After the lovely, yet dishearteningly disorganized meeting, it was time – time to play cards. I was in a big group of eight of us and I didn’t win or lose, I came somewhere in the middle, and provided all the wise comments throughout. Apparently, in the game of BS, you’re not supposed to let on that you don’t have a card. Who knew?
After the game, we found that they serve a midnight snack at ten o’clock, more commonly known as the unadvertised ten o’clock snack. If it’s a desert item, nine times out of ten, you really can’t go very wrong. And it was one of the nine because I enjoyed my snack. But after all the day, I was tired and ready to go to bed. The last thing I wanted to do was be up late for the first day of classes. I thought all day I had an eight o’clock class, and was pleasantly surprised to see that it was on the other day of classes. We have A Days and B Days of classes, and they just alternate it back and forth when we’re at sea.
But the day did not end without disappointment. Around dinnertime, they came over the PA system with announcements and informed us that we would be losing one hour in the middle of the night, and to adjust our clocks accordingly. You know, if we were going the other way, we’d be adding hours. But no, we’ve got to go east. Probably to avoid the large waves in the Pacific common this time of year.
The next morning, the boat is still moving around and I still can’t walk upright in one particular windy hallway. I still have to push off on the wall of that one when I walk into it, but I’m not complaining. Don’t forget, I’m sailing around the world. I’m not allowed to complain. I don’t think you’re going to let me complain, and I also don’t think that you’re going to want to hear me complain.
Anywho, after I went over for breakfast, this time I ate inside, we all had to go over for our daily Global Studies class. It wouldn’t be that bad, but it’s very boring. And the position of the Union classroom on the ship makes its gentle rocking very conducive to falling asleep for having the mind wander. Similar events happened this morning, but I stayed attentive enough to get all the notes for class and know what was going on.
Then I had a big break from 10:30 until 2:15 until my next class. Because it’s still early on in the trip, there isn’t as much work to do. Hold on, let me correct that, there isn’t much schoolwork to do, there’s still a lot of work to do concerning meeting and remembering and socializing. No matter how unimportant it sounds, knowing more people on the ship just makes it easier to sit around and hang out, which can happen.
I had another above
The professor actually started class off in an interesting way saying that she failed her college art history class and later dropped out to move to
Towards the end of class, the rolling of the ship turned into more of a roooollllling and the ship swayed back and forth in bigger and slower arcs, making walking just that much more fun/difficult. I have my sea legs. I don’t get seasick, I’m okay with all this kind of stuff. You would think that it would be something that should be looked into before deciding to join a voyage of the magnitude that we’re on. That wasn’t the case for everyone, as once the bigger rolls came in, along came more trepid travelers. (That’s trepid, not tepid, that’s a measure of temperature.)
The night before we enter a port (as this is one in which) we have a debriefing of the port.
I’ve been to
I knew we were supposed to arrive at the dock at 8. I didn’t know how long before then I should get up to see us coming into port. I set the alarm for quarter after six. When I woke up around six, I set the alarm for twenty minutes later. When I got up, washed and dressed, it was a few minutes before seven. I made it up just in the nick of time. The sunrise was still about ten minutes away and the island was fast approaching on the horizon. I posted the start of the sunrise in the last post, and the picture still doesn’t do it justice. It was absolutely spectacular. Without a doubt, the best sunrise I’ve seen, and I can only hope that if it gets better with every port, I’m going to be in for what Clark Griswold would call, “a real treat.” As long as the treat is not a year’s subscription to the Jelly of the Month Club; even though it is the gift that keeps on giving.
The approach was incredible. The fort on the edge of
The process of clearing the boat once it docks is different, to what I’ve gone through in the past. On cruise ships, they take care of everything for you, and eventually they start letting you off. Here, we have to go into a room, retrieve our passport, present it to an immigration official, have them stamp it, take a photocopy of our passport, have that stamped, then give the passport back, and leave with the photocopy, which they say is all we need when we’re in port for whatever could happen. Although they did say almost everything that could happen. That was a qualifier.
They called us up by our sea and of course, I was in the last group, and for some reason, we were rushed up much faster than all the others. They came on the PA like we were already late before they made the announcement. The line was longer than I would have liked, but it moved quick, unless there was a poke in the line who didn’t know what they were doing. In that case, it started to move slowly, and everyone was already antsy to get off the ship. I think it was around ten once the ship was finally cleared for getting on and off.
