. The same thing happened again where we were swarmed by salesmen. We went into the main area and went from booth to booth, with people trying to convince us to buy things. I ended up buying two flags and some other small trinkets and then I was out of Cedi. I just hung out around the market, talking with the salespeople. It was a good way to find out who was really nice and who wasn’t. I would tell the people I was out of money, and they wouldn’t believe me. I would then show them my empty wallet, and the nice people would keep talking to me, and the mean ones would walk away frustrated. We spent a while walking around the market getting pulled into booths and talking with the salesmen. I took some pictures with some of the salesmen. We then followed a guy named Dante to his drum shop where we talked for a while and played the drums with him. After a while, we were sufficiently hot, sweaty, and shopped out. We hailed a cab and went back to the bus stop. We only had to wait about ten minutes for the bus to get there, then we hopped on, waited a bit in the AC, and then the bus left. The bus ride back took about an hour and a half, but it was just nice to be in the air conditioning. We got back to the ship which is where we stayed for the rest of the afternoon. We swam in the pool and relaxed until the ship left, where we watched us pull away from Africa for the last time.

2010-04-16T07:29:00.000-07:00

When I looked out my window on the morning of March 31st I saw beautiful flat topped Table Mountain rising up from behind the city of Cape Town, South Africa. It was sunny, no clouds in the sky, and a perfect 70 degrees. I went upstairs and had breakfast on the back deck, overlooking the city. After a quick breakfast and taking pictures of the town and mountain, I went down and packed my bag for the day before heading up to our diplomatic briefing. This diplomatic briefing was a special one because we had Amy Biehl’s mother, Linda Biehl, come aboard and tell us about her life. Amy Biehl was an American college student who came to South Africa to be part of the Anti-Apartheid movement. It was her goal to help the black people, but one night, the night before she left to go back home to the US, she was murdered by a group of four African males. Her parents were notified, and instead of getting angry they set up a foundation to help the African people because they realized that these four killed Amy, not because they specifically wanted Amy dead, but because they were trying to make a statement. They even testified to get the killers amnesty because their action was motivated by political means. She came on and talked about her foundation and what her experiences have been like working with the African people. She gave a great speech and afterward I went back to my room and got my bag. I got off the ship around 0900 and walked around the waterfront taking pictures of the ship and port. At 1015 I went back to the area where we got off the ship where I met with a group of my friends to go Great White Shark cage diving! There was a total of about 30 of us who split up into two vans and headed toward Gansbaai where we were going diving. It was about a two and a half hour drive to Gansbaai. South Africa is absolutely beautiful. It reminds me a lot of California. Even Cape Town made me reminisce of San Francisco. We drove through wide valleys and over small mountains until we got to our destination. There were lots of vineyards that looked like Napa; South Africa is famous for its wines. We also passed through a few shantytowns with houses that were thrown together with scrap metal and plywood. There were young children playing on the side of the freeway, not noticing the heavy traffic whizzing by. We arrived at the building of Shark Diving Unlimited, which is the shark diving company owned by Michael Rutzen. You might know the name Michael Rutzen if you watch Shark Week religiously. You might know him as “Sharkman,” the man who goes free diving with Great Whites and tries to slowly roll them over to put them in a state of tonic immobility. You can put some sharks in a state of tonic immobility by rolling them upside down or covering their eyes. They become paralyzed and very relaxed, and cannot move for about fifteen minutes. Their brain is flooded with serotonin, butting them in a pleasurable comatose state. When the sharks are in this state, it gives scientists amazing opportunities to study them and plant tracking chips in them. We walked in the building where they had lots of Great White photos and a video playing talking about the sharks. We had a quick breakfast of scones and pastries before splitting up into groups. I was very lucky; we were split into two groups, one had 11 people and the other group had 21. I was in the group with 11. Sharkman was out on a different tour, but the leader of my boat was his brother. We signed our lives away and then headed down to the boat loading area. All the boats are kept on land on trailers, and we got on the boat while it was still out of the water. Our boat was called The White Shark, and it was a sleek 25ft catamaran with a top observation deck. We got on the boat, and a tractor came and pushed us into the water. He made our way out of the bay into open water. We headed out toward the horizon for about 20 minutes, bouncing over huge swells. The boat had two 200hp engines, and went very fast. We were flying over the swells and I swear the boat even jumped out of the water once or twice. It was really hard to stand and even sit. We also got our wetsuits on on the way out which made things that much more difficult. We got out to the cage, which was attached to a buoy left out in the ocean from the morning tour. We pulled up and hooked the boat onto the cage. Once we were safely attached, the boat operators started chumming the water and they threw out a line with tuna heads on the end. They are an eco-friendly tour group, so they don’t use mammal meat, they only use yellow fin tuna, a fish that is on the Great White’s natural diet. We had barely even gotten attached before the guides started yelling and told five of us to jump in the cage. Apparently there was already a shark going for the bait and we had to get in quickly. I slid down into the cage and into the freezing cold water. I got in so fast, I didn’t even have time to put on a hoodie to keep my head warm. It took a minute for the water to seep into my wetsuit and get warmed up by my body, but I was not thinking about the cold. We didn’t have scuba gear, just a mask, and the top of the cage was out of the water, but you could push yourself down under the water to get good views of the shark. When I first got in the cage, I was pretty nervous. First off, the bars of the cage were a lot further apart than I had expected. With the current and the swells, it was very difficult to keep my arms and legs from drifting out of the holes of the cage into the open water. I was looking straight down below me, to the left and to the right, expecting to see a big shadow lurking out in the green murk. I saw nothing, which made me more nervous, I was expecting it to shoot out of the emptiness and bit the cage in half. All of a sudden, I heard our boat captain yell, “Divers! Down!” which meant that a shark was coming. I went below the water and kept my eyes on the floating tuna heads. All of a sudden, a huge Great White came up from the depths, circled the bait, and went for a bite. The grace of the animal was amazing, very smooth movements, but it could turn on a dime. Its huge jaws opened up, showing its rows of teeth, and it tried to chomp down on the tuna, but our captain pulled it away at the last second. The shark passed right by the cage, then disappeared into the ocean again. The system they had was they threw the tuna head bait right in front of the cage, and as the shark came up to bite the fish, the captain would pull it toward the cage, trying to get the shark closer. They also didn’t want to feed the shark, and keep it on a regular eating schedule. The shark made a few more passes, until the captain told us to get out of the cage so that the other six could get in. we climbed out, which was surprisingly difficult in a wetsuit and with a lack of hand/footholds. I grabbed my camera and went right back to the edge of the boat. You could see the big black shadows of the Great White right under the surface of the water. We took turns spending time in the cage, the two groups cycling in and out. The first turn we got was the shortest, probably about ten minutes each. After that, we the turns got longer and were probably about twenty minutes. The first time was so short because the guides wanted to make sure that we all saw at least one shark, so they made sure everyone got in the water right away. Throughout the day, we saw five different Great Whites; four females and one male. The largest shark we saw, which was one of the females, was 3.2 meters, which is about ten and a half feet. A few times, the shark would hit the cage, bite it, and even roll on top of it. The shark would sometimes grab the bait, and thrash around, smacking the cage with its fins and body. My friend Dan got hit in the face with one of the shark’s fins, and me made the joke that he got slapped in the face by a Great White. The coolest thing is that sometimes the shark would roll over, trying to get the bait off the hook. We spent a couple hours out on the water. We all got four different turns in the cage, my last two being in a row, spending about 40 minutes in the water. Even though I had already been watching the sharks for a long time, I still wasn’t even paying attention to the cold. The shark activity finally decreased which is when we decided to head back in. We all got back in the boat and they pulled the cage up onto the back deck, and made our way back to the harbor. It was another fifteen minute boat ride back, and when we got back into the harbor, the tractor and boat trailer was waiting for us on the ramp. The boat slid right in, and the tractor pulled us out all in one fluid motion. We hopped off the boat and made our way back to the building we signed forms so we could grab a bite to eat and watch the video of our trip. They made us grilled cheese sandwiches (which are really popular in South Africa) and we had the choice between hot chocolate and coffee. We sat down in front of a TV where they popped in the DVD of the day and played it for us. After the movie, we went back to the main building of the company and where we waited for the other group to come back. They got back and we also watched their movie. Judging from what we saw and heard from the other group, our experience was much better. Our group was half as big and we saw more sharks and had a lot more active sharks. Our sharks grabbed the bait and thrashed around, while theirs just bit small bites off. Once everyone was fed and warmed back up, we hopped in the vans for the long car ride back. We got dropped off at the ship around 2000, and my friends Shannon, Stephanie, Scott, Tyler, and I decided to go out for dinner. Shannon had asked our local van driver what the good restaurants were, and he had given us a few recommendations. We put our stuff in our rooms and met up at 2030 to go eat. We hopped in a cab and told our driver to take us to a restaurant called Mama Africa, where they had traditional African food and music. The cab pulled up and our driver warned us that this is a very popular restaurant and he didn’t know if we could get a table. We sent Shannon in to see how long the wait would be, and she came back out in a few minutes and said it would be an hour and a half. Our taxi driver said he knew a different African restaurant close by, and that he would take us there. He drove us down a couple blocks and off the main street and pulled up in front of Marco Place, another African restaurant. Shannon ran inside this one, and came back out and said they had a table. I was slightly nervous after India, going to a restaurant that was recommended by a taxi driver while asking for no extra money. But I got inside and I was immediately impressed. It was a very nice two story restaurant with tables on balconies above the main room. There were African animals hanging on the walls and a live African band playing traditional music. We got a table on the second floor almost directly over the band. It was very nice. I ordered a plate of springbok, which is an African deer like a gazelle. It was delicious, and tasted a lot like steak. I also tried Kudu (another African deer) and ostrich. The springbok was my favorite, but it all tasted good. I also tried pap, which is an African side dish that is made from maize, looks like hard mashed potatoes, and tastes like mashed up rice. It tasted delicious. We paid our bill and went outside where our taxi driver was waiting for us. We had told him to come back and pick us up at 2230 because there are few taxi cabs in Cape Town and they are hard to come by, so you need to arrange pick up times if you want to make sure you get back. He took us back to the ship and we greatly thanked him for the great restaurant recommendation and for being so nice to us. I went back on the ship and went to bed, because I had to wake up early for my safari in the morning.
I woke up the next morning and 0600 and packed my backpack for the next three days. I went up to the union where our trip was meeting and waited for everyone to arrive. Once everyone was there, we all headed out onto a bus that took us to the airport. From Cape Town, we flew to a city called Durban, which is still on the southern coast of South Africa. The flight was about two hours long, and when we arrived we met two of our safari guides in the airport. Our two guides were Kurt and Phil. We hopped in two separate vans (there were 21 of us total) and made our way to the reserve. The reserve we went to was called Hluhluwe-Umfolozi (pronounced Shloo Shlooie Umfilozee) and it was a three hour drive from the airport. An hour into the drive we stopped at a gas station and got snacks and went to the bathroom. When we got back in the van, we headed back on to the freeway. About five minutes out of the gas station, I saw something moving out of the corner of my eye. I look onto the window about a foot in front of me, and there was a big, about an inch and a half long, brown, hairy spider, and I could see its fangs. I wanted to ask the driver if it could kill me, but I didn’t want to draw attention to it, because there were a few people in the van who would have really freaked out if they had seen it. I slowly picked up my plastic soda bottle, and tried to give it a whack. It moved and I only partially hit it, not even hurting the big spider. I tried again and missed, and it darted into a crack on the other side of the window. Some people looked at me funny, wondering what I was doing, but I didn’t want to tell them about the spider because I had failed to kill it and now it was hiding somewhere still alive in the van. I kept my eye on that crack for the rest of the van ride, but it never came out. We drove through many fields and small towns, and it was much greener than I had expected. We finally turned off the road and onto a dirt road where we drove for about another ten minutes down a very bumpy overgrown path. We arrived at a gate, where our driver punched in a number, and the gate opened and we went inside. We pulled into a circular gravel driveway of the Umkhumbi Lodge. We got out and met the owner of the lodge, a man named Antone, and he told us we should have a quick lunch so we could go for a walk before the park closed at 1800. We walked along on a narrow dirt path through a low tree tunnel to get to the eating area of the lodge. We passed by a couple small cabins where we would be spending the night. Each cabin was about 30 meters apart, and about 15 meters away from the main path. They were very private. The two story, open air eating area was about 150 meters away from the vans. It was pretty much two porches on top of each other, wide open sides and wood floors. The top floor had a bar area and one long table and the bottom story had three big tables and the kitchen in the back. We ate a quick lunch of bagels with different toppings such as tuna, cheese, and tomatoes. When we finished, we hopped back in the van and drove about fifteen minutes to iSimangaliso Wetland Park where we walked along a path that borders Lake St. Lucia. We walked right on the lake shore, which was very wide because they are having a seven year drought, so there was a very wide ring around the lake. On the beach, it was mostly dry silt with rocks scattered about. This is an excellent place to find fossils. Our guides found a fossil of a baby alligator in this one small rock. We had just started heading back to the vans when we saw the first flash of lightning. It was way out on the horizon but we decided to get back to the vans quickly. As we were walking back, the lightning got closer and closer, until it was pretty much right above our heads and that’s when it started pouring. So much for the seven year drought. A lot of the kids started sprinting for the vans, but everyone was thoroughly soaked within two minutes. It was some of the hardest rain I have ever seen. My friends Michelle, Anne, Becca (the trip leader), and I took our time getting back to the vans. There was no way we were going to get any more wet so we thought we might as well enjoy our time there. The lightning was really intense and happened about every five seconds, if that long. We got back to the vans and headed back to the lodge. The uphill road from the lake to the main road was pretty much a shallow river. Once we turned back onto the dirt road leading to the lodge, I felt like I was in Jurassic Park. We were in two vans, it was pouring, lightning was flashing, and we were bumping down a dirt road through an African forest. When we got back to the circular driveway, we were told to stay in the vans for a bit because we hadn’t checked into our rooms yet and they wanted to do it in small groups so we would stay out of the rain. Antone came running up to our van and told us that the storm had knocked out all the power and running water. Just like Jurassic Park. We waited in the vans for them to sort out the rooming situation, and when they got it all figured out, they split us up into small groups and a guide took us to our room. It was my turn to go and I stepped out of the van into the torrential downpour. I followed my guide on the path through the trees, and the once dirt path was now a cascade of water seemingly ankle high. There was also no light. No light at all, we could only navigate during lightning flashes. The lightning would flash and we would get a brief glimpse of the path in front of us. We then had to walk in complete blackness trying to remember where the trees were. Of course, my cabin was the very last cabin on the path and as far away from the vans as you could go. It was even past the eating place. I didn’t mind this. I thought it was really fun trying to run through an African storm. I got to my room and my roommate Scott was already there. The room was very nice. It had two beds, two wicker chairs, a nice stone tile bathroom, a patio, and a small refrigerator. He had a headlamp and they provided us with one small light sitting on the table. We put our stuff down and hung out in the darkness for a bit. We decided to play a game of cards to pass the time. Once we were almost done, we heard the refrigerator start whirring and some cheers from outside. We went over and tested the lights and the power was back on. We finished our game of cards and went to the dining area. About half the group was there sitting around the second story bar area. We got a few drinks and then it was time for dinner. We had a delicious dinner of beef stew with rice and pap. It was way better than I expected. We also got a dessert of chocolate mousse which was amazing. I ate on the second floor with about eleven other people. When we finished eating, we all returned to our rooms for an early night. We were all tired and we had to get up early the next morning.
We woke up the next morning at 0430, showered, and got a quick breakfast of tea and biscuits before hopping in the vans and heading to the Hluhluwe-Umfolozi game reserve. Hluhluwe-Umfolozi was once two parks, Hluhluwe Game Reserve and Umfolozi Game Reserve, but the elephants needed more room to roam so they opened the parks up and combined them. We got to the park entrance at 0600, right when it opened and we hopped into three open-air safari vehicles. We entered the park which was a lot different from what I expected. I imagined wide open flat yellow savannah, with in intermittent tree here and there. Instead, it was a mountainous green forested area. It was slightly drizzling when we first arrived but it stopped as soon as we entered the park. It was still overcast for the whole day though. When we entered the park, the three vehicles split up; this made the experience that much better because we were alone. The vehicles were all equipped with radios, so if anyone saw something, they would report it to the other vehicles so we wouldn’t miss anything. The first animal we saw was a giraffe. It was way up on the hillside and we were all ecstatic to see one. The vehicle stopped and we all took pictures. Once we were all satisfied, we go around a bend in the road and there were two giraffe’s right on the side of the road. These pictures turned out a lot better. After watching them for a bit, we drove over a small hill where we could see into a huge valley. We pulled off onto a roundabout overlook, and our driver (none of us could pronounce his real name because it had a click in it, and since the first animal we saw was a Giraffe we called him Geoffrey) looked out over the valley. He didn’t see any animals so he decided to go a different direction. We backtracked a little bit and pulled off onto a smaller road. We were driving along and right as we pass by a small bush, someone shouted “Hyena!” A hyena was standing about eight feet away from the vehicle walking parallel to the road. Geoffrey slammed on the brakes and stopped so we could all take pictures. The hyena looked at us, and picked up its pace, but didn’t go farther into the brush. Instead, it decided to use the road we were on. We followed the hyena for about 50 meters until it turned off the road and headed into the brush. It is really rare to see hyenas in the daytime, because they are generally nocturnal animals. They go off at night alone, and sleep in the daytime with the rest of the pack. This one was probably finishing its savaging and heading back to the pack now to sleep. We continued on down the road and a little while later, some shouted that they saw something on the hill to our right. The driver stopped and looked over and we all saw the big white rhino slowly meandering down the hill toward us. The brush was tall near us and the rhino got low enough to where we couldn’t see it, but we knew it was heading in this direction, so we waited to see if it was going to come close to the road. We waited a long time to see if it was coming but nothing happened. Our driver quickly drove to the top of a nearby hill to see if we could spot it. We couldn’t see anything and we were all confused on how a huge rhino could just disappear. All of a sudden, the mud puddle at the bottom of the hill started moving and the huge rhino rose out of it. The rhino had been taking a mud bath, so we couldn’t see it because it blended in. The rhino continued its march toward the road, so the driver raced back down again to get close. He stopped where he thought it was and we waited. We heard the bushes move and the huge rhino emerged from the brush and stepped onto the road about fifteen feet in front of our vehicle. He slowly crossed, not even caring that we were there, and headed out into the brush on the other side of the road. We had seen a white rhino and there were two types of rhinos in the park; white and black. White rhinos are far more common. They are much larger than the black rhino and far less aggressive. White rhinos are distinct because their head always looks down and almost grazes the ground. It is designed for eating plants and grass. The black rhino is about half the size and looks straight ahead, it is built for eating berries and fruits on bushes. The black rhino is also very territorial so many drivers don’t like to get close because it may charge the vehicle. Although, black rhinos are very rare in the park. Once the rhino had disappeared, we continued along the road driving to the spot where we were going to have breakfast. We went over a hill and down to the other side where there was a small pond by the side of the road. We saw a big herd of about 40 water buffalo grazing at the top of the hill. We stopped so we could take pictures and while we were stopped, one buffalo separated from the rest of the heard and headed down the hill towards us. He came right up to the water hole and started drinking right in front of us, about ten feet away. We thought he was going to get in and take a bath, but he just walked around it and headed off on his own. Once we lost sight of the buffalo, we continued down the road. About a mile or two down we saw a group of zebras eating the grass by the side of the road. There were about five of them standing very close. We pulled right up, and I was surprised to see how calmly they reacted to our approaching vehicle. Our driver always turned off the engine before we got close to an animal and coasted until we were close enough. Normally I imagined zebras as skittish, but when we got close, they only stepped a few feet away and kept eating. Since they took a few steps away, they weren’t facing us, resulting in a lot of great butt pictures. We made our way to the breakfast picnic area, stopping once or twice to see a few birds. We got to the picnic area and hopped out and there were three zebras right in the middle of the picnic grounds. One of them was a little baby zebra, so we all got our pictures taken in front of them and we could get really close. We also saw a nyala in the bushes, which is a gazelle type animal. We ate our breakfast of yogurt, granola, and an apple, and used the bathroom before hopping back on the safari vehicle. We wound up into the hills where we saw another rhino grazing by the side of the road. He just walked right by us eating from the grass. We kept on going and our driver spotted an elephant way up on the hill behind us. We all got small glimpses of it, and our driver turned around and went in the direction that it was heading. He pulled off on a small side road that went closer to the elephant. We were driving along it and we saw a small, younger elephant off the side of the road to the left. He was alone and our driver told us that the others had to be close because he was so young. We went about 50 meters down the road and we saw four elephants off the road to the right through the trees. They were really hard to see so we went down the hill farther to see if we could get a better view. We stopped and waited. As we waited, the other two vehicles met up with us because we had radioed it in. After about ten minutes, the elephants made their way out of the trees into the clearing that we were next to. The power of the elephants was amazing, they could bend and snap trees with no problem. There were also a lot more elephants than we thought. There was a whole huge herd. There were probably a total of 20-25 elephants, all of them different ages. There were babies, males, and females. The males surrounded the babies when they came close and protected them. The babies were not afraid at all; they were just playing underneath their parents and trotting around. The elephants started to get a little nervous with us around and they started displaying aggressive signs such as shaking their heads and dragging their feet on the ground like a bull does. The elephants decided to leave and they all trailed off into the jungle after crossing the road right in front of us. They pushed their way through the trees bending and snapping them along their way. Once the elephants were gone, we headed back out to the main road. We rounded a corner and there was a giraffe just standing in the middle of the road. It was just standing there, chewing. I guess that’s kind of all giraffes do, they eat, walk around, and then chew. We watched him for a bit, but we couldn’t get around him because he was right in the middle of the road. Our driver revved the engine and pulled up closer, this made the giraffe slowly walk off the road and stand off to the side. We drove by him and continued on our way. We drove to the top of one of the biggest mountains in the park where there was what’s called Hilltop Camp. Up there, there was a small store and a lookout point. We stopped, used the bathroom again, and bought snacks at the small store. The lookout was beautiful. We could see miles across the park. I was hoping to see elephants or something on distant hilltops but I didn’t see anything. We were driving down from the Hilltop Camp when our driver suddenly stopped and pulled out a pair of binoculars. He stared silently way down into the valley we were on top of until he put the binoculars down and shook his head. He said, “I thought I saw two lions down there, but they were only zebras.” We asked him where we was looking, and way down on the road in the valley, at least five miles away, there were two small white specks along the side of the road. I have no idea how he could have spotted them, I had a lot of trouble finding them when we weren’t moving. This guy must have had like 20:10 vision or something. We continued down the mountain until we were in the valley we were previously above. The road went through a river that we drove through in our vehicle. I thought it was really cool. We drove around a little bit looking for animals but had no luck. After a little while we went to a different picnic are for lunch. This spot was right next to a river valley, on the other side of the valley there was a large stone cliff that looked very African, like something you would see in the Lion King. We had a lunch of chicken stir fry and rice, which was delicious. After we ate, we hopped back in our vehicles and continued on our search for wild animals. We crossed over another river where we saw a small alligator resting on a rock. We kept driving around for a while, not having much luck finding animals. Most animals don’t come out in the middle of the day, so it was very rare to see them. We saw a few herds of zebras and a few more giraffes along the way, but no more elephants or rhinos. We were also on the lookout for lions and leopards, but those aren’t very common in this park. Also, we were on the north side, and those animals generally hang out on the south side. The reason we didn’t go to the south side was because you have a higher chance of seeing other lions and other big cats, but there aren’t nearly as many of the other animals, such as zebras, elephants, or giraffes. We were driving along ridges of mountains where we saw a family of warthogs, another rhino hidden in the bushes, and a family of baboons sitting by the side of the road. We also saw a few more nyalas running around at intermittent points. The day was almost over so we started making our way toward the park entrance. We went back along a road that followed the ridge of the mountains. We had beautiful vistas and scenery the whole way back. We finally descended into the valley where the park entrance was. We were driving along and as we come uo a small hill and around a corner, there was a rouge male elephant in the middle of the road. Our driver slammed on the brakes and stopped. The elephant turned around and started heading the other way. We started following it, but then the elephant turned around and started shaking his head. He then started running toward our safari vehicle and our driver threw it into reverse and backed up really fast. The elephant kept charging the vehicle until we dipped down back the small hill we came up. The elephant then stopped charging and turned back around. It started walking away so our driver cautiously followed, ready to back up if the elephant charged again. The elephant stepped off the road toward a small puddle in a dirt area. It started spraying itself with mud, and we took this opportunity to sneak by it while it was distracted. We continued our way to the park exit when someone spotted a rhino in the brush to the right of the vehicle. We stopped and watched it. It then crossed the road right in front of our vehicle and went onto a dirt roundabout. We followed him onto it where we stopped and watched him for a while. He proceeded into a mud puddle where he started rolling around and splashing himself with mud. He was taking a mud bath right in front of us and it was awesome. Once he was finished he got out and meandered back into the brush way out of sight. We continued toward the exit and right before we got there we saw a family of giraffes by the side of the road. We took pictures and finally made our way out of the park. We pulled into the parking lot and waited for the other vehicles. It took about another ten minutes for them to come out and when they did we hopped back into our vans and headed toward the lodge. We got back, dropped off our stuff at our rooms and met up at the dining area. We had a few beers, and the bartender was Antone himself. We started talking and I asked him about a “Danger – Landmines” sign hanging above the bar. He said that story as too long and he seemed to really not want to talk about it. I asked him what he did for a living before he opened this lodge. He said that he was a part of the South African Military during apartheid and that now he tracks down poachers in the park. He didn’t really want to talk about his time in the military, which was understandable, but he was more than happy to talk about his time tracking poachers. He told us that he would camp out in the park and wait for people to sneak in. He would then ambush them and try to take them alive and get information out of them. He said if the people wouldn’t talk, he would put them in the river with the alligators until they talked. He would try and find out where they were dropping off the horn or tusk, and set up sting operations to nail the next person up on the ladder. The people actually killing the animals in the park were paid next to nothing, and were just doing what they could to feed their families, but anybody above that was in it for the real money. After we talked about that for a while, he showed us some things he had kept from his time in the military. He had kept three bullets. One from an AK-47, one from a big rifle, and then one bullet that was easily longer than my hand. He said it was from a mounted gun that could tear down buildings. He also had a claymore (a motion sensor mine you plant in the ground) with the explosives taken out. The funny thing about claymores is that on the front in big letters it says “Front Toward Enemy.” He also had two exploded mortar shells and a steelhead grenade. Dinner was called, but my friend Nick and I decided to skip the appetizers and keep talking to Antone because we got in a deep discussion about President Mugabe in Zimbabwe. We headed down once the main course was served and ate a delicious dinner of impala with rice, pap, and a salad. After dinner, they started a fire in the fire pit right outside the eating area. We sat around for a while until they asked us if we wanted to go on a scorpion hunt. Scorpions have a special chemical in them that makes them glow bright green if you shine a UV light on them. We all said yes, and started heading toward the vans on the path that went by all of our cabins. I thought we were going to hop in a van, drive out to a far away field and look for scorpions there, but once we got away from the light of the fire, our guide turned on the UV light, and the whole forest lit up with little green dots. I was surprised how many scorpions there were, and they were everywhere. He found one that was near the path and we all got a close look at it. Most of the scorpions weren’t that big, but they were all poisonous. We learned that if the scorpion has big claws and a thin tail, then it isn’t very poisonous, but if the scorpion has little claws and a thick tail, you better watch out. We saw all different kinds, the biggest scorpion was saw was a black one about three inches long. Once we made our way back to the campfire, they showed us what was around us. There were scorpions all under the patio we were sitting on and in the supporting logs holding up the campfire area. Scorpions aren’t really vicious; they will only attack in self defense. Antone said he normally just gets stung when reaching into the firewood pile without a flashlight. He has been stung a couple times. We sat around the fire for a little bit and then Nick and I went upstairs to talk to our two guides, Phil and Kurt. We asked them if Antone was telling the truth about all of his war stories and whatnot, and they said it was all true. Apparently, the Discovery Channel was coming in a few weeks to make a documentary about him. He was also breeding venomous snakes in his garage, which was going to be the main focus of the documentary. After we talked a little more about growing up in South Africa and football (soccer), we went back down to the campfire area. We asked if we could do something the next morning because the current plan was just wake up and go to the airport. Antone said if we got up earlier we could go see the snakes in his garage and maybe go on a short walk. We agreed to that and headed off to bed.
We awoke the next morning early and I grabbed a cup of tea and a biscuit. When I finished that I went down to the garage where a group of people was gathering for the snake tour. We waited for the rest of the group and Antone opened the door of the garage. It was filled with big plywood boxes and glass cases. In the plywood boxes, Antone had the snakes that he was trying to breed, and in the other glass cases he had individual snakes. There were cobras, black mambas, and a whole bunch of other snakes. He even had a few frogs that secreted poisonous mucus. We got to walk around and check out all the snakes. There was a cobra that made a few snaps at us but the glass case safely contained it. Antone then took out a snake called the Brown House Snake and he let us hold it. This snake was not poisonous and it was pretty small, about two feet long. Once we passed around that snake, he took us to his wall of scorpions. He had scorpions in boxes from all around Africa. He took out one box and told us that it was the most poisonous scorpion in Africa. He opened the top of the box and there was a fake half-log in there that the scorpion was under. He lifted up the log, and while both his hand were full, the scorpion climbed up the side of the box and jumped out. It hit the floor right at my feet, almost between them, so I backed up quickly as far as I could and watched as it started running around. It started coming towards me, but I couldn’t go anywhere because I was at the end of a row of snake boxes and in a dead end. I started getting pretty nervous as the scorpion got closer and was desperately searching for escape routes. The scorpion got within a foot or two of me before it turned away and headed somewhere else. By this time, Antone had grabbed a pair of oversized tweezers and came up behind the scorpion and grabbed it by the tail. He picked it up, put it back in its box and closed the lid. After that near death experience, we headed outside and gathered for our nature walk. It was just a short jaunt through the forest around the lodge. We saw some poisonous plants, an abandoned termite mound that a snake was using as it’s house, and some small wild mammals. The walk took about a half an hour and was a big loop. Once we got back we had a delicious sit-down breakfast of eggs, hash browns, bacon, and cereal. Once we finished that we packed our bags and headed to the vans. We hopped in (I made sure not to get in the one with the spider) and made our three hour trek back to the airport. Once we got there we checked in, went through security, waited for boarding, and got on. The flight back was another two hours, and I slept for most of it. When we arrived back in Cape Town it was around 1430. We got off the plane, made our way through the airport, and boarded a bus back to the port. I got back onto the ship and unloaded my things and took a shower. Once I was all clean, I disembarked the ship again and headed toward the mall that was nearby. I walked through the mall to a Pick n’ Pay store, which was the first real grocery store I had seen pretty much since Hawaii. I stocked up on some snacks and tried to leave the mall. An amazing thing about this is that I had been to numerous cities in different countries around the world not once was I really lost or got disoriented. But, I could not figure out this mall. I wandered through it trying to find my way back to the ship, but I wound up outside on the opposite side of the mall. I decided just to walk around and head to the waterfront. I got there just as it became sunset, and the sun was setting right over the top of the soccer stadium in Cape Town, which will be the site of the 2010 World Cup. I watched the sunset until it started to get dark, then I walked along the water back to the ship. I had a quiet night planning my last day in Cape Town and downloading pictures and I went to bed early so I could get up early the next day.
I woke up at 0445 and went upstairs to try and sneak my way into a special early breakfast for some students on an FDP. Unfortunately, there were only eleven kids on the FDP and they were checking off the names of the people on the trip so I wasn’t able to get in. I then met up with my friends Scott and Simone and we packed our bags and got ready to hike Table Mountain. We left the ship around 0530 and walked down to the street to try and find a taxi. There were two taxis in the taxi pullout, one with no driver, and the other one had a driver taking a nap. The sleeping driver heard us coming, woke up, and called us over. We hopped in his cab and told us we were heading to the trail that went up Table Mountain. He was very excited; he was about a 70 year old white man named Arrol and he told us how he loves to hike that mountain. He was very happy to be driving us around so early in the morning and told us all about his life. He had lived in Cape Town his whole life and he now has five children. He also wrote a book that he was trying to publish on the racial differences in South Africa. He was a kooky old man that got us up to the start of the trail. He pointed us in the right direction and we headed off on our way. When we hit the trail, it was still dark. Our eyes had adjusted to the darkness, so we didn’t need the flashlights we had brought. The hike up the mountain was amazing. The hike itself was a lot like the Half Dome hike, though not nearly as long. The mountain is 1,086 meters (3,563 feet) tall. The trail started three hundred meters up the mountain so the hike itself was only about 786 meters. The path was made of big, irregular, stone steps that zigzagged up the mountain. The view was beautiful; we saw the gleaming lights of Cape Town under a navy blue sky with an orange glow slowly getting stronger in the east. We were about 80% of the way up the mountain when the sun actually caught our eyes. The sun rose in the small gap between Devil’s Peak on the east side and Table Mountain itself. Once the sun had risen, we continued up the last stretch known as Platteklip Gorge, which is a small crack on the west side of the mountain which is one of the only ways to get up. As we got closer to the top, the wind picked up and the infamous Table Cloth was rolling in. The Table Cloth is a cloud layer that forms on the top of the mountain and spills over the side that looks like a white table cloth. We decided to hurry up, which was very difficult because the wind was ripping down the gorge at around 20-25 mph. It got a little scary at points because the trail was very narrow and sometimes when an extra strong wind gust blew, it would actually knock you off balance and almost off the path. Simone decided to stay at this point because it was getting too difficult fighting the wind and the clouds were starting to get heavier. She took cover behind some boulders and Scott and I hurried up the last stretch of the mountain. We thought the wind would become a lot less forceful when we got to the top, but I was wrong. It was really ripping up there. I am not an expert of judging wind speeds, but I would say it was somewhere between 30-40mph. It was at the point where we were unable to walk in a straight line at the top. The wind was a crosswind to the direction we were walking at the top, and it came in a lot of gusts, and it was pushing us over, and we would fight it, then the gust would die, so we fell into the wind, then we would compensate for the new wind speed and a new gust would come up and push us back over. The top looked nothing like I thought it would. Table Mountain almost looks like a desert butte, made of red-brown, dry rock with very few shrubs on the side. I thought the top would be an open, arid, flat plateau with dry rocks everywhere, but that was not the case. It was more like a marsh. I guess the condensation from the clouds was enough to dampen the earth and allow a lot of grass and reeds to grow everywhere. It got so wet at points that the trail became a small boardwalk thing that was elevated above the mud. The top of Table Mountain is two miles long, and about a mile wide. The west end has the cable car station, which normally opens at 0700, but did not open at all that day due to the high winds. Scott and I walked along the Cape Town side across the plateau to try and find the “peak” of the flat topped mountain. We walked right along the cliff, getting partial views on the city through breaks in the clouds. We walked for about fifteen minutes until we got to the other side, then turned around and headed back. On the way back, we climbed up a small rock wall, and at the top there was a pile of stones that had a metal stake at the top. It was obviously a man made peak, and the highest point of the mountain. We both climbed up to the stake and took photos of us at the top. We headed back across the plateau to Platteklip Gorge so we could start our journey down. We zigzagged down a little ways and met up with Simone, who joined us on our journey down. The way down went a lot faster than they way up and you pretty much had to jump from step to step. It was really hard on the knees. We made it down by about 1030 and walked down the road from the trailhead to the cable car area. As we were walking down we ran into this man who was also walking down the road. He told us he used to be a guide around the mountain. He also used to operate the port radio tower as well as work on a lot of ships crossing the Atlantic. We walked with us back to the cable car and asked if we wanted to share a cab. We agreed and finally found one. It took a while because most people who rode in a cab up saw that the cable car was closed and just went back down in the same cab. We got one and told the driver to take us down to the waterfront. On our way down our new friend told us about all the times he had crossed the Atlantic on small sailboats, it sounded pretty intense. We got down to the waterfront and our friend wandered off. Simone, Scott, and I went into the mall to get us a big lunch. We hadn’t eaten yet that day due to our inability to sneak into breakfast. We found an American diner and I got an Avocado burger with an Oreo milkshake. It was just what we all needed. Once we finished lunch, Simone got back on the ship while Scott and I decided to walk around town. We walked along the waterfront all the way to the soccer stadium. It kind of looks like the Olympic Bird’s Nest stadium in Beijing, but it wasn’t quite as fancy. We walked around that area for a bit before heading back towards the ship. We stopped off at a restaurant to get something to drink before getting back on board.
We were scheduled to leave at 2000 that night, but it was so windy in Cape Town that day that the port closed. The ship couldn’t leave so it stayed the night in the slip and all of the next day until 1700, when the winds died down enough for us to leave. It was painful sitting in class and looking out the window and still seeing beautiful Cape Town with Table Mountain rising up behind it. But we finally left and headed north, up to Ghana. I will write again soon!

