1,003 Steps

A journey of a thousand miles begins with the first step.
                                                                   --Confucius

(Luana:) Those of you who know me well would not describe me as a gym rat, but that is what I have become during our voyage. I now spend about two hours a day in the ship’s fitness center, and the payoff came on day two of our Rio excursion.

We headed out with a company called Jeep Adventure Tours (curiously, they had no Jeeps, just other brands of big open-air 4-wheel-drive vehicles) for a very full day that included a hike in the rainforest of Tijuca National Park, a picnic at the beach, some city sightseeing, a visit to a favela, dinner at a blue-collar fair, and a music/bar-hopping visit through Rio‘s nightlife area. Most of these areas can’t be reached by tour bus because of switchbacks and narrow roads.

Anyway, after lunch we headed to the Lapa Steps, a famous tiled stairway created by artist Jorge Selaron. It’s been a work in progress for the past 20 years and has 215 steps, 17 landings and 16 entrances. We started at the bottom and climbed all the way to the top on a hot and humid day, enjoying the colorful and whimsical tiles sent from around the world. I reached the top feeling like Rocky Balboa on the steps of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, because it wasn’t hard for me to do. Four months ago I would have been doubled over and out of breath.

Next we went to the Santa Marta favela where Michael Jackson filmed parts of his “They Don’t Care About Us” video. (Santa Marta is now a “model” favela, but it was such a mess and so drug-infested at the time he made the video that it’s reported he had to bribe the drug lords to receive permission to film.) This place has 788 steps and has been in the news recently because it now has a funicular to save the residents from having to climb up the nearly vertical hill. We didn’t use the funicular, and fortunately we were doing the trip downhill, but still, 788 steps is a lot! It’s about like a 56-story building. Everyone arrived at the bottom sweaty and thirsty and with shins a-tingling. But I made it -- and saw an interesting slice of life along the way.

A Million Dollar View

Luana has written about our guided walk through Santa Marta, one of Rio’s smaller favelas -- about 1,000 homes serving 8,000 residents. About 20 percent of Rio’s 9 million people live in favelas, and it is interesting to hear local people describe them.


Many have been around for decades, and they all started the same way: poor people new to the city and looking for work threw up shacks in open space. All of Brazil’s big cities have them. In Rio, surrounded by hills and with limited available real estate, these favelas were often built on steep hills that were rated geologically unstable for construction. Thus, in Rio, they often have fantastic views -- local people say they are $1,000 shacks with $1 million views.

Many of these favelas are run by drug gangs, with police afraid to venture into them. The one we walked down through had been “pacified.” The drug gangs had been kicked out, and there were two police stations among the houses.

Rio residents don’t view these areas as shantytowns filled with the unemployed. Rather, in Rio they are seen as working class neighborhoods, since most of the people living there have jobs. These neighborhoods evolve. The people living in the shacks gradually replace the wood walls with brick. You can see houses that are halfway through this process, which can take some time as the resident earns the cash to buy the building materials and then does the work himself. In established favelas the city brings in water and sewer lines, electricity and even cable TV and Internet lines. All these services are free to the residents. All this is, in a sense, a form of welfare, but as was pointed out, since many of these people are employed as maids and gardeners for rich people it also allows those employers to pay lower wages.

Another big plus for the favela residents is the short commute they have to work; if they lived way out in the suburbs where they could afford land for houses, they would probably have a 2-hour commute each way. So, all-in-all, there are some economic and lifestyle advantages to living in these neighborhoods.

One disadvantage is when torrential rains occur; some of these structures slide off the hills. More than 240 Rio residents were killed in recent downpours about two weeks before our visit.

Stores, bars and churches also set up in the neighborhoods. One guide said the bars in the favelas have the coldest beer in the city, since the bars are getting their electricity free.

Our guide said a recent poll of favela residents in Rio found only 15 percent wanted to move to regular neighborhoods. I would tend to doubt that percentage since I wouldn’t want to raise kids in areas controlled by drug gangs. But in the safe favela we walked through the people were engaged in regular neighborhood activities: watching TV, children playing, dogs everywhere (a slight sanitation problem there), doing laundry, cooking, talking, etc. It provides a different perspective than the usual American one. I haven’t told Luana yet, but I’m thinking of moving to a favela for our retirement; free cable TV sounds like a pretty good deal.

Best and Worst of Brazil

(Bob:) Of all the countries we visited on this trip and those I have visited in 60-plus years, Brazil is the hardest to categorize. It is a place of extreme dichotomies. It is the size of the continental U.S., but only has about 190 million people.

It is a land of vast natural resources -- lands, minerals, fresh water -- and a geography as varied as that of the U.S., although in general much warmer; shoveling snow is not a Brazilian activity.

It is a land of beautiful natural surroundings and has the world‘s most naturally beautiful city, Rio, with no close second. (Paris, in another sense, could be considered the most beautiful city, when you rate on charm, history, beautiful buildings and gardens, etc., but that is a different category.) But imagine a major U.S. city with beautiful beaches everywhere, where holidays and other civic celebrations are frequent; where going down to the beach is a part of the lifestyle 12 months of the year; where family is a very important part of life, as is generally enjoying life -- long lunches and dinners, beach volleyball and soccer and surfing and walking along the beach and going to soccer games -- and where everything including schools shuts down to watch Brazil play in the World Cup. Only Miami is in the ballpark in lifestyle, but still far behind in beauty.

