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.
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.