2010-03-29T08:13:00.000-07:00

March 23, we pulled into Port Louis on the North West corner of the island Mauritius. When we pulled up, a soft rain was falling on the windows of the ship which was very disappointing. We could see the town of Port Louis, and behind it were beautiful steep volcanic mountains covered in jungle shooting straight up into the low lying clouds. Mauritius was once a French colony, so the two main languages are French and Creole. Even though English is the official language of the island, not many people speak it fluently. The people of Mauritius are mainly comprised of three races: Africans, Indians, and Europeans. The three races live there and intermingle very well. There is no hostility between religions and complete acceptance no matter where you are from. We ate breakfast, went through our diplomatic briefing, and prepared to go out. We only had one night on the island, so we had to make the most out of both days. The reason we only had one night, is because Mauritius does not like Semester at Sea very much. Over the past years, Semester at Sea students view this stop as their spring break, spending their whole time getting incredibly drunk and trashing the place. A lot of my friends were trying to book hotel rooms and small villas, but they couldn’t use their SAS e-mail account because people would flat out reject them. They had to use their old gmail accounts or AOL accounts to book rooms. When we were allowed off the ship, I met up with Carson, Sarah, Toland, Jill, and nine other kids from the ship. We had chartered a van to take us to the South East side of the island, to a city called Mahebourg. The drive took a little over an hour where we passed through sugar cane fields and small towns along the way. We pulled up to our hostel in Mahebourg called Le Bamboo, a small three story building owned by a local native woman and her husband. There were fifteen of us total, taking up all but two of the rooms in the house that had other people staying in them. There were five people in my room with one bunk bed. Once we settled in, put our stuff down, and changed into our swimsuit, we walked down to town and it was our plan to go to Blue Bay to go swimming. We split up into two groups, Carson, Sarah, Toland, Jill, and I, and then the other nine. My group walked down to the downtown area where we found an ATM and got some money. In Mauritius it is 30 Mauritian Rupees to the dollar. Once we had money, we went to get some lunch. We stopped at one restaurant, sat down, and looked at the menu. It all looked really good, but when we ordered, they were out of stock of almost all of the items on their menu. This demonstrates very well the attitude of Mauritius. They have the island attitude, where they get things done when they get them done. No deadlines. It’s actually quite nice; the people are relaxed and happy. We got up and left this restaurant, walked down the street another block or two, and then found another restaurant. I got fried noodles which were delicious, and while we were eating, there were a few downpours right outside the open air restaurant. When we finished, it had stopped raining, and we walked down a couple blocks to the bus station. We passed through a market on our way where they were selling a lot of fruits, spices, and fish. We hopped on an old rickety bus to Blue Bay, which is about fifteen minutes away by bus. We were about halfway when the bus started going very slow and making funny noises. Eventually our bus driver pulled over and made a few cell phone calls. They never said what was going on, but a few of the locals got up and started walking down the road. My group and I got up and walked to the front and asked what was going on. They said the bus had broken down, but another one was on its way. We decided to wait outside of the bus because we were on a beautiful ocean front road. We walked up and down the road, taking pictures while waiting for the bus. The new bus came in about fifteen minutes and we hopped on yet again and were on our way. It wasn’t more than another ten minutes until we got off at the Blue Bay bus stop and by this time the sky had cleared and it was nice and sunny. We saw the rest of our big group eating at a restaurant, so we went up to them to see what they were doing. They were just finishing up their lunch, and they were about to head down to the beach. We were walking over when a man came up to us and offered to take us out on his boat for a snorkeling trip. We agreed for 200 Rupees a person, he would take us out for 2 hours. That was only about six US Dollars! We went down to the dock and got on his boat, which was a lot nicer than expected. It was plenty big enough for all fifteen of us and it was also a glass bottom boat. He took us out to where all the best coral was, gave us all masks and fins, and told us to jump in. The water was very warm and crystal clear. Our boat driver also threw a few pieces of bread in the water to lure out all of the fish. There was a lot of Staghorn Coral and Rock Coral. We swam around this snorkel spot for a while before picking up anchor and heading to a different spot. The next stop we went to was on the edge of the reef, where a big sand bank met the coral. There was a small current here of about a knot, which made it a nice drift swim. There was a whole bunch of Plate Coral at this site and it was pretty amazing. I saw a couple of Trumpet fish along with other normal reef varieties. We swam here for quite a while before piling back onto the boat and heading back to shore. We got off the boat, took a big group picture, and then split up yet again as our group headed back and the big group stayed by the beach. We took the bus back to town where we meandered up and down the small streets. We stopped in a grocery store where we bought a few snacks. We then walked back to our hostel and took turns taking showers. The shower at the hostel was in a very nice spacious bathroom, but the shower itself was just a small hose protruding from the wall that spit out a minimal amount of water and had one temperature: cold. The cold water was nice though considering the air was very hot. We also met the other people who were staying at the hostel. There was one woman from Germany who was a teacher and was here on her Spring Break. She was travelling on her own and was planning on spending ten days in Mauritius. The other two people in the hostel were a young couple from Holland. The girl was a social organizer for a research vessel. She would plan parties and functions, got the caterers, and made sure everything went smoothly when the ship had a big event. I never heard what the man did. All three of them were very nice and they all spoke really good English. We hung around and talked with them for a bit until the other part of our big group came back. They all hopped in the shower and got ready to go out for the night. The lady who ran our hostel told us of a really good restaurant called the Grand Creole, which she heard everyone say was really good. She pointed us in the general direction and we headed out into the night. We were walking through the city, stopping to ask for directions every couple of blocks, until we got to a different restaurant. We asked where the Grand Creole was, and I think the same person who owned the Grand Creole owned this restaurant as well, because they said they would call a big van to take us there for free and have a fifteen person table ready by the time we got there. We arrived at this very nice restaurant, mostly outdoor seating with a pig tropical looking patio. It was on the edge of a small lagoon where they had their own private dock with a couple of kayaks and a sailboat. We sat down at a very long table and we ordered some drinks and our meals. The food was all very very good. It was a classy place. We ate our food, which came in huge portions, and then sat around the table and talked for a while. Soon, the three Europeans from the hostel showed up; we told them where we were going. The sat down and had a couple drinks with us. We decided we wanted to go somewhere else, so we all piled back into the van, a little cramped due to the extra three, and it dropped us back off in front of our hostel. Carson, Sarah, Toland, Jill, and I went into the hostel because we were going to bed because we were planning on leaving at six the next morning. Everyone else went back up on the town because they had no plans for the next day.
We woke up at 0545 and got ready. The woman who owned the hostel was going to be our private driver for the day and take us around the island. The five of us piled in her small car and headed west, along the southern coast. We drove out of the town and went through sugar cane fields and tea plantations. She pulled over so we could check out the tea plants and take pictures. We also drove by a big lake with a huge copper statue of Shiva. It was the main place for all of the Hindus on the island to go and pray. There are also big religious festivals held at the lake. Our first stop for the day was at a National Park where we were going to go on a hike to see some waterfalls. She dropped us off at a tourist information center where we bought a map and headed out on one of the trails. We walked for a while along an opening until we turned into a small path that went into the dense forest. Not too far in, the trail turned to pure mud, considering it was raining the day before. We decided to take off our shoes and power through it barefoot. We kept on walking and walking until it got too deep. We were sinking up to our ankles and hiking was tough. We decided to turn around and head back because at this rate we weren’t going to be able to see this waterfall and do all the other things we had planned on doing that day. We tromped back through the mud, put or shoes back on, and headed back to the entrance of the park. Our driver picked us up again, and drove us further west to Alexandria Falls. This was an awesome waterfall that fell into a valley that overlooked the ocean. We went out to the lookout point, but you couldn’t really see the waterfall. We hopped a railing and climbed out onto a tree branch that hung out over the valley. From there we had a magnificent view of the falls. We followed the river up a ways from the main falls and found a small cascade leading to about a 25 foot waterfall. We climbed around here and took pictures for a long time. It was soo nice. The water was clear and cool, and we took off our shoes and climbed up and down the cascades. We left this area and went slightly north but continued west, going deeper into the island. We pulled over at Black River Gorge, which is a huge valley carved out by the Black River. There was an amazing Panorama view from the top of the lookout. There were tree waterfalls scattered throughout the valley, and we could see for miles all the way out to the coast. We left this scenic lookout, and continued to head west. After a while we got to the largest waterfall on Mauritius, and it was amazing. It fell off a perfectly flat cliff down into a carved out pool below. There was a spectacular viewpoint from across the valley that we stood and watched the water crash into the rocks below. We then drove another 2 kilometers to the rainbow sands, which is a series of sand dunes that are colored by volcanic minerals. They ranged from burgundy to orange to red, and all those earthy colors. They looked like they were tie-dyed, almost like what oil looks like on water. We piled back into the car and headed to our last stop for the day: the beach! We arrived at a beautiful white sand beach on the west coast of the island at around 1300. We all got lunch at a little place near the water and once we were finished, ran down to the sand, threw our stuff down, and ran into the water. The water was a beautiful baby blue, and behind the beach there was a vertical volcanic butte that shot out from the ground. There was also a really strong current on this beach, about 2-3 knots that pulled us along downstream. We floated around and played in the water for over an hour before we had to start to go back to the ship. We took a walk along the beach as we dried off, wondering past the beach front resort and classic palm trees. Once we were dry and had purchased a couple more bottles of water for the road, we got back in the car and headed north for Port Louis. I was enjoying the scenery until I feel asleep, along with everyone else in the car. I woke again when we were stopped in traffic, not moving. We had been there for a while, and we had only move up about a car length. Our driver got out and asked what the big traffic jam was about. Someone told her that a big truck had tipped over and it was blocking the road. She decided to try another route, so she pulled out of traffic and wound her way through the side streets until she got to another main road. We went along that road for a good two hundred yards until we saw that it was closed and it diverted us back to the road we were on before. This time, it was much more crowded due to the accumulating mass of cars. We were starting get a little worried because it was 1530 and we had to be back on the ship by 1800, and we were still about 45 minutes away. We were sitting in traffic until about 1600, when we told her that we really needed to get back to the ship in any way possible. She was really nice and understood, so she got out and started asking everyone around us if there was any way. She eventually found a small delivery truck that had to make a delivery in Port Louis, so he too was also in a hurry. He said he knew some backstreets and told her to follow. She turned to us and said, “This man says he knows a way. I don’t know who he is or where he is going to take us. Should I follow him?” We all said why not, because at this rate we were not going to make it, so we would try anything. The truck pulled out of traffic in front of us and went down a small backstreet. The delivery driver drover very fast through these small backstreets and our driver had trouble keeping up. We started heading south, which worried me a little bit, until we turned around back north and started heading the right way. We wound through these streets for a long time until we finally could see the town of Port Louis. Unfortunately, there is only one bridge that goes across the river on the south side of Port Louis and that too was jammed with traffic, because it was now rush hour. It was 1445, and we had to rush back to the ship as fast as possible. We decided to ditch the car, because our driver told us it was about a 45 minute walk to the port. We thanked her a lot and headed out. When we were leaving, she told us not to ask directions from drug dealers. We laughed and promised that we wouldn’t and started power walking though the city. We got to the bridge and crossed it, and when we were on the other side, the traffic cleared up, not a lot, but it was still slightly faster than walking. We decided to hop in a cab and hope that it would be faster. We jumped in and told him to go to the port so he immediately turned down a small side street and accelerated. He knew our ship was leaving soon and understood we were in a hurry. He knew all the back streets of the city and he drove them ridiculously fast. We wound through the streets, dodging speed bumps and pedestrians until we all saw the ship and seriously relaxed. We hopped out of the cab, paid the man, and got in line to board the ship. We waited in the long line and finally boarded at 1730. Still 30 minutes to spare. I got back on, showered, and then headed to dinner, which that night, was breakfast for dinner. After dinner, I watched the ship depart Fort Louis and went to bed very early.
We are now going to arrive in South Africa in two days. The trip there has been fairly uneventful until yesterday when the sea started to get really rough again. The pool water was sloshing out of both sides and going over the side down to the outdoor dining area. It was really fun. Today I woke up and looked out the starboard side, to see a beautiful view of the African coast. We have been really close to land to avoid the worst of the seas. Three main currents merge at the southern point of Africa, making the seas really rough all the time. We are almost to Cape Town though, and I am so excited! I will write again after.

