Refueling

Refueling

(Written yesterday afternoon…) We arrived this morning just before dawn at Las Palms, in the Canary Islands, for a brief refueling stop, and just as I began writing this we began to depart.  No one has been off the ship: it's in fact the next-to-last day for a lot of courses, with many having exams or last preparations for exams, so folks are busy.  And tired, and emotional ,or getting ready to be emotional, because we are getting near the voyage's end.  There is still much ahead of us, though—one of our most exciting stops, perhaps, in a couple of days (Morocco), then an intense three days before arrival in the UK.  So it behooves us all to summon what energy we have. We are picking up speed just now, the yachts and hotels passing my office window more quickly, and that seems a good image for the state of the voyage.

a little quieter

Maybe I'm just projecting my own little weariness, but it has seemed to me that everyone on board has been a little quieter since we left Cape Town about 48 hours ago.  There would be a number of possible explanations:
1) South Africa offers a collection of intensities like no other port: some have to do with the country's painful racist history; some have to do with the country's painful economic present; some have to do with its astonishing beauty, from Table Mountain to the game reserves; some have to do with various aspects of 'adventure travel.'  I don't think anyone came back to the ship other than exhausted.
2) We are in any case on the home stretch, with everyone having a lot of work to do--in a typical semester we'd be just around Thanksgiving or well past spring break--and everyone recognizing too that we are near the journey's end.
3) Archbishop Tutu left us to go home, taking with him his own splendid laughter but also the billows of applause associated with his every public appearance.
4) On our first night out of Cape Town we had some heavy seas: it's hard to know how much of the subsequent fatigue has to do with the rolling itself, with medications various of us took to mitigate the effects of the rolling, or just with lost sleep as a consequence of the rolling.
5) And today there are of course the somber feelings and thoughts associated with the news from Brussels.  This is, unlikely as it may seem for a cruise ship in the sun on lovely seas, a place where people think.  And nothing is quieter than that.

towards Cape Town

Our time in India made a powerful impression, necessarily, on everyone who visited there—I don't think that's an exaggeration—and our one-day stay in Mauritius introduced most of us to a magnificent place we'd known little about.  We have had since then slightly rougher seas, not too bad but unfortunate in their timing because we've had a couple of new arrivals, and because it's a challenging time for a lot of students academically.

As for the new arrivals: Archbishop Desmond Tutu, a Nobel Prize-winner and genuine hero of our time, has arrived with his wife, Leah.  They will be with us until our next port, Cape Town.  Heads turn towards them in precisely the way I recall seeing heads turn towards Jackie O when I was at an Alvin Ailey performance in New York with a teacher of mine years ago.  Tomorrow is a No Class Day—these appear intermittently on the voyage calendar as breaks and study times—and the Archbishop will make his big public appearance for the voyage tomorrow afternoon in our one large room, The Kaisersaal, which fits all of us passengers at once.  His words are eagerly awaited.  I think I speak for many when I say that I find it deeply moving just to be in his presence.  What might distinguish me is how much relief and pleasure I am deriving from the presence of another new arrival, Professor John Bugbee, who has arrived to take the place of the Religious Studies professor who left us early in the voyage because of a health matter in his family.  I know Professor Bugbee to a brilliant teacher and scholar but share in everyone else's mild pity for his having to integrate himself into a community that has already shared so much.  He'll be wonderful at that, I think.

As for the challenges: We have held yesterday and today the 16^th meeting of each course on board, putting us 2/3 of the way through the voyage's classroom sessions.  Lots of courses have had exams and/or papers due in these last few days.  The exhaustion that comes from ambitious travels in the ports and time at sea does make it hard, sometimes, to rise to the academic occasions.  But the faculty have been deeply impressed by how well and consistently the students on board have so risen.

We zip along, the sea a brilliant blue, with whitecaps frequent.  Madagascar, I'm told, is somewhere nearby, though not, as far as I can tell, in sight: "nearby" is a very relative term in relation to the enormity of the seas.  Tonight the crew will put on its talent show, one of the program's traditions.

