Stormy Weather

Back on the ship, waiting to wave goodbye to South Africa, they had a local township choir come on and sing, which is what choirs do, I guess. They were very good, and reminded me of the gospel choirs that we have back in the states, but still different enough. Africa isn’t the US after all. But there would be periods where nothing was going on between songs, and small chatter broke out that ended once they started up again. There were some people that were shhhhing people unlike anything I’ve ever seen in my life. And they were shhhhing during the between parts. And they were louder than the chatters. That’s what the shhhhers don’t realize – they’re the loud ones. We had one next to us, and she was like a wild banshee the way she shhhhed. We never interrupted the performance, we made sure of that. But she sure did. I shhhhed her back once. She didn’t shhhh back.

After the choir performance, a lovely announcement came on that said that due to the windy conditions in port, we would be unable to leave this evening. It doesn’t matter that much, except for the fact that when you look out the window, you’re teased by South Africa. Which is actually an issue here, we all really wanted to be back out in the country.

Something I should point out is that when we leave the port area, we have to go bunker. To bunker means to sit next to something and refuel the ship. Why this didn’t happen while we were in port is something that only people of more maritime experience can answer. There’s probably some kind of pollution or fire danger, but that’s all I can figure.

So because we weren’t leaving, there was no reason to stay up and watch us leave, so I finished a paper for tomorrow and went to bed.

When we woke up, it looked like we hadn’t moved. It actually took a fair portion of the day to convince most people that we had. We were in another area of the port that offered a very similar view of Table Mountain, as compared to what we had at the other docking area.

I spent most of my day unpacking from my travels in South Africa. The first day after port is always a bit like that. It begins the recovery phase that is so necessary and lovely. As a result, as I’ve said before, not much happens, other than classes.

We were fueling all day, and were running late. We were supposed to have fueled up in the middle of the night and left right around dawn. We didn’t shove off from South Africa until dinnertime. This is putting us about a half day behind, but we weren’t concerned because in all our transits so far, we’ve slowed down because we would reach port to quick. I was sure that we would just slow down less to reach the lovely island nation of Mauritius.

Leg 4 – Cape Town, South Africa to Port Louis, Mauritius

For some reason, our bunkering day was a class day, and now, the day after, was a no class day. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not complaining, I’m just looking for sense, which at this point in the trip, I should know that that task is a taxing and fruitless search often. So, because it was a no class day, we get to sleep in. There were no activities planned for the day, so it’s really a day to ourselves to help that candle burning at both ends. It’s something that is so vital to all of us on board. No class days are a slice of heaven in small Halloween-style “fun-size” candy form.

Before I go on, let’s give a quick geography lesson about where we are. The southern tip of Africa is where the Atlantic and Indian Oceans meet. That’s two large bodies of water mixing at the same spot. The waters are seemingly calm, but the underwater currents are going in every which direction, but the one we’re going in. That’s why it’s called the Cape of Good Hope (which is not the southernmost point in Africa, that’s Cape Agulhas,) because the old ships that went through the area, frequently plagued by storms as well, is so difficult to navigate. Ships would, as a result, stop in the nearest land, and thus beginning the troubles of the people of South Africa.

But I digress. Anyway, the reason why I bring that up is that exactly at 6:45am, we hit the multiple currents. Hitting more than one underwater current (hereon referred to as currents because they’re all underwater) moving in different directions tries to send the ship in multiple directions, while it’s trying to move forward. The ship does not like that. So, instead of the usual rocking or rolling, it does what I call shimmying. That’s the best way to describe it. Picture a ship shimmying from the inside, and you’ll know why I know it started at 6:45am.

I never fell back asleep on my day off, and I was annoyed. It couldn’t have waited just a few more hours? I mean, did you read my South Africa post? I need to recover from that! So, while trying to fall back asleep, I’m laying in bed being shifted back and forth in place. I don’t want to call it a violent shift, but it feels like someone keeps kneeing the side of the bed. It’s just enough to keep you from falling asleep.