Per capita GNP is about $10,000 and 18 percent of the population lives on less than $2 a day -- bad but still better than Africa. Brazil’s economy has a high growth rate, so it might join the “developed countries” within a decade or so.

Brazil produces all the energy it needs -- thanks to ethanol and abundant hydropower -- and even exports energy to other countries. And when and if its immense offshore oil reserves are developed, it may become another Saudi Arabia in 10 to 20 years. It could export cheap ethanol -- made from sugar cane -- to the U.S. if we hadn’t erected high tariff barriers to protect our corn farmers and big agribusiness companies. Brazil has figured out the energy situation.

(If a young person said they wanted to live overseas for a while, I would advise them, if they were doing it for the lifestyle, to learn Spanish or Portuguese and move to Buenos Aires or Rio. If they were doing it to earn big bucks, I would advise them to learn Mandarin and move to Hong Kong or Shanghai.)

Brazilians, like Americans in general, are a bit arrogant about their country. They feel they have a lot to teach America when it comes to appreciation of history, art, lifestyle and the “finer things” of life, and perhaps they do.

But Brazil, like Mexico, also has its dark side. Our ship docked in Salvador, the country’s oldest city near the hump. The city has about 3 million people, and is the capital of the state of Bahia. This place is a pit in terms of crime -- the worst of any port we visited by far. People were getting mugged and robbed in broad daylight -- women having purse straps cut by thieves running by, crew members having their pants torn off so they had to run for the ship in underpants, students being beat up. It is appalling that the ship even comes to this port. We were told it’s only because the dockage fees are so low. The city has a beautiful old town and some nice museums, restaurants and beaches, but they are unsafe. We ourselves didn’t have any problems, but we were very cautious and consider ourselves just lucky to not be among the victimized.

Rio, too, has major crime problems, although it seemed nowhere near as bad as Salvador. We had one free day in Rio after two full days of touring, and walked along and ate along Copacabana beach for that entire day with no problems. But our guide in Rio said he had been carjacked twice, and, at night, Rio law allows drivers to not stop at red lights on deserted streets to help prevent carjacking.

The causes of all this crime apparently are income disparity and drugs. Drug gangs control many of the favelas (poor neighborhoods) and a lot of very well off people live behind their big walls topped by broken glass and concertina wire with guards at the gates. I think another element may be that the entire society takes sort of a lax attitude toward stealing. I’ll deal more on that in my entry on favelas. I think people in Rio may also have the attitude of “Well, I was robbed and I can go to the police station and spend the day filling out police reports, or I can go to the beach. Screw it, surf’s up.”

Highlights of our days in Rio included taking the cable car up to the top of Sugar Loaf Mountain, which is between downtown and Copacabana. Ipanema Beach is the next one beyond Copacabana, and there is another beyond that and another beyond that and ….. Beaches tend to be divided up into areas, with one section for gays, one for young people, one for families, etc. Thong bathing suits appear to be very popular among the women, although I didn’t really notice that, of course. “I’m just staring at the surfers out there in the ocean, dear, with my binoculars. Whoa, look at that pair … of surfers.”

We did a walking tour of downtown (without large cameras so they wouldn’t be the target of thieves), took a driving and hiking tour in the giant rain forest park up above the city and made several other stops, including one at the giant Catholic Cathedral built in 1980. It seats 20,000 and is shaped like a beehive (See photo) -- the result of an architectural competition. It’s quite an amazing building. Brazil takes great pride in its architecture and has many noteworthy buildings. Since the federal government agencies moved to Brasilia in the 1960s and 1970s, many of the previous government agency buildings have been converted into museums and cultural centers. The city has a very European feel in its appreciation for the arts.

We stayed at a nice hotel across the street from Copacabana beach. The hotel’s buffet breakfast was fantastic, with an enormous supply of tropical fruit.

Sugar Loaf is about 1,000 meters high, while the other big monument is on the other side of town on a 2,000-meter mountain. That’s the Christ the Redeemer statue built in the 1920s. It was closed when we were in Rio because torrential rains the week before caused slides that closed access roads to it, and the statue itself had scaffolding around it for renovation. So we didn’t get to go there.

Brazil hosts the World Cup soccer competition in 2014 and the Summer Olympics two years later, so a lot of new construction and renovation is planned. One hopes that preparation work also includes a major beefing up of police forces, but we would love to return to Rio regardless.

Obladee, obladah, OLODUM!

We arrived in Salvador, Brazil, with some sense of trepidation, as our guest lecturers from Salvador, Nelson and Molly Cerqueira, had stressed the safety problems of this troubled city. So we headed out on a walking tour of the old historic district, the Pelourinho, with a bit of dread -- and stumbled on one of those delightful moments of travel where you find something unexpected and totally fun.

We took the municipal elevator (something like Oregon City’s but with an entire marketplace at the bottom) to the bluff above the port area to visit monuments, churches, and the requisite shops with ladies dressed in traditional white hoop skirts and bright head wraps (the old slave garb now used for tourism). The lovely colonial-era Portuguese architecture dating from the 1500s makes this city architecturally stunning (it’s a Unesco World Heritage site), but the weather was iffy and we were dragging a bit.