I thought I had a plan. I thought it was sound, and I thought it was one that others would most likely be following. I was wrong. There’s a saying that starts with, “The best laid plans of mice and men…” and it goes on from there and I’m not sure how it ends, but I’m positive it can be applied here.
I thought that people would take their time getting off the ship. After all, we’d only been on it for two and a half days. That’s not bad at all considering some of the upcoming transits that we have in front of us. No sooner did they clear the ship did everyone run off it like it was on fire. No more than ten minutes later, the ship seemed like a ghost ship. The ship is only so big, but I couldn’t find anyone but crew when I was walking around. I felt like I was the only one there. My logic was that I had a trip leaving at 1 and I didn’t want to get off the ship at 10, and then have to rush. Why rush when you can relax and take it easy? I don’t see the point. I guess everyone else found a point, which I’m discussing below.
We are privileged to be on this ship. We are privileged to be sailing around the world. I do not understand how the only thing you talk about before entering port is drinking. It doesn’t make sense to me. I want to see the world. I don’t want to see the inside of dingy bars and their equally dingy bathrooms all night. There is more to this trip than drinking. I’m not saying they shouldn’t drink, it shouldn’t be the primary focus and reason for getting up again in the morning. I despise the logic that “it’s just what college students do.” It’s incredibly misused in its context here. We’re not just college students, we’re US citizens who have to represent our country. I’ve had it with the constant talk of drinking. I’ve had it with it being the primary focus. I’ve had it, it’s disgraceful, and I don’t agree with it and never will.
With that aside, and thank you for allowing me to do that, I feel better now, I departed the ship, or vessel as Captain Jeremy calls it. I was going on the kayaking tour, somewhere in northeastern
So we get to the beach, and the guide hops on the bus and tells us, the first words out of his mouth (after greetings), “This is a strenuous kayaking trip. It’s really hot outside, so if you don’t have sunglasses, a hat, and sunscreen, you could be in trouble. We’re going to be out there for two hours in the
I’ve never kayaked before. It’s a completely foreign concept to me. I know nothing about kayaking. I’ve seen people kayak before, and that’s my total experience with kayaks. They put us into two-person kayaks and gave us a lesson on how to paddle that lasted less than a minute, which indicated to me that there was a short learning curve. That’s like the Jelly of the Month Club part.
Then we get down to the water and into a kayak and shove off. Before we departed, they told us that the person in the back has to steer and when applicable, apologize. Apologize for anything and everything that could be at fault for either person in the boat. I’ll give you a hint as to what I did: I steered. What I thought would be a short, easy learning curve was in fact, not. We moved to the back of the pack quite rapidly. They have to have one guide in the back to make sure that nobody gets lost or disappears. In a particular moment of brilliance when we were going in the opposite direction we were supposed to, the guide informed us to, “paddle with each other.” To which I responded with, “Yes, I’ve been trying to do that for ten minutes now. I think that’s part of the problem.” He didn’t reply.
Eventually, the pack (not yet including us) got to the corner of the ocean inlet we were in and turned to the right. I immediately tried to take a short cut, because with the extra effort we’d already put into the paddling, I didn’t want to end up floundering before I finished. Now let’s make something clear before I continue: I’m not built like an ox, I’m skinny and only have so much muscle on me. I used it all, and then some to keep going. I had a tough time, but I don’t think everyone else considered it a walk in the park. Once we caught up to some people via the shortcut, everyone acted like they could keep going for another two, three or four hours, and in some cases, days. These people were all liars. All the ones I talked to at least.
In the middle of the inlet, the waves were choppier and we were going up and down pretty good. As stated earlier, I don’t get seasick, but anybody that does would really have been feeling it. I think everyone on the trip was okay with it, but we had waves breaking over the tip of our kayak. It wasn’t the calm, leisurely trip that was advertised.
I don’t know how far we went to reach the beach on the opposite side of the inlet (not where we started). Some of the ladies later said that it was one mile. And the next time, they said two. And then if they were asked again, it was three, and it kept going on and on from there. We arrived at the beach and the first thing I did was take off my life vest and dive into the water. I was on the overheated side. We did a lot of work to correct whatever we had done wrong and I had to apologize for. They gave us a sufficient amount of time in the water to relax and recover, which I didn’t complain about, I was happy to finally be back with the majority of the group. It had been so long.
