Someone told me that I haven’t posted recently enough, and you know they might be right…so, here’s an update which is really long!
First, I want to give you a quick thought on Ghana because I just ran through the laundry list of all the things I did there in my last post. Ghana has all of the elements necessary to improve its economic status quickly over the next decade. The people I talked to in Accra seemed hopeful, but at the same time they were cautious in saying that things would inevitably improve. Ghana’s democracy is only 20 years old and inequality could grow between the coastal, urban south and the landlocked, more rural north. The general feeling was that with a little luck and decent government actions over next ten years Ghana will be safely on its way to prosperity!
Okay, now onto Cape Town and South Africa! If you ever thought about vacationing in Africa then you need to put Cape Town at the top of your list (right next to Egypt and the pyramids actually). The city is absolutely gorgeous because the scenery is some of the best in the world. Table Mountain overlooks downtown and is part of a larger chain of peaks that extend several miles to Cape Point (aka The Cape of Good Hope), the most south westerly part of the African continent. There’s also the Kirstenbosch Botanical Gardens and about a thousand other nature involved or extreme sports related activities at hand. That doesn’t even count any of the attractions that a big historical city like Cape Town has or the estates of the nearby wine lands (which I didn’t get to see). So yeah, that’s my marketing pitch for Cape Town!
Okay, so about things I actually did…the first day I walked through downtown for one of my classes and learned a little about the history of Cape Town. My favorite stops included the Fort of Good Hope, City Hall (which is an arts center now), the Company Gardens, and St. George’s Cathedral. Our guide made it pretty clear that Cape Town is a little different from most of South Africa. There’s more mixed history, which includes a different ethnic makeup (a huge majority are colored, which is politically correct to say in South Africa) than the rest of the country. Cape Town’s province, Western Cape, is also the only region of the country governed by a party other than the dominant African National Congress (from the little I learned I’d be a member of the opposition party, the Democratic Alliance). The first day was good introduction to Cape Town.
The next morning I woke up and headed to Robben Island with an SAS trip. Robben Island was the location of the prison that housed anti-apartheid leaders like Nelson Mandela or (can’t remember his first name) Sobukwe. During the day we toured the island, the prison facility, saw penguins (oh yeah!), and talked to an ex-politcal prisoner who works at the museum now. It was really cool to hear his perspective on South Africa today and what progress has or hasn’t been made since apartheid’s end. Interestingly enough, even though freedoms have increased since the end of apartheid (and let me be clear, no one would go back), I was told several times during the week that the apartheid government was better at implementing its policies, better governed (at least for now), and better at keeping unemployment low. It’s shocking to think that an inhumane system like apartheid had benefits. Which is why the ex-political prisoner we talked to, Zozo, says thanks to all the foreigners he leads on tours through the prison. I wasn’t alive, so, I never realized how influential foreign pressure and divestment was in ending apartheid until I talked to Zozo. I’d always assumed apartheid was dysfunctional mess, but it partially worked when the international community turned a blind eye (which is sobering food for thought).
Okay, so, aside from those thoughtful comments I had a great time on Robben Island. While we there, had meals cooked for us by a woman named Josey (which involved Malay and Indian food, a barbecue, and a solid breakfast), and we slept in the guesthouse of the house used by the warden when the island was still a prison. I had hoped we might sleep in a prison cell or something cool like that, but I won’t complain. That bed is probably the softest thing I’ll sleep on this entire voyage…ahh.
After I got back from Robben Island, I headed to Table Mountain with one of the girls from our group named Tommie. Unfortunately, we were pressed for time and had to take the cable car up instead of hiking (which is the right way to do it according to the shipboard community). The views from the top were still amazing! Table Mountain is 1000 meters above the city and the ocean, and there were canyons and trails all across the top that you could explore (it really is like a table, a small city could fit up there). Sometimes a cloud hangs over Table Mountain and locals call it the tablecloth. The plants were also nifty and different. Little known fact, Cape Town has a unique floral region that only extends 50 kilometers inland from the coast. For those of us who aren’t botanists…there are only 6 floral regions in the world. Cool, huh? Oh, this from Table Mountain.
From the cable car station below Table Mountain, Tommie and I headed to Kistenbosch Botanical Gardens to attend the last day of Cape Town’s summer concert series. Since they had just hosted an international music festival, we heard the Cape Philharmonic play underneath solos by several classically trained singers with European sounding names. It was beautiful and romantic; too bad I don’t have a girlfriend…Tommie and I were joined by Jira, her boyfriend Nat (who flew to Cape Town for her birthday), Nat’s friend Antonio, and Sophia (who is another friend on the ship I might not have mentioned). If you ever get the chance to hear the Cape Philharmonic or see Kirstenbosch then do it, preferably together.