(briefly) from India

It's hot here--hot, we're told, even for here.

It's also magnificent, in all kinds of ways.  Before my first Semester at Sea voyage, in Spring 2012, I spoke happily but a little casually about being headed to places I had never expected to see during my lifetime; but by the end of the voyage, I felt I'd been an idiot not to have done all I could previously to visit some of these places, India chief among them.  The future is here, especially in Kerala, the state where our port, Cochin, is: if you don't know of Kerala's astonishing achievements in terms of literacy and life expectancy (especially relative to per capita income), they are worth looking up.  The place is a miracle, not least, in my view, because of the elements of beauty that are interspersed so widely and vividly in a place that has done so much with so little.  A walk today in Ernakulum, the business part of town, found much development since 2012 but many of the same remarkable mixes, all of it too much again for me to fathom.

My family is sticking around Cochin and mostly around the ship, which is largely deserted during: many folks are away on distant trips, others on day trips.  I had mentioned in an earlier entry that those who have an eye on us here but who are far away should not be surprised, and, if possible not too disappointed if you don't hear much from us while we're in ports.  Well, there is so much to take in here, and those processes can be so overwhelming, that I'd especially urge you to patience in the week ahead.  

I hope you'll have been with patient with me too. I am sorry to have been off this for so long.  Myanmar had its own distinctive challenges and absorptions, and for me the stretch between Myanmar and India was especially busy, partly because we had so much faculty, student, and visiting expertise to draw on.  Our two pre-ports were, I'd say, among the most exciting we've had.  I think folks arrived here as ready as they could be, which, because there is so much to India, must necessarily have meant only a very little ready, with ready hardly even the right word for what one could aspire to.

UNan

Yesterday began, more or less, with the ship's undertaking a very impressive U-turn from its berth in Ho Chi Minh City, and then heading out to calm seas, where we are now.  My share of the hundreds of conversations that follow our time in each port has included many enthusiastic, often passionate, responses to Vietnam and Cambodia. 

We have on board for this next leg a Burmese monk and a young man with experience in the country's tourism industry.  Yesterday the began visiting classes and answering questions, and the monk, Van Nendaka, held a fascinating, well-attended question and answer session last night.  Coming as it does nearly at the mid-point of the class schedule—we had nearly a third of our class sessions before we reached Japan—our next port offers opportunities to think about and discuss matters pertaining to the ethics of tourism, some unique to our next port and others common to many of the ports and indeed to much of the world.

But what to call this next port?  I am, you see, using "Burma," as does the voyage home page at semesteratsea.org.  We are in this way consistent with US State Department practice, though one could argue that http://travel.state.gov/content/passports/en/country/burma.html fudges it just a little.  UNan, as we call the visiting monk, is insistent that we say "Myanmar."

As long as I am including links, let me suggest http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/25/opinion/ending-the-horror-of-myanmars-abuse-of-muslims.html , which indicates some of the issues that will require ethical questions to be part of our discussion.

My administrative colleagues tell me that some parents worry a little during our times in port when son and daughters become less communicative.  The students are busy on days like today when we're at sea, but these are in some sense normal academic days, and they may allow the quick text or email message, whereas for many, maybe most, days in port can have a very intense pace, driven by the desire to get us much from our short stays as possible.  A parent myself, I don't doubt, let alone deplore, other parents' wish to hear regularly from their children on those days, but neither do I doubt, having met many current students' parents back in San Diego and since, that most would prefer for the times in port to be so full as to make communication back home less common.  The reward for occasional radio silence must be the thrilled reports that follow when students return to the ship.  I hope some come today: Happy Valentine's Day to all.