Then we heard music, rounded a corner into one of the town squares, and stumbled on a band in the plaza playing lively Afro-Brazilian music. It turned out to be one of Brazil’s most famous music groups, Olodum, performing in front of a huge crowd of our students who had beaten us up the hill. Olodum was filming a TV commercial to advertise the upcoming World Cup games in Brazil. They have played with Paul Simon and appeared in one version of Michael Jackson’s “They Don’t Care About Us” video (not the Prisoner version). All I can say is, they were FUN. Instant energy.

One of the students got to wave a huge American flag in the video, and there were other international flags in the crowd, and everyone was learning a dance step to go along with the samba-reggae music. So if you see a commercial for Brazil’s World Cup that has people dancing to energetic music and flags waving all over the place, look for us in the crowd. Of course, we’ll be the only ones not dancing.

I shot a quick and bumpy video that I will post when we get home, but for now here is a picture of the crowd scene. The music was so fun -- vibrant, catchy, totally alive. I bought a CD to bring home. We should have a party, because this is great party music.

You may never get to see Olodum playing live in the square in the Pelourinho, but if you ever do make it to Salvador, be sure to see the beautiful Igreja de São Francisco, or the Gold Church. Cherubs and angels in abundance, all washed in gold leaf. Unfortunately, no photos allowed. But amazing…

Reflections on Ghana

(Bob:) We spent four days in Ghana in West Africa, and two statistics will immediately make clear a lot about the country to people who live in Oregon. The Ghanaians themselves describe the size of their country as being about the same as the state of Oregon. Ghana, however, has 23 million people. Since I consider Oregon -- at least the Portland area -- overcrowded at present and there are only 3.5 million people in all of Oregon, you can make your own comparisons.

And all these people tend to live in single story homes, shantytowns or huts; there are few multistory apartment buildings.

The capital, Accra, has about 4 million people, so it’s among the smaller of the cities we have visited on this trip.

Even with all these people, you still find plenty of open spaces. One of our days was spent touring Accra, and the other three driving through the countryside -- 4 to six hours of driving a day -- so we got to see a little of the area around Accra.

You become very aware of your whiteness in Ghana. In three days of travel outside Accra, I saw 3 white people not from the ship. Vegetation is lush, but with few tall trees. You find mostly tall grasses, bushes and low palm trees, and banana and plantain plants.

Ghana is just north of the equator, so is very hot and humid. The rainy season is just starting there.

If you want to go into business in Ghana, the best bet seems to be to start a Christian church or school. Churches are everywhere (60 percent of Ghanaians are Christian, 17 percent Moslem), and people love to advertise their religion. There are many, many, many businesses with names like Jesus Loves Me Auto Parts and Praise the Lord Fast Food. There are also many technical schools advertising for students -- everything from language schools to computer schools to truck driving schools. Also a number of “remedial” schools.

Ghana has about 40 tribes, each with its own language, but the official language is English, from the days when England was the colonial power. Ghana was the first black African country to become independent in 1957. It has had several military coups since then, but now appears to have a generally stable, democratic government. (I loved one campaign slogan I saw on a sign: Vote BHP Party. So Far, So Good) This was the first African country visited by Obama last year, and the Ghanaians are very proud of that.

The people are very friendly. They were always smiling and helpful, although pushy when trying to sell you something. Our guide said Ghanaians are only pushy with Americans because they know they can get away with it with us; they don’t try those type of sales tactics with Europeans. We are too willing to make eye contact and engage in conversation.

Ghana is a true Third World country with a high rate of poverty: 54 percent of the population earns less than $2 a day. Many people appear to be trying to make ends meet by setting up roadside stands to sell a variety of items or by trying to sell to cars stuck in traffic. They make very delicious bread that is sold that way. It‘s about 75 cents a loaf U.S. for a big loaf. It’s a good thing I ran out of Ghana money (called cedis), or I would have bought 100 loaves and ate them all. (It’s also perhaps a reflection of how sick I am of shipboard food.)

The women, and some men, can carry an enormous amount of stuff on their heads without using their hands. The women who sell bread usually have it in tall glass cases on their head, or in baskets. (See accompanying photo of a woman who sold me a loaf of bread.) They can keep it balanced on their head while running alongside slowly moving vehicles and conducting business transactions with the riders.

Much of agriculture is slash-and-burn. The smoke in the air was very bad at times. Cacao is the big cash crop, but a lot of things are grown.

Ghana also appears to be the road construction capital of the world. Roads everywhere are being worked on -- perhaps not the correct word. More like under construction, with actual construction work visible only in scattered places. It’s said that the Chinese are helping fund a lot of these projects, since they are interested in many Ghanaian resources, including bauxite, manganese, and new and large offshore oil deposits that are just starting to be developed.

There is also one major road construction project in Accra, which our guide said was funded by the U.S. when George Bush was president, so the highway will be named for him. I told the guide that I guess that meant you could only turn right off that road and that it ran off a cliff after a few miles, but he didn’t understand the joke -- or perhaps I wasn‘t joking.

Anyway, with all the construction, plus many, many speed bumps, travel is very slow. Our six hours of driving one day probably covered about 220 miles. And that’s six hours of very bumpy travel. We thought that was bad until we heard about the Semester at Sea trip to a national park farther north where they have elephants; those folks spent 15 hours of driving each way.

We did purchase some crafts and visited some historic sites in this very hot country, mentioned in other posts. We are now in the Atlantic, traveling west and south toward Salvador, Brazil, where we arrive in a few days. This morning we crossed south of the equator again. We arrive in Florida May 5 and are back in Canby the next day.