Then we had to paddle back to where we started. I felt like I was getting the hang of it (now that we were well over and hour into it) and we were moving in a more generally correct direction. I had more time to enjoy some of the scenery and realize what I was doing, which is very cool. Kayaking is a fun thing to do if you know what you’re doing. If you’re struggling, like we were to start, it can be painful. The trip back was more with the current, as opposed to the way out, which was completely against the current, and we made it back somewhere in the middle of the group, which I was sufficiently pleased about. It was a relief that I had made it back and that I wouldn’t have to undergo the terms of the waiver, but I thoroughly enjoyed the experience as much as I may have overexerted myself.
Because this was the first trip we’d all been on off the ship, nobody really came prepared with what we should have brought, so I was in an air conditioned bus for an hour and a half with a wet bathing suit, vanilla cookies, and a bottle of water rapidly increasing in temperature. Other people decided to change into dry clothes, and did so in the aisle on the bus. I have more shame than that. But that’s just me.
We were running on a bit of a tight schedule. We were due to come back shortly before the big university trips that we were supposed to go on, and I wanted a shower to get the salt and sand of me, so I wouldn’t have the sand exfoliating my feet with every step I took for the remainder of the evening. The university trip left at 1930 (we use military time on the ship, that’s 7:30 PM for you laymen), and we were back about an hour and a half before. That would have left more than enough time if other trips also did not get back at the exact same time that we did. We waited a half hour to get back on the ship because we all have to go through security and have our bags searched. That made the time crunch a little tighter, but still manageable. And I did make the trip. And what a trip that was.
I didn’t know how many trips I would get in Puerto Rico, because we’re not guaranteed the trips we sign up for, so I signed up for five, and ended up getting them all, so for all the time I’m going to have in San Juan, I’m going to be going at a steady clip for just about all the time. Anyway, I went down to pick up the trip, which was supposedly quite large, meaning that a lot of people on the ship were taking it. We were told that we would be split between four different universities, with two buses going to each, and had no control over which trip we would be sent to. My friends that were on the trip with me all got packed onto a bus going to the
The bus pulled up (although it did take two attempts to do that, the driveway was a hard right) and there were people dancing on stilts, people screaming, people playing drums loudly, and that was just on the bus (that’s where the rim shot goes.) So we drive through all these people and board off the bus, only to be mobbed by people and walk back through the crowd we just drove through. They brought us into an ample sized, stadium seating lecture hall – with the drums. I couldn’t hear anything for a while after they stopped. Actually, I shouldn’t say that, I could hear ringing and me yelling, “Muy bien!” which means ‘very good.’
They gave us a short presentation on the school and what it’s like, then showed us a video of it in Spanish, so the moving images were wonderful. Then they opened a door and ushered us back outside to the drums, stilt dancers and crowds, who all took us over to the party area they had set up. They went all out, let me tell you. I didn’t have much time to look at it at first because we had to enter the area walking under the legs of the people on stilts, which still doesn’t seem like the best idea to me, but I think it worked out. I didn’t make anyone fall over at least, and that’s all that really matters. I don’t want to be the guy on the ship who everyone looks at and says, “Hey, he’s the one that knocked over the people on stilts.”
The party was loud, with a lot of dancing. It was literally three straight hours of dancing. First it was quite a bit of them dancing in traditional, uh, dances, and then they made us start to be involved, but that was a little later. I don’t know what I was thinking, it must have been the loopiness I had from being up since 6:30, but I was singing and dancing along to everything. I was even doing that in line for the appetizers they had set out for us.
The appetizers were the traditional Puerto Rican style, I assume. Everything was a different shade of brown. The only other time I see that is breakfast. Anywho, the only one I really wasn’t a fan of was the one that was cooked in the banana leaf. That one wasn’t really a hit with many people, and I’d tell you what it was but, even at the time I was eating it, I had no idea. We had six different appetizers on our plate and there was one weird, lumpy brown one sitting there, and there were two of them on the plate. It looked almost like it had been fried, but I had no idea what it was. It had to be told that it was fried chicken. I ate all of that one.