Vietnam at Tet

 

My apologies for having fallen off here a bit, and my thanks to those who cared enough to call attention to it…Some of you will know of at least one of the two factors that have made my job a bit overwhelming lately: the permanent departure of a faculty member due to a family illness, and our one-day delay in arriving here in Ho Chi Minh City, each of which left me scurrying to find substitutes for essential pieces of the academic program, and at a time that would already have been very busy.  For those of you who care about the outcomes of those details, I can say that the news gets better and better: we have not fixed everything yet, but pieces are being fixed bit by bit and sometimes in ways far better than we could have reasonably hoped for. Some of it is dumb luck, and some of it is very hard work by people in the Field Office both on board and back in Charlottesville and Colorado Springs.

So to recap: Shanghai was brutally cold, and, I think, a challenge for a lot of us, but also thrilling in all kinds of ways; Hong Kong was a relief in terms of weather and mood, perhaps, but posed new challenges because of an inconveniently located berth for the ship, and some unexpected complexities of a kind that are inevitable when so many people engage together in international travel.  Those of us on the administrative team came away from that stay delighted by the behavior of the majority of those on board and disappointed and worried about the behavior of a few, so our logistical pre-port for Vietnam concluded with an unusual session from which we excluded all but a few of the grown-ups, in order to try to communicate in an unimpeded way to the students their responsibility for themselves and each other.  All this happened in the context of that weather-related delay.  A few students, disappointed that the delay would cost them trips they'd eagerly anticipated, wondered whether the calm seas we had between China and Vietnam meant that our waiting a day before heading here had been a mistake; those of you who followed the weather map know that in fact the captain had performed with his accustomed brilliance and found for us calm seas when few were to be had around here.  I sat the other night in the Fritz Lounge with the voyage engineer, who reiterated that the comfort of the passengers comes first.  We benefited from, that, more than most of us could know, these past few days.  This is the way to be safe on the seas.

We have arrived in Vietnam during Tet.  The atmosphere in the city yesterday was as joyful as any I have ever found in an urban setting: it's thrilling.  Our cultural pre-port briefing had benefitted , as had every moment of our trip here, from the presence of a wonderful visitor named Dan Quynh Pham Ngoc, our "inter-port student', who was generous and smart in preparing us, alongside some enrolled Vietnamese and Vietnamese-American students, for what we'd find here; it benefitted too from presentations from three members of our faculty who briefly but profoundly reminded us of or introduced us to (this depends on matters of age) some matters of Vietnamese history that are essential to understanding our voyagers' astonishing experience here.  For we are welcomed here, as warmly as in any place I've ever been.  I couldn't get over it when I was last year on an SAS voyage in Spring 2012; if anything I feel more profoundly affected by it this time.  America's history here would seem to me either to bar me, as American, from coming here, or to sentence me to resentment or worse.  Instead there is some kind of genuine collective embrace.  Why?, I asked the guide on the little trip I took with my family yesterday.  "We cannot have a good day if we don't forgive," she said.

Arriving in Shanghai

I write this as we sail on the river on the way into Shanghai, where we should arrive in 90 minutes or so.  Most reading this will have heard wonderful reports of Japan, where we had cold but wonderfully clear weather, often affording great views of Mt. Fuji.  Last night at our logistical pre-port briefing for our Chinese ports my colleague, Dean John Tymitz, thanked everyone for generally splendid behavior during the days in Japan; there were exceptions, and a couple of complications of the sort that have kept me busy enough to be away from this blog (for which i apologize), but on the whole the students have been doing wonderfully.  Between Japan and China we have had on board a wonderful visitor, Mr. William Duff, a quite distinguished State Department official, who seems to have spent every moment on board engaging with students: Semester at Sea's enduring connection with the State Department seems to me among its most appealing aspects.  We are expecting cold weather again in Shanghai, and a stay to be complicated by new matters, including Google and its associated products not being available to any of us (so you shouldn't expect emails from the usual shipboard accounts) plus Chinese new year celebrations.  But everyone's been well briefed, and you will no doubt have access to other accounts of genuinely thrilling times.