Beautiful Cape Town, Or, The Perfect Day

I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.

Okay, maybe Matt Damon got a better tour of Robben Island in the movie Invictus, where he stood alone in Nelson Mandela’s cell and conjured the mental image of Mandela studying, chipping rocks in the courtyard, and reading the words to the namesake poem. The reality is that you get about 10 seconds to block and tackle the 99 other people in your tour group so you can snap a picture, but that is perfectly okay. We were so grateful that we were even able to get a ticket to go out to Robben Island, and we had the most perfect, gorgeous, lovely day! What a thrill to walk in the tracks of the most special and extraordinary Mandela, who went from spending 27 years as a political prisoner to become president of his nation.

First some background: We docked in Cape Town at 8 a.m. today, coming into the harbor as we watched a lovely sunrise cast rays of light on the nooks and crannies of Table Mountain. The mountain was so much bigger and more imposing than I expected, and to arrive in Cape Town harbor by ship is one of the joyous benefits of ship travel. We docked right at the heart of the beautiful Victoria & Alfred Waterfront, a huge shopping and restaurant complex, and as soon as we could leave the ship we headed straight for the Nelson Mandela Gateway to try to purchase tickets to Robben Island, where Nelson Mandela spent 20 of his 27 years in prison. We had meant to purchase tickets online before we arrived, but online sales were closed by the time we tried, so we decided to just give it a go.

When we got to the ticket window, our salesperson told us the first available tickets were for the day after we were scheduled to leave Cape Town. I don’t know why, but I just couldn’t walk away; I really felt that I was going to be going to Robben Island. First I asked if they had a waiting list. No. Did they sell tickets if people with presale tickets didn’t show up? No. Did they wait to see if the boat was full and then sell tickets at the last minute? A pause. Let me check. And before you know it, we had two tickets on the 11 a.m. ferry, the Sikhululekile.

The 7-mile trip out to the island, which we had just passed on our ship a few hours before, took about 40 minutes and was a nice change of pace from our big ship--fast and breezy. We docked at the island and walked to tour buses that take you around the island to see the lighthouse, churches, homes for the guards, and the leper cemetery (Robben Island hosted a leper colony from the mid-1800s until the 1930s). We also saw the building where Robert Sobukwe, leader of the Pan African Congress, was held in isolation during the 1960s. His four children were allowed to visit him and their pictures were on the wall above the beds they used.

Then we left the bus and met a new tour guide, a man who was actually a former prisoner on the island. Our guide Sparks spent 7 years on Robben Island after he was convicted as a terrorist for his anti-apartheid political efforts.

Sparks took us to the large room where he lived with 60 other men in double bunks. There were window openings with bars, but no glass, so during the winter the rain and wind blew in; there was no heat, and the 60 men shared 2 toilets and 2 showers. Then Sparks took us to see Mandela’s cell, which was in a section of individual prison cells, each a rectangle about 6 feet by 8 feet. Mandela slept on a mat on the floor and had a bucket for a toilet. Very sparse, very grim. And yet he decided to befriend his jailers. Sparks said that many of the prisoners hold reunions now and the jailers also attend.

At Sea (Or, A Touch of Cabin Fever)

(Bob:) Some of the regular readers of this blog have been saying, “Bob, that’s terrible.” So screw you.

I’m writing for the readers of our blog who have asked, “Doesn’t it get terribly boring at sea? Don’t you begin to get cabin fever and go a little crazy, repeating yourself at times?”

“Doesn’t it get terribly boring at sea? Don’t you begin to get cabin fever and go a little crazy, repeating yourself at times?”

“Doesn’t it get terribly boring at sea? Don’t you begin to get cabin fever and go a little cra… Whoa, sorry, I spaced out a little there.

No, silly readers, of course not. I’m well-adjusted to the routine and it doesn’t bother me a bit.

WHOA! IT’S THE END OF MARCH AND I HAVEN’T SEEN A SINGLE BASKETBALL GAME. THIS IS TORTURE! OH, THE HUMANITY! IN FACT I HAVEN’T WATCHED A SINGLE SPORTING EVENT (OTHER THAN A BLURRED VERSION OF THE SUPER BOWL) SINCE MID-JANUARY!