2010-03-27T10:01:00.000-07:00

On March 11th, I woke up and excitedly looked out the window to see where we were. I saw open water, and presumed that I was just on the wrong side of the ship. I ran up to breakfast and looked out both sides, and yet saw more open water. We were hardly moving though and I was slightly confused. By the time I finished breakfast, I looked out the window again and I could make out large vague shapes out on the horizon. As we slowly moved forwards, I realized that these large shapes were the cranes on the ports, and we weren’t that far away, but the air visibility was so low that you couldn’t really see them unless you were within a couple miles. I went outside to the deck where I could get a better view of us pulling into port. The air was incredibly hot and humid, but this was expected after Vietnam. We were pulling into the Port of Chennai on the eastern coast of India. We pulled into the port and we couldn’t get off the ship until after our diplomatic briefing. We learned that we always have to discuss a price with the taxi drivers before going anywhere, we shouldn’t use our left hand for anything social because it is a sign of disrespect (the Indian people don’t have toilet paper in rural areas so they wipe with their left and eat with their right hence why using your left hand is a sign of disrespect), and that it is socially unacceptable to show your knees and shoulders. After the briefing, I met up with Mike, Corena, Erin, and Elena, and we decided to walk down to the downtown area of Chennai. We got off the ship into a very dirty and unimpressive port area where we were immediately swarmed by taxi and rickshaw drivers. We said we didn’t need a taxi or anything and that we were just going for a walk but they are some of the most persistent people I have ever met. They follow you for long distances trying to get you into their rickshaw. We made it through out to the main street and started walking down to the city. Rickshaw drivers would pull up to the side of the road and yell at us from their rickshaw trying to get us to hire him. They would creep along right next to you and the best tactic to get them to go away was to ignore them and wait until they get tired of following you. We were winding up and down the streets of Chennai, working our way to the city center and looking for ATMs. Mike had to turn back around this time because he had an FDP he had to go on and it was meeting at the ship. We had a pleasant walk to the city, even though it was exuberantly hot, it was my plan to walk around the city until 1400 where I was going to meet up with the Indian interport student named Vikram where he was going to give me a private tour of the city in his car. We were walking around the town just fine and found an ATM, and out of nowhere, Elena just announced she was very sick and was exhausted. It turns out she hadn’t brought any water and didn’t ask us for any of ours, and she thought she was suffering from heat stroke. Personally, I think she was just tired and hot, not at the heat stroke level, and just wanted to go back to the ship already. We gave her a lot of our water and called a rickshaw to help Elena get back to the ship. I had enough time to drop her off, then catch another rickshaw back to where the meeting point was with my friend. We got into the rickshaw and it was about a ten minute ride back to the port. Rickshaws are fun. They wind around through traffic, drive on the wrong side of the street into oncoming traffic, brake at the last second, and swerve around other cars with inches to spare. It is like Mr. Toad’s wild ride at Disneyland. There are seven gates at the Port of Chennai, and we had to enter through gate seven, which is the closest gate to the city. The thing about rickshaw drivers is that you ask them if they know where something is and they always say yes, no matter if they know where it is or not. They just want your business. So the rickshaw driver went right past the gate we were supposed to enter and took us about halfway down the long port and dropped us off in front of gate five. We didn’t think it really mattered what gate we entered through, but the armed guards at gate five told us that we were only allowed to enter through gate seven, which was about three quarters of a mile away. I started power walking down to the gate through a market so that I could drop the girls off safely and head out to meet Vikram. Elena didn’t want to walk as fast as me, and kept telling me to slow down. Then she decided to stop and look in a little store and that’s when I decided that I was just going to let them do their shopping and I was going to go off by myself and meet Vikram. I had about twenty minutes to get to the statue of Gandhi on Marina Beach which was about ten minutes away. I hailed a rickshaw, agreed on a price of 50 Rupees for the ride, and told him where to go. By the way, while we were in India, it was about 46 Rupees to the dollar, things were pretty cheap. He brought me to the beach and dropped me off in front of a park with a few statues in it. I got out of the rickshaw and gave him a 100 Rupee bill and asked for change. He took it and put it in his pocket and said, “No, 100 Rupee.” I firmly replied with, “No, you told me 50 Rupee.” We argued for a while and I had to start yelling at him before he started giving me change. He first told me he didn’t have any change and I told him he was lying to me and that I needed my change. He said “fine,” and pulled out a wad of money from his pocket and gave me 10 back. I said, “No, 50 Rupee.” We argued and argued, him giving me my change in 10 Rupee increments, until I finally got him to give me the full amount. He left and I went into the area with the statues and looked around. None of them were Gandhi and it was already 1400. I asked some locals where the Gandhi Statue was and they told me it was all the way down on the other side of the beach. I started power walking/jogging down to the other side. It was incredibly hot, humid, and my backpack was very heavy. It took me thirty minutes to get to the other side of the beach and when I got there I was exhausted, covered in sweat, and very dehydrated. I walked around the vicinity of the statue looking for Vikram and he wasn’t there. I didn’t blame him because I was 35 minutes late. I went down to the sand, found a tree to sit under to get out of the sun and I contemplated my situation. While resting and wondering what I was going to do with myself for the rest of the day, an Indian man walked up to me and introduced himself as Anthony. We talked for a little while and I found out he was a student at the university in Chennai and the he was also (surprise) a rickshaw river. He asked me if I wanted a tour, and I declined at first, because I wanted to rest and just hang out on the beach for a bit. Then he told me that he would take me to temples and churches for just 20 Rupees. I confirmed with him that it was actually 20 Rupees and I said ok. We hopped in his rickshaw and started heading out, then he asked me if I wanted to drive for a bit. I said, “Of course!” and hopped in the front seat. He showed me how to do the gas, brake, and gears and then let me drive. He stayed in the front seat with me for safety, and I got to drive up and down the street by the beach. It was pretty cool driving it, and way different from anything I have ever driven before. After a bit of driving he took over again and took me down the street to St. Thomas Church. The church was built on the spot where the apostle St. Thomas died. He was killed in India after spreading the Christian influence. We walked around the outside of the intricate white church taking pictures, and I was looking through the windows at a service that was going on when a bus came up filled with kids on an SAS trip. They all headed in to watch the service and I was going to join them when Anthony came up to me and said, “It will be too crowded in there, I will take you in the back door.” We walked around to the back of the church and he took me in a door that was open. We came around a corner and I was surprised to see that I was on the altar. Anthony just walked out and waved at me to come join him. I went out in front of all the Indian people and the SAS kids that were surprised to see me up there. I waved to a few of my friends and Anthony told me to take pictures. We weren’t up there long and then he took me out, and into an adjacent building where we entered the tomb of St. Thomas. There were stairs that went underground and then a tunnel that went back under the church to the tomb. There was a class case/coffin around a model of St. Thomas lying on his back. Underneath the model, there was a small glass panel where you could see into the dirt where the real St. Thomas was buried. There was also a skylight above the burial site where you could see up into the church. We left the tomb and went back up to the rickshaw and left. We were driving around and Anthony starts talking to me about how if he brings me to certain stores and I go in, he will get a kickback, whether I buy anything or not. I agree to go into a few, because he was only charging me 20 Rupees. It turns out he brought me to six, which is A LOT of stores for me. All of these stores had the same products and were terribly terribly overpriced. After spending like an hour and a half being dragged in between stores (I didn’t mind too much because I thought it was a good way to see the city) he took me to the Temple of Shiva, which is one of the Hindu gods. The temple was beautiful and comprised of an Inner Sanctum, one huge entrance tower, and lots of smaller shrines surrounding the Inner Sanctum. The buildings were all covered in extremely beautiful sculptures of gods, animals, and other deities. Only real Hindus are allowed in the Inner Sanctum, so I could not go in, but I walked around the perimeter and took pictures there. In the back there was a huge artificial lake with two small temples in the center. I walked around the whole temple, going in a clockwise direction, which is the way you are supposed to walk in Hindu temples. There were a lot of people there praying and I ran into another SAS trip there and talked with them for a while. I left the temple, fought my way through the mob of people trying to sell me things, and got back into my rickshaw. I told Anthony it was time for me to go back to the ship because I was really tired and needed to take a break. He took my back to the ship and I washed my face and cleaned up from being out all day. After that, I met up with Carson and we went out to the local market that was right outside of the port. We were slightly disappointed to find that it was a market filled with mostly electronics. We found a few stands with movies and sunglasses, but there wasn’t anything really cultural at this market. We walked around for a while, bought a few movies, watched the local people shop, and then went back to the ship for the night.
The next morning I woke up, ate breakfast, and disembarked the ship at around 0930 with my friend Simone. We hopped in a taxi cab and asked to go to an internet café so Simone could upload some pictures. We agreed on a price and headed out through the port. Right as we got to the main street, the taxi driver pulled over, got out, popped the hood, and told us that his car was broken. He then ushered us into the nearest rickshaw and told the driver where we were going and we left. Personally, I don’t think that the car broke, I think it was a scam because we agreed to pay a certain price for the taxi, which was a legitimate car with air conditioning, and got shoved into a rickshaw for the same price. I think that the taxi had a few rickshaw driver friends waiting outside and he was just bringing kids back and forth between the ship and the main rickshaw area pricing them for cabs, then sending them out in rickshaws. We got to the internet café where Simone spent some time uploading pictures and I looked up good things to do in Chennai. Chennai was mostly a port city, and most of the stuff to do was an hour or more outside the city, so we decided to head to a really good market called Spencer’s Market that we had heard about from kids who went there yesterday. We got back into the same rickshaw and told him to go to Spencer’s Market. He told us that it was closed and that it wasn’t going to open for another hour, so we told him that was fine and to take us there anyway and we would just walk around. He told us that he would take us to a different store, but I said no because I knew it was going to be a kickback shop. He told us again that Spencer’s Market was closed, and I told him that I understood that, but I wanted to go there anyway. We argued in the rickshaw for about ten minutes before he finally said that he would take us to Spencer’s Market. We pulled up in front of one of the kickback stores about ten minutes later, and I told him that it was not Spencer’s Market. He said yet again that Spencer’s Market was closed and that we should go in this shop, but I told him to just take us to Spencer’s Market. He kept insisting that we go into this shop, and I finally just asked him where Spencer’s Market was, and he told us it was about a block away down a certain street. Simone and I just got out of the rickshaw and gave him money. He asked where we were going and we told him we were just going to walk there. Then he started yelling at us because we didn’t give him enough money for the ride. We gave him what we agreed on, but since we weren’t going to the store he wanted more. We told him no, but he kept yelling, and what happens in India, is that if there is an argument on the street, a mob will form due to the high population density. We had already overpaid him for the ride to the internet café, we gave him more than enough to get to where we were, and he didn’t even bring us to the spot we asked to go, but he kept yelling at us for more money. Soon people started to gather around us, all of them angry looking Indian people, so we just decided to give him the money out of fear for our safety. Another thing is that due to the Public Nuisance Clause of Indian Law, police in India can arrest you for pretty much anything. A couple weeks before we got there, there was a British couple where the man kissed the woman on the cheek and they both got thrown in jail. They just declare you as a public nuisance and they have the right to take you in. I didn’t want to be declared a public nuisance. We left that area and headed towards Spencer’s Market. Once we were standing outside we were deciding which way to go. Another rickshaw driver came up to us and asked us where we going, and we told him we were going to walk around and find an outdoor market. He told us that he knew one that was nearby and he would only take us there for 20 Rupees. We agreed and hopped in. He drove us a couple of blocks away and stopped in front of another kickback store. We told him no and that we wanted a real market. He said ok, drove around for a bit, and brought us to yet another kickback store. These stores are all over by the way. They all have the exact same trinkets and whatnot, and you can buy the same items on the street for about 10% of the price. We told him to take us to the Shiva temple because we had seen an outdoor market near there, and we weren’t making any progress with any of the rickshaw drivers, so we decided to try and walk from there. He took us to the Shiva temple, I got out, and tried to give him 20 Rupees. He said that it wasn’t 20 Rupees and that it was 20 Dollars. I laughed at him and told him flat out no. He told me then that it was 600 Rupees, and I told him that was ridiculous. We argued for a long time again and then another mob started to form so we just paid him the ridiculously high amount of money and got out of there. We walked down a block to the market which turned out to be mostly a vegetable market. We bought some slices of fresh watermelon which was delicious. We walked around for a while checking out the market. There were a few clothes stands, some art stands, and some trinket stands, but mostly fruit. There were a whole bunch of different fruits that I had never seen before. We walked around this area for quite a while. We went by a school when it got out and all the kids waved and some came up and shook my hand. After we were thoroughly exhausted, we went back to the ship via rickshaw. This driver dropped us off in the wrong spot, not too far away from the ship, but he didn’t charge us a ridiculous amount of money, which was very nice. We got back on the ship, and relaxed for a bit. We were going to head out again but decided we were really tired, didn’t want to deal with the rickshaw drivers anymore, had seen most of the stuff there is to see in Chennai, and there wasn’t a whole lot of time left before we had to be back on the ship. We left the port at 2200 that night and headed south around the tip of India.
The next two days were days in transit. They were very relaxing and I spent the spare time catching up on sleep and schoolwork. I also spent a bit of time up on the 7th deck swimming and relaxing.
We arrived in Cochin on the 15th, and I was hoping that my experience here would be better than in Chennai. I got off the ship with my newly made friends from the transit days Carly, Steph, Kaylee, and a few other people. In Cochin, there are two main parts, the modern city, and old Fort Cochin. Cochin is made up a few islands and there are bridges and ferries connecting them. This city somewhat reminded me of Vietnam, with lush green trees everywhere. So far, the aesthetics of this city were a lot better than Chennai. It was still very hot and humid, but by this point in the voyage, I am used to being dripping in sweat thirty seconds after leaving the air conditioning. We decided to take the ferry over to the modern part of Cochin, to the main street which is known as Mahatma Gandhi Street. The ferry only cost two Rupees and it was a nice ten minute boat ride across the waterway. The ferry was very small, only about 20 feet long and about ten feet wide. Before we got on, a bunch of people got off where we got on, and the ferry was relatively empty for our ride. We went right next to the MV Explorer and got a great view of the bay. Gandhi Street is about three blocks inland from the waterfront on the main island of Cochin. We walked up through alleyways until we got to the incredibly busy street. The traffic in India is made up of all types of transportation, unlike the US where it is mostly cars and in Vietnam where it is mostly motorbikes. There were everything from bicycles, to motorbikes, to auto rickshaws, to cars, to big trucks. We walked up and down the main street looking for outdoor markets, but we couldn’t find any. We went into a few stores, but I found them all fairly overpriced and not very cultural. They were all more westernized. We walked around for a little while before we had to head back to the ship because a few of us had an FDP leaving at one. We hopped in a rickshaw, and headed back to the ship. This rickshaw driver was a lot nicer and actually accepted the agreed price. I got back to the ship, packed a backpack, got a quick bite, and then headed out for the bus. The trip I was going on was to an SOS Children’s Village about an hour and a half away from Cochin. SOS Children’s Villages are where children go that are orphaned. There, they are put into a house with around ten other kids and a “mom” that takes care of them. They learn to socialize and be part of a family and go to school and they can stay there until they are 18. The smartest kids get sent to college, fully paid, and the ones who aren’t quite as smart get sent to vocational schools to get a trade. The older children (13-18) help with raising and taking care of the younger ones. We arrived at the village around 1430, where we were greeted by a parade of children that escorted us up to a big central gazebo. We were blessed in the Hindu way with incense and bindis (the little dot of paint on the forehead) and then seated in folding chairs in front of a small stage. We got a presentation of what the SOS Village is and how this one worked. After that, we a song and two dances put on by the children. The first song was in English and sang by about seven little girls and one little boy. The song was about how glad they were that we were there. The next dance they did was a traditional farmer dance that was performed by about ten little girls. They had props like little bushels of wheat and scythes made of cardboard and tinfoil. The last dance they did was two little boys did their own dance to a backstreet boys song. It was hilarious and actually really good. One of the little boys actually choreographed the whole dance himself. I was impressed. After the dance, we met up with the kids and they took us to their houses. Two little seven year old boys latched on to each one of my arms and pulled me toward their house. I wish I could remember or even pronounce their names. I had them repeat them at least fifteen times, but they were very difficult Indian names. They were my two little tour guides for the day. The whole SAS group split up to go with their kids, and it was really nice having personal time with them instead of being with a big group. They took me to their house and showed me their room. Their house was pretty nice. It had a small front room, but it had very high ceilings. There was a fish tank with a small fish, lots of photos of all the kids in their family, and lots of religious pictures. This was a Christian house, but there were also Hindu houses and Muslim houses. There was also a small sandpit in the house for the kids to play in. I thought it was really interesting that that was inside the house. There were two rooms for the kids; one for boys and one for girls. They were set up with bunk beds and there were five to a room. The “mother” of the house got her own room right next door. I talked with the mother and the other kids in the house for a bit before my two boys led me out to show me the other houses. They spoke very little English, and while we were walking between houses they would point to a bush and say, “Boosh” or to a flower they would say, “Butiful fower.” They also pointed out mango trees, jackfruit trees, and other fruits. All the houses I went to had the same set up, but each one had different pictures and decorations. I gave my little boys my little camera and that had a blast with it. Over the course of the day they probably took about 200 pictures of themselves and all their friends. Their favorite part was viewing the picture they just took in the little screen. They also took me out into their garden and picked a whole bunch of different fruits for me to try. They were all very good, but I don’t know the names of any of them. After taking me to five or six houses, where I got served coffee, banana chips, and got told stories, everyone gathered on the field for games. I had brought with me a bag of toys for all the kids, which included whistles, horns, necklaces, and bouncy balls. I distributed the toys and all the kids were so happy. They were running around taking pictures, dancing, playing kickball, playing tag, and playing cricket. We played with them for a while on the field before it was time to go. We all sat on the amphitheater seating by the field and took a huge group picture. Afterward, we got sung a goodbye song by five little girls. We went down to the bus, all the kids following us out saying goodbye. As the bus drove away, all the kids stood by the front gate waving until we were out of sight. We got back to the ship and I had a quick bite of food before heading out again with Candice, Kayleigh, Tyler, Scott, and Emerson. We took the ferry back to Mahatma Gandhi Street, where we walked around for a bit. We found a bookstore where we bought some books (yes, they were in English). We kept walking, enjoying the nightlife, and looking at all the stores. After a while, we stopped in a small restaurant for some food. I wasn’t the biggest fan of Indian food. It is too spicy for me. After we ate, we decided to go back to the ship because we were all exhausted. We went back to the ferry only to find it had stopped running about thirty minutes earlier. We walked back out to the street where we hailed a rickshaw. We piled all six of us into one rickshaw and headed out for the ship. We got back, boarded, and all went straight to bed.
The next morning I woke up at 0630 and got breakfast and got ready. I met up with Mike, Helen, Jose, Gabe, Malinda, and a few other people for a trip to the backwaters. The backwaters are like a delta. It is a series of small rivers and canals that makes a whole bunch of islands. Helen had set this trip up through a man who owned a hostel that she had stayed in a few nights ago. He picked us up at 0745 in a big white van and drove us about an hour to a river. We all got out, bought some snacks at a small store, and got on a boat. The boat was very similar to the one I was on at the Mekong Delta. This one was about 25 feet long and eight feet wide. It was made all of wood and had a covering over all the seats. This boat had no engine and was propelled by a man in the front and a man in the back, pushing along the bottom of the river with really long bamboo poles. It looked like a lot of work, but it was really nice not hearing the drone of the engine all day. We took off in a big river, and quickly exited into a small tributary. We went up that for a while, passing by farms, houses, and jungles. There weren’t a whole lot of other boats out on the river. All of a sudden, our driver turned the boat into a very small stream. The boat was about eight feet wide and the stream was about ten. Bushes were scraping against both sides of the boat, but we kept on heading through. We wound our way through a maze of small creeks, getting terrific views into farmland and jungle. We then broke out into a larger river yet again where we pulled over and stopped at a factory for lime. This isn’t the fruit, but a fine white powder made from the shells of small hermit crabs. They dried the shells and cooked them in a giant fire pit. The black shells turned white with the heat, and even disintegrated into this fine powder. They also sold coconut beer at this small factory. I didn’t buy any, but Jose did, and it tasted like beer mixed with coconut. Not the best tasting drink in the world. After we walked around here for a bit, we got back on the boat, and went another quarter mile up the river to a small rope making village. Here, they made rope from coconut husk. They took the fibers, and spun them and pulled on them. It wound up into rope, but this rope wasn’t very strong by themselves. What they did was took two of these ropes and wound them in opposite directions. This made it very strong, I couldn’t even break it. After the demonstration of how to make rope, we walked around the rest of the village. There were a whole bunch of really awesome plants. There was jackfruit, mango, cashew, mint, cinnamon, betel nut, and many more that I had no idea what they were. We got to try a bit of everything; we got to chew on the mint leaves, bite the cinnamon branch, eat little fruits, it was all very good. We spent quite a while here before hopping back on the boat and heading out. On our way out, we saw about thirty smaller boats throwing what looked like handfuls of small pebbles into the water. Our guide told us that they were actually throwing out the small hermit crabs used to make the lime powder. The crabs are born in a lake far away, collected, and then thrown into the river here to mature. This way, they can collect them all in the same place when they reach full size. They were spreading these all over the river. We floated down for a bit until we returned to the place where we got on the boat. We all got off, thanked our guide, and headed back up to the van. He took us back, making a quick stop at the post office for people to buy stamps. We got back to the ship and I threw my heavy backpack in my room, then met up with Mike to go out again. We hopped in a rickshaw and told him to head to old Fort Cochin because we wanted to buy ties. He drove us to (surprise) one of the kickback stores, and we went in to see if they had ties. They had a few, but they were all really expensive and were really bad quality. We told him to bring us some place less expensive, and he just brought us to another kickback store. We asked if they had ties and they said no. We told him there were no ties there, so he took us to a different place. We repeated this process about five times, none of the stores having ties. He then brought us to an outdoor market at the tip of the island, which was actually very nice. There were old Chinese fishing nets that were still in use which was cool to see. We took a quick glimpse through the market, but there were no ties to be seen. We got back in, while our driver was talking to another guy. He was asking the other man where to go. He got back in and told us that there was one more place we could try. He took us to a tailoring place, where I actually picked out the fabric and color and they made the tie right there. They were pretty expensive, so I only ordered two, thinking they would be very nice. We waited about a half an hour while they made the ties, taking a break in the air conditioning. They finished my ties and showed them to me and I was very disappointed. They were very rough and had a lot of stitching errors, but we had to get back to the ship. I took the ties and told the driver to take us back to the ship. He did, and we walked on back into the wonderful AC. A little while later, the ship pulled out from its berth, and slowly made its way out of the harbor and back out into the open sea. I enjoyed Cochin a lot more than Chennai, but both had their ups and downs. India is very different from anything I have ever seen or experienced before. The shock value never stopped because you saw new and amazing things all the time. India was exhausting and I was kind of glad to leave, but I will definitely go back at some point in my life.