The Vodaphone Village

(Luana:) In Ghana, if you live along a main thoroughfare and have no money for paint, and you want to spruce up your house or your shed or even your storage locker, you can swear allegiance to a cell phone carrier and -- voila! -- you're covered. The company paints your building in exchange for the right to slap multiple logos across your walls.

The Ghana countryside between Accra and Kumasi is an endless procession of red buildings with Vodaphone logos, canary yellow buildings with MTN logos, aqua and purple buildings with Zain logos…you get the idea. Sort of like a Crips vs. Bloods gang rivalry, with paint as the weapon.
 

The paint company evidently gets the idea too: there were many buildings painted with the Spar Paint logo.

Building Someone's Castle

(Luana:) I think Habitat for Humanity is one of the world’s great organizations and have volunteered with them in Canby, so we were really happy that we had the opportunity to participate in a “build” in Ghana as part of our Semester at Sea group. About 120 of our shipmates worked on three homes over three days in a village called Adadientem in Birim Agya, about 2 hours from Accra. A number of homes have already been built there and the community has several hundred people.

Our group of 40 went on the third and last day and we were divided into three teams. Our group had about six shovels, one pick ax, a wheelbarrow and two bowls, and our job was to move dirt about 100 feet from a rocky mound to fill in the foundation of a cinderblock house. (Another group had to pump water and mix cement to mold building blocks; there was only one form, and they said just pumping the water in that heat was exhausting.) I felt pretty cocky pushing the first three wheelbarrows filled with dirt, but soon switched to digging and chipping dirt from the rocks, and finally settled for stamping dirt into place or sitting in the shade and trying to avoid heatstroke.

It was hot, hot, hot, and everyone became very wet and dirty, but we had a lot of fun and we couldn’t have had a nicer group to work with. One person played her Ipod and everyone danced while shoveling. Several of the kids were people I knew from my English lit class, and my friend Chandra (in the picture with the bowl on her head) kept me laughing as she leapt in slow motion while carrying bowls of dirt. She has a gift for making things fun!

We also enjoyed meeting the people in the village, who made lunch for us. Many children were around because they have to attend school in shifts -- there aren’t enough teachers or classrooms, so there is a morning school and an afternoon school -- and some of the students gave them stickers, which they put all over their arms and faces. So cute…

What struck me most was how hard we worked and how little we accomplished. We all wished we could have done more for them. At home, we think nothing of calling up a contractor to bring a backhoe and dig things out for us. But these folks don‘t have that luxury. Their houses, simple as they are, represent a lot of physical labor. With a backhoe, one person could have had the entire foundation filled in in a couple of hours. As it was, it would take a group like ours several days to get the job done.

We didn’t meet the family that is going to live in the house we worked on, so I’m going to have to imagine them enjoying it, cooking meals, planting a garden, hanging laundry to dry, or walking down the road to go to school. I hope their house is finished soon.

A Little Shopping Adventure

(Luana:) Just to set things straight: I am no longer the only shopper on this trip. Our luggage is now three large wooden masks heavier, following a visit to the Ahwiaa wood carving village in Ghana. Bob found two irresistible additions to our wall o’masks at Ahwiaa and another at the museum shop of the Manhyia Presidential Palace Museum, just two of the shopping delights of our overnight trip from Accra to Kumasi. How we are going to get all this s-t-u-f-f home from Florida in a few weeks weighs heavily on our minds, but soon the weight will move heavily to our shoulders and backs.


Anyway, back to the trip. Kumasi, in central Ghana, was the seat of the Ashanti Empire and was once the capital, but now Accra is the capital. We went there primarily to see several craft villages, including the Bonwire (pronounced bon-weary) village where Kente cloth is woven, the Ntonso village where Adinkra cloth is made, and the Ahwiaa wood carving village. We also saw a couple of local history museums, as well as lots of countryside (since we spent hours and hours traveling on bad roads).

Kente is the colorful Ashanti ceremonial cloth that is hand-woven on a horizontal treadle loom, with the weaver using both his hands and feet. (Apparently women do not weave; only men do.) They weave strips measuring about 4 inches wide; these are sewn together into larger pieces of cloth and worn for important social and religious occasions. Each pattern has symbolic meaning, such as integrity, harmony, courage, so in a sense the cloth is a form of written language. I just know that I like it and wanted to see it made and probably buy some.

In Ghana, buying things is a contact sport. The salespeople grab at you in order to keep you away from their competitors, and they start draping things over you and insisting that you buy them. It’s hard to look around and touch the things you’d like to touch, or even take a breath or collect your thoughts, but somebody has to do this thankless job! So, while Bob took pictures, I sucked it up and bravely entered the fray. Wish I’d had more cash on me, too -- I came away with some lovely strips of kente and learned a bit about the weaving process while I was at it. My best score was a tote bag woven from kente strips.

We also went to Ntonso to see the stamping process for Adrinka. It’s kind of like rubber stamping, but with some pretty large stamps, and the “ink” they use is made from boiled cassava that has been through an intricate cooking process until it is virtually black. It sits up a bit when it’s stamped on the cloth and is slightly shiny.