But, of course, there’s plenty of other things to do. I can go to college courses and watch know-nothing students gossip and play solitaire on their computers during class time so they’ll become know-nothing adults. Party on, Wayne. Party on, Garth. That makes you encouraged about the future.

Or I can go to the meeting every other day of our “Lifelong Learner” (old coots) group, and hear the following conversation: “Now you all may want to go to the special performance tonight in the student union at 8.” At which time, somebody will pipe up and say, “ Where and when is that performance? I don’t know anything about it.” At which point I want to say, “READ THE PAPER RIGHT IN FRONT OF YOU, YOU DIMWIT. IT’S IN THE FIRST PARAGRAPH. HOW DID YOU GET TO BE 186 YEARS OLD WITHOUT KNOWING HOW TO READ?” But Luana always stops me from doing that. So then we follow that up with questions about whether anti-malarial medicines cause gas and similar topics. Believe me, you don’t want to hear my answer to that.

NO SPORTING EVENTS SINCE JANUARY. OUR IN-ROOM TV HAS 6 CHANNELS, BUT NO ESPN. I CAN’T TAKE IT!

Of course, there’s always reading. I think I’ve read 186 books since leaving the mainland U.S., including all 940 pages of Don Quixote three times. Can you imagine someone so insane he rides around Spain trying to do good deeds to win the heart of Dulcinea del Taboso. And all the time she is in our 6th floor dining room, held captive by a dragon and a minotaur. I have a plan to get her out that involves bringing a horse and some lances on board. Stay tuned.

Anyway, as you can see --NO SPORTS ANYWHERE! NO SPORTS! WHY, I DON’T EVEN KNOW WHAT PRISON THE OREGON FOOTBALL PLAYERS ARE GOING TO -- I’m perfectly well-adjusted to shipboard life.

Other than the food. Now I know it’s wrong to complain about food when we visit so many places where people don’t have enough to eat, but the cooks onboard hate me. They have this conspiracy that has made everything taste the same -- it all tastes like plain pasta -- salads, meat, pancakes, everything. I think that cockroach I killed in India might be the ancestor of one of the cooks. And the cockroach was a better cook. NO SPORTS!

So, now that I’m feeling better I’m going to get in my car and drive down to the local bowling alley, roll a few games and then go to Red Robin for a Banzai Burger and unlimited fries. UNLIMITED FRIES!!!!

Oh wait, Luana wants me to go to bed after taking my meds. I keep forgetting to do that on ship. There’s so much to do.

(Note from Luana: We arrive in South Africa momentarily. I promise I'll get him out for air.)

Could You Live on $2 a Day?

I miss having coffee with my friends back in Oregon, but it might be hard to go back to spending $3 or $4 on a latte again. That’s because this trip is really bringing home to me the poverty that informs the lives of so many other people in the world. As unemployed as I am, and as uncertain as I am about my future, I can see that my life will always be more privileged than most lives on this planet, and that is a very humbling thought.

When we get home, I’m thinking of decorating one wall in the kitchen with the World Population Data Sheet. It’s fascinating reading, a pile of statistics on each country in the world -- fertility rate, gross national product, AIDS/HIV rate, infant mortality, etc. One of the statistics that keeps calling out to me is the number of people in the world who live on less than $2 a day. It’s a pretty shocking number: 48 percent. Of the countries we are visiting, India at 76% and Cambodia at 68% are definitely in worst shape. In Africa, we will visit South Africa, at 43%, and Ghana, at 54%. But for the African continent as a whole, the sad statistic is 65% of people living on less than $2 a day, and in several African countries the numbers run upwards of 90%. In Liberia, 95% of the population lives on less than $2 a day. Can you imagine it?

Today we can see Africa for the first time from the ship. We are hugging the South African coast as we round the tip headed for Cape Town, because the seas farther out are rough and roiling. I’m not sure why all these statistics keep floating in my head. Maybe it’s because I‘m about to see more statistics turn into real, live human beings. And I’m wondering: What does it mean? What can I do about it?

The students on the ship are working in groups to create projects on sustainability for their Global Studies class. One group is having its members take turns trying to survive on $2 a day as we visit each country, and another student is shooting video. We have some concerns about safety--$2 a day isn’t even enough to buy bottled water, and it doesn’t seem safe to sleep on the streets, which is about all you can afford on $2. But I’ll be really interested in seeing their presentation and hearing what they learn. I’ll keep you posted.