Also, on March 19th, we crossed the equator for the first time. There is a big celebration and we get the day off from class and it is called Neptune Day. It is the day we all go from polliwogs to shellbacks. We were woken up at 0730 by the crew dressed in togas wielding tinfoil spears and swords, running up and down the hallways banging on drums and people’s doors. We had breakfast, went up to the pool deck and started the ceremony. The first part was getting fish guts dumped on our heads. At first I thought it was a fake concoction of things from the kitchen, but then I smelled it and saw fish parts floating and realized it was real. After we got it dumped on us, we jumped in the pool, circled it one time, climbed out and kissed a fish. After we kissed a fish, we went up to the Dean and his wife, who were also dressed up in togas, and we kissed a ring that they each wore. After that, our global studies professor, Don Gogniat knighted us with a tinfoil sword and pronounced us shellbacks. Once this process was over, I waited in line for a while to get my head shaved. All this is optional, but how often do you get to do things like this? Now I am bald, and I have had to apply gratuitous amounts of sunscreen to my white head. We spent the rest of that day lying around and enjoying the free time. It was all really fun.

The next stop is a quick two day excursion to Mauritius, and I will post again after that!

2010-03-10T02:05:00.000-08:00

I woke up at 0700 on the morning of February 26 and looked out my window to see us about 25 meters away from a jungle covered coastline. I went up on deck for breakfast where I could see out of both sides of the ship and saw that we were actually heading up a river about 150 meters wide. We were going up the Saigon River up to Ho Chi Minh City (formerly known as Saigon) which is located 37 miles upstream from the South China Sea. I got my breakfast and headed outside to the back deck to eat. When the sliding glass door opened, the air was like a punch to the face. Even though it was only 0730 by this point, it was about 85 degrees and about 90% humidity. It felt like I was breathing liquid; I am not used to this kind of humidity. I went outside anyway to eat because it was just too beautiful to eat inside. South Vietnam is very flat and covered with jungles, and from the 6th deck, we could see very far. I sat down at a table with my friends Corena and Shannon and we started planning what we were going to do that day. As we ate and planned, we were watching the spectacular view of our huge ship going up this little river. The river was also packed with smaller boats. There were cargo ships, little fishing boats, and I even saw two hydrofoil boats, which actually lift themselves up out of the water. We put putted along up the river until we reached the Port of Saigon, right on the edge of Ho Chi Minh. The ship pulled up, docked, and we all gathered in the Union for our diplomatic briefing. Before every country we go to, we have people come on and give us a Diplomatic Briefing, which consists of them telling us what is not socially acceptable to do and little words of wisdom for each country. In this briefing, we learned some key phrases in Vietnamese, how to tip, what to wear, and what taxis to take. After the briefing, we had cleared immigration and were allowed to get off the ship. Corena, Shannon, and I got off, ventured into the heat and humidity, and headed for the little shuttle bus that would take us to the Rex Hotel, right on the main street of downtown Ho Chi Minh. The Rex Hotel is also only about 50 meters away from Ho Chi Minh City Hall, which is a beautiful, white, colonial style building that is at the end of the main drag, diverting the street to the left or right. We got off the bus and the first thing we did was find a bank. Crossing the street is a real experience in Vietnam. Vietnam is in the “motorbike” stage of development. This means that their roads and infrastructure is developed enough, but the country isn’t quite wealthy enough for everyone to drive around in cars, so most people ride around on motorbikes. There were thousands of motorbikes everywhere you looked. Also, traffic laws are rarely enforced, and the only way to cross the street is to just walk into the swarm of bikes and just keep walking at a steady pace in a constant direction, and people will swerve around you. It is actually pretty fun. Once we found a bank and got some Dong (which is the Vietnamese currency, and yes, even us mature SAS students made a few jokes here and there) we decided to just walk around the downtown area and look for a good tailor to get a suit made. We started winding up and down the streets, stopping here and there to look in stores and check the prices at tailors. Vietnam is ridiculously cheap. It is about 18,000 Dong to the US Dollar. We round that up so it is pretty much 100,000 Dong is about 5 Dollars. A big meal would cost around 40,000 Dong and nice purses were between 60,000 to 80,000 Dong. We stopped by a few tailors and checked their suits, materials, prices, and asked how long it would take to get done, but we never really found anything we liked/was in our price range/could be done in time. After we shopped for a bit, we decided that we were going to head out and do all the tourist stuff. We headed to the other side of the city where the Reunification Palace was. The Reunification Palace was formerly known as Norodom Palace, and it was the palace of the President of South Vietnam during the Vietnam War. It costs 15,000 Dong to get in (less than a dollar!) and we got to walk around for as long as we wanted. This building is the famous place where the North Vietnamese Army tank crashed through the front gate and took the palace during the Fall of Saigon. The palace was called Norodom Palace until 1962 when it was bombed by the North Vietnamese and almost completely destroyed. After that, the palace was rebuilt on its original location and named Independence Palace when it was completed in 1966. This palace survived a few bombings until 1975, when the North Vietnamese tank crashed through the gate, signifying the end of the Vietnam War. Once North Vietnam and South Vietnam were unified, the palace was renamed the Reunification Palace, which is still its name today. We walked through the front gate where there was a huge circular driveway and a giant fountain in the middle. Over on the side there were two deactivated North Vietnamese tanks, identical to the one that took the palace. There were bright red Vietnamese flags along the edge of the driveway leading the way to the front door. The palace was very open. There were no walls along the backside, allowing the warm breeze to flow through the hallways. The palace was a beautiful white stone building with elegant grey marble floors and lots of intricately designed rugs. On the first floor there were big meeting rooms for the president, vice president, and so on. The largest room on this floor was a big conference room where the papers were signed at the end of the war. There was a giant red banner at the front of the room and on one corner there was the yellow star that was on the Vietnamese flag and on the other corner there was the communist hammer and sickle. In front of this there was a large gold painted statue of Nông Đức Mạnh, who is the current leader of Vietnam. On the second floor there were more rooms including dining rooms, a bar, tea rooms, and so on. Up on the third floor was the president’s office, the map room, and the president’s lounge area. All of the rooms in the palace had really impressive furniture along with beautiful carvings and paintings. One room had two huge elephant tusks held up by a amazingly carved decorative wooden stand. After wandering around all of these rooms, we headed to the roof where you could see all around the front driveway and the surrounding gardens. The best thing about the roof was that there was a military helicopter parked on top that was used by the president. It was a fighting helicopter painted in the jungle camouflage and it looked really cool sitting on the roof. We headed back down through the palace and exited through the back door and walked through the gardens to the exit. We decided to head to the War History Museum that was only a couple blocks away. We made it over there and saw that the museum was closing in about 45 minutes, but we decided to go in anyway because it only cost another 15,000 Dong. Outside the museum there were a whole bunch of military planes, helicopters, tanks, artillery, deactivated bombs, and transport vehicles that were used in the war. It is funny because the Vietnamese do not call it the Vietnam War; they call it the American War which was weird to think about. We had a lot of fun taking pictures of the fighter jets and tanks and then we went inside the museum. The museum was a cube, two stories with one big room on the bottom and a whole bunch of art galleries on the second floor. We walked in and the first few display cases showed different types of ammunition and land mines and the like. The museum was mostly photographs with descriptions, and after walking around for abit, we realized it was very anti-American; nothing like the Hiroshima museum. All the photos and stories were of atrocities committed by American troops during the war. It was really interesting seeing this war displayed from a different perspective. There were lots of photos of people who were affected by Agent Orange (the defoliant used by the Americans to clear the trees and make it easier to spot the Viet Cong) and the napalm bombings. It was a really depressing museum, but it was worth visiting. We left when they started closing up the museum and started meandering our way back to the ship. We found a market that was on our map so we decided to stop by and check it out. The market was inside a big warehouse that I thought it was like an oven. We bought a big bag of Rambutan, which is a small red fruit with spiky hairs on the outside. You peel it open and the interior is very similar to a grape but it has a big pit in the center. We walked around the market for a bit and I bought a chopstick set that came in a nicely carved wooden box and it came with about 5 pairs of chopsticks and chopstick holders. I got it for 100,000 Dong, which was only like five bucks. I love the deals you get there. I was starting to get overheated by this point so we left the market and slowly made our way back to the Rex Hotel. We took the shuttle back to the boat, dropped off our stuff, took a quick shower, then headed back out for dinner. This time around it was Mike, Corena, and I and we just started walking around and looking for a place to eat. We stopped by an outdoor vendor that had a lot of Vietnamese people eating at it. We were about to get food when a man came up and asked if he could help us. Apparently we looked confused. We asked him how to order and he said that this was not the best place around to eat. He was very very nice, and he was apparently from the United States but he was back in Vietnam to visit his family. He gave us directions to an area with a whole bunch of good restaurants that was only a couple blocks away. We thanked him and headed off in the direction he told us to go. We found a good looking restaurant right where he said there would be some and we went inside and ordered some noodles. It was really good. After dinner I split off from Corena and Mike, hopped in a taxi, and went back to the ship. I met up with Carson there and we took a cab to a popular nightclub called Apocalypse Now. We weren’t there for very long, we made the rounds and talked with all the SAS kids that we knew, and afterwards headed back to the ship because we were tired and had to get up early the next morning. We didn’t have the most pleasant taxi ride back. I asked the driver how much it was and he told me a price, and I said ok, but when we got to the ship, he told us that it was per person, something he never told us before. We argued with him for almost a half an hour, before he started getting a little scary and we decided to just pay him and get out of there. He pretty much took most of our money, but I didn’t want to risk anything bad happening. We got back on the ship and went to bed, slightly disheveled from our taxi ride.
I woke up the next morning at 0630, showered, and packed for my two night trip to the Mekong Delta. We all met in the Union and took roll. Once everybody was there, we left the ship and piled onto a bus. There were about 30 of us total on this trip. Our first bus ride was about two and a half hours up to where we met our boat. We stopped once at an extraordinarily nice rest stop, designed for tourists. There was an artificial pond with lots of lily pads and flowers all round. Surrounding the pond was thatched roofed huts that were restaurants and gift shops. We spent about fifteen minutes here while people used the bathroom and hopped back on the bus. We drove the rest of the way through jungles and small towns until we got to the delta. We got off the bus in a town called Cai Be and headed down to the pier where we applied mosquito repellent, more sunscreen, and got on our boat. Our boat was about thirty feet long, eight feet wide, and made completely of wood. There were rows of folding wooden chairs that ran the length of the boat on both sides. We pulled away from the dock and headed up stream a bit up to a small floating market in a small town. The delta is a huge maze of rivers, creating many islands where small towns reside. We wound our way through a tow, through a floating market. Floating markets are where people fill their boats up with their product, such as fruits, vegetables, and fish. Every boat has a tall pole on it where they hang their product to advertise. For example, if it was a pineapple boat, they would have a single pineapple hanging from the top of the pole. They bring their boat out to the middle of the river, throw out an anchor, and just sit and wait all day as people come and go in their own boats, buying their product. We wound our way through the boats into the center of this town where we docked and walked around. We walked into the heart of the town where we got to go inside a rice net paper factory. Rice net paper is a thin white net-looking pancake made of rice, that you can use like a tortilla. There was about a group of 30 women, sitting in front of small stoves with frying pans on them and a bowl of white liquid between their legs. The white liquid is just rice mashed up finely with water. They have a can with a few holes in the bottom where they scoop up some of the liquid, and drizzle it through the holes over the frying pan. They spread a thin layer over it, let it cook for about ten seconds, then sweep it out with a brush. Each woman made about 2,000 rice net paper sheets per day. It was like an oven in that building and I was fairly grateful when we left. We walked down the street farther where we went to see a coconut candy factory and a popped rice factory. When I say factory, you probably imagine a big brick building with lots of machines and conveyor belts. These factories were just wooden huts, that were open to the air and only had a few machines because most of the work was done by hand. For the coconut candy they cut a coconut in half and grind it up against a twirling grinder where the coconut meat gets finely shredded. When the meat is fine enough, they pour it into a bowl with water over a fire. It is cool to see because they use the leftover coconut husk to fuel the fire, they don’t waste any part. They simmer the meat with water and add in a lot of sugar. It turned into a molasses type fluid which they pour out and let harden and cut into small pieces. We all got to try a piece and it was delicious. After the coconut candy factory, we went right across the street to the popped rice factory. Here they had a huge bowl that was filled with super heated river sediment. They reuse the sediment every batch so it is very dry and burned black by the heat. They throw in a normal pile of rice, and it pops open, just like popcorn. It turns into pretty much Rice Crispies. From there they put it through a strainer where they separate the rice from the sediment. Once the popped rice is separated, they put it into a big bowl where they pour a sweet molasses over it. They then stir up the rice, spreading the molasses evenly making it stick together. They then press it down into a mould and cut it up into little squares using two large sword-like knives. After we saw this demonstration, we got to sit at little tables where we got served tea and little platters of assorted candy. They had coconut candy, ginger candy, rice candy, banana candy, and others. We also got to try Snake Wine, which is made by taking rice wine and putting a whole snake in the bottle. The venom from the snake is dissolved by the ethanol of the rice wine and is rendered harmless. The bottle looks rather scary, the one I saw had a snake that was posed in a curled position and they even put a scorpion in the snake’s mouth. It didn’t taste as bad as I thought it would, but it’s still not my drink of choice. After this small break, we walked down a couple houses to a Fish Sauce factory. I am not the biggest fan of fish sauce and the smell was overwhelming. Fish sauce is made from letting fish ferment and adding salt. Some different types use other herbs and spices, but not all. We saw big barrels of this stuff, about eight feet high and six feet in diameter. We walked around for a bit, but there wasn’t much to see because it was just fermenting fish. We walked out of the factory and the boat came around to meet us right outside of the Fish Sauce factory. We re-boarded our boat and it took us down the river a ways where we hopped off again and went for a brief walk. We walked down a small dirt path that followed a small tributary of the delta. The river was on our left and local’s houses were on our right. The houses were all fairly small, but decorated very nicely. They all had big front gardens with fruit trees and flowers. Along this walk we crossed a few small footbridges and got passed by a few motorbike riders. We walked for about twenty minutes until we got to a small restaurant type relaxation area. We sat down and we got plates of fresh local vegetables. We got watermelon, jack fruit, mangoes, and other fruits. After we tried these delicious fruits we got about twenty minutes to take a break. There were hammocks spread everywhere so most of us laid down and rested. I sat in the hammock for a bit before getting up and exploring the gardens around the rest area. When it was time to go, we all walked back to the small tributary where we got to go for a rowboat ride. It was three people to a boat, that was built like gondolas from Italy, and in the back a Vietnamese person stood up and rowed with oars that were attached to posts on both sides of the boat. I rode with Carson and Sarah and about halfway down, Carson asked if she could try rowing. After a wobbly exchange of places, Carson tried to get the boat moving but somehow the boat ended up in a tree that was along the bank. With a little help from the guide, we got back into the middle of the river and we zigzagged our way down the river a bit. When Carson was done Sarah got up and gave it a shot. Sarah was able to go a little straighter than Carson, but she was much more wobbly standing up in the back of the boat and almost flipped it about three times. Boats started going by us so our guide took over again so we wouldn’t get in their way. We got back to where our boat was where we did a mid-river transfer from our little rowboats back onto our motorboat. We were served coconuts when we got back on board and made our way to where we were spending the night. We spent the night in a bungalow on one of the tributaries of the delta. It was family owned, and they had about three houses with beds for all of us. The building was literally over the river, and they had a big outdoor deck with tables and hammocks where we all hung out. They also had a huge garden with many fruit trees and other plants. I could hardly tell what any of them were. We all decided to go for a swim, which probably wasn’t the best idea due to the leeches and all the other dangerous critters that were in the water, but most of us hopped in anyway. There was a small pier that we could jump off of, and the river was about 5 meters deep, which is a lot deeper than I had expected. We had so much fun swimming around, taking pictures and videos, and jumping off the pier. We swam for about an hour before getting out, rinsing off, and changing back into our normal clothes. That swim was much needed because it was unbearably hot and humid. After our swim, we all played cards for a bit and walked through the garden. Dinner was served to us out on the deck overlooking the river. We were served fish, prawns, soup, and other traditional foods. It was all very good. The fish was very big and it came whole, with its head and fins and everything. It was placed in the middle of the table and we had to peel off the meat we wanted. After dinner a local Vietnamese band came and played traditional music for us. All the songs they sang were also stories, and the two singers, a man and a woman, acted out the stories as they sang. One story was about a man working in the field and the wife bringing him lunch and another was about the man and woman meeting. We could not understand the lyrics of the songs, but our guide gave us a brief synopsis of what each song was about. After the music, we played cards for a bit longer before heading to bed fairly early. We all talked in our rooms for a long time before we actually fell asleep. It felt a lot like summer camp.
We woke up early the next morning and had a delicious breakfast of freshly baked rolls, eggs, and fruits. We hopped back on the boat, waved goodbye to the owners of the bungalow, and headed downriver. We went back to one of the main rivers where we stopped at a brick making factory. There were huge furnaces for heating the bricks and it was all really impressive. They also did decorative pieces there and there were cats, dogs, fish, and other cool statues. We got back on the boat and made our way to a big town where we disembarked and walked through a market. This was a very traditional market with lots of things you would never see in the United States. There were rats, ducklings, snakes, pigs, squid, crabs, and a plethora of other items. We walked through the market out to the street where we met our bus which took us to our hotel, about two hours away on another island. We had to take a car ferry across which was pretty cool. There were tons of people just crowded in this portal to be allowed onto the ferry which sometimes took half an hour for them to get through. Once they were allowed to cram on to the ferry they got the pleasure of sitting with lots of other people in the heat. Most of these people were wearing long-sleeves, something that I really couldn’t understand as I was sweating in short sleeves. There was one old man on the ferry that was blind and the way he made money was by playing a guitar type instrument that was made out of a stick and a metal bowl (and obviously some strings). It took about 10 minutes to get across and meet back up with our bus only to find out that some people had just stayed on the air conditioned bus the whole time and rode the ferry while inside of the bus. It was quite an experience. We went from the ferry to lunch which was in the second story of a nice open air restaurant. We got the usual: soup, chicken, fish, all in different sauces. The main desert was Banana Flambé which came out on a plate that was still on fire. After lunch we made our way to Soc Trang, a town farther inland where we went to a Buddhist temple, which was probably one of the strangest things I have ever seen. It wasn’t a temple like you would expect. It looked more like a crazy religious carnival. There were a whole bunch of brightly painted shrines inside a big one room building. There were Christmas lights and flashing lights everywhere. It was very noisy and jammed packed with people. Outside was the main statue of the Buddha and other smaller shrines. It was very busy and I think this was mainly because it was still the end of Chinese New Year. This was the most colorful temple I have ever seen and it looked like a funhouse. After this temple, we went to another one called the Khleng Pagoda on the other side of the city that was much more like I pictured a temple to be. It had big spires and was donned in gold trim. We went inside where there sat a giant golden Buddha and incense and candles in front of it. The walls and windows had intricate pictures and carvings of plants and animal looking things. We left the inside of the temple and walked to the side, where we accidentally came across a funeral. It was very very sad and I felt awkward for being there, but it was interesting to see other traditions. We left this area fairly quickly and headed back to the bus. We drove back to the hotel, which was called the Ninh Kieu 2, where we checked in and then we got the rest of the day until dinner for free time. My roommate for this trip was Kevin, a hilarious and quirky guy. Carson and I went across the street to the local supermarket where we bought avocadoes, spices, limes, and chips because we were really craving guacamole. We came back to the hotel room and cut up the avocados only to discover that they are not the same as they are in the US. They were hard and tasted funky, they could have just not been ripe, but they weren’t suitable for guacamole. We cut them up, and tried to mash them with a fork, only to discover that it was incredibly hard and when I tried to mash them, they would slip out from under the fork and go flying across the room. We eventually gave up on our experiment and as we were cleaning up, some friends knocked and we let them in. We hung out in the room with a couple more people until it was time to go to dinner. We went to a very nice riverside outdoor restaurant. We got served mango fish, soup, prawns, and more. The food in Vietnam is very sweet. They use a lot of fruits and sweet spices in their cooking which I thoroughly enjoy due to my unquenchable sweet tooth. They also use a lot of mint in Vietnamese food, and the combination of mint and sugar is quite good. After dinner, the majority of the group decided to walk back to the hotel which wasn’t very far away. We wandered up and down a local market that sold mostly clothes. After exploring the street that followed the river, we stopped in a local bar where we got a quick drink. We sat around and talked for about a half an hour and then decided to make our way back to the hotel. We got back to our rooms, chatted for a bit, and then went to sleep.
We woke the next morning and had a very nice breakfast on the top floor of the hotel. We could see over the whole city. When we were done with breakfast, we hopped on the bus, went down to the river, got on our boat and headed for the Cai Rang floating market; it’s one of the busiest in the delta. There were hundreds of boats anchored in the river and even more smaller boats darting form anchored boat to anchored boat. I was amazed how well our boat captain was able to navigate so well through all of them. Also, people don’t really care too much if you hit their boat, so there was a fair bit of bumping going on. We meandered our way up the maze of boats and back down. We pulled up next to a big pineapple boat where they were cutting up fresh pineapples and selling them for just 10,000 Dong. They would cut the skin off the pineapple and cut out the little spikes, and give you the whole pineapple on a stick. It was delicious, fresh, and juicy. We pulled off from this boat and weaved our way to small tributary where we stopped by a local house. We went inside and saw how they made rice noodles. It is very similar to making rice paper: they use the mixture of rice and water, spread it into a circle, steam it, then let it dry out in the sun. When it is dry, they put it through a shredder that cuts it into long noodles. In the back of the house they had one huge female pig that was probably about six feet long. There were also about eight or so smaller pigs in other pens. After looking around we got back on the boat and went back to the pier where our bus was. We drove back to the hotel where we checked out and had lunch down in the lobby. We hopped back on the bus and it was time to head back to Ho Chi Minh. The bus ride back was over five hours, most of which was spent in line for the car ferry. This time we stayed on the bus because it was very busy and the bus had to get on and off the ferry really fast. The rest of the bus ride back was fairly uneventful, going through jungles and small towns along the way. We arrived back in Ho Chi Minh around 1800 and re boarded the ship. I took a much needed shower and cooled off in the air conditioning for a bit before Carson and I headed out to the market again. We took the shuttle to the Rex Hotel and walked down a block to where there was a whole street filled with movie vendors. Each movie was 10,000 Dong which is only about 50 cents. They had hundreds of movies including new releases. They also had seasons of TV shows for sale. I ended up buying eight movies and the Simpsons box. I got 20 seasons of the Simpsons for 440,000 Dong, which is about 22 dollars. That is slightly over a dollar a season. I wish I had bought so much more. After we were done buying movies we walked back to the main street and looked for a place for dinner. I really wanted Pho (pronounced Fuh), which is a Vietnamese noodle soup, and it is apparently extraordinarily tasty. We found a restaurant that we had heard about called Pho 24 and we sat down and got a bowl. It was just as good as everyone had said. I thought it was delicious and afterwards we hopped back on the shuttle and went back to the ship. When we got back we just went to bed because we were really tired.
The next morning I woke up at 0600 and got ready for my trip to the Cu Chi Tunnels. The Cu Chi Tunnels are the tunnels that the Viet Cong built during the Vietnam War and the soldiers pretty much lived in these expansive tunnel networks performing guerilla style warfare on the Americans, then quickly disappearing back into their tunnels. We got on a bus where I met the new interport student from India. Before every country, we get a new interport student that travels with us from the country we were just at to their home country. The interport student’s name is Vikram, and he is a third year medical student in India. He had just gotten on the ship the day before, so he didn’t know anyone or too much about SAS. We sat together on the bus, and we talked for a bit before we both fell asleep. It was still really early. We awoke when the bus stopped at a rubber tree plantation. Our tour guide wanted to take a quick stop here before we got to the tunnels because rubber is a big export of Vietnam. There were hundreds of trees, all planted in rows, as far as the eye could see. We gathered around one and our tour guide took out a set of keys and scraped a line into the tree with one of the keys. A white viscous fluid started seeping out, which he explained was the main component for rubber. He said they cut holes in all of these trees and let it seep out into buckets that they collect it in. We wandered through the trees for about fifteen minutes before making our way to the tunnels. We arrived and it was actually pretty crowded. There were a bunch of other tourist busses there. We entered the main area and we all sat down and watched a video about the tunnels. The video was made during the Vietnam War and it was very anti-American. It was really interesting to see, and they talked about stories of hero American-killers. After the movie, we walked along the path of the park, stopping at all the little exhibits. The first place we stopped was an un-altered entrance to the tunnels. It was incredibly small, designed so American soldiers could not get in. We all got to take turns sliding down and take turns with our heads popping out. I barely managed to squeeze into the hole, but coming out I got stuck. I had to undo my belt because my buckle was getting caught on the lip of the hole. Once I did that, I was able to slide back out again. The next exhibit we saw was a leftover booby trap; it was one where there was a teeter-totter trap door covering a hole with spikes at the bottom. I would not want to fall into one of those. We walked along the path some more through craters still left over from bombs that were dropped on the area. We saw some other tunnel entrances and even a air vent cleverly disguised as a termite mound. Along the path there was a building with demonstrations of a whole bunch of different types of booby traps. They all looked excruciatingly painful and effective. The spikes were also lined with a neurotoxin, so if the trap didn’t kill you, you would still be poisoned. We walked a ways until we got to the main visitor center and shooting range. At this shooting range you could shoot pretty much any gun used during the war. They had AK-47s, M16s, M1 Garands, and Brownings. You had to buy ten bullets minimum if you wanted to shoot one, so me and five other people decided to share a clip. We bought a clip for an AK-47 and we were escorted down to the range. I just wanted to shoot one bullet to say I shot an AK. Down in the range it was deafening. There were other guns going off, and I had no idea how loud these guns actually were. The worker put the bullets into the gun and we all took turns firing. It was incredibly loud and the recoil was stronger than I expected. My right ear was ringing for a long time afterward, and I can’t imagine being in an actual war with those going off all the time. We came back up from the range, but we couldn’t find our group. From this point the trail branched off in many different directions and we just guessed which one our group went. We wandered around, looking for our group but had no luck. We decided to explore on our own and we found an entrance to a tunnel that you could go all the way through. It was a lot hotter than I expected in the tunnel. I thought it would be cooler because it was below ground, but it was probably a good ten degrees hotter. You couldn’t stand, and you either had to crawl or walk whilst being bent over. It was really dark in the tunnel (there were scattered small lights) and to see we used the flashes from our camera to get quick glimpses of where we were going. We emerged from beneath the earth about 100 meters from where we started. We slowly walked back to the entrance and where the bus was, stopping at exhibits, and looking at the scenery. We exited the park and sat down and waited for the rest of our group, and they came out about ten minutes later. We got back on the bus and went to lunch in a village about an hour away from the tunnels. We had another delicious meal of soup, spring rolls, chicken, and noodles. After lunch, we walked around the local village, visiting with two local families. The first house we went to was very small, and only really one room. There was one bed and the toilet was outside. There was no shower and only a big tub outside for washing. We talked with the woman who lived there and found out that she only makes 50,000 Dong per day, which is not even three dollars. The next house we went to was just as small. There was only one woman there, and her husband had died a few years ago, so most of the house was dedicated as a shrine to him. There were photos and little trinkets with candles surrounding them. Out in the street, there were little kids playing. We played with one kid who was riding his bike around. He only had one training wheel so he leaned far to the right as he rode so he wouldn’t tip over. My friend Sarah had little toys that she was giving to kids she saw. She gave this little boy a bouncy ball and a rubber lizard. He was fascinated by the bouncy ball but didn’t really know what to do with the lizard and he dropped it on the ground to play with the ball. An older kid, around our age, came up behind him, grabbed the lizard and put it down the smaller boy’s shirt. The little boy freaked out and started spinning, trying to get the lizard out. We all had a good laugh before continuing onwards through the town. We walked along a dirt road to the other side of the town while being followed by little boys and girls. We got to the other side of the town where there was a huge mint farm. There are many types of mint plants and the ones we saw were young and not more than two feet tall. The field was very extensive, and way on the horizon was a tall egg shaped mountain, in fact, the only mountain I had seen in Vietnam. Southern Vietnam is very flat and mostly jungle and marshlands, while Northern Vietnam is very mountainous and hilly. We met the two ladies who watched over the farm and walked around a while. Afterwards, we made our way back through the small town and got back on the bus for our two hour ride back. I sat with Vikram again and I got a really awesome private question and answer session the whole way back. I asked him all about India and learned more about it in that two hour bus ride than I would have learned from hours of schooling. We got back to the ship about thirty minutes before on-ship time so I just stayed on the ship and relaxed. I talked with my friends, discussing what they did in Vietnam, before heading back to my room and falling asleep.
The ship departed the next day at 0600. I had an 0800 class so I was up by 0700 and watched us make our way back down the Saigon River. We got back to the open ocean and headed south to get to India.