Later that night we headed to dinner and met up with Stephen and some other friends to eat Thai for Jira’s birthday. Stephen told us about his experiences bungee jumping and shark diving from the two days before, which sounded pretty awesome (to Stephen’s parents: the video of him jumping is pretty cool, you should watch it when we get back).
Okay, fast-forward one day and most of us who had been at dinner the night before headed out with a local tour company to see the highlights of the cape area. We drove through the Clifton beach area, which I was told multiple times by different people is, “The place to see and be seen.” Anyway, our first real stop was Hout’s Bay (I got a cool video of guys forming a fish passing relay J) and from there Chapman Road. Chapman Road was built along the cliffs around the peninsula heading towards the Cape of Good Hope (it was an engineering marvel at the time it was built). Most of the drive has sheer cliff face on one side and sheer drops on the other side. It’s an extremely safe road, but every view is definitely movie worthy.
From there we visited Cape Point Park where we visited the Cape of Good Hope and got some cool pictures standing on the edge of the world. No big deal. We had to hike and then bike from there to reach our lunch stop on the tour. The bike ride was exciting, but I wish it was a little longer just to take in more scenery. Lunch was at the Park Visitor’s Center where we were joined by three hungry baboons. It was interesting because you weren’t sure whether you should hide or stand five feet away and take pictures (I chose the latter before one baboon tried to chase me). The baboons had me seriously nervous the whole time because apparently they have a nasty habit of attacking people with food. You can imagine the feeling you have when you’re staring at a baboon on the roof above you that only seems to have eyes for your food…
Next we dealt with some more amicable animals: African penguins! They were kind of cute, no doubt about it. There might have been a couple hundred penguins on the beach, which was really cool. It was definitely not your normal day at a zoo, especially since one penguin was sitting under the stairs on the boardwalk waiting to bite anyone who walked down. After fighting traffic heading back to Cape Town, we ended our tour and showered. Our group headed to an Indian restaurant called Masala Dosa on Long Street (which is like Bourbon Street, only not quite as exciting I’ll bet). It was fun to walk around and then I headed back to the ship for some shut eye before my class field trip the next day.
For my Politics of Development class we visited an NGO, Operation Hunger, which works to improve child nutrition in the outlying townships around Cape Town. We visited Capricorn Township, which has had an influx of foreign refugees over the past ten years. This has caused tensions with the local residents who have made money by renting out their backyards to let newcomers build shacks for shelter. Capricorn is a relatively new project for Operation Hunger, so, I helped make plots for the new community garden they’re growing (in soil that is mostly sand, which I don’t quite understand, but apparently it works). Another group helped local women cook that day’s lunch. In the afternoon we helped weigh kids and measure their arm circumferences and heights as reference points to see if Operation Hunger is having success. Overall the experience was everything I had hoped it would be, and I’d love to go back and volunteer with them or work in a similar organization at some point. Other than a visit to the V&A Waterfront (a really swanky mall near our ship that we had been going to in the evenings for dinner or groceries), that was it for the fifth day.
Finally, on our last day in Cape Town I went with a group to Mfuleni Township where we spent the day working with Habitat for Humanity. The groups before working before us that week had been painting finished houses, so naturally, our group was tabbed to fill house foundations with sand and level it out before they poured concrete slabs (which I understood because of helping build the patios at home, thanks Mom and Dad!). It was a ton of hard work (very possibly a literal statement), but we finished filling foundations for seven of the eight houses they were starting and we saved the subcontractors two days of work. Our work leader, Rob, has been involved with Habitat for two years and he said they’d built 460 houses in that time in Mfuleni Township alone, with only 40 left on the waiting list. That’s about 4 to 5 houses a week, which is awesome… I was planning on heading out for the last couple hours before the ship left, but I crashed hard after I showered. South Africa (at least the Cape Town part) is amazing, and I’d love to come back someday. I guess that’s why it’s an adventure, memories I’ll never forget…
P.S. It has come to my attention that WKU won the Indoor Sunbelt Track Title, congrats!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Hey everybody!