I laid in bed far too much longer than I should have, considering that I wasn’t going to fall back asleep, and eventually gave on and got on with my day. One of the first things that I did was pack up my dirty clothes for laundry day. Laundry day rotates through the hallways on the ship, and when it comes around, you put your bag of clothes outside the door at night, and they magically return sometime later. It could be days, it could be hours. But for some reason, it’s always days with me.

Anyway, we had a laundry day before South Africa, and then we had another one before we got there again. We all felt that it was too close to the one before, so we foolishly didn’t put out any laundry. As luck would have it, it’s taking forever for laundry day to cycle back around to us again, and I’m running low on clothes and available room in my standard issue plastic laundry bag. So, it’s packed, and ready to go whenever laundry day decides to present itself.

Over the course of the day, I finished two papers, and started studying for our Global exam with a review session. If any of you have seen the film Office Space, Dr. Dan, the professor of global, is Lumburg. His mannerisms and voice inflections are identical. They’re long drawn out words, phrases, and pauses in a semi-deep voice that I can’t take any more. And we’re only about halfway through classes now.

Later in the evening, we had another round of sea meetings, and we had our Sea Olympics sign-up. The Sea Olympics take place on the no class day we have after we leave Mauritius, just so that we won’t be able to sleep in on that day. It’s a day of lots of events we can participate in on the ship, and the winning sea is able to get off the ship first in San Diego. They say it’s torture getting off the ship late, so there’s some motivation behind it. I looked over all the events and I found the one I wanted to sign up for: the trivia challenge. It was the only non-physical event on there, so I knew it would be right up my alley. Even though I slept in, I went to bed not long after because we’re losing another hour tonight.

There was something odd outside the ship when I was having breakfast in the morning: Africa. Apparently, we moved back towards shore and traversed the coast of it, deviating from the initial navigational plan, which we get streamed to us on the TVs in our rooms. Supposedly, there’s a cyclone near Mauritius, and we’re trying as best we can to avoid it. That’s the rumor anyway, and as things go on this ship, there’s a 98% chance that’s a false rumor.

In Global, we had the salute to women today. You can tell three of the female professors pressured Dr. Dan to be able to do a woman’s day in class. Of the three professors, there’s one that I’m fond of, Gloria, but for only one bizarre reason. If you’ve seen Christmas Vacation, you’ll know what I’m talking about – one of them is Aunt Bethany. She had really big earring that bob when her head moves and she’s got the voice perfect. She’s not as senile, but the potential to be that senile exists down the road some ways. I can’t wait to see her again in Global.

I have my first history exam tomorrow, so I’m spending most of the day studying for it. I don’t think it will be all that bad, but with the first exam in any class, you really never know, so you just prepare for whatever you think you should. I’ve got the study guide filled out and almost into memory, so I think I’ll be fine.

In my art class, there’s an entirely different side of the coin. I’m really quite interested in the art and the subject matter, but I’ve never taken an art history class before, and I’m finding it alien to most of the classes that I’ve taken up to this point. I actually got into an argument with someone the other day who majors in history, I think, about how they believed that art and science are very linked and if you do well in one, the other should be a breeze. I asked her how many science classes she’s taken, and she said one. I’ve taken nearly all science classes, and they’re nothing like art history. Take my word for it, I’ve been through the wringer of science classes (I finally made it out last semester) and trust me when I say art and science are two different subjects.

In the evening, there are periodically movies playing in the union, but tonight was sitcom night, with a bunch of sitcoms of a few years ago. And it was kind of weird. It was an enjoyable evening, because I got to sit around and watch TV, which is something I haven’t done in literally months. But it was weird because I haven’t done it in so long. And we’re in the middle of the Indian Ocean watching Seinfeld. There’s something inherently unusual but delightful about that.

My history exam the next morning went fine. It was originally going to include an essay. I haven’t taken an in-class essay exam since high school. And I didn’t take one here, it was changed to short answer because that’s easier to grade. I didn’t complain, and I’m sure that I did well with it.

Then after that, the real global studying begins for the exam tomorrow. We have to learn all the countries of Africa, and there’s about 54 of them. Did you know Zimbabwe and Zaire are right next to each other? That’s incredibly inconvenient when you have to memorize the entire map.