Today is the last day on the ship before we get two India, and a few noteworthy things happened on the journey travelling on the South China Sea, through the Strait of Malacca, and across the Bay of Bengal to India. The first cool thing was we had to stop and anchor off the coast of Singapore for a whole day as we refueled. We anchored among about ten huge tanker ships while a smaller fueling vessel came up and latched onto our side. We were surrounded by small islands, and on one of the islands there was a huge oil refinery. I am guessing this is a main refueling port for ships going from East Asia to Africa or India. The coolest thing about this was that where we were refueling was a main area for pirate attacks, so all day we had a military warship circle and protect us. It had two huge front cannons and a whole bunch of side turrets. Not only was there a warship circling us, but we occasionally got a flyover by military reconnaissance planes. We were well protected. I spent most of this day up on the 7th deck, swimming in the pool, lying in the sun, watching the ships and planes. Another awesome thing about this area was that in the oil refinery, there were a few smokestacks jutting out from the complex. One of these smokestacks had a small flame coming out the top, and about every twenty to thirty minutes a huge fireball would erupt from this smokestack. The fireball would erupt about 200 feet into the air and then burn out into a thick black cloud. It was really awesome. I tried to take pictures, but it was so hot and humid that the air inside the lens of my camera condensed the water due to the difference of temperature and fogged up the lens. We spent all day anchored there and pulled out around 1800.
The next notable event was the Sea Olympics. This is a huge event on Semester at Sea, and how well you perform determines when you can get off the ship back in Florida. My sea, the Mediterranean Sea, is composed of most of the rooms on the third floor port side. Our color was green and we all represented. I wore a green shirt, painted my face green, and wrapped up uncovered limbs with green yarn. The other seas are the Caribbean, Baltic, Arabian, Adriatic, Red, Yellow, Bering, and, since the kids and lifelong learners are not part of any sea, they created their own team called the Salty Sea Monkeys. There was a whole bunch of different events like crab soccer, dance competitions, relay races, and tug-o-war. My event (the best event) was Synchronized Swimming. We had to make a three minute routine and perform in front of the whole ship. The song we chose was a spliced up compilation of Bella Noche, Cha Cha Slide, Save a Horse (Ride a Cowboy), and more. My friend Natali and I were the main choreographers and we preformed with my next door neighbors Anela and Ashley. It was really fun performing in front of about 500 people, showing off my amazing synchronized swimming skills. The events were all day, from 0930 to about 1800. My event was at 1400, and I spent the rest of the day going from event to event supporting my teammates. All day the Mediterranean Sea was in third place, battling for second or first. The way the scoring works is you get certain points for getting 1st, 2nd, or 3rd, and you get more or less points depending on the event. They displayed the scores on the TVs around the ship so you could see who was in which place, but there were certain events, like Synchronized Swimming, Lip-sync contest, and whatnot where the scores were not told until the closing ceremony, which kept who was going to win a surprise all day. The closing ceremony was at 2000 that night, and we got our scores. My synchronized swimming team didn’t place, but we didn’t really care too much. Our dance team got 1st place which is probably the main event so everyone went crazy when we heard that news. The last thing they announced before they said who was the final victor was the Spirit Award. They had secret Spirit Police going around the ship all day looking to see which sea had the best sportsmanship , who supported their teammates the best, and who just was overall the most into Sea Olympics Day. In many people’s opinion, this is one of the best awards it win, considering the whole day was based around spirit. It turns out that the Mediterranean won that award which when announced made everyone go crazy. They then announced the final standings and the Mediterranean ended up getting 3rd place overall. It was an exhausting day, but well worth all the spent energy.
The last cool thing that happened on the trip to India was we passed through the Nicabar Islands, one of the most isolated and undeveloped island chains in the world. They looked like normal islands, but apparently it is almost impossible to get there. There are no airports, and you have to get permission from the Indian government to go there. The cool thing was, we circled one of the islands (it looked like a normal island) but it had a huge shipwreck sitting on the beach that had gotten washed up by the 2004 tsunami. It was a giant passenger ship that was probably the size of our MV Explorer, and it was amazing to see it sitting on its side on the beach. It really showed us the power of the ocean. The rest of the crossing was uneventful, filled with classes and sunbathing. I am really excited for India and I will update again when I get back on the ship!

2010-03-01T07:34:00.000-08:00

Early on the morning of February 16^th the MV Explorer pulled into Yangtze River and went upstream to the port in downtown Shanghai. The ship docked very early in the morning but yet again, the process of immigration kept us impatiently waiting. The day we arrived it was sunny yet very cold. The air had a bite to it and there was frost all over the top deck. The Yangtze River flows right through the center of Shanghai so the ship was docked right in the middle of downtown; we were surrounded by tall skyscrapers and beautifully architected buildings. When we could get off the ship, around 1200, my friends Mike, Erin, Elena, and I did the first thing you have to do in every country: find an ATM and get money. Fortunately, this wasn’t that hard, we just had to follow the sea of SAS kids down the street to the bank. It took us a while to withdraw money because of the long line, but once that was done, we started making our way to the Bund, which is the high class riverfront area of Shanghai. The overall plan was to catch a bus to the other side of Shanghai and go to the zoo where we could see the pandas. We had a tour book of Shanghai that told us what bus we needed and which streets to catch it on. We started heading for Ningjing Street, which we found on our map, where the number 13 bus was supposed to stop. The walk was all through the Bund right on the edge of the river through the mobs of Chinese people. Shanghai normally has a population of about 22 million people, but while we were there it was much more than that. We just happened to be in China for most of the Chinese New Year which was downright amazing. Because of the New Year, many shops were closed and the streets were packed. I have never seen so many people in one place in my life. We carefully navigated the streets of the Bund trying not to lose any of our group members. The buildings along the river at the Bund were beautiful white stone colonial looking buildings. They were mostly hotels with a few ritzy shops thrown in here and there. We walked and walked quite a ways until we got to what we thought was Ningjing Street. We looked around and we could not find any bus stops. We looked at the street sign and realized we had made a mistake; we were looking for Ningjing Street, but we had found was Ninjing Street. This was one of the problems of navigating China, there were many Nings, Jings, Nins, and Nans in the street names. By the time we realized all of this, it was too late to go to the zoo so we just decided to walk around and see the rest of downtown Shanghai. We started heading inland and wanted to find a place to stop and eat lunch. We left the ritzy area of the Bund and entered the normal commercial area of the city. We walked until we encountered a group of pagoda style buildings and lots of red Chinese lamps hanging everywhere. It was a Ney Year market where they were selling toys, decorations, and other miscellaneous items. We entered this two block by two block market and were shocked. This was the most densely packed area I have ever been in. There were people shoulder to shoulder everywhere there was space. The only possible way to move was to enter a current of people and follow it wherever it was going. Fortunately I found a man walking a bicycle and got in behind him, which gave me some extra space. The streets were not closed to cars, but no car even dared try to get through the mob of people. We got in one block to the main intersection of the market and decided we were too overwhelmed and started heading out of the market a different way we came. When we finally got out of the madness and caught our breath we decided we were very hungry and wanted to find a restaurant. I was surprised by the fact that I had not even seen a restaurant yet that wasn’t a McDonalds or a different fast food place. We walked another block from the market and saw a few people eating bowls of noodle soup outside of a small door with some Chinese characters above it which we presumed was a restaurant. We walked up and a very exited Chinese man started rapidly talking to us. When he realized we were giving him blank stares, and that we didn’t speak Chinese, he just pointed to the people eating and said, “Soup?” We replied with yes and he told us to follow him inside. We went down a narrow hallway and into a room that was about ten feet by twenty feet that looked more like a storage closet than a restaurant. There were about five tables inside, three of them already having families eating at them. He sat us down and about two minutes later came out with four big bowls of soup. We devoured the soup, now being very proficient at eating soup with chopsticks, and rested for a few minutes before heading back out to the streets. We paid for our soup which turned out to be six yuan for each bowl. The exchange rate while we were there was 6.8 yuan per 1 U.S. dollar which meant that the big meal we just ate wasn’t even one dollar. We walked around some more just winding down any street that looked interesting. We found a small street vendor that was grilling on the corner so we decided to go see what it was. He was grilling kebabs of octopus tentacles and since we have to try everything interesting, we all ordered one. We watched him throw the kebabs on the grill and powder on a few different spices. It actually tasted very good, but had a weird texture. The flavor was mostly from the spices he put on it and the tentacles had a somewhat rubbery chewy texture. We decided to head back to the ship because we were going to meet our friend Corena who was coming back from an FDP (Field Directed Practica) which was riding the Maglev train. The Maglev train is the fastest train in the world which actually hovers along the tracks on very powerful repelling magnets. The way it accelerates is by activating attractive magnets on the track in front of the train, pulling it forward. This modern marvel travels at around 450-500kmh, which is about 270-300mph. Unfortunately it is still really only a prototype and it only goes from Shanghai to the airport. We got back on the ship, freshened up, and headed back to the Bund, which is spectacular by night. The classic colonial style buildings were lit up on the front, and across the river the tall skyscrapers had their lights on with exterior colored lights. We walked up and down the street for a bit taking pictures and enjoying the lights until we got hungry enough for dinner. We called two cabs and went to the other side of town to try and find a restaurant that we saw in the Lonely Planet book. We took a taxi to a corner near where the restaurant was, but on the walk to our chosen restaurant, we saw a different restaurant that looked too good to pass up. We went inside and it was a pretty fancy sit down restaurant that served traditional Chinese food family style. We all chose a dish and shared them throughout the table. It was delicious and not terribly expensive due to the exchange rate. After dinner we heard about a go-kart arena and bar so we hailed two taxis for the five of us and headed out. Mike and I got in one taxi and Corena, Erin, and Elena got into the other. The girls got in the first taxi, I showed the driver the directions, then hopped into our taxi. We lost sight of the girls within two blocks, but we figured that since we showed the driver the same directions, we would end up at the same place. The taxi took us through some really strange back streets and dropped us off in the middle of a somewhat run down residential area. We didn’t see the place we were looking for but there was a big billboard there advertising the bar we were looking for so we figured we had to be close. We waited about fifteen minutes for the girls’ taxi but they never showed up. Mike and I decided to follow the arrow on the billboard and it led us through a fairly sketchy area. There weren’t many streetlights and there were run down apartments all around, also the street was torn up due to construction but Mike and I are fairly big men so we weren’t terribly worried. After wondering around for about ten minutes, we found the go-kart bar on a pretty nice street. It was surprising how quickly you can go from poverty to classy areas. Mike and I went inside saw some other SAS people and asked them if they had seen our other group members. They said the girls hadn’t shown up yet so Mike and I went out on a search party. We walked around for about 45 minutes, but had no luck. We went back to the bar and decided to hop in the go-karts. It was amazing, the track was 4,500 square feet and the karts went really fast. Afterwards, we hung out in the bar and then headed home pretty early because we had to get up early the next morning. We got back to the ship, checked to see if the girls had made it home safely (and they had), and went to bed.