I thought I’d take a break from telling you about Brazil and give you an update on what’s been happening around the ship. Or really what just happened this morning. Semester at Sea has a tradition every time a voyage crosses the equator for the first time on the open ocean (we already crossed it sailing the Amazon River). It’s called Neptune Day, and people who’ve never sailed across the equator (which is almost all of us) are treated to a little ceremony.
First, we were woken up early in the morning by members of our crew banging drums and blowing whistles while dressed in togas. After that, we had fish guts poured over our heads and we jumped into the pool on-board to rinse off. We also had to kiss a fish. Plus, everyone had the option of shaving their heads. Being the rebel that I am I decided to go for it (sorry Mom, it’ll grow back). Tonight, some friends and I are signed up for a five course meal to celebrate a birthday.
This is how you pass ten days on a ship the size of a high school by the way; by doing things you didn’t really plan for. It keeps you from getting cabin fever, but hey, that’s why it’s an adventure…
P.S. I figure the ship's bandwidth can handle one compressed photo right?
Well everybody, sorry for the long intervals between posts, but I’ve been catching up on sleep and class work since Brazil. Oh, speaking of Brazil, it was awesome! So awesome, that I’ll be splitting my post about it in two…so, here it goes.
The MV Explorer sailed up the Amazon River for a few days until we reached Manaus which is where the Amazon forms between the meeting of the Rio Negro (which has black water) and the Solimoes (which has brown water). This juncture is called the Meeting of the Waters because the two rivers flow together, but don’t mix. The first thing my group (the one I traveled to Rio de Janeiro with) did was get on boat and motor downriver from our port to the Meeting. It really is as nifty as people say because the rivers hardly mix (due to temperature, density, and some other factors I’m told).
After this point our guides took us out into the marshes between the two rivers on motor canoes. We didn’t see anything absolutely amazing nature wise, but it was definitely sobering to see houses floating on and built along the water. Some were actually nice, but a couple of the houses were leaning a foot to one side and people were still living in them. I took a few pictures until I realized people were actually home, at which point I got really embarrassed. I certainly wouldn’t like people taking pictures of my home simply because it showed how poor I was…
So, after that sobering moment, we got to see some cool things in the marshes, several birds, a gigantic colony of ants carrying leaves to a tree, and a caiman (which is related to alligators). I actually spotted one of the caiman. From there we returned to the port in Manaus, and since we had finished an hour and a half early (it was still a long outing) we had time to explore Manaus before we had to be ready for our plane flight to Rio de Janeiro.
I definitely wish I’d had more time in Manaus because the parts I saw were really interesting. Right out of the port there are street vendors everywhere because it’s the heart of downtown. There were several blocks of stores and street vendors actually, which is super interesting consider how dead the downtowns of some cities are in the United States. We passed a cathedral in the middle of a park downtown which was having mass when we passed by and a few blocks up we saw the Téatre Amazonas. This is the opera house in Manaus, which like most of the other really nice European style buildings was built during the rubber boom in the early 1900s. It seems like your average neoclassical building until you look at the dome on top. It’s a mosaic that looks like the Brazilian flag and has other bright colors.
It was at the opera house that I and two other guys from SAS met some high schoolers from Manaus. They knew some English words, and we were able to gesture the rest. They taught us a few words in Portuguese, we laughed at how weird both our sets of names were, and everyone exchanged e-mails. Brazilians are extremely friendly (at least the ones I met) and I’m looking forward to a future where Brazil has more influence and contact with the USA.
After exploring Manaus a bit, I got showered and packed for the flight to Rio de Janeiro. We flew out of our airport at 12:30 AM and because of the time zone changes, we reached Rio at 6:30 AM. Except for the two and a half hours of sleep I caught on the plane, I didn’t close my eyes until one the next morning.
So, our guide in Rio took us to Copacabana (a few blocks from our hotel), but we didn’t hit the beach. Instead, we hiked up a steep hill near the end of the beach into a former favela. It’s now known as the Babilonia/Chapeau Mangeira community. This was the most inspiring place I was able to visit in Brazil. There was obviously a lot of poverty; people lived in units, only about a third of the size of my home, built of bricks and other easy to obtain materials. The catch here though is that, according to my guide (who grew up in Babilonia) this community is heavily involved in improving its lot.
They’ve made deals with the city to gain some electricity and sanitation services, and they’ve built a water storage setup to help with sanitation in the community. They also host a university from either Switzerland or Sweden that built a green roof over their community center to help keep the building cool and catch rain water. In that community center they have an after school program staffed by teachers who are paid by the tours they give to groups like SAS. And, the reason they have so many tour groups visit this favela lies in the half the community’s name – Babilonia.