And what’s the best thing to do after eating a bunch of what I would call foreign food to the stomach – dance, of course, that’s the first thought that came into my head. And, I’ve brought proof:
It wasn’t like there was a choice either, and not like I made one anyway. You would be pushed onto the dance floor, and then a member of the opposite sex from the school would teach you how to dance to whatever was playing on the blaring speaker. I wasn’t on the dance floor when ‘Celebration’ came on, but it didn’t look like anyone knew what to do with that one.
I don’t remember exactly what I danced, but I was told by my partner that one of them was the Salsa, to which I responded that I’d only previously salsa’d on my chips. She laughed and lost step, which made me lose step, and we had to start all over again, but it’s not like I was going anywhere.
We did that until we had to board the buses and head out of there. They gave us a very nice gift bag with a plethora of miscellaneous items loaded into them. A t-shirt and an odd, furry pen were amongst the items included. At least that’s what I’ve been told, I’ve yet to actually look through the bag.
At the end of the day, I was tired, I was up early, I was ready for bed, and I had to get up for a trip departing at 8 the following morning. Don’t want to waste a second of the day!
For the second straight day here in
The trip that we all left to depart on was a hike in what we were told was the only rainforest in the US National Park System (don’t forget, Puerto Rico is a colony of the US and they’re all US Citizens), however I always thought that Washington state also had a rainforest somewhere, so my jury is still out on that one. We went to the El Yunque Rainforest, situated at the top of whatever mountain range dominates the mainland of
I knew when I was coming on this trip, I wanted to have some way to connect myself through each country with something of a similar nature, souvenir-wise. I really didn’t have any idea what I was going to do until I was in the shop and I found the section with all the tribal-looking carvings, and I saw a small mask that really stuck out to me. So now I’ve decided to come back with something that looks what I’ll call “tribal” from each country. I have no idea what I’ll do in countries like Japan, which I don’t think has any kind of tribal origin, but I’ll figure it out when I get there, I may have refined my definition of tribal by the time I get there.
We leave the shop and head towards these mountains. These mountains are serious. So serious that we had to turn off the air conditioner on the mini-bus we were riding in. That’s always a reassuring thought. But we made it up fine. It was a long, windy (wind like wind a watch, not wind like breezy) road and unlike the long, windy roads of
Our tour guide told us that she had been up here two or three times already this week and, wanting to shake things up for her, she wanted to take us from the bottom to the top instead of from the top down. How nice of her to turn a leisurely stroll into mountain climbing.
We leave the bus and the first thing she shows us is this bizarre plant that when you touch the underside of its tiny ferns, it closes itself up. It may have been the coolest plant I’ve ever seen. I wanted one, but they apparently don’t do well in more temperate climates like back up home in
Anyway, it’s a rainforest, so it started to drizzle on the already drenched landscape, but it didn’t last long. It just raised the humidity up a bit more and made the temperature rise a couple more degrees in the 80s. Nope, I don’t miss Winter one bit.
It almost seemed like our guide had somewhere to go because we stopped walking once in the first half of the hike. I was up in front, so if I wanted to take a photo, I’d block everyone behind me, and as a result, all the photos from the beginning are blurry. I’m having real issues with the blurriness of my photos. It seems like the camera should be able to figure out how to make that a non-issue, but apparently Kodak is still working on that in R & D.
The one time we stopped, the tour guide thought it would be a good idea to show off the properties of the sap from one of the trees. The sap is flammable. She put some on her switchblade and lit it aflame – in the middle of the rainforest. I thought we were supposed to be extra careful with these places and help to protect them. Apparently not. She only had to put out seven or eight spots of fire on the ground with her foot.
The halfway point of the hike was a stop at a beautiful waterfall called La Mina. What do college students do at a waterfall? Strip off their clothes down to their bathing suits, which have apparently replaced underwear on this trip, and jump in the water. I would have been inclined to do so if someone who went on the trip the day before had not informed me that the temperature of the water was in the fifties. It’s hot out. It’s not that hot out.
So I spent about a half hour with half the group taking photos of the area, and I got a few nice ones. I did spend a little too much time trying to take a photo of a small spider that turned out to be a small blurry mark after all the time that I spent, but it’s not like I had anything better to do, or was in some kind of rush.