I woke up around 0700 the next morning to get ready for my Xi’an (pronounced Shee-an) and Beijing trip. We met in the union and waited for everyone to get there. At 0930 all 96 of the kids who were going on the trip were present so we split up into three groups by last name and headed to the busses. We took three busses to the airport, I was in bus A, regrouped and checked in. The check-in and security was relatively painless and then we had about an hour to wait in the airport before our flight to Xi’an. Our flight was scheduled to leave at 1200 and we departed only about fifteen minutes late. The flight to Xi’an was two hours and twenty minutes which wasn’t that bad because I got a window seat and met two nice people named Chelsea and Greg. I was slightly worried flying into Xi’an because looking out the window all I could see was polluted air and lots of farmland. But, when we got off the plane, onto the busses, and started heading into the city I could see that my preconceptions were wrong. Xi’an was the capital of China during the Zhou, Qin, Han, the Sui, and Tang Dynasties and it is filled with culture. There are giant walls throughout the city that used to surround it, but nowadays the city has expanded far past them. Our tour guide was named Albert and he was pretty funny. Albert is just his English name, I can’t even begin to pronounce his real name. The first place we went to was the Tang Dynasty Art Museum to see some art and try our hand at calligraphy. The art museum was pretty nice and filled with art from many different time periods. There were paintings, tapestries, masks, sculptures, and even shadow puppets which are movable puppets that are made from clear plastic-y paper and you use them in front of bright lights. After taking a guided tour throughout the museum, we sat down in the largest room where they had rice paper, brushes, and paint set up for us. We learned how to write “forever” and “I love you.” My calligraphy is not the best, but I didn’t think it was too bad. After we practiced these symbols for a bit, we could walk around on our own and purchase small paintings if we wanted. After the art museum, we headed to our hotel to check in. We were staying at the Xi’an Jianguo Hotel, which was a very nice four star hotel. We got assigned roommates based on our last name and I got roomed with a guy named Zach, who I had met once or twice before, but never really talked to. He turned out to be really awesome and we became really good friends. We rested in the hotel for a little bit, got to watch some Olympics, and then it was time for dinner. We went to De Fa Cheng which is a big classy restaurant and we had a huge dumpling dinner. They brought out about twenty different rounds of different dumplings, most of which were delicious. There were some spicy ones, that were way too spicy for me, and some seafood ones which I wasn’t a fan of, but overall, I definitely got my fill of dumplings. After dinner, we could have taken the bus back to the hotel but most people decided to walk around the hotel area and see what there is to see. Xi’an at night turned into a vibrant and colorful city. There are lights everywhere: on buildings, on the trees, on the wall, and even in the sky. The sky was filled with kites, strings of lights, fireworks (for the new year) and the mini hot air balloons that the Chinese light up and let go and they float off into the sky. We walked around the main downtown area which was a giant roundabout with a huge pagoda style clock tower in the middle. We walked around a market for a bit before we decided we were tired and wanted to back. We hopped in a cab, went back to the hotel, and fell asleep to the Olympics.

We woke up at 0645 the next day and had a Chinese/American breakfast in the hotel lobby. It had noodles, eggs, sausages, and lots of other good food. After breakfast we hopped on the bus and went to the Xi’an City Wall. It is the most complete city wall that has survived in China and it was very tall and very wide and also covered in decorations for the New Year. We climbed to the top of one of the guard towers where we could see all the way to the bell tower in the center of the city. We walked around the wall for a bit before hopping on the bus and heading to the Great Mosque. The Great Mosque is an Islamic Mosque in the center of Xi’an that is integrated in the middle of an intricate maze off alleys and markets. It would have been very difficult to find if we were not with a tour guide, but it was awesome. There just so happened to be a big festival going on so we saw a whole bunch of people praying and feasting. The Mosque is 12,000 square meters and filled with small houses, wells, and stone walls. We walked around in the gardens for a bit and headed back to the bus yet again. We drove about 45 minutes to the outskirts of Xi’an where we out to lunch at a local restaurant and had a traditional Chinese restaurant with a big lazy susan in the center and lots of plates of chicken, pork, vegetables, all in different sauces. After lunch there was a market right outside the restaurant where we shopped for a bit and then headed to the Terra Cotta Warrior Museum. The museum was only about ten minutes away from the restaurant and the actual building housing the soldiers was surrounded by a big park. The bus dropped us off and we walked through the ticket gate to the main plaza. The Terra Cotta Museum is divided into three sections. Building 1 has the re-assembled soldiers and the current excavation of the remaining soldiers, Building 2 has a huge excavation site of the rest of the tomb, and Building 3 houses the two famous bronze chariots that were uncovered. We first went into Building 1 where the soldiers were. We walked into the lobby of the building and the man who actually discovered the Terra Cotta soldiers, Yang Xinman, was sitting signing autographs and books for people. He is very old now, but back when he discovered the soldiers, he was just a young peasant. He actually found the soldiers because he was digging a well for their village when he stumbled across the artifacts. Since China is a communist country, he was not entitled to any claim over the artifacts, but the government gave him some monetary compensation and gave him a comfortable job signing autographs all day. This would be way better than a peasant lifestyle. We entered the room where the soldiers were being excavated and it was huge! It was a giant hangar covering the excavation site that was about 300 yards long and about 75 yards wide. There were about eight rows of soldiers going all the way to the back of the hangar with one row perpendicular to them out in front. They are arranged in a Chinese war formation, designed to protect the emperor after death. The most amazing thing is that every soldier is different. Each one has a unique set of armor and facial expression, and because of this, out of the 8,000 soldiers made, only about 1,000 have been reassembled. This tomb was raided before it was actually discovered, and because of this many of the soldiers were damaged or destroyed. The worst thing was that when the tomb was first opened, a lot of the soldiers just crumbled and their paint flaked off because of the new fresh air entering the tomb. They have yet to open the tomb of the Tang Emperor for exactly this reason. No one has dared enter the tomb until they can develop a technology that will preserve the artifacts in the fresh air. They are also dearly concerned about booby traps, like a real life Indiana Jones. We walked all around the hangar taking photos of all the reassembled soldiers and horses. All of them were incredibly detailed and life size, it was truly amazing. After wandering around in there for a bit we headed for Building 2, which wasn’t nearly as impressive. It was an excavation of a different part of the tomb, but there was nothing really in it. We were above it looking down and all it really was was a whole bunch of corridors and walls. We left that building and headed to Building 3, where the bronze chariots are kept. We entered and went down a large staircase to the room where they were. They were remarkably beautiful, but I was surprised to see that they were not life sized. They were each about six feet long and about four feet high, both chariots had four horses in front pulling them. They had amazing attention to detail and they were pretty awesome to see. By this time, it was about time to meet up with the rest of the group at the tea house. We got a quick tea ceremony, where they let us choose six different types of tea and we got to see how they were made and sample them, before we headed out. We all piled back onto the bus and headed for an orphanage on the outskirts of Xi’an. The orphanage was about 45 minutes away from the soldiers and it was in the very outskirts of the suburbs of Xi’an. There are normally about 90 kids in the orphanage, but since it was Chinese New Year a lot of the kids got to visit distant relatives for the holiday and only about 30 of them were still there. We entered the orphanage which was a small fenced off complex of buildings. There were a few classrooms, bedrooms, and one auditorium. When we first got there we took a brief tour of the classrooms and bedrooms. They were very small, but painted in bright happy colors. We exited the buildings and some of the kids started emerging from the other buildings. We got to play with them for a bit and we may have even started a snowball fight. It was my job to make snowballs for some of the smaller kids and they would go throw them at the other people. After running around for a bit we all headed into the auditorium where the kids put on a little show for us. The first show was four kids standing in a box formation and they did a little dance to a Chinese kiddie song. Afterwards, all 30 of the kids got up on the stage and did a hand gesture song which was pretty cute. When they were done, about half of our SAS group, including me, got up on the stage and sang the kids some American kiddie songs, such as Itsy Bitsy Spider, If You’re Happy and You Know It, and Row Row, Row Your Boat. After we were all done performing we played with the kids for a little longer before getting back on the bus and heading back to downtown Xi’an for the Tang Dynasty Dinner Show. We arrived at the Tang Dynasty Theater which is a brightly lit and colorful old style dinner theater. We all got to sit in the first two rows of tables which was an amazing view. As we sat down, the world renowned Tang Dynasty Orchestra started playing to accompany our dinner. I didn’t recognize any of the instruments but it was amazing. It was traditional Chinese music that was mostly plucked string instruments with a flute and all the orchestra members never even looked at their instruments. They stared smiling straight ahead the whole time. Dinner was a delicious five course meal with prawns, steak, dumplings, soup, chicken, and an orange soupy desert. It was all amazing. When we finished with desert, the show started. It was a beautiful performance with dancing and singing. I was right next to the orchestra which was really cool because they sounded amazing. They did a few costume dances where they incorporated long flowing twirling gowns into the dance and they did warrior dances where they leaped around with swords and got into choreographed fights. It was truly spectacular. The show lasted about two and a half hours which just flew by. When the show finished we piled back onto the bus, went back to the hotel, I went on a brief walk with my friend Buddy until we realized we were too tired, went to the hotel, and watched the Olympics for a bit before crashing.

We awoke the next morning at 0700 and went to breakfast. We ate at the hotel like the morning before and piled into the buses to head to the airport for our flight to Beijing. Our flight left at 1050 and arrived at 1225 fairly on time. We got out of the airport and met our Beijing tour guide, a lady named Susan. Susan was a small 30 year old woman with the spirit of a seven year old. She was excited about everything and loved to talk. She was really informational and told us a lot of cool things on our ride to lunch. It was another traditional family style lunch where we sat at big tables and ate off a lazy susan. Most of these meals were pretty much the same with pork, chicken, rice, and tofu, all in different sauces. After lunch we headed to our hotel which was the Courtyard Marriott Hotel which was amazing. Apparently, all the SAS trips that are overnight and not staying in a local’s house have to be in a hotel over four stars. I would have liked to stay in a smaller, more hostile type hotel, but I certainly wasn’t complaining about our hotels. After we checked in and put our stuff away we got the whole afternoon off to do whatever we wanted. Zach and I freshened up we met up with a few people and decided to walk around the block. We heard there was a mall across the street so we went to check it out. We found a 24 hour bakery that was a block away from our hotel and got some amazing Chinese treats. We went into the mall which was disappointing. We were expecting a traditional Chinese mall with vendors and everything, but it turned out to be your stereotypical American looking mall. The only cool thing about it was that there was an ice skating rink that you could look down upon from the first floor. We decided that there was nothing really in this area so we just headed back to the hotel and rested for a bit before dinner. We walked around for a bit looking for a good place, and we weren’t that hungry from our pastry earlier, and there weren’t really any traditional Chinese places so we decided to grab a quick bite at KFC. Apparently the Chinese love KFC. It is everywhere and they are always packed. People like to have long sit-down dinners there. We just grabbed something quick and headed back out. We went back to our room, got on some night clothes, picked up our friends, Isaac, Lauren, Amy, and some others and decided to hit the town. We heard about a place called Bar Street where, guess what, all the bars are. We took two taxi’s, and this time we successfully ended up at the same place. We started walking down the main drag and tere was bar after bar after bar. We went into a few but they were very expensive and very touristy with SAS kids everywhere. Zach, Isaac, and I wanted to actually go to a local bar and try and meet some local people, but the rest of the group didn’t. We split off from them and got off the main drag. We walked down a side street where there were a lot of Chinese people. We went into a few bars until we found one we liked called “Shooters.” We started talking to two local girls who could speak English pretty well. We spent most of the night there until we decided to walk around some more. We walked back to the main street where we saw a cop car with its lights on and a big group of people. We decided to check it out to see what was going on. We were walking by and it looked like a big group of Chinese people, as we were passing, we saw one SASer in the middle of the group that we knew, his name is Edwin. He saw us walking by and ran up to us and started blabbering about why he was in trouble with the cops and surrounded by a group of Chinese people. He was fairly inebriated, which is never a good idea in a foreign country that you don’t know, and especially not in China where the police are not the most friendly people. Apparently what happened was that he was with a group of SAS kids that got really drunk at a bar, and for some unknown reason, one of them (according to Edwin it wasn’t him) kicked a BMW and dented it. While they were walking away the owner of the car came over and said it was Edwin and called the cops. All the other kids left and it was Edwin alone with two officers and about ten Chinese people. Half of them were saying Edwin did it and half of them were saying he wasn’t the one. Whatever the case, Edwin had to pay off the police officer so he wouldn’t be brought to jail so he asked my friend Isaac to loan him some money so he could get out of it. Isaac gave him some money and he got enough to pay off the officers, they all left, and he stumbled away. We tried to get him into a taxi to get home but he found some other SAS kids and started hanging out with them so we hopped in our own taxi, went back to the hotel and went to sleep.

We woke up the next morning early, hopped on the bus, and went to Tiananmen Square. It was a huge open stone square with a stone column in the middle, the capital building on one side, and the Forbidden City on the other. There were lots of soldiers walking around on patrol and lots of other tour groups there. We walked through the square from one end to the other, stopping here and there for small history lessons. We eventually made our way to the gateway of the Forbidden City where the giant portrait of Mao Zedong hung over the central entrance. There are seven entrances to the Forbidden City. The center and biggest one is for the Emperor and the Emperor only. The two to the left and right are for the Emperor’s advisors and officials, then the two farther out are for guests of the Emperor, and the outer two exits are for servants and workers. We entered the first gateway into the first courtyard. There were pagoda style walls all around and a big empty courtyard in the middle. We went through the second gateway where there was another similar courtyard but slightly larger. Lastly, we went through the third gateway where there was an enormous stone courtyard with a frozen river going through it. At the other side of the courtyard was a large stone staircase going up to the main palace of the Forbidden City. The main palace, along with most other buildings in the Forbidden City, was painted beautiful and vibrant reds, greens, and yellows with gold trimmings. We couldn’t see the interior of the buildings, but the outsides were amazing. The thing that surprised me the most was how big the city was. I thought we were at the end when we got to the palace, but our tour guide walked past it and into a maze of alleyways and smaller courtyards. This is where all the servants and consorts lived. The Emperor could have hundreds of different consorts, but only one wife. There were beautiful courtyards and gardens with stone sculptures, metal sculptures, fountains, trees, and beautiful natural rock formations. After winding through these for quite a while we emerged on the other side of the city where the bus picked us up. We drove about ten minutes to the area where all the Beijing locals live and we got off the bus and got onto a rickshaw. Rickshaws are the little two person seats that are pulled by a bicycle. We all paired up, hopped into a rickshaw and went for a ride. I was with my friend Amy and we were in the back of our group of rickshaws. Our driver was hilarious and kept trying to pass all the other rickshaws and kept ramming the cart with my friends in front of us. We winded trough alleyways and small streets until we got to a small local house where we were going to have lunch with a local family and learn how to make dumplings. We got off and walked in to the very small, single story house where the woman, Madame Fung, had set up two tables for our group of fifteen. She brought out delicious dishes of chicken, rice, tofu, and all the other Chinese foods, but it was by far the best food I had in China. She and her daughter spent three hours that day preparing it for us and I thoroughly enjoyed it. She even had this one really good dish where she cooked chicken in Coca-Cola. After dinner, we got to ask her questions about her local life while our tour guide translated for us. Then, she brought out dough circles and filling for us to make dumplings. We put some stuffing in the center of the dough circle and folded it up, how a dumpling should look. Apparently I didn’t do a very good job because Madame Fung, her daughter, and my tour guide all pointed and laughed at mine and said, “Ha ha ha. That is a very special dumpling!” After we folded our dumpling, it was time to leave and take our rickshaw back to the bus. We all took a group photo before we left and the rickshaw ride to the bus was just as exciting as the one to the house. After getting on the bus we headed for one of the places I was most excited for: the Olympic Bird’s Nest and the Water Cube. We pulled up at the Bird’s Nest, hopped out, and pretty much ran inside. At the time we were there, there was a winter festival going on and they had filled the interior with snow and set up sled runs and a whole bunch of snow games. There were also a few stages for performers. We didn’t have much time there, so we ran around, snapping photos, and looking at the amazing architecture. After exploring a bit, we walked outside and went to go check out the Water Cube. Unfortunately, the interior was under renovation so we could not go inside, but the exterior looks really really cool. I am sure you have all seen it, and it is just a rectangular building that is decorated like bubbles. It was pretty awesome. After we explored, we got back onto the bus and headed for a silk factory. We got a quick tour of the factory where we saw the whole silk process. We get silk from the cocoon of the Silk Worm. They soak the cocoon, take the cocoon apart layer by layer, stretch it out, and let it dry. The silk is surprisingly strong, and you can’t rip it very easily. Then they thread the silk through a machine that rolls it up so it can be used as thread. After we saw this process, we got to feel samples of different silks, then of course, were led into the shop at the end where we could purchase items. We didn’t spend very long there because we wanted to get to the Pearl Market that closed in a bit. We quickly headed over there and entered the Pearl Market which is a huge four story building filled with different vendors and stands. All the floors had different types of items, and at the top floor, hence its name, was pearls. I was with my friend Carson through this shopping experience which was fairly overwhelming. The vendors would grab your arm and pull you to your stand and you had to fight your way away. This was the first place where we really got to haggle, which I love. When they see tourists, they always try and severely rip you off, for example, my friend got a jacket from 1200 yuan down to 200 yuan. Carson got a small purse from 395 yuan down to 80 yuan. They always say the same hilarious things such as, “I give you good price,” “I give you student discount,” and, to whatever your starting bid may be, “ohhhh, you joke, you joke, this is high quality!” After the sensory overload of colors, sounds, and physical harassment, we took a taxi back to the hotel to meet up with the bus to go out to a roast duck dinner. We went across town to another large table, lazy susan restaurant where we sat down and started our normal dinner of rice, chicken and pork. About halfway through the dinner, about four chefs came out each with a huge roasted duck, and they started cutting it up right in front of our table. They would cut slices onto plates and put the plates on our lazy susan where we would consume it. It was the best duck I have ever had. It was delicious. After dinner we headed back to the hotel where we walked around for a bit before getting too tired and then went to bed.