As with the kente weaving patterns, the stamp symbols represent qualities such as life, fidelity, strength. (Ghana is very big on symbolism and traditions.) In addition to the stamping, they do some silk-screening as well, and we all got a laugh over the strips of Adrinka that had portraits of Barack Obama silk-screened in alternating patterns with Ghanaian symbols. (You might have to turn your head sideways to see his face in the photo.) Africans really seem to love Obama and we definitely felt the goodwill trickling down to U.S. visitors throughout our time in Africa.

Julia visited Ghana right after Peace Corps and she brought me a beautiful piece of Adrinka that has strips of Kente sewn into it. Right now I can picture it on the dining room table at home. I didn’t see anything more beautiful than the piece she gave me, so I just enjoyed watching the process and looking at all the lovely work. It also helped to really, truly be out of cash. When the salespeople said they would make a special price, I could honestly say I couldn’t pay ANY price. And that’s a good time to stop.

Kofi's Proverbs

Ghana has a rich traditional culture, from the tales of Anansi the spider, to rigid customs, to a reverence for wisdom. Between South Africa and Ghana, we had a guest lecturer on board the ship named Kofi Opuko, a professor who has written several books on Ghanaian proverbs. They’re sort of like Aesop’s Fables stripped down to the punch line, with an African twist. I attended several lectures by this very charming man and would like to share some of the Ghanaian proverbs he told us:

• Plant a tree when you are young, so you will have shade when you are old. (Plan for the future.)
• Until the lion is the historian, the glory will always go to the hunter.
• Proverbs put salt into speech.
• One head does not make a decision. (Ghanaians thinks groups make the best decisions.)
• Truth may become skinny but will never perish.
• Words are like bullets--once they leave the mouth, they can’t come back.
• If a person thinks cooperation is not possible, let him speak with one lip.
• When spider webs unite, they can tie up a lion.
• Together, sugar ants can carry an elephant.
• It’s the heart that gives; the hand only lets go.
• A letter from the heart is read in the face.

And my absolute favorite:

• With patience, you can skin an ant and obtain its liver. (The value of persistence.)

 

Cape Town Ramblings and Factoids

Trying to fit Cape Town into any overall pattern is very difficult. The guide on our wine tour said Cape Town is unlike any other South African city and is more like a European city. Since he was born in S. Africa, is retired from being an insurance executive and lived most of his life in Johannesburg, I’ll take his word for it. We only saw the Cape Town area and loved it, despite its obvious problems, such as poverty, lack of adequate housing and crime.

Cape Town is the most cosmopolitan of South African cities. First the Dutch colonized the area. They brought in French Huguenot settlers who established the wine industry. People from India were brought in as indentured servants. The British ruled here starting in 1795. Apartheid was set up by whites in an independent South Africa in 1948. Now, of course, black African people are finally getting to run their own country.

Having seen all the major port cities of the world, I would say Cape Town ranks as the second most beautiful, behind only Rio. Others in the top 5 would be San Francisco, Vancouver, B.C., and Hong Kong, with Hong Kong probably the most beautiful at night. New York rates its own special category, both beautiful and ugly at the same time. Cape Town has done a great job limiting development to the lower slopes of the mountains surrounding the city. Otherwise, there would be tons of ugly high-rises covering the hills. (This picture shows the "tablecloth" on Table Mountain.)

Cape Town must have the cleanest air of any major city. (Cape Town has 4 million people. South Africa has about 50 million.) The prevailing winds blow all the air pollution out to sea. Reportedly, nearby whales have a high incidence of lung cancer. Just kidding!

South Africa has had four winners of the Nobel Peace Prize. (See photo of 4 statues.) Of course there was Nelson Mandela (1993) and Desmond Tutu (1984). Also winning it with Mandela was De Klerk, the South African president who compromised with Mandela and worked out an agreement for black South Africans to get the vote. The fourth winner was in 1960 -- Albert Luthuli, who was head of the African National Congress Party before Nelson Mandela, and in that role fought against apartheid. (Over the years, some 97 individuals and 23 organizations have won this prize.)

The food in Cape Town was great, both the sea food and the South African game. There is a cape salmon that is delicious; it’s a white fish. The wine in South Africa is said to be great; I can’t remember drinking any. In fact, I can’t remember much about South Africa …..

The road system is good, although traffic is a problem at rush hour. A couple of major freeways are in the city. For some reason, unlike India and Vietnam, the poorer people don’t ride motorbikes. Saw none of them. This is surprising, since the public transport system is not good. Even in the one squatter camp we visited, a few of the people had beater cars and kept them in ramshackle garages next to their ramshackle houses. Gas is about $4 a gallon.

South Africa ranks very high in the GINI income inequality scale (Social scientists have a scale for everything.) -- second in the world behind Brazil. The scale ranks countries from 0 to 1, with 1 being complete inequality (one guy owns everything) and 0 being complete equality. South Africa’s score is .58. The U.S. score is .45 and trending toward greater inequality (although national health care is expected to reverse that trend.) Most European countries and Japan are in the .3 to .4 range. The countries with the most equality are the Scandinavian ones, ranking in the .2 to .3 range. ANYBODY STILL AWAKE OUT THERE? Outside the downtown area and in the local beach areas, there are scores of multimillion-dollar homes and condos in a lot of gated communities. Farther out are the townships and shack housing for the poor. The GNP per capita for South Africa is almost $10,000, a good number for Africa, but 43 percent of South Africans are living on less than $2 U.S. per day, according to the United Nations.