Later in the day in my cinema class, the professor opened up the class to talk about South Africa. I thought it would be a discussion lasting a maximum of five or ten minutes. I had to hear these boring stories about people’s travels for almost an hour. If there was some funny stuff in there, it wouldn’t have been nearly as bad, but there wasn’t. It was painful, and staying awake was an issue. The classrooms are small and slightly cramped, so there’s nowhere to hide.

That evening I had dinner with my adopted family, John Paul and Shannon. He’s the AV guy on the ship who coincidentally graduated from Penn State, and his wife. Only about half of our ‘family’ showed up in comparison to last time, so we decided to disown them from the family. I’m now very close with my two sisters Jordie and Maria. We had a very nice dinner. With a smaller group, as always, you’re able to get a little more personal, which is always a nice thing on a trip like this where nobody really knows anyone outside the confines of the voyage. And with all the time we spend with each other, it’s almost like you feel like you know them better than most of your friends after a while.

After dinner, you could tell the entire ship was in study mode because we all have the same exam to study for. It’s actually quite amusing to watch mass panic. I wasn’t panicking. I already knew most of the countries of Africa, so I only had to create a pneumonic device for what I call the ‘armpit’ of Africa. There’s lots of small countries on the western coast of Africa, so I needed to shore up on some of those, but in less than a half hour, I had Africa good to go for the exam tomorrow.

I was up studying in the piano bar, which is usually quite the hopping spot, and was even more so tonight because of all the studying, which made it particularly amusing when Bob and his band came in to play in the piano bar and people were trying to study over the music. It got loud.

The next morning, March 13 for your reference, for our second global exam, they make announcements to remind people to get out of bed for the exam. The exam that we’ve heard about non-stop for days now. And still people come late, claiming that they just heard about the exam. It’s on the announcements – you can’t hide from the announcements on this ship. I guess some people were never really meant for some things.

The exam is both far too specific and general at the same time, and there is no coherence to it. When professors present in global, they subsequently submit three to five multiple choice questions to be put into the exam, and then the guy that’s in charge of global, Dr. Dan, picks out whatever he wants, in addition to the questions that he makes. On all other exams I’ve taken, you adapt to how your professor makes the exam. Here, that’s impossible to do, because the exam ends up to be a dumping ground of multiple choice questions.

After the exam, I felt a bit burnt out from my two exams the past few days, so I went to go sit on the back on the ship. It’s not something that I do enough. It gets really hot, especially as we’re getting equatorial again. After a while, I started to feel a bit like a bump on a log. The days all start bending into one and it’s difficult to distinguish one from the other, and that just does something to your head that makes it difficult to focus on what we’re doing. The fact that I’m sailing around the world disappears for a while, and I really have to work at it to get it back sometimes. Today was one of the rougher days, and I’m not sure what I did, but later in the day I was doing much better. It’s just something that I have to work at, and hopefully as the trip crosses the halfway point in about two weeks, I’ll have it under control.

In the evening, we had another Vicarious Voyager packing meeting to send stuff back to our middle school on Long Island. We send them stuff from our travels, and they’re supposed to send us stuff about them in return. We’ve yet to receive anything yet, and most groups have. On top of it all, my partner didn’t show up for our meeting, so I had to put all the materials together and write the letter about what we did all by myself. I had a wonderful time coming up with stuff that she did in South Africa and Brazil. It’s almost tough to think as far back as Brazil at this point. It seems so long ago, but I don’t even think it’s been a full month yet. It’s bizarre.

In the past, they tell us that cultural preport is always so much better than logistical, which namewise would seem obvious. But because logistical stepped it up so much in the beginning, it’s been the opposite. Now that the idea well has run dry for both preports, preports are kind of annoying now. They want to present the information in fun ways, but sometimes important docking information shouldn’t be presented in song by the dependent children, like it was tonight. I think I got all the stuff, and I don’t think Mauritius is the danger port (that’s the big black cloud of India looming in the distance).