We woke up early again, piled on the bus, and went to a Kung Fu school in Beijing. We got a welcome dance, as we walked up to the school, from four men in two tiger outfits. The guy in front was the front legs and controlled the face, and the guy in back controlled the back legs. We entered the main auditorium where they put on an awesome show of amazing Kung Fu moves and jumping and leaping. They demonstrated different weapons and I saw a guy break a big bowl with his finger, another guy had a thick wooden stick be broken on his back, and the most amazing feat was a man put the tip of a practice spear on his neck (a long six foot spear with a relatively dull tip) while another man held it in place and the man who had the tip on his neck walked towards the other guy until the spear bent and snapped in half. After a few demonstrations of quite impressive skills, we got to go up on the stage, play with the practice weapons, and take pictures with the Kung Fu students. We took a few pictures of mid-air jumping kicks and whatnot, and talked with the students for a while. Afterwards, we headed for the bus where it was about an hour and a half to the Great Wall of China. On the ride up the bus played a few games and if you lost you had to do a song or dance in front of the bus on a microphone, it turns out that the same guy lost three times in a row, so he just stayed at the front of the bus for the rest of the ride playing DJ by holding up his iPod to the microphone. On the ride to the wall, there wasn’t much to look at until the very end. Most of the ride was undeveloped flat land that wasn’t terribly exciting. Near the end we started heading into the mountains where we passed a huge frozen lake and through a forest filled with dead deciduous trees. We stopped for lunch about ten minutes away from the wall and had lunch at a nice lazy susan restaurant but this one had lots of trees inside and was decorated like a tropical jungle. After lunch we hopped back onto the bus and drove the last few miles up to the wall. We drove to the base of the ridge that the Great Wall was situated on top of. We got into a gondola and took it from the base of the ridge right up to the edge of the Wall. The ride up was pretty spectacular but, since it was winter, the normally lush green trees on the mountains were all dead and brown. The Wall was one of the most amazing things I have ever seen. It was very tall, wide, and snaked across the top of all the mountain ridges until it was out of eyesight. There was a guard tower every 100 meters or so that you had to pass through to walk along the wall. This was the best day that I had on this trip. I was pretty much speechless for the entire two and a half hours we spent on the wall. We walked from the gondola station to the place on the wall where we went down which was about a mile. We even (probably illegally) climbed the outside of one of the guard towers up to the top where we got a spectacular view of all around the wall. There were a lot of steps as the wall went up and down and the steps were uneven and slanted, so you had to always watch where you were going. There was snow in the shadows of the wall which add a beautiful effect, and the mountain range next to us had little watch towers scattered across it. You could look back to the valley we came from and see the small town which we passed through and all the terraced fields above it. We walked around, completely awestruck, until we reached the point where we descended. The best thing about this is that we didn’t walk down, nor did we take the gondola down, but what we did was toboggan down. Not an actual snow toboggan, it was more of a dry bobsled thing where we were on little sleds with wheels and we went down a metal chute that twisted and turned its way down the mountain. I was going really fast until about halfway down when I got stuck behind a man and his son going quite slowly. The good thing about this was that I got to see more scenery. We reached the bottom where we shopped at a small market, buying Great Wall trinkets, for about twenty minutes before piling back on the bus and making the long trek back to Beijing. We arrived at our dinner restaurant, which was another lazy susan dinner with the same chicken, pork, and rice dishes. After dinner we went to a Chinese acrobatic show which was absolutely spectacular. It was in a fancy theater with amazing lights, lasers, smokescreens, and sets. I saw some awesome feats of balance and coordination. I saw about fifteen girls pile on to one bicycle and ride it around the stage, I saw an amazing pile of people and boards piled and balanced up to about thirty feet in the air, and some spectacular vaulting and jumping through hoops. The most amazing thing about this was that there were no safety mats or nets, the only safety equipment they had was for anyone who was over thirty feet in the air and all they had was a small rope. They never even got the rope taught until the person jumped off and they were lowered to the ground. The show lasted about an hour and a half which wasn’t nearly long enough. We headed back to the hotel when the show was all over and we decided to go out and get ice cream. Carson, Spencer, Stephanie, Emily, Katie, and I went out to McDonalds and got some quick ice cream treats. After our snack, we went to the bakery that was near the hotel and picked up some pastries for the morning because we had a very early flight. After picking up some snacks, we decided that it was our last night in Beijing and that we need to embrace the Chinese culture and buy some fireworks. This night was the seventh night of Chinese New Year, and every night we had heard and seen constant fireworks. It almost sounded like a warzone, all day every day, with the noise from the explosions. We found a firework store on the corner which had a huge selection. We were trying to spend a lot of out yuan, because our next stop was Hong Kong where they don’t accept yuan and instead use the Hong Kong Dollar. We bought a big bag and headed for the street. There are no real firework laws in the cities and you just light them off in the middle of the street between skyscrapers. It is all cement and there is nothing that can really catch on fire. We even had a police officer come over and enjoy the fireworks for a bit with us before he strolled off again. After the fireworks, we all went back to the hotel and passed out because our alarm was set for 0345 because we had to depart the hotel at 0430 to head for the airport for out flight to Hong Kong.

We woke up the next morning, tired and groggy, stumbled onto the bus. Surprisingly I stayed up on the twenty minute ride to the airport. This airport check-in wasn’t as smooth as the others because since Honk Kong is separate from China, we had to go through customs and immigration which took a long time because all 96 kids in our tour group were checking-in at the same time. We got through eventually, waited a bit for our flight, we all got on, and I pretty much passed out for the whole 4 hour and 45 minute flight. We landed in Hong Kong around 1130 on a very foggy and cloudy day. Getting off the plane was a shock to me. We went from about 30 degree weather with super dry air to about 80 degree humid weather. For those of you who know me, I do not handle heat and humidity very well, which is unfortunate since I will soon be going to Vietnam, India, Ghana, and Brazil. The only country that won’t be hot and humid will be South Africa. After waiting for everyone to regroup at the end of the airport, we all hopped on busses and rode them back to the MV Explorer docked in Kowloon, which is the closest point of land to Hong Kong Island. We ran onto the ship, threw our bags in our room, then Carson, Sarah, Isaac, and I headed for the Star Ferry to get to Hong Kong. The Star Ferry costs about 30 cents U.S. or 2.50 Hong Kong Dollars. It is about a five minute ferry ride across with stunning views of the city and Victoria Peak behind it. We got off the ferry and decided we were hungry so we set off for a restaurant we had heard about. We hopped on the subway and took it a couple stops to the other side of the city. We got off and found our restaurant which was called The Modern Toilet. It is a pretty funny restaurant where all the seats are toilets and the food is served in fake bedpans and minitoilets. They had all types of food there and I got what is called a hotpot, which is pretty much a big bowl of soup with assorted things thrown in. There is also a fire under it which keeps it hot and the food cooking. In the hotpot there was shrimp, slices of meat, tofu, vegetables, and a whole bunch of unrecognizable stuff, but it was all pretty good. After lunch, we decided to head for the mid-levels escalator, which is the largest stretch of escalators and moving walkways in the world. Hong Kong is on an island which is pretty much just one mountain, Victoria, sticking out of the ocean. This means that the city is built on a hillside and the farther in you go, the higher you go. What they did was build a massive moving walkway and escalator system that brings people up, but it is mostly used by locals going to their apartments away from the waterfront buildings. It is a great way to see a lot of the city. We rode it all the way to the top, and started walking back down, and we made it about halfway until we decided to take a cab because we were taking a really long time and we wanted to get back to the ship to watch the Hong Kong laser show, and then go out to dinner. We hopped in a cab, went to the Star Ferry, rode across, changed, and headed up to the top deck. The laser show wasn’t what I thought it would be, but it was still pretty good. All the buildings lit up in cool patterns and some shot powerful green lasers across the bay. After the light show, we decided to head back to Hong Kong, but this time it was just Carson, Sarah, and I. We got a quick bit to eat at a fast food restaurant and headed back across to Hong Kong. We were going to an area known as Lan Kwai Fong, which was the main bar street of the city. When we got there, it was already packed with SAS kids. We got their fairly late and a lot of people were in every bar and club and hanging out in the street. It was mostly a pedestrian street which made a really good social atmosphere. We got a drink at one bar, socialized, moved to another, and repeated. We stayed for a little bit, then went home with one of the funniest cab drivers that I have ever ridden with. He seemed like a normal guy, and talked on the phone for about half the cab ride, but when he got off, he started driving fast and making high-pitched funny noises. He didn’t really speak any English but he would just repeat everything we said really high pitched and with a Chinese accent. He got us to the ship safely where we got on and went to bed.

The next day I woke up early to try and get a few sunrise pictures over Hong Kong, I think I got a few keepers. Afterwards, I had a nice long breakfast with a few of my friends and we all discussed our plans for the day. When I was done eating I met up with Carson and we got our stuff for the day packed and we headed out for the Star Ferry. We took it across and started heading up through the city to the free zoo and botanical garden. It was a pretty long all uphill climb in hot and humid weather, but the scenery was awesome. This day was a lot sunnier than the previous and Hong Kong has some of the most amazing architecture I have ever seen. We finally made it up to the zoo, and it was a lot better than I had expected. There were monkeys from around the world, tortoises, awesome exotic birds, and some small ground mammals. It was beautiful; it was a small patch of green nature in the dead center of a cement and steel city. It was almost junglesque, with tropical lush trees outside all the exhibits. After looking at the animals for a bit, we took a quick stroll through the botanical garden, which was very nice. There was a beautiful fountain in the center, with small streams and rivers flowing around all the plats. There were a few people there practicing meditation and some sort of Tai Chi. After spending some time there, we headed for the Peak Tram, which is the trolley that goes to the top of Victoria Peak. The trolley ride was incredibly steep; I would say about 45 degrees. The tram needs a big wheel at the top that actually pulls it up the mountain because it is way too steep for any normal wheels. When we got to the top, the view was spectacular. We could see all of downtown Hong Kong and far into Kowloon. Unfortunately, it was very humid and muggy, so the normal air visibility wasn’t terribly far, but it was still amazing. Carson and I started walking to what we thought was a lookout, but it turns out we were on the Dragon’s Back Trail, which is the trail that goes all the way around the top of Victoria Peak. We circled the top of the mountain, getting spectacular views over all sides of the island. After our hike, we hopped back on the tram and headed down the mountain. When we got off, we started meandering our way back down to the Star Ferry, looking for a place to eat. We found one near the harbor area, got a quick bite, and hopped on the ferry. We rode it back to Kowloon and decided to go to the Lady’s Market, in downtown Kowloon. We hailed a cab and headed on our way. We got there and it was extraordinarily crowded. It was just like any other market bazaar with stands everywhere selling miscellaneous items. We both purchased one or two things and then we realized it was time to head back to the ship. We got in another cab and got dropped off at the port. I still had a few Hong Kong dollars to spend so we stopped at a candy store that was near the ship and bought a few treats. We boarded the ship about half an hour before On Ship Time at 1800. When I got back on the ship, I ate dinner and had lots of conversations with all of my friends about all of their China adventures. After dinner, we had to do our second Muster Drill, which took a while and was quite uneventful. The Muster Drill is where you practice going to your emergency lifeboat stations in case there is a disaster. We have to do a few of these on the voyage to make sure that we remember how to do it (it isn’t that hard, but some kids still have trouble). The ship was scheduled to pull out at 2000, right during that night’s laser show. Most of the kids were out on deck while the ship departed from the dock and made its way back out to open sea. When the ship was away from all the lights and sounds of Hong Kong, I went back to my room and fell asleep rather quickly, thus beginning our (only) two day voyage to Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, which afterwards I will update my blog again.

2010-02-15T08:42:00.000-08:00

The crossing from Hawaii to Japan was fairly uneventful and filled with class. We left the night of January 28th and did not get to Japan until February 9th, which was ten whole days at sea. It would have been 11 days, but we crossed the International Date Line which made us lose a day. We went to bed on the night of the 2nd, and we woke up on the 4th, which was a weird feeling. During this crossing, I spent most of my time going to class, reading for class, laying on the deck, and attending various activities such as Salsa Dancing, Spiritual Dance, watching movies, and playing cards. They have a lot of clubs, dance classes, and lectures you can attend to pass the time. Salsa dancing is every B day on the outside deck, which is a lot of fun really difficult to do on a rocking ship. Spiritual Dance is a fun dance where they play one spiritual song, then one modern dance song, and it keeps going back and forth. It is really fun and you have to dance ridiculous and run in circles, and the songs get faster tempo until the end, when the leader puts on a slow spiritual chant, and you relax and meditate for a little bit before it ends.
The weather across was very mixed. The first two days were pretty windy with whitecaps and small swells with storms on the horizon, but it wasn’t too bad. After that we had a few days of nice weather where we could lie out on the deck in the sun which was very nice. Three days before we arrived in Japan, we got an announcement that said that there was a big storm between us and Japan and we would have to go around it. The ship had to divert its course 190 nautical miles around the south end of the storm. We had some really rough swells while we were going around, but they weren’t like the swells we had on our way to Hawaii. Going to Hawaii the swells were big and very uniform, so they rocked the ship in regular intervals. These waves were very choppy and misshapen so they would rock and shake the ship in random directions. Every so often, a big swell would hit us at a strange angle and it would make a big crashing noise that could be heard in any part of the ship. The first time I heard it, it woke me up and I thought that we actually hit something. We were supposed to be 12 hours late getting to Yokohama because of how far we had to go around the storm, but fortunately the weather cleared up on our last day at sea and the captain got the speed back up and made up for lost time. We ended up only arriving around 2-3 hours late.