The percentage of people with HIV/AIDS in South Africa is about 18 percent of the population between the ages of 15 and 49. That’s one of the major reasons life expectancy in South Africa is only 52, about 25 years less than in the U.S.

Cape Town has the only nuclear power plant in the whole continent of Africa. Much of South Africa’s power comes from coal; it has sizable reserves.

The large big game parks in South Africa are in the north part of the country, about a 14-hour drive or 2-hour flight from Cape Town. There is also said to be a luxury, old-style classic train that runs from Pretoria in the north to Cape Town. Big game (elephants and lions) used to roam in the Cape Town area, but they were all killed in the 1800s. The government is trying to reintroduce the zebra and some similar animals in some of the Cape Town park areas.

The shopping in Cape Town is good for African crafts, although many are brought in from other African countries, and they are not cheap. Nothing in Cape Town is cheap.

Geraniums originated in Cape Town and spread to the rest of the world a couple of centuries ago.

When people glance at a world map, they tend to think the tip of Africa and the tip of South America are at the same latitude. In fact, South America extends much farther south -- to about 56 degrees of latitude -- while Cape Town is at about 34 degrees latitude. (As a comparison, Salem is at 45 degrees north latitude.) So Cape Town’s climate is more like that of central or southern California. Yet there are penguin colonies at coastal parks just outside the city, and we saw penguins on Robben Island. (Thanks to our friend Alex for sharing her penguin picture, which we missed.) The water is cold at Cape Town.

Cape Town harbor must have the most seals of any major harbor; they are everywhere.

The president of South Africa has 4 wives and 20 children. That’s probably why he approved Viagra as an official sponsor of the World Cup. That last sentence was to see if you were still paying attention.

You Be the Judge

Overall, I think capitalism is the best economic system available, as long as there are controls to prevent what caused the current recession.

But there are those “Let them eat cake” moments which cause one to wonder what appropriate controls are and if people can be so stupid as to not understand how their conspicuous consumption looks.

Take the little plaything pictured with this story. It was berthed right next to our ship in Cape Town. It’s the private yacht “Rising Sun,” among the five most expensive in the world. Its value is in the $200 million to $300 million range. It supposedly has a crew of 50 and can accommodate about 50 passengers in splendor. It’s a shiny, gleaming example of excess in every sense of the word. Even the big spools that hold the ship's lines were heavily chromed.

It’s owned by Larry Elligson, CEO of Oracle, and David Geffen, one of the heads of Dreamworks. Now I don’t know how much these gentlemen contribute to worthy causes; it could be a substantial amount. I certainly praise the efforts of other corporate bigwigs such as Bill Gates and Warren Buffett and all they are doing to fight disease in the undeveloped world.

But this yacht is berthed in Cape Town, at a cost of several thousand dollars a day, and will stay there through the World Cup in June and July so its owners and their friends will have a nice place to stay during the games. There are several beautiful luxury hotels within a stone’s throw of where that yacht is tied up, by the way.

What kind of message does it send to bring this yacht and have it on display for several months in a country such as South Africa with all the abject poverty, AIDS, crime, unemployment, lack of adequate housing and a government struggling to meet all these needs? It’s one thing to have this yacht in Monaco or Bermuda or even Fort Lauderdale, but it’s another thing to bring it to Cape Town.

I think the owners of “toys” such as this would be wise to remember what happened to Marie.

Hakuna Matata!

Hundreds of people on our ship went on 3-day safaris that involved flying and hotels, but Bob and I both wanted to concentrate our South African experiences around Cape Town, as we had heard the city itself was simply amazing. (And it was…) Instead, I ended my time in South Africa by going on a 1-day safari at the Inverdoorn Game Reserve near Ceres, about 2½ hours east of Cape Town. Good choice, if I do say so myself! The trip packed a lot of wildlife viewing into one day and it was a great way to have the safari experience without having to catch airplanes and fly to the other end of the country. By the way, I realize the cheetah picture looks like it has a painted background, but that's really what the countryside looked like. The mountains in South Africa are some of the most beautiful I've ever seen, so the bus ride alone, through valley after valley of table grapes and wineries, was drop-dead gorgeous.

Our group arrived at Inverdoorn, had a great Easter brunch of local foods, and then split up into 2 big 4x4 open-air vehicles that could take the rough trails. First our ranger took us to see some cheetahs that have been part of a restoration project; the park plans to move two of them into the wild portion of the park next week. (Bye-bye, albino springbok! They say you‘ll be the first to go, since you show up so well.) We also saw a male and 2 female lions, plus giraffes, zebras, impalas, kudus, wildebeests, a hippo, millions of birds, and a red Botswanan deer. About the only thing missing (besides Bob, who went to a botanical garden and a wine store in Cape Town) was the elephant; it’s too dry in this region, called the Karoo. We also never tracked down the black rhino.

With the Lion King soundtrack playing in my head, we headed back to the ship, which was scheduled for departure at 8 p.m., but the bus got stuck in traffic. Even though it was Easter, full road crews were out paving the freeway in preparation for the FIFA World Cup that starts in June. We got back to the ship nearly at sailing time--only to find that the harbor was too windy and we couldn’t leave! We nearly were blown into the water while walking the short distance to the ship, but once we were aboard Customs closed our entry, and then the ship sat in the harbor for another 21 hours, in full view of all the great shops and restaurants we had come to love during our 5-day stay. Many a sad soul lamented our return to iceberg lettuce, bland pasta, and classes, when such tantalizing possibilities were right off our decks. Now we are hauling ass for Ghana, trying to make up for lost time. Meanwhile, Bob and I are plotting a strategy for our return to this wonderful country.

