When I was a child, I thought that I could see the other side of the world across the ocean.

I never believed myself to be superhuman in this endeavor; on the contrary, I believed that it was something everything but my (at that naïve age) old mother with her ‘failing eyesight’ could see. It was only just sitting on the horizon; a whole new experience just waiting to be reached. Sitting on the beach by my grandparents' house in New Hampshire, the world seemed so small—if I hopped on a boat I could be in another continent by noon, and there were no doubts in my mind that I would someday make that trek...

Tuesday, March 20, 2007

3/20/2007- Dreams (Indian Ocean)



It’s funny because all my friends are asking about the ‘cruise’ and the ‘lack of work’, but the truth is that we don’t have a single day off this entire semester. We don’t have weekends here, and the days off class are all either events of the ship or when we are in port where we get even less sleep hen when we are onboard the ship. I’ve never been so emotionally And physically drained as I am after leaving port. You can’t imagine the effect this is having on people; we literally don’t have a moment to look back and say ‘wow’ because you are either in class, studying, or running around the next part of the world. Sometimes I’ll try and step back before bed and think about where I am, but it seems so surreal. Like now, I’ve always wanted to go to the Indian Ocean after hearing about it as a kid. I’ve always wanted to step on all seven continents. Well, I’m staring at the Indian Ocean right now and I’ve hit two continents in the last three weeks alone, with the third coming up in five days.

It’s like we’re living a dream and in a dream you never realize that it’s a dream, you just keep watching and learning and remembering until you wake up; but by then it’s over and you can’t go back. Everything that’s happened, the things that are happening to me right this minute, are things that I will remember for the rest of my life. I remember when I looked at the stars in Brazil and thought to myself ‘well, this is a moment in my life that I will remember until the day I die’, but it was just another memory, the impact not hitting me until I had a moment to step back later. I’m realizing these things, realizing I’m seeing the universe in pain, suffering, life, death, and hope; but it’s so hard to make them seem real.

Thursday, March 15, 2007

3/15/2007- Scents (Port Louis, Mauritius)



The Mauritian air was heavy with the scent of molasses.

That was the first thing that any of us noted about the new world we had just embarked upon. It’s funny, because each place that we entered had a distinct scent to it—whether it was the pungent scent of urine and sweat in Brazil, the scent that can only be called ‘Caribbean Paradise’ in Puerto Rico or the old smells of Cape Town, you knew how far you were away from home not by the sights or sounds, but by the amazing smells that you never noticed before. It makes me wonder whether or not I will notice one upon my return to the United States—perhaps there was something there all along that only getting away will ever show you. I am eager to leave the ship in San Diego in two months time and see the changes that I notice in the place I once called home.

Saturday, March 10, 2007

3/10/2007- Interlude in the Form of a Letter Home (Indian Ocean)



But these things, in all honesty, have blended together in my mind. I experienced so much that it’s impossible to put down in words what any of it was like or what it means. For the first time I understand what the alumni truly mean when they say that you simply know how to talk to the people at home, as much as you miss them. It’s as though there are two separate lives that we have the chance to experience—there’s the us at home that misses our friends, our cars, our families and our foods. Yet there’s also the person on our voyage, who travels—the person who, in a little less than a month, has undergone the biggest change in our life. One of the comedians the other night put it best:

“How do you call home and talk to your mother? She’ll ask what you did that day and how do you respond? ‘Well, I woke up to see the sunrise over the open ocean, ate breakfast with the Archbishop of South Africa, took my morning class with one of the top professors in the United States, had lunch while sunbathing under the equator, spent the afternoon by the poolside while drinking smoothies in my bikini while reading a few pages for homework, had dinner with my friends from Hawaii and China and Taiwan before going to the comedy show and pub night.’ Or even better, when we’re in port. ‘Well today we got up, hiked the tallest peak in all of Africa with the old mayor of Cape Town, went sky diving in the country with the longest freefall, ate dinner in a township restaurant and then found a neat hotel that was cheap in the winelands so we could spend all evening tasting the finest wines of all Africa and not worry about coming back to the ship afterwards’. That’s not fair to your mother, or anyone else. What do they respond back, ‘Yeah, well, um, Jim came over today...’”

This isn’t meant as a slight or as boasting at all. I just want you to understand why I’m not talking about the experiences I’ve had. I still haven’t digested at all what happened in Brazil, so how can someone so detached from this reality even hope to comprehend? I feel bad writing these letters as I feel that they often seem as though I’m taking this for granted or am showing off. I’m really not trying to, I promise, it’s just impossible to put on paper all that happens in our minds; so I have to try and put down a shadow of how we are living.