Japan was absolutely incredible. We had five days and four nights, from 1200 on February 9th to 1800 on February 23rd, to see as much of the country as possible. We pulled into port around 0930 and we had to wait around while they checked all of our customs and immigration forms. They started letting us off the ship around 1030, but you can only get off when they call your “sea.” All the rooms in the ship are part of a sea; it is just the name for your hall or part of your hall. I am in the Mediterranean Sea which is most of the 3rd floor port side rooms. I could get off the ship around 1200 which I did so with my friends from Hawaii: Corena, Elena, and Erin. We got off the ship and we went through a pretty thorough immigration procedure. We had to scan our fingerprints and do a thermal scan to make sure we weren’t sick. If you were sick, you weren’t allowed to get off the ship. No one that I know of was held on the ship due to sickness, the ship is very clean and not many people have gotten sick this whole voyage. After passing through immigration, we were in the main hall of the port building which is just like any other port building; it had seats, kiosks, information booths, and all that. The amazing thing about this building is how it looked from the outside. It was mostly wooden, almost no sharp edges, and you could walk all over the outside of it. It was more of a place for the people of Yokohama to come and hang out and go for runs and walk their dogs than it was a landing place for tourists. We exited this beautiful building and we were right in the heart of downtown Yokohama. The first thing we had to do was go get some Japanese currency, the Yen. We asked around for a bank and we got some very vague directions from some fellow SASers. We decided just to walk down the main boulevard because we thought there had to be a bank somewhere along the way. We found one after walking about two blocks (which were pretty long) and we went inside. It was multiple stories and a lot more complicated than our banks. We found the ATMs in the corner and I tried to withdraw money while my other friends went upstairs to a foreign currency exchange. Right now, it is about 89 Yen to 1 USD. We pretty much simplify it to 100 Yen equals 1 USD. I may have done a miscalculation at the ATM because for a moment I thought that it was 1,000 Yen to the dollar. I tried to withdraw 100,000 Yen, which to my math would have been 100 dollars, but it was actually 1,000. Fortunately, the bank declined this withdrawal, but this also made me scared. I figured the bank had cancelled my card after being used in Hawaii, even though I had called and told them where I was traveling. I ran upstairs to tell my friends and they corrected me on my error. Feeling better, I went down to the ATM and tried to withdraw just 10,000 Yen, but yet again I was denied. Now I was afraid that since I had tried to withdraw such a large amount, my credit card company thought it was stolen and cancelled it. I tried a different card and I was still denied, which scared me even more. I tried to ask people working at the bank what was wrong, but the language barrier was too hard and I didn’t get any information. We decided to try a different bank, which we found quickly, but my cards were still denied. I was starting to feel very uncomfortable being in a foreign country with no money. We just decided to go out to lunch, where I would borrow some money from my friends, and after we would go back to the ship where I had some USD that I could bring to the bank to exchange. We ended up in the Chinatown (ironically) of Yokohama which is filled with pedestrian streets, bright lights, and lots of street vendors. We walked around until we found a good looking restaurant and went inside. We were seated on the second floor (most stores and restaurants are multiple stories in Japan) where our waiter came up and gave us an English menu. Normally in Japan, you only get one menu for everyone at the table which makes things take a little longer. Sit down restaurant meals are supposed to take a long time and are very proper and served in small portions. Our waiter came, who hardly spoke any English, came up and took our order which was a fun experience trying to communicate through hand gestures and pointing at the menu. Fortunately, almost all of the restaurants had their dishes in display in the window and pictures on the menu. We all ordered a dish and shared everything. The food was delicious, we had everything from Shark Fin (I don’t approve of killing the sharks but I figured I had to try it!) to pork and beef in various sauces. This was a Chinese meal, but we figured we still had five days and lots of meals to get traditional Japanese food. After lunch, we decided just to walk around the downtown area of Yokohama and see what there is to see. The Japanese architecture is very beautiful and ergonomic. The buildings are very close together, there aren’t very many zoning laws so houses would be next to stores which would be next to office buildings, and they are built to maximize space. The coolest thing I saw was a parking garage for a residential complex that consisted of a car elevator that would take you car up to a small slot in a steel structure where you would leave it. These were all over which was very cool. As we were walking around, we ran into another group of SAS kids who I told about my money situation. They told me that there were very few banks/ATMs that would accept American cards; one of them was at the post office that was near the ship. We headed straight there and I tried my card and it worked! This made the rest of the day much more enjoyable for me because I didn’t have to worry about how I was going to get through the next five days. After getting money, we headed for the central park in Yokohama, aptly named Yokohama Park. It is really interesting that every major city in Japan is required to have a very large open park in the center of the city to be used as an evacuation area during a major earthquake. The park was beautiful. They had ponds with turtles and coy, fountains, trees, and the little Japanese bridges. There was also the giant Yokohama baseball stadium in this park which was easily bigger than PacBell Park. Baseball is a huge sport in Japan that lots of people love to go and see the games. For the rest of the day we walked around and looked at all the buildings until we went back to the ship to meet our other friend Michael at 2030. We were planning on going out and getting sushi, but by the time we got out of the ship and into town it was about 2100. In Japan, many restaurants close around this time, so no good sushi places were open. We just kept walking around until we found a small restaurant where we got small pork, beef, and even squid dishes. We all tried a glass of hot Sake which is the Japanese rice wine. I thought it was an interesting taste, like white wine with a splash of vodka in it, but after a few sips I decided that I liked it. It was all very good. After dinner we walked along the water to the financial district, where all the really tall buildings were. We ended up just walking around for most of the night looking at the lights of the buildings and the ports. We headed back to the ship around midnight after exploring and taking lots of pictures.
The next morning I woke up around 0900 and had a slow morning packing and cleaning up my room because I was scheduled to meet my travel group at 1230 in the atrium of the ship. At 1230 I met up with my friends Eric, Rory, Candice, Carly, and Kayleigh. We walked out of the ship and met up with a group of three other people that were with two local Japanese girls who were going to show us how to use the Japanese train and subway station. We walked about two blocks into town where we descended into our first subway station. The subway and train maps look extraordinarily complicated, but after you figure out what is going on in the maze of colored lines, it is really easy to figure out. Once we got our tutorial, we bought our tickets, separated from the three other SASers and the Japanese girls, and hopped on the first train to Tokyo. We took the train to the main Tokyo station in the very heart of the city. We got out of the station and started walking around the downtown area. We were trying to find a Tourist Information Center, but we only had a poorly drawn map from a Japanese local, and we never found where it was. We did see two Japanese college students crawling along the sidewalk so we asked them what they were doing. What we picked up from their scattered English was that they were worshiping the train. They said that the train travels so fast and that people take it for granted so they were demonstrating how slow in relation to the train humans go. It was slightly weird, but they were very nice and fun to converse with. We walked around for about 20 minutes and realized there wasn’t a whole lot to do besides look at the giant office buildings. We hopped back on a subway and took it to a district of Tokyo called Shibuya. Shibuya is the big yuppie area of Tokyo. It has a lot of entertainment places such as bars, karaoke, restaurants, and shopping areas. We arrived and the first thing we wanted to do was find a hotel and but down all of our backpacks and other stuff we had been lugging around all day. We looked at a local map and found the closest hotel. It was about two blocks from the main downtown corner of Shibuya which you have probably seen in photos. It is very New York looking with a crosswalk that crosses all the corners of the street. In Japan, it is very against their culture to jaywalk and everybody waits for the green light to cross. At this intersection, when people cross the street, it becomes a sea of people. Fortunately for me, I was about a full head taller than everyone there, so I could still easily see all my friends. Also, I was wearing my red beanie so if people got separated, they just looked around for the “red beacon” above everyone else. The night we got there, it was very cold and drizzly, so we just headed straight for the closest hotel. In Japan, they charge hotel rooms by the person, and in most hotels, they do not allow unmarried men and women to stay in the same room. What we would do was send in two people to book the room, and the rest of us would find the back door to the hotel and sneak in and meet them in the hotel. The first hotel we stayed at was called the Granbell Hotel. It was a very nice and modern hotel with black hallways and bright neon doors. Our room was like any other hotel room, pretty nice, but it had no door in front of the shower, only a see through curtain which made things interesting. After throwing our stuff down in the room and washing up a bit, we exited the hotel and started looking for a place to eat. We walked back to the big intersection of Shibuya, turned up one of the main streets, and then turned on to a small and narrow pedestrian street with lots of shops and restaurants. We were walking around trying to find a traditional Japanese restaurant, but everything in that area was a fusion. We saw Japanese-Hawaiian, Japanese-Spanish, and Japanese-Italian. We ended up at a Japanese-Italian restaurant which I couldn’t find the name of because it was only written in Japanese characters. We ordered pasta dishes that were made of Japanese noodles with Italian sauces served with tea and Miso Soup. It was delicious. After dinner we started walking up and down all the streets around that area. The only store we went into was the Disney Store because we wanted to see how decorated it was. The store was three stories and each story had a different theme; the first floor was Mickey Mouse, second was Toy Story and Pinocchio, and the third story was all the Princesses. It was pretty crazy how detailed the store was. We didn’t spend too much time in there, we just wanted to take a quick look, so after we left we decided to go look for a karaoke bar. This was not hard to find. They are all over Tokyo and other cities in Japan. They are a very popular place for Japanese businessmen to go and have meetings after work which is a lot more fun than a fancy restaurant. Also, the way karaoke bars work is you walk into a main lobby and you rent out a private room where you go up and get your own TV and songbook while waiters bring up food and drink to you. We rented out the room for 2 hours and sang our hearts out. The list of songs they had was amazing; the size of the book they gave us was easily bigger than a dictionary. We looked up a song we wanted in the book, it told us a number, then we entered the number into the karaoke machine and the song would play. The funniest thing was that the English words for all the songs weren’t translated perfectly, so there were some wrong words that were pretty funny. After karaoke, we walked around Shibuya a little more, stopped in a small restaurant bar and got a glass of sake before heading back to the hotel. We turned on the TV before heading to bed and watched a little Japanese television. It was pretty funny. There were some ridiculous Japanese game shows and we turned on the news for the weather and the weather lady stood in front of a map (not a green screen) and held up anime pictures of snowmen for snow and umbrellas for rain and made them dance across the map. Not quite as advanced as I thought that the news would be, but it was very colorful.
The next morning we woke up around 0600, showered, and headed out for the train station. We bought our first bullet train ticket, picked up a quick breakfast at a Japanese bakery in the train station, and went up to the platform to wait for the train to Hiroshima. We had to take the train to Osaka, have a ten minute layover, then continue on to Hiroshima. The trains in Japan are on time to the minute, which is amazing and very reliable. The train pulled up right on time, we got on, and sat in our assigned seats. I was on the aisle seat, my friend Carly was in the center seat, and a sleeping Japanese woman was by the window. The other members of our group were scattered behind us. The train started moving and I didn’t even know it. It was so smooth. I saw the train next to us start moving by the window, so I assumed that it was leaving. All of a sudden, the train ended and I saw that it was actually us that was moving. The acceleration and braking mechanisms are extraordinarily smooth and quiet. The train we were on traveled at about 200 kmh which is about 120 mph. I was trying to take pictures out the window but things were flying by so fast I didn’t have time. About thirty minutes into the train ride, Carly and I were talking and a Japanese woman from one row behind us comes up and asks me where we were from. I told her I was from California and asked her if she had ever been to the United States but she didn’t speak enough English to understand. She went back to her seat and I thought I had embarrassed her, but she came back thirty seconds later with two candies for Carly and I. We said “arigato gozaimas” which means thank you very much. She smiled and bowed and returned to her seat. We ate the candy which was a delicious chewy caramel candy. Five minutes later, she came back with two small burrito looking things wrapped in tinfoil. She handed them to us and said “homemade,” and we thanked her for them. We opened them up and they were thick tortillas, more like brad than tortilla, wrapped around pork and lettuce. It was very good and I turned around, rubbed my tummy, gave her the thumbs up, and said, “Delicious!” She understood that and smiled proudly. This is just an example of Japanese generosity. This was not the only time on the trip that this happened. In Japan, if someone knows how to speak English, they will come up to you and talk and try and help you, but if they don’t speak any English, they will be very embarrassed and walk away. The train ride to Osaka was about two and a half hours, and slightly disappointing because the weather was not that good. We were supposed to see Mt. Fuji from the train but it was too cloudy and gloomy. The thing that struck me the most was that even traveling across half of the country, we never really left urban areas. There were houses and buildings the whole way there, which was actually pretty cool. I liked looking at the smaller, residential districts up in the mountains because they were beautifully integrated into the valleys. We even saw patches of snow at the tops of some of the passes! We arrived in Osaka on time to the minute, got off the train, walked over to the platform next to us, and hopped on the train to Hiroshima. This train ride was only about 40 minutes and not too exciting because a lot of it was through tunnels. We got off in Hiroshima and it was raining pretty hard. I had packed my rain jacket so I threw that on and some of my group members bought cheap umbrellas, which were on sale everywhere. We hopped on the local streetcar and took it to the International Peace Park, right under the epicenter of the atomic bomb. The peace park is on an island formed by a river coming down through the city, and forking about a couple miles from the ocean, creating an island. The US dropped the bomb on this part of the city because the fork in the river was in the dead center of the city and very easy to see from the air. There is also a T-shaped bridge connecting the island with both sides of the river creating a highly visible target. We got off the streetcar, crossed the street, and the first thing we saw was “The A-Bomb Dome.” The Dome was originally called the Hiroshima Prefecture Industrial Promotion Hall and it’s is on the edge of the river, not on the island, but looking across to it, and it is the closest building to the epicenter of the blast that remained standing. It was once a center for art that had a beautiful green copper dome on the top, but now all that is left are a few cement walls and the steel structure that held up the copper dome. This is the only building that has been preserved exactly the way it was after the bombing. We walked around it a few times, and then crossed the T-shaped bridge (which had been rebuilt how it was) onto the island. There were a whole bunch of shrines that were dedicated to peace and all the people that had died. They had a Peace Bell, that when rung could be heard throughout the whole park. The most touching shrine to me was a shrine called the Children’s Peace Monument dedicated to Sadako Sasaki who was a girl who survived the Hiroshima bombing when she was only two. She grew to the age of twelve when she was diagnosed with leukemia and given a year to live. An old Japanese story is that if you fold 1,000 paper cranes, than you will be granted one wish, so Sadako started folding cranes. Sadako died on October 25, 1955 having completed her goal of folding 1,000 paper cranes but her wish did not come true. She had finished her 1,000 back in August, but kept folding more until her death in October. To this day, people still bring cranes to put on display at the memorial in honor of her. Another striking monument was a big mound with the ashes of over 70,000 people inside who had died in the blast. All these shrines were near the fork of the river at the north end of the park, and at the south end of the park was the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum. Between the museum and shrines, there is a long pool of water and a cenotaph with all of the (known) names of the people who died in the blast being covered by a saddle shaped stone monument that is said to represent a shelter for the souls of the victims. The cenotaph also says, “Rest in peace, for the error shall not be repeated.” After walking around the park in the dreary rain (as if it wasn’t sad enough) we entered the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum. We got our ticket and a listening device to tell you about all of the exhibits as you walk around. The museum was done very well, starting out with the history of Hiroshima and why it was a target for the bombing. Hiroshima was a big military industrial city where they were making weapons and it was also where the entire 5th regiment was mobilized. Then it talked about the actual blast. There were two huge dioramas in the center of the main room; one with a layout of Hiroshima before the bomb went off, and one after. The damage done was incredible. The first diorama had at least 300 buildings, streets, bridges, and factories. The next had almost nothing. There were faint lines of where streets used to be, one or two bridges standing, and only about seven buildings. The bomb dropped was known as Little Boy. It was a Uranium fission bomb about 10 feet in length and about two to three feet wide. The bomb had 60kg of Uranium 235, of which only about 1kg actually detonated. This bomb is different from Fat Man, which was dropped on Nagasaki five days later, which was a Plutonium bomb and more powerful. Little Boy, which was an air detonation bomb, detonated 600 meters in the air for maximum damage, about a couple hundred meters south east of the T-shape bridge target at 8:15am on August 6, 1945. The explosion turned the air temperature to about 7,000 degrees Fahrenheit melting all copper and incinerating all the houses (which at this time were mostly made of wood). Fortunately, because of all the air raids over Hiroshima before the nuclear bomb, most of the children were evacuated outside of the city to a nearby valley where they would be kept safe. All the children that were evacuated survived the bomb, but they were all orphaned. It was a squad of three planes that dropped the bomb: one B-29 bomber and two other aircraft carrying survey equipment and cameras. Since it was only three planes, the Japanese thought it was a reconnaissance mission and did not sounds the air raid alarms, so no one went down to their bomb shelters, even though it probably wouldn’t have helped. After all the exhibits on the bomb itself, they showed the after effects on the city and radiation on the people. There were some gruesome pictures of people with radiation sickness and actual pieces of buildings that were melted and torn up. This area of the museum was incredibly depressing and moving. After that section, they talked about the world’s current nuclear situation. The governor of Hiroshima has written a letter protesting every nuclear test after Hiroshima. They displayed every letter ever written and it took up about two whole walls. By this time, the museum was closing so we had to hurry through the rest. We headed outside into the rain and none of us said much. We saw one of the LLCs of someone in our group and he recommended a good restaurant in downtown Hiroshima. We walked through a covered pedestrian street with many bright shops all the way there. We entered the restaurant which was a small, skinny, two story restaurant in the back alley of a side street. There specialty there was called Okonomi-yaki, which is the Japanese version of a pancake-pizza. It is a big doughy oval bread topped with noodles and a dark sauce. You can get different toppings and I got egg, cheese, and green onion. It was very good and I also got a Japanese beer called Sapporo with it. Everyone felt much better after sitting in a warm room and getting some good hot food in us. We finished our dinner and hopped on a streetcar and headed back to the train station. We got on another bullet train and headed for Kyoto. We arrived around 2000 and just checked into the first hotel we saw, which was called the New Miyako Hotel, which was right across the street from the train station. We sent two girls to get a room while we snuck in the back and waited for them. We got to the room, which was much smaller (yet much cheaper) than the first night, but we were all so tired we didn’t really care. Eric, Kayleigh, Carly, and I ran across the street to grab some Japanese snacks, returned to the room, talked for a bit, then fell asleep.
We woke up early the next morning and checked out of the hotel. We hopped on the subway and rode it up to the Imperial Palace. Kyoto was the capital of Japan until 1876, when it was moved to Tokyo. The Imperial Palace was a huge park with wide gravel pedestrian streets and the actual palace in the middle. We walked around the gardens and the trees for a bit before checking out the palace. The front gate was extremely impressive, a big wooden door with the pagoda style roof and painted gold in places. Unfortunately, you need to apply for a permit to actually go inside the palace which we didn’t do. We walked around the exterior of the wall and headed back for the gate we came in. We found a small pond with a Japanese pagoda house and a very traditional bridge which we walked around. It was beautiful. On our way out, we found a visitor center, which is in a building that used to be a house for one of the royal families. We had to take off our shoes and put on sandals they gave us to go inside. The house was very pristine with big wooden rooms, a garden in the middle, and a lot of sliding paper doors. Very traditional. We walked around and saw a photo gallery comparing the palace now to how it was two hundred years ago, which was neat. After exploring in there we took the subway to the biggest Buddhist temple in Japan called Shinshu Hombyo. The biggest building in the complex, The Goei-do, is also one of the largest wooden buildings in the world. One of the traditions before going into a sacred place is you have to wash your hands and mouth in a spiritual fountain outside the temple. This fountain had an elaborate dragon with the water coming out of its mouth into a stone pool. You scoop up the water in copper ladles, and you pour it over your hands and mouth. After washing up, we took our shoes off at the bottom of the stairs and went inside. We were very fortunate to catch the end of a Buddhist service that was going on. We sat in the middle of a huge wooden and golden room and listen to a group of about 20 monks do a beautiful religious chant in front of a big golden Buddha. At the end of the chant, one spoke a short passage from a book, then they all got up and left in complete silence. We weren’t allowed to take any photos inside the temple, but it was beautiful. There were intricate sculptures on the wood and a beautiful shrine set up in front of the Buddha. We left the temple and went into a small family owned restaurant across the street for lunch. It could seat about 15 people, and the six of us with our backpacks almost filled up the whole place. There was no English menu, but the lady who ran it was very excited to have us Americans come visit her restaurant. She told us in very scattered English that their main specialty was bowls of noodle soup with different toppings such as pork, chicken, tofu, and egg. We all ordered a bowl, I got chicken, and it was served to us with a cup of tea. It was great, but it was very difficult to eat soup with chopsticks, but we figured out from watching the only other person in the restaurant that you eat all the stuff in the soup with the chopsticks first, and then you just drink the broth. After we got this warm meal in us we headed back to the train station and hopped on a train to Osaka. When we got to Osaka, it was already night time. We wondered around the streets which reminded me of the Shibuya district in Tokyo. There were lots of bright lights, shops, and a whole bunch of restaurants. That night we wanted sushi, I have only had one bite of sushi in my life before and I didn’t really care for it so I figured I should get some good Japanese sushi. No one in my group is really a big sushi fan, but we thought we should try it anyway. We looked on the map and found a highly recommended sushi place in the Namba district where we were. We walked in, told them we had six people, and they told us to wait for a bit. After about 5 minutes, they told us to take the elevator up to the third floor to eat there. It seems most big restaurants have multiple floors for different purposes. Since we had such a big group, we were sent to the floor where there were mostly Japanese businessmen having meetings. There were a bunch of big, yet private, tables that were only about a foot off the ground where you could sit cross legged, on your knees, or (if you’re like me) you could put your legs under the table where they had a hole so you could sit in the normal sitting position. They gave us a menu with an English translation book (some of the items translated hilariously. For example the description of a drink: Fruit liqueur of the fresh and young taste that I finished without. I used condensed apple fruit juice luxuriously, and using the sugar.) and we picked out some big combo platter plates that we all split between us. To order, we had little buttons on the table, and we would press them and they would send a signal to the hostess who would send a waitress to our table. It was really nice because we could call the waitress whenever we wanted. On our platters were Shrimp tempura, octopus, tuna, squid, eel, some rolls, and many other types of fish that none of us knew what it was. Honestly, I wasn’t a very big fan of any of it, except for the shrimp tempura. None of us really were, but we had a really fun time guessing and tasting, and it was a Japanese experience. After dinner, we exited the restaurant into the freezing cold. We decided we wanted to warm up so we walked around and tried to find a traditional Japanese bar. All the places we saw were big nightclubs or themed bars, but we just wanted a traditional one. We finally saw a small sign pointing to a back alley that said “bar” on it. We started heading back there, and it looked a little bit sketchy and we almost turned around, but we decided to just take a quick peek in and if it was too run down, we would just leave. We looked inside and it was a very long and narrow bar that could seat about a maximum of 10-12 people. It was lit very nicely and there was no one else in there, so we decided to go in and see what the bartender was like. We all sat down, and he looked a little worried seeing six American kids walk into his little bar, but we all ordered a drink and started talking with him. At first he was shy because he hardly spoke English and it was hard to talk to him, but we kept just trying. Apparently, Japan has a very different bar culture, we asked him his name and he said, “Why would you Americans want to know my name?” As if normally people don’t care what their bartender’s name is. Once we convinced him we weren’t the stereotype stuck up Americans and that we actually wanted to learn about Japanese culture, he really opened up to us. He told us his name was Sato, and we asked him about his life, why he became a bartender, what the people are like in Osaka, what is his favorite part about Osaka, and all that. We talked to him for a good hour and a half and decided that we should leave because we were going to take the train to Kobe and spend the night on the ship to save hotel fees. We got back to the station which was only about two blocks away, bought our train tickets, and went to Kobe. We pulled into the Kobe around midnight, and got off at Kobe Station, which (apparently) is not the closest stop to the ship. We looked at a map and saw where the Port of Kobe was where we were told the ship was, and did the five minute walk down to the pier. When we got down to the pier there was no ship… We started getting a little scared because it is normally easy to see the MV Explorer because it has a very bright string of lights that run from the bow to stern over the top of the ship. We decided to walk to the end of the pier and take a look around to see if we could see the lights. We walked all the way down, and about two miles away we could see the bright string of lights on the other side of a group of small buildings. That is when we learned that the Port of Kobe runs along about half the city. We decided to walk the distance because we would only have half of the day tomorrow to see Kobe and we didn’t want to waste any time. We had a really pleasant walk along the wharfs and we saw a bunch of cool boats and hotels and got to the ship around 0045. We boarded, went to our rooms, and crashed in our beds that we hadn’t slept in since we left Yokohama.
We met for breakfast at around 0700 the next morning and the plan for the day was to go up to Arima, which is a small suburb in the mountains behind Kobe, and visit the Onsen (Japanese word for volcanic hot springs). We found out it was very difficult to get to Arima, which wasn’t very far away but it required four train transfers. We may have taken the wrong train once or twice, but we always figured it out by the next stop. The train ride up was beautiful; we were traveling through the Japanese mountains in valleys and passing by small towns. We got off the train and looked around. We had no idea where the Onsen was and we started asking around. We had heard about different types, there was a golden one from all the iron in it and even a clear radioactive one. I wanted to go to the radioactive one but other group members weren’t so excited. It was very difficult finding someone who could speak English because we were in a smaller Japanese town. Eventually we found out that there were a whole bunch scattered throughout the city, and the man circled a few on the map we had. We started trekking up the sloped town of Arima, keeping an eye out for anything that looked like a hot spring. The town itself was beautiful. It was in a valley, sloping upwards, with a river flowing down the middle. The great thing about the river is that it was in a deep cement gorge, built for floods like the LA waterway, with a deeper part in the middle for the normal water flow. Instead of just a straight river down the middle, it twisted and turned in intricate patterns with spirals, bridges, and islands. Following along this, we made our way to the central intersection in the town. We asked directions again and made our way up small, steep, winding roads that were packed with cars squeezing by each other with less than six inches to spare. We ran across some large stone stairs heading up out of eyesight and we decided to follow them because we were curious where they headed. We got to the top of the stairs and found a small shrine. There were plants potted in stone pedestals with water on the top, but overnight, the water had frozen it was beautiful seeing red, yellow, and blue flowers growing out of the ice. The shrine itself was a Buddhist shrine with a golden Buddha in the middle surrounded by other smaller statues, lamps, and candles. After walking around the shrine, we asked for directions again (since we diverted off our last directions to go up the stairs to the shrine) and the man could only point down the road. It turned out that we were only about a block away from one of the best bathhouses in Arima. The way the bathhouses work is by taking super hot water that is heated by the natural hot springs and pumping them into a nicely decorated pool. We entered the house and took our shoes off and put them in small lockers and then we proceeded down a hallway where the girls go to the right and the guys go to the left. This is an actual Japanese bathhouse, not a tourist attraction, which means that there are actual Japanese rules, such as absolutely no clothes allowed in the bath. We walked into the changing room, stripped down, and entered the room with the bath. There was a big wall running down the middle of the room; girls on one side, boys on the other. The bath was more like a big shallow pool that ran along the wall. On the opposite side of the bath and the wall there was a whole wall with little stools, mirrors, showerheads, and soap. You actually have to wash yourself before you get into the bath. You sit on the little stool and you get a bucket and a detachable showerhead. You get yourself wet, soap up, and then fill up the bucket and rinse off. Once you are clean, you can get into the bath. This was hotter than anything I have ever been in before, it probably wouldn’t be legal in the United States. You could sit on the floor of the bath, where the water came up to your neck, or you could sit on the seat, where the water would come up to mid chest, or you could sit on the edge with just your legs in the bath. I tried to sit all the way up to my neck, but I only lasted about thirty seconds it was that hot. I sat on the seat for a while, but even then I was still overheating incredibly fast. I sat with just my legs in the water and finally had to get out, go back to the shower area and drench myself in cold water. I repeated this system about three times before I had to once and for all get out of the heat. While I was dying in the hot water, other Japanese men were sitting in the deep area the whole time while I was getting overheated and cooling myself off. I was in the bath for no more than thirty minutes, but it was the best I had felt the whole trip. My entire body was relaxed and my sore muscles from walking around for the past four days hurt no more. I headed back to the locker room and, of course, I didn’t have a towel and when we had entered the bath house, I assumed they would be in the changing room, but apparently you have to rent them out from the front desk. I spent about fifteen minutes drying myself in front of a fan and with hairdryers before I could put my clothes back on. I headed out and the group all met back up in the lobby of the bathhouse. We went outside back into the freezing cold and wished we could get back in the bath. We headed down to the main intersection where there was a bus stop that would take us directly back to Kobe, without all of the confusing transfers of the train. We saw that the bus was coming at 1250 and since it was only 1200, we decided to get some lunch. We wandered around a few streets, taking pictures, until we came across a rice and noodle restaurant. Yet again, the meal was amazing. I got a rice bowl with pork on top with a side of green tea and Miso Soup. By this point, I had no problem eating plain rice with chopsticks; I am quite proud of my proficiency. We finished our lunch and walked back down to the bus stop, it pulled up as we were getting to the stop and we were about to get on until we were stopped by some lifelong learners. They told us we were getting on the wrong bus, even though I was pretty sure we weren’t, and they told us that this was the slow bus that takes 50 minutes and we should wait for the express bus that takes 30 minutes. We decided to listen to them and wait for the bus they were thinking of. They said that the right bus was supposed to come at 1300, and we waited until 1310, and there was no bus. We asked a lady who was waiting at the bus stop to translate the schedule for us, and as I guessed, the bus we wanted was the one that left twenty minutes ago, and the bus that the lifelong learners were waiting for wasn’t going to come until 1505… We decided that we weren’t going to wait and take the hour long train ride back. The train goes fast, but it is all the transfers that take so long (also one or two wrong trains may have been taken again). We finally arrived back in Kobe a little after 1400 where, for the first time, the group split up. Candice, Kayleigh, and Rory wanted to go back to the ship, get their laptops, and go look for some internet while Eric, Carly, and I wanted to walk around Kobe. It was our last day and we had to be back on the ship by 1800 so we didn’t have very much time. We decided to just walk around the vicinity of the train station, which was where all the main downtown shopping was. We decided to take mostly the back roads and tried to stay away from the touristy areas and we finally stumbled across a (we believe) Shinto temple. It was beautiful and intricate wooden building painted bright red with gold linings. We saw a few people praying and reading from books in the main room and after exploring the outside, we went back to the main streets and slowly meandered back to the subway station. I had some leftover Yen so I bought some snacks to bring back to the ship. I boarded the ship around 1700 and spent the rest of the evening talking to people about their Japan trips and fell asleep pretty early.

We are actually arriving in Shanghai, China tomorrow. The past two days on the ship have flown by and have been filled with school, reading, papers, and writing this blog. Now I apologize for any typos and confusing sentences because I have not and will not have time to go back and proofread this, but I don’t think it’s too bad. We are arriving in Shanghai at 0800 tomorrow and will probably be allowed to get off around 0900. We are spending a week in China and I will update this again after that!

2010-01-29T23:53:00.000-08:00

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!