The Song of the Dodo…But Fortunately Not the Kestrel, Or the Fody, Or…

(Luana:) When we studied the itinerary for this Semester at Sea voyage, I will admit I had no idea where Mauritius was or why I might want to go there. It appeared that it might simply be a surf-and-sand mai tai stop for passengers to refresh after India on the way to South Africa (and that would have been just fine by me). But it was so much more. It was an amazing educational experience of a lifetime, thanks to my English lit class, taught by Professor David Sumner of Oregon’s own Linfield College, who absolutely rocks as a teacher (and who also plays great bluegrass).
It turns out that Mauritius was the one and only place on earth where the now-extinct dodo lived; the Dutch finished clubbing all of them to death around 1680 "because it was fun." From the number of T-shirts and trinkets featuring dodos that we saw for sale, I’m not sure if that’s a point of pride or not, but one thing is certain: Mauritius has its act together now where extinction is concerned, and is doing something about it.

In my lit class, which has focused on nature writing, we read a remarkable book by David Quammen called The Song of the Dodo, Island Biogeography in an Age of Extinction. Quammen traveled the world looking at evolution and extinction issues as they are illuminated by islands. A good part of the book focuses on the Mauritian kestrel and a biologist named Carl Jones, who managed to bring this nearly extinct bird back from the brink. (There were only 4 birds left in the 1980s.) David arranged for our class to go to Ile Aux Aigrettes (Island of Egrets) off the southern coast of Mauritius, where Jones’s Mauritian Wildlife Foundation is bringing back critically endangered native birds, animals and plants. The director of the foundation took us on a 4-hour hike to see the wildlife for ourselves.

What a success story! Over the past 20 years or so, the foundation has ripped out invasive species that choked the island, and killed off the nonnative mongoose and rat populations that were eating bird and tortoise eggs and ruining habitat for native plant species. They have restored native ebony trees and palms, started a nursery to repopulate plant species on the mainland (where sugar cane has replaced far too much native vegetation), and created an Eden for restoring birds and animals. It was a beautiful, heavenly place, a real paradise, very close in appearance to what Mauritius originally looked like before people first inhabited the island around 1600 and started tearing out the native flora to plant sugar cane for profit.

Interestingly enough, we never saw a kestrel, although that had been the focus of our readings and the stated purpose for making the trip. That’s because the kestrel is no longer endangered--WAHOO! It actually lives on “mainland” Mauritius, not on this little island. And we didn’t even care that we didn't see it! We learned so much and saw so much and we were so happy the kestrel was doing well, and we saw many other success stories for species that are currently being restored.

 Here are some of the things we saw in the wild:

• The Mauritius Fody, a bright green bird with brilliant red head, which is now off the critical list and merely endangered.
• The critically endangered Pink Pigeon, the only wild population of these birds to be seen by the public anywhere in the world. Unfortunately, it is showing some signs of distress, with unexplained disease and a decline in its reproduction rate.
• The Olive White-eye, Zosterops chloronothos, a bird I barely glimpsed.
• The Aldabran Giant Tortoise, brought in to replace the two species of Tortoises that lived on the island and that are now extinct.

• Telfair’s Skink, a lizard that was just reintroduced into the wild a couple of years ago.

After our visit to Ile Aux Aigrettes, we also went to the Vanille Crocodile Park, which had so much more than crocodiles, including the most gorgeous insect collection I’ve ever seen. We also saw a lot of what our group came to call “tortoise porn.” It was mating season for the 200 or so giant Aldabra tortoises that live at the park, and there were many, many pairs having what you might call Harry Met Sally moments. It was pretty noisy! We also happened to be there when they fed dead whole chickens, feathers and all, to the crocodiles. Horrifying!

I’m looking at the environment in a whole new way. Mauritius was a real gift for me--a place not on my radar turned out to be a highlight of this journey, thanks to one book, one professor, and one day out in nature. If you ever want a good, thrilling read that just might make you think, I highly recommend The Song of the Dodo.

Hope for India, and Welcome to Mauritius

(Bob:) My last entry for India, and my first and only entry for the island nation of Mauritius, strikes a distinctly different note than my first entry for India. That entry centered on our first port of call, Chennai (formerly Madras) on the southeast coast of India, plus the three northern India cities of New Delhi, Varanasi, and Agra. It was so depressing, bordering on despair, to see such utter poverty in a country with the resources of India.