Friday, March 9, 2007

3/9/2007- Racial Divide & Hope (Cape Town, South Africa)


How can you describe a moment in time that changes your life?

How about an hour in time, or a few days? Does that make it easier to put into words? Or how about writing a realization, gathered over a short time? Can you even tell someone, over the phone or instant messaging them, what it’s like to be a completely different person than you were when you left only a few weeks before?
When speaking with my parents on the final day docked in South Africa, I ran into this problem. I wanted them to understand me, to feel the same I did, to cry like I cried—but they didn’t. They didn’t even show much emotion other than to be proud when I told them how I’d managed to climb Table Mountain and swim with the Great White Sharks. But then again, how do you explain to someone something that you can’t even explain yourself? I can’t even tell my diary how much emotion I felt while speaking with our colored cab driver, listening to him tell of how he had been beaten and gassed and discriminated against, only to learn to love the people who did it to him in the end. I can’t write about how the kids in the townships had hope written in their eyes, a glimmer that we rarely see even in our own privileged children. I can’t say how I personally felt while I watched the land disappear on the horizon, knowing that if I ever returned to this place which changed my life, it won’t be for years and years.

Coming into port was like something out of a dream. In the freezing pre-sunrise air of the Atlantic I stood with my friends watching as these mountains, the likes of which I have never seen in my life, grew larger and larger with all the colors in the universe dancing behind them. We had been told numerous times that Africa is where all of us originated from, but for the first time I understood what was being said. My first thoughts were that if every single person died in this world, I knew that the sun would keep rising just like that and everything would be alright. Even just seeing the horizon was comforting in a way that can only be described as a homecoming of sorts—although I am by no means a world traveler, I can say with blunt honesty that the sunrise over the mountains in Cape Town was the single most beautiful and comforting sunrise in the entire world. I pity the fact that only six ships a year carrying passengers experience coming into this city in the manner that we did; the few thousand that have the experience we were lucky enough to have are too few and far between.

Tearing my gaze from the skyline for a moment, the next evident thing were the hundreds of tiny boats near us, all fishing in the early morning light. Unlike Brazil, in which the people would point and stare as they spoke in rapid Portuguese behind our backs, the people on the boats began to wave and cheer. Like I had been conditioned to do in the prior port and my experience living out of the country this summer I began to think of these people as mocking; prepared to begin calling us all ‘Bush-lovers’ and ‘American scum’ as soon as the ship moved past. As we went through the preparations to enter the country, I mentally prepared myself for more of these attacks. Moving out into the new yet old land a few hours later with a township tour group, I braced myself.

What I experienced over the next week, however, shattered my vain illusions. As a craft seller from Kenya told us when we stopped for an hour to speak with him after closing, how can they mock us for things that they are working to overcome themselves? How can they insult us for discrimination and racism when they only just ended it and are working to reverse the lasting effects? Sure, none of them care for Bush or the war in Iraq. But unlike in Brazil and Spain, they knew that the citizens were not Bush. They realized that we were just as unhappy with the situation as a whole, but change does not come quickly. He told us how they loved Americans in South Africa because the few that they got were the ones who wanted to venture out of their comfort zone, not indulge their luxuries. We were accepting of the differences and willing to lend a hand, not afraid to venture into a country many have left for dead.

Why else would the children in the townships, born into a world in which their parents were discriminated against and thrown aside, hug us and follow us as though we were movie stars? Why else would families stop on the side of the road to wave and talk with us, despite their other engagements? Why else would we feel so comfortable and so at home in a place that is like nothing we had ever seen before? I’ll be the first to admit that I had never felt as relaxed as I did in the townships. After all the warnings not to venture into them I had been expecting something reminiscent of Bronx or Harlem, not a community of people who lived in such poverty yet never had a smile leave their faces?

Later in the week, I joined in with some people who I met heading down to Boulder Beach. We hailed a cab and loaded in, not sure how long the drive was or if our driver would be kind enough to show us the sights as many others did. At first he put on a DVD of reggae music, swaying gently to the rhythm. It was only when we passed a small colored neighborhood that he turned it off and asked what we knew about South Africa. Feeling on the spot we explained what we had learned in Global Studies, citing the Archbishop’s words. What happened next caught all of our attentions—he scoffed. He told us about how, although what Father Tutu had done was admirable, he didn’t understand what it was like to live as a colored person in this day and age. Over the hour drive he took detours, pointing out to us where he had lost his friends to gunfire, been beaten near death by the police and been tear gassed while in class. He told us how he had lost forty of his fifty classmates and friends to the struggle before apartheid ended, how he had been beaten for entering white areas and how he had not been able to hold a job other than a sign holder on the hot pavement.