Touring with the Fuskies

We spent one of our days in South Africa touring the wine country outside of Cape Town. We went on a tour in a van with a guide/driver, Mervyn Davidson. We had a fantastic time. Two other couples were on the tour, one that we knew from the ship and one we met on the wine tour -- a doctor and a public health educator, both of whom work at a new hospital in Botswana, the country north of South Africa where our Julia worked as an intern for the United Nations last summer. They had many interesting stories about opening a new hospital. The doctor, Edmond, was from Zimbabwe and the woman, Julie, was from California.

Now, those of you who know me won’t believe this, but the couple from the ship that we spent the whole day with are Washington Husky fans -- not just fans, mind you, but they are both UofW employees. Not in the Athletic Department, thank God, but both work in administration and they are about our age.

I know some of you may have fainted or are catching your breath at the thought of me socializing with avid Huskies. Perhaps a few of you are saying, “Well, Bob was just being kind to the less fortunate.” I do have a few friends who are Husky fans, but with those people I have always held out hope that they might be converted to right thinking. There is no hope of that with Eric and Georgia; but they are still wonderful people. There, I’ve said it. I can’t believe it, but I’ve said it. I guess I’m just going soft in my old age.

We’ve even suggested that they come and stay overnight at our house this fall when the Huskies travel to Autzen for their annual drubbing. I said we would supply the crying towels. And I said I probably wouldn’t wear my “Huck the Fuskies” shirt. They haven’t responded yet, but I would enjoy having them visit -- if we win.

Anyway, to return to the tour, we traveled about an hour outside of Cape Town to the chief wine-growing region, based in the towns of Stellenbosch, Franschhoek and Paarl. About half the drive was on a freeway and half over wide, 2-lane country roads. The countryside is idyllic, with rocky hills looming in the background over acres of vineyards. The area is fantastically beautiful. The harvest had just been completed.

We visited four vineyards in a wide geographic area and had tastings at each -- I think we counted about 26 samples in all, those of us who could still count. At one, where they do sparkling wine, we got a full 2-hour tour given by the vineyard owner, where Luana was one of the featured stars, as described below.

Tasting rooms tend to be more elaborate affairs than in Oregon, more on the Napa Valley scale. Many have restaurants. We ate at one which had absolutely delicious food, including African game, beef and Cape salmon, which is a delicious white fish that I chose for my meal. Franschhoek, at the center of the vineyard area, is considered the gourmet capital of the country, with one of the restaurants rated among the top 35 in the world.

The tour of the sparkling wine facility -- the winery is Haute Cabriere but the brand name is Pierre Jourdan -- included a lot on the history of sparkling wine and concluded with the owner calling onstage a person from the audience -- Luana -- to perform an old French ceremony, sabrage, where a saber is used to open a bottle of sparkling wine by slicing off the top of the bottle. She did it most successfully on the first try. The owner then “knighted” Luana, who performed a beautiful curtsy as part of the ceremony. Fortunately, he gave her a souvenir -- the bottle top she sliced off -- and didn’t give her the saber, or I really would have had to watch my tongue for the rest of the voyage. (Note from Luana: Malik, I’m bringing you a toy, kitty!!)

Luana and I each bought two bottles of wine -- the limit the ship allows us to bring on board in each port. That’s too bad, because we would have liked to purchase many more. There were many wonderful wines, and a number of them were at very good prices, both whites and reds. The Sauvignon Blanc seems especially good at several different wineries.

But the best part of the day was the good fellowship, even withhhhhhh (spit it out, Bob) Husky fans. There, I’ve said it again. It’s getting easier.

Table Mountain Terrorists

Looming above Cape Town is the imposing rock formation of Table Rock. It’s part of an immense national park that includes other rock formations and extends several miles down to the Cape of Good Hope. It’s beautiful. Development is limited to areas lower down on the mountains and a few coastal towns that nestle along the shorelines with fantastic beaches.

Of course, one of the chief things to do in Cape Town is to go up on top of Table Mountain to see the views -- other than the days when it is enveloped in clouds, which are known as the Table Cloth (seriously).

There are two ways to get to the top of the mountain: hike on one of several nice but steep trails or take an aerial cable car, which costs about $20 per person round trip. The cable-car journey is quick -- just a few minutes. But Luana and I, being the avid physical fitness buffs that we are, had planned to hike it. It’s a little more challenging, but we were sure we could handle it without bickering or whining: “How much farther is it? Don’t drink all the water! This trail is really steep. I have to go to the bathroom. It’s really hot!”

But that was before we heard about the pirates, or some might call them terrorists -- particularly if you were worried about headline alliteration with Table Mountain.

The night before our long-planned hike, after my 17th glass of good South African wine in a bar, I was under this table in the bar when I heard some guy with a patch over his eye whisper: “We’ll take that table tomorrow.” Well, immediately I surmised (I often surmise after several glasses of wine.) that he was part of a gang of pirates intent on capturing Table Mountain. So I knew that we had to get up the mountain early the next day to see it before the pirates took over, and perhaps to help sound a warning. So we had to take the cable car, even though we would have much rather hiked.