After everyone reclothed themselves, it was onward and upward over hundreds of steps. Just as we were leaving the waterfall, another group that was going in the opposite direction on the hike came down. One of the people on the hike was one of the Lifelong Learners that are on the ship. Let me give a quick rundown on them. Most of them are retired and want to do this trip either because they love to travel, or their grandkids did it, or something like that. They’re in different classes than we are all day, but we’re all together on the trips. There was a Lifelong Learner on the hike who had to be in great shape because she was doing very well. I went over and told her how great she was doing and gave her a lot of credit for not just doing the voyage, but this intense hike over hill and dale. I really am quite impressed and can only hope that I should be so fortunate to have a body to allow me to do this trip again in sixty years. It has yet to cease to amaze me.
On the way up the steps, I was very glad to have changed my spot to hang out in the back of the pack. Now I actually had time to stop and take photos that came out in focus. We were also walking along the stream that headed down to the waterfall, so the scenery was more scenic, if you will. The second half of the hike was much more enjoyable than the first half.
When we got to the top of the hike, the bus was up waiting for us and we boarded it and sucked down a clod bottle of water they had waiting for us. At least they knew that we were going to be tuckered out (to use a phrase of Aussie origin). And that was the hike. We stopped on the way down the mountain (with the A/C back on) to take some photos of the great view we had from our vantage point.
Once we got back to the boat, we ran over to lunch before it closed. Then something rather interesting happened. I was eating with a couple other people next to a table with a bunch of people dressed in suits. Eventually they look over to the table and ask the girl I was sitting next to if she was at the Caribbean University Reception the night before. She said no. The person asking around was the dean of the school, and once he looks over to me he says, “Oh, I remember you! You were there weren’t you? You looked like you had a good time.”
My next trip didn’t depart until later in the evening, around 7, so I was foolish enough to assume that I had plenty of time to wander down into Old San Juan and shop for a while. I went with two other people and I told them that I was in
It took us forty minutes to walk down there. I know what it’s like to be dehydrated, it’s happened to me on a number of occasions earlier. I made sure we stopped and got something to drink once we passed a place. Then we saw an ice cream place and figured that that was also a good idea, and had some ice cream in there. We have to pay for ice cream on the ship. That’s mildly annoying because I enjoy ice cream.
Then we started wandering around Old San Juan and ducking into some of the shops that we passed. We did that at a leisurely pace while I rebuilt my stability. There’s an interesting phenomenon that happens to you once you get off of a rolling ship and back on land. It feels like the land is moving like the ship. It’s bizarre. I’m pretty bad. When I’m standing in line waiting for something I shift my weight back on forth from leg to leg and makes everyone around me nuts, but I don’t even know when I do it. After being on the ship in transit for two days, you’d think by the second day off the ship that we’d be able to walk with no ill-effects, but you’d think wrong.
I didn’t end up getting anything in the stores that we went to and ended up meeting up with someone else from the ship on the way back. Supposedly taxis are three dollars back to the ship and a bus is seventy-five cents, and the person we met up with wanted to take the bus. So I decided that it would be another adventure and that it would be a good idea. We’d all be in it trying to figure it out together.
We couldn’t find the bus stop, and the sun was still beating down on us (try to visualize this to yourself as you look out your window at the frigid temperatures you’re suffering through – try, really try). Somehow we wandered into a travel information building and they told us that the bus station was three blocks down and to the left. So we went on our way, continuing the misadventure. We went three blocks down, and one block over, and did not see a bus terminal. It wasn’t until the eagle eyes of another person in our group saw a dark enclosed space with a bus driving out of it, that we realized we actually found the bus terminal.
We went in and waited. And then tried to figure out which bus to take. Then tried to figure out when the bus would leave. We had no idea what we were doing for the first fifteen minutes, and I was just coming along for the ride. Eventually, we found that the bus we were waiting in front of was not supposed to be the right one, and as soon as we moved away, the bus we were waiting for left. Now, we didn’t know what to do again. Buses were driving by us and the other people and not stopping. The fumes from the buses in the enclosed space that we were in were becoming a little on the overpowering side. And we still didn’t know what was going on over a half hour after arriving. Lesser men would have given up and taken the cab. I had faith that we’d find our way back to the ship hell or high water. I was really hoping for neither hell nor high water, just a prompt return back.
Soon, the guy we asked about how to get back jumped into a bus and loaded us into it, along with the other locals and dropped us off two blocks away from the ship. We did make it back and it did turn out to be an experience, one that I’ll remember, although it’s unclear for how long because my life was never in danger. That usually prolongs the shelf life of most stories.
Next time, the last day of