One of the trips that I wanted to go on was the Adventure Park, because it’s zip lines and fun traversing through the jungles of Mauritius, and I didn’t get selected in the lottery. Mauritius is known for its beaches and villas on the beaches, so a lot of people who have adventure tickets are trying to sell them so that they can spend their entire time in Mauritius at their villas on the beaches. I found one of these people and bought their ticket off of them, which I was really excited about. I didn’t have anything to do that first day anyway, so now I can relax about finding something to do.

And, as if preport wasn’t bad enough, we have to lose our last hour before Mauritius tonight. I feel like a broken record complaining about losing hours in the night, but it’s really not very fun. Try it yourself at home for two weeks, losing an hour of sleep every night or so. What’s that? Oh, you don’t want to do that to yourself. Oh, welcome to my world then.

The ship is going through really rough water. On a scale of 1-10, with ten being the roughest waters we can go through, these are supposedly an 8. The bow of the ship rises and falls like a roller coaster, and you get that weird zero g feeling in your stomach with every rise and fall. This is happening because there’s a cyclone north of us, and we’re getting currents and waves coming at us from two of three different directions, so the ship is getting tossed around like it’s in a bathtub. Some people are really not doing well with the motion either, and you have to feel for them, which is tough when I don’t feel sick at all. Actually, I think the motion of the ship is really fun. It’s like being on a big motion machine that’s broken. It’s really fun for me, I feel bad grinning riding the waves while other people are looking shades of pale or green.

And this is serious stuff, too. We were averaging 15 knots because if we went any faster, like up to our normal speed of 20 knots, we would be doing structural damage to the ship. When I say we were going as fast as we possibly could be going, I mean it. I still can’t figure out if we were always going to be perfectly fine, or if there was some kind of inherent degree of danger, however infinitesimally small. But, rough currents and waves should be excepted on a trip of this magnitude.

What I find most interesting are the two terms that I use to describe the motion on the ship. I’ve already told you about shimmying, and the other is reverberating. To review, shimmying is the gentle, although sometimes forceful shaking of the ship back and forth, almost as if it were shimmying its hips. Reverberation is the fun one that only happens about once every two or three minutes. I say only like it doesn’t happen often, while the sickly would say that it happens all the time. It’s all a matter of perspective. Anyway, reverberating is when the ship pitches up and down in front and there’s a particularly low pitch and the bow of the ship descends down into a larger oncoming wave. As you would assume, you can feel this impact in the ship as the wave energy reverberates throughout the ship. You can’t really feel it that much in the back of the ship, but when you’re in the front in the Union, you can feel it like you’re right on top of things. The best way to describe the sensation is to say that it’s an intense vibration that is there for a half second, then it’s gone for a half second, then comes back and slowly diminishes in strength over about five or ten seconds. And it’s loud, and the ship is shaking, and the ship is still pitching and rising and falling, and all this is happening during the shimmying, and it’s like one big science teacher’s dream!

Over the noontime announcements, the voice tells us what we’ve been dreading hearing just once on the entire voyage – we will be arriving into Mauritius late, with the early estimates pointing to 4pm, just a little deviant from our scheduled 8am arrival time. Later in the day, it moved up to noon, but the fact of the matter was that we were getting in late. I sat and reflected for a moment and figured that if there were one port where this would have to happen in, Mauritius would probably be the one that I would pick, just because there’s nothing spectacular that I’m looking forward to that could be cancelled or ruined, like a safari or a trip to a world famous monument. I have made it to those, and I’ve got more coming up, so as long as we’re getting this out of the way now, I’m relatively okay with it.

Of course, if the timing is right, that means that the adventure park ticket that I just bought might have me finding the girl I bought it from searching for a refund. She’d be refunded into her shipboard account anyway, but I’ve given her a large chunk of the cash that I have remaining, and I’d kind of like it back, if you know what I mean.

In the evening, we had preport, which you’ve heard enough about at this point. They did tell us that aside from a small threat of malaria, there’s something called chickengunya, more commonly called bend-bone fever, also carried by mosquitoes. This is what they tell us anyway. That, and that the next most dangerous thing that we have to worry about while in Mauritius is falling coconuts from trees. Do some research, if my memory serves me correct, more people are killed by falling coconuts than lightning strikes. I could be wrong, but I don’t think I am.