But there is another Indian story in the state of Kerala on the southwest coast of India, and a related story on Mauritius, since 60 percent of its population are Indian descendants, whose forebears were brought there in the 19th century to work on the sugar plantations as indentured laborers when slavery was outlawed by Britain in the 1830s.

Kerala is the most international of the Indian states and the least Hindu, with only about 50 percent of the population following that religion. About 25 percent are Christians, the highest percentage in India, about 18 percent Moslems and then various other faiths. Kerala was a prime area for the first European explorers who came around Africa in search of the spice trade. Also a prime area for the first European missionaries. It’s a very tropical area, getting about 120 inches of rainfall a year. This provides abundant water, allowing the state to produce a lot of hydroelectricity from the more mountainous area in its north.

Kerala has the highest literacy rate in India -- about 95 percent. This, I think is key to its success, along with a weak caste system.

The state also had a communist government that won elections and took over state government in 1956 and has been in power much of the time since. (It’s one of the few communist governments to ever take power through elections and maintain the elections.) The communists are currently part of the coalition government that rules the state. The communist government enacted land reform in 1968, so land ownership is relatively widespread. I was also told that the state has done a much better job of enforcing gender equality than many other Indian states.

There are things you don’t see in Kerala: there is very little garbage along the roadsides; I never saw a cow, let alone have them stand in the middle of the road. I saw no hovels of untouchables along roadsides; with the lesser number of Hindus, the caste system appears to be weak in Kerala.

More important are the things you do see: high-rise construction in many places, some of it apartments, some hotels and some offices. Kerala, probably because of the high literacy rate, has been a prime spot for American outsourcing of such things as call centers. This was also the only state where I saw family planning advertising -- “One child per family.” One indication of the growing prosperity of the place: our port city of Cochin, with about 1.5 million people, had brand new Audi, BMW, and Mercedes dealerships.

Kerala supposedly has nice beaches, although I didn’t make it to them, so it also has a growing tourism sector.

In short, Kerala seems to have it figured out in terms of economic development, I think primarily through education. But I plan to research this further to find out what the experts say about the place. I only hope that what’s happening there can spread to the rest of the country, but the task is so daunting.

One thing you discover even if you are in India for only a few days is that Indians are very vocal, very talkative and very opinionated and argumentative. It’s said that if you put 10 Indians in a room, you’ll have 25 opinions on any subject brought up. That’s one reason it seems unlikely that any governing system other than democracy would ever work for India, even though it doesn’t work very well.

In Mauritius, Indians have proved they can run a democracy well. Mauritius is an island about the size of Rhode Island, located several hundred miles east of Madagascar and west of the American bases on Diego Garcia. Mauritius is known to much of the world, particularly Europe, as a big beach resort with 200 miles of white sand beaches and a coral reef surrounding the island. There are many luxury and more moderate hotels lining the beaches, and the island has been discovered by McDonald’s and Pizza Hut.

The French ruled the island in the 18th century; the British took over in 1810 and ruled it until independence in 1968. The result: a French culture overlaid by a British bureaucracy. The people speak a Creole French; advertising signs are in French, but road signs are in English.

The island has 1.2 million people, and is visited by 900,000 tourists each year. The per capita GDP is more than $12,000, about six times the level of India and the highest in Africa, where Mauritius is placed for classification purposes. The country has a government paid health-care system (What a concept!) as well as old-age pensions, unemployment compensation, housing assistance loans and a whole variety of social welfare programs funded at an appropriate level for the country. You see poverty -- slums in the city, poor shacks for sugar cane workers, etc. -- but it appears manageable. Again, to me it appears to be Indians who don’t have the burden of the caste system being able to run things efficiently, as in Kerala.

Probably most important for the country has been the smart economic planning by the government: Realizing that sugar cane and tourism weren’t enough to provide needed employment, the government first in the 1980s created export processing zones where textile manufacturers could bring in material duty-free, have it sewn into finished clothing and then exported duty free. That proved 70,000 jobs. Then in the 1990s, the country loosened its banking regulations so off-shore banking became a growth industry, and banks built big office buildings in the capital. Today the government is building a big high-tech office park called Cyber City. Now, if you are a high-tech CEO, would you rather have your overseas office in India with all its problems, or in Mauritius where the CEO can have a beachfront house 10 minutes from work?