We made it up there in the morning, saw many beautiful views, hiked around on top -- it’s quite big up there with about 2 miles of flat hiking trails, and even had lunch at the park restaurant, all while keeping a wary eye out for pirates, of course. Somehow, they must have been delayed.

But we didn’t want to take any chances so we took the cable car down, too. You don’t want to run into pirates on hiking trails; that’s for sure.

Table Mountain was fantastic, and we’re glad we saw it before the pirates got there.

We took the open-top red tour bus down from the mountain and stopped at a luxury hotel at one of the beach towns to check and make sure the pirates hadn’t landed there. In South Africa, it seems they call Happy Hour drinks “Sundowners.” We decided to take part in this pleasant custom in the hotel while keeping our pirate watch. We spent some time there, but never did see any pirates, at least I didn’t from under that table in the hotel.

South Africa appears safe for now, but we also kept a close watch the next day -- on our wine tour.

Working with Operation Hunger

When apartheid held its ugly grip on South Africa, the white government forced black and colored families to relocate outside of Cape Town, primarily to the barren Cape Flats area to the east. One entire neighborhood at the heart of Cape Town called District 6 has a museum dedicated to the forced relocations and evictions that were intended to completely separate the races and clear out the city for whites. Due to ongoing land disputes, 45 years after District 6 was declared a white area, it still lies mostly empty and weed-choked, and the razed homes have never been replaced. It’s one of many sad chapters in the book of South Africa, with later installments on topics such as poverty, hunger, and AIDs.

But people have to live somewhere, so townships sprang up in the Cape Flats, with names like Khayelitsha and Mitchellsplain. You can see the rainbow stages of poverty here--everything from wretched rows of shack upon shack made of rippled scraps of metal, to suburban-style homes of stucco over cement blocks, pretty western in appearance. Through Semester at Sea, we had signed up for a day visiting sites in this area that are served by a nonprofit called Operation Hunger. The trip promised an opportunity to roll up our sleeves and help people in danger of malnourishment (the polite word for starvation).

Our first stop was at an AIDs/HIV clinic in Khayelitsha called Site C, where we dropped off some food supplies to a soup kitchen that provides meals to people who have come for treatment. This visit would have felt a bit voyeuristic had we stayed longer without pitching in to cook or do something -- imagine having 40 people come and stare at you while you sat in chairs in a parking lot waiting for a meal -- but it was a really quick stop.

Then we were off to a squatters’ camp called, interestingly enough, Los Angeles. LA doesn’t even qualify as a township; it has no electricity, no police services, no streets, but at least a couple of public water spigots where wells have been drilled. Eventually it may become a township when the government finally admits it can‘t just displace the residents, most of whom came to the Cape Town area 15 years ago from rural areas in search of work or health care. For now, the people who live here have pirated live wires from the next township over the hill, and the only thing keeping their barefoot children from getting shocked is the fact that the current is pretty weak by the time it travels all that distance. Little electricity means little refrigeration, so not much in the way of fresh food; no streetlights, so not much in the way of safety; not much of anything. And yet the people appeared to have a sense of hope and a desire to make things work. After seeing the filth of northern India, we were impressed at the cleanliness and the minimal trash. Some of the shacks had fresh coats of paint. The kids walk to school on the other side of the freeway, about 2 miles away. It wasn’t perfect, but we definitely felt comfortable there, and very welcome.

Operation Hunger had just received a grant from the Spar grocery chain to fund a soup kitchen in Los Angeles to feed the children five meals a week, so they wanted to do an age/weight assessment of every child in the village. The soup kitchen is inside an old shipping container. Another container houses a church. Everyone in the settlement wanted to come see who we were. With our 40 people, 37 of them about age 21, we were able to set up three scales and make quick work of weighing about 100 children and plotting their weights by age on a progress chart. The Operation Hunger folks said they love Semester at Sea because they can do in one day what it normally takes them months to do. Some of the kids tried to help in the soup kitchen, but the ladies in charge didn’t want much help and quickly reclaimed their territory. But the kids who weren’t busy weighing or plotting or going door to door to round up all the children just played with the little guys, and everyone had a wonderful time.

At lunchtime, our group went offsite to a freeway convenience store to eat our boxed lunches from the ship. Many people bought lunch there so we could supplement the soup kitchen meal with all our sandwiches, fried chicken, hard boiled eggs and apples from the ship meals. It’s amazing how much food the ship provides in a boxed lunch. We returned in time to help serve the kids their soup, which is made with a protein powder for supplemental nutrition, and then the kids did some dancing for us and just played and took pictures with our cameras.

Operation Hunger had interesting information about malnourishment. For instance, boys are more likely to be under-weight because parents keep girls at home (when not in school) to protect them. Thus, the girls are in the kitchens a lot and can eat more. Boys go off all day and play soccer, so they eat less.

I’m so impressed with the attitudes of some of our students. This neighborhood could clearly use electricity, and two of the students who went on the trip are already planning fundraisers when they return to their campuses to raise the money needed to bring electricity to LA. All I could think of after we left was how much red tape would be involved and how it might be impossible to do it, but they don’t see those obstacles at all -- they just see an opportunity to try. Good lesson to me: Stop thinking about barriers!

A side note: We made this trip on our 32nd anniversary.