After preport, I had been bugging a group of my friends that I’ve wanted to play Trivial Pursuit for a long time, and we finally got around to it tonight. Unfortunately for some people, they really weren’t that into the game. I say that because I get really into games like this. I get kind of loud, and when someone doesn’t know an answer I bust their chops a bit, with the intention that when I get something wrong, that they return the favor to me. Most people are good about that. But we had a couple sourpusses at the table that night. They said they were tired, so I guess that excuse is good enough, we have lost a bunch of hours since South Africa.

The games are due back to the desk at 11, so I ended in a tie for first with three pie pieces after almost 90 minutes of gameplay. With four teams it takes a while to get through it. But after the game, it was bedtime, and it was time to see land again.

Port Louis, Mauritius

Before I continue, make sure you pull Mauritius up on a map just for your own reference. Not many people have heard of it, so make sure that you educate yourself about its location, as I begin to educate you about the plethora of activities available to entertain you on the lovely isle of Mauritius.

Mark Twain was once quoted with saying something to the extent of ‘first God created Mauritius, and then modeled heaven after it.’ That’s not he exact quote, but it gets the gist of things across – you know what I’m talking about. As this account of Mauritius progresses, make sure that you form your own opinion, and then I’ll give you mine at the conclusion.

Because we got into Mauritius late, there was no reason to get up at the crack of dawn to watch our sunrise entrance to port, because there was no land, and thus no sunrise entrance to port. After getting up, we had just started to transverse the island laterally and were on our way to Port Louis. I figured I had good timing again, and I did. I’ve been kind of lucky with coming up with times to watch us come into port.

As with every port so far, I always get that butterfly feeling about entering into something completely foreign to me. It’s another step out of my comfort zone. You would think that this far into the trip that the bounds of my comfort zone would have been broken, or at the very least stretched out. But as far as I can tell, I don’t feel much different. I pretty much feel like I have the same confidence and worries that I always have. And that’s not a bad thing, it’s just the way I’m wired I guess. Until I find that country that has that electrician that can rewire my intellectual hard drive wiring, I don’t think I’m going to see a whole lot of change in that reservation.

As we drew near to Port Louis, we slowed down a bit and started to turn towards port, which would have put us in about an hour early. The more time, the better. But then, for reasons still unknown to me, we did a dead u-turn and started sailing in the opposite direction of port. And because our ship is as good as it is, we did a tight u-turn. Why we popped a u-ey is completely unknown to me, and everyone else for that matter, and were all confused as we now turned around and saw Mauritius slipping away behind us. The thought that comes into my head is that some news has come in, and, this far away from land, we have to turn away and already start heading for India. Again, I don’t know why this was my first thought, but it was. Again, blame the hardwiring.

And a few minutes after we headed back out to sea, we turned around again and did another u-turn back towards port. I almost think that we did it just to show off of make sure the rudder was working. That’s the only logic that I can find in it, but even that hardly makes a lick of sense.

Once we get into port, the big news on the ship is that Mauritius is supposedly the first country in the world to have coast-to-coast free wireless internet. Naturally, I took my laptop up to the top deck of the ship as we reached the dock and tried it out. That free wi-fi stuff is a farce. Nobody on the ship could connect, and once we were off the ship, people had just as much trouble finding any kind of usable connection, so it wasn’t really worth it at all. And I wasn’t about to take my laptop off the ship to walk around and start searching through downtown Port Louis for wi-fi hotspots. It just doesn’t sit well with me to do something like that. But for other people it did. And I think they’re either nuts, or made of money. It has to be one of the two.

After they started letting us off the ship, now an hour or two into the afternoon, I looked for my group. And amidst the swirling masses on board, I could not find them. I can’t say I didn’t try, so I found another group to tag on to. They were exploring downtown Port Louis, and I found that that was a good idea and a common interest. So, I joined the line with them, and departed the vessel, again ignoring my Dad’s warning to never leave the ship.

Next time on the blog: my three days in Mauritius, and why I’d be surprised if Mauritius ever lets Semester at Sea come back.

To hold you over, here’s an upcoming photo from Mauritius:

I just love not being able to take an unawkward photo...