You see, Babilonia, when it was founded as a favela in the early 1900s, was named after the hanging Gardens of Babylon. The hillside where they built the community was Atlantic forest (of which only 7% remains on the Brazilian coast), and they’ve preserved a large chunk of it for tours. There are even monkeys, so, it’s not your typical trail. After walking through the trail and stopping at an overlook of the city (it was spectacular) we headed down from Babilonia and out to our bus (I’m not really sure it could have driven the road up to the community).
I walked around the city for a couple of hours with some others, and we ate lunch along the way. I had a cheese and meat pastry of some kind, which was awesome. And a note to any travelers in Brazil, you need to be on the lookout for Pao de Queijo. They’re fluffy little cheese rolls that are very difficult to stop eating. Once we had eaten, my group set out to find a good deal for tickets and travel to the futbol match being played that night. And that’s where I’m leaving you all for now…
P.S. Again sorry I haven’t posted more pictures. I fully intended to in Rio, but it cost money to use our hotel’s internet, and I didn’t really have time to log on anyway.
If a picture is worth a thousand words, then this is needs to be a long post...however, I’ve been busy. This post is basically from an e-mail I sent back home. Sorry, if it seems a little thrown together. Dominica is the most gorgeous place I've ever been to (at least based on beauty density). The island is 16 miles across and maybe 40 miles long, and it has 365 rivers coming off the mountains. The island was volcanic and is made of mountains almost 5,000 feet tall. The island just shoots straight out of the water when you see it! The indigenous name for the island (Dominica has the largest indigenous population in the Caribbean at 3,000ish) is Waiti Kubuli, which means "tall is her body". The mountains are also the reason the rainforest is still mostly intact because they couldn't grow sugarcane there.
Anyway, I went with some people to Ti Tou Gorge on the first day. They filmed part of the second Pirates of the Caribbean there. It's basically a slit in the ground with a river flowing through, so, you can swim back a couple minutes (without being able to touch the bottom half the time). One of our professors told us that the gorge wasn't carved by the water, but was just a large volcanic rock that cracked when it cooled, and then filled with a river. After getting lunch in Roseau (the capital of 20,000 people) we headed to a place called Victoria Falls (it was an hour drive and another hour hiking up the river bed to the falls). That was cool because the waterfall is on a circular cliff, so, it falls across the face of one side of the cliff in to a huge pool. We did all of that independently, and it got pretty expensive (I spent about $50 on all of it) with taxis and guides, but it was still cheaper than going with SAS. Getting to Victoria Falls was difficult, once we left Roseau every road had long stretches like the palisades along the Kentucky River, except that their roads are steeper and there are more switchbacks. Building infrastructure in Dominica is probably a lot like building infrastructure in Eastern Kentucky, but if they could improve access to their major sights (which includes marked trails because there aren't many except for one trail that spans the whole island) it would be an awesome place to visit.
The next day Stephen and I were in a group that hiked to Middleham Falls with SAS. Our guide was 40 year old, who told us to call him Bushman. The hike to the falls was steep and mildly dangerous towards the end, but he got us all there. A lot of people did a forty foot jump into the pool below the falls, I mostly watched and took pictures of one the girls I've met while she did the jump (she's from Trinidad, there's so much diversity on this ship!). I did get in and swim for a while, and I jumped off a spot 15 feet up without any problems, so, it was pretty cool. On the way out of the forest a rainstorm came through and drenched everyone, it's amazing how much water the canopy in a rainforest catches though because for a while I thought we'd stay dry while we hiked. After that our group went back to the ship and we ate lunch (it was around 2:00 or 2:30) at a restaurant near the port. They served pig snout, but I decided to stick with the pastry full of tuna salad. After meeting with some other people and hearing their stories we got back on the ship to avoid the line that forms the last hour and a half before we have to be on the Explorer.
Dominica was an amazing couple days filled with a lot of sightseeing and riding around in buses or taxis with people. The places were beautiful, and I think I’ve gotten the hang of travelling by cab. My main goal in Brazil will be to talk to as many people as I can. As beautiful as sights can be, the people that take you to those sights are way more exciting. That’s why it’s an adventure…
P.S. I can’t wait until I can post some pictures from an internet connection in Brazil! Oh, and location update: We’re sailing up the Amazon River as of a couple hours ago…it’s so wide I can’t see either side, but the ocean water and river are mixing different colors. It’s kind of cool.