As one of the members of our group was black (by our standards—he was surprised to learn that he would be considered colored for his stringy hair in South Africa), the driver was shocked to see how we interacted. We told him how at home we had friends who were black that we consistently went out with, and how one of the girls even had a black boyfriend. He laughed and told us that we would be dead, without question or thought, if we were in South Africa behaving in this manner, even today. His passion for teaching us about the truth was evident by his slamming on the wheel and yelling at times, making us feel lost and selfish for having homes and safety.

There was a bumper sticker that I saw on my last day in South Africa on a beaten car heading into ‘Kill Me Quick Town’, or Lavender Hills. ‘For Everything, Give Thanks’, it read. For me this was the most inspiring moment of the entire stay. Despite having nothing at all, these people were happy to simply be free. It doesn’t matter to them if they have the newest videogame or the latest issue of Cosmo. It doesn’t matter if they have a mansion or a boat or a convertible. To them, freedom is the greatest gift of all.

That is how I will tell my friends and family about this journey. Not by my own words, but by those of a peeling sticker in the back of a forgotten car.

Thursday, March 8, 2007

3/8/2007- Inches from Shark Week (Cape Town, South Africa)


On my last day in South Africa I went cage diving with the Great White sharks. The cage looked as though it had been thrown over a cliff fifty or sixty times—there were bars broken and bent everywhere. Yet, without care or thought, we slipped into wetsuits, donned snorkels that we ended up throwing back on the deck and jumped into the cage. Like the biggest idiot of them all I went in first and was pinned in the corner of this tiny cage, crammed in with three other people. You don’t have to be claustrophobic to feel as though you are facing death at this moment. The waves periodically splashed over the top of the bars giving us no air to breathe all the while people were kicking and being thrown about into one another due to the strong currents. I couldn’t move at all, was braced by holding onto these bars on the top, could only breath periodically when the waves went down, and on top of it all the water felt about the temperature of the Antarctic. So whenever they would say to dive down to look at a shark, we would be plunging our faces into a bucket of ice.

Fortunately, you don’t much care about the cold when National Geographic is an inch in front of your face in much more vivid colors than even an HDTV can provide.

The first time our guide said ‘dive’, I pulled myself under—and was face to face with Jaws. Great White Shark, king of the oceans, oldest killer in the world... these things all cross your mind. And since there was a bit of chum which had floated next to my face, he was staring at me like I was a seal and thus a shark burger at his local McDonalds.

They really do have sharp teeth, by the way.

So the second time a shark comes by, the captain manages to have him ram straight into the cage, literally inches from us. Oh fun, the killer of the world running into us while the bars look ready to give any minute and there are two other sharks perusing the area! It is just like you see on National Geographic during Shark Week—literally because it’s the same sharks. This was the bay that they do the filming on since there are something like a thousand Great Whites on the bottom of this 100-foot deep bay. The water isn’t nearly as clear as you’d think though; the sharks have to be right there to see them. That’s why all of them on the TV are close up.

In total I think I saw four sharks in the cage, and a few more from the ship—maybe fifteen total, including possible multiple sightings of the same sharks. The most amusing moment, however, came when a baby shark bit the chum straight off the line and the captain pulled it in while muttering ‘well, this has never happened before...'. Something you never should hear the captain of a cage diving tour say out loud.

Friday, March 2, 2007

3/2/2007- World's Sunrise (Cape Town, South Africa)



Coming into port in Cape Town was like something out of a dream. In the freezing pre-sunrise air of the Atlantic I stood with my friends watching as these mountains, the likes of which I have never seen in my life, grew larger and larger with all the colors in the universe dancing behind them.

We had been told numerous times that Africa is where all of us originated from, but for the first time I understood what was being said. My first thoughts were that if every single person died in this world, I knew that the sun would keep rising just like that and everything would be alright. Even just seeing the horizon was comforting in a way that can only be described as a homecoming of sorts—although I am by no means a world traveler, I can say with blunt honesty that the sunrise over the mountains in Cape Town was the single most beautiful and comforting sunrise in the entire world.