The country has had regular elections since 1968. Maybe we could convince this government to come over and run the United States for a few years.

We were only in Mauritius for about 36 hours, and Luana had the most interesting trip in that time, which she will relate.

In addition to going all over the downtown of Port Louis, I went a little way out of town to a sugar museum. I learned that Mauritius is one of the chief exporters of sugar to Europe, that there can be about 10 kinds of sugar, each tasting slightly different (I tasted them), depending on boiling time, and that Mauritius gets 40 percent of its electric energy by burning sugar cane waste.

Now you can rest from factoid exhaustion.

Crossing a Line

When you see the Southern Cross for the first time
You understand now why you came this way.
'Cause the truth you might be runnin' from is so small.
But it's as big as the promise - the promise of a comin' day.
     --Crosby Stills & Nash

(Luana:) We've now passed the half-way point of our journey in terms of how long we will be gone from home. We're now exactly half-way around the world, in a time zone 12 hours away from Canby, Oregon, so I guess it's only appropriate that now we are also in a different hemisphere. In the middle of the night last night we crossed the equator in the Indian Ocean, while sailing from India to Mauritius. This means we have been in all four hemispheres on the trip now -- East, West, North, South. Incidentally, we are so close to time for the Spring Equinox tomorrow, that we were told the sun was exactly overhead today at noon. I went up and took a picture; it looks like a flashbulb going off.

This weekend the ship will have Neptune Day, where exalted Shellbacks like Bob, who have already crossed, will initiate lowly Pollywogs like me into the Order of Neptune. I'm trying to decide which I'll choose: head-shaving or a bath in fish guts. I suspect vanity will rule. (Bob: The emphasis in that sentence should be on "exalted.")

Yesterday also marked my first real spotting of sea life. You'd think we would have seen plenty of dolphins and whales by now, but that hasn't been the case. The ocean has been vast and mysterious on this journey. Yesterday, though, I saw hundreds of flying fish. They're small and they fly close to the water, and they usually fly for only a couple of seconds. But I was beginning to think I would be the only person on the trip not to spot some, so I was thrilled to see so many all in the space of a half hour. It was a nice way to mark the half-way point. Who knows what other adventures lie in store?

Through the Eyes of a Child

(Luana:) Our last impression of India is one of hope and awe, full of good feelings, based on our visit to the SOS Children’s Village in Cochin. We didn’t know what to expect at an orphanage, after seeing some of the squalid living conditions in India. So it was a relief and a pleasure to feel both amazed and impressed.

When we got off the bus, children led us by the hand to an open-air pavilion and presented us with coconuts and straws, for a refreshing drink of coconut milk. Then some of the children entertained us. Beyond cute, and you could definitely see that Bollywood has had its impact. The ship had sent a group a day earlier, and SOS had prepared two groups of kids to do performances for them. Well, all the other kids wanted to perform so badly that three additional groups came up with acts overnight, so our group had five different acts to watch -- all adorable. Then the children led us around the complex to see how they live. Bob and I were with a darling girl with an unpronounceable name -- Amritsa?? -- who looked 12 but said she was 18. She seemed to like the arts, and she was sweet and shy, and she held my hand as we walked.

SOS is an international organization, and in India it has 40 orphanages alone. The term orphan is a loose one. Many of the children have family, but their family is either too poor to care for them, possibly has abandoned them, or could tell some other sad tale. But instead of just shoving the kids into an institution, SOS sets up its own family structure. Each child grows up in a home with about 10 other kids of all ages, with a mother to care for them. Each family does its own cooking, and there are three bedrooms. One bedroom for the girls, one for the boys, and one for the mother, with room for any babies or sick children who need special care. Each child has his or her own bed. This complex had Hindu houses, Christian houses, and Muslim houses, so the children could be brought up according to their own religion. The lovely thing is that this family unit remains intact, and the children don't even appear to be forced out at what we would consider adulthood--there are many 20-somethings still living with their families. That especially made me happy, given the job prospects they face and the number of people who appear to be living on the streets (although not so much in Cochin, which seemed more prosperous).

We visited inside the homes of four of the 15 families at the Cochin SOS site, and in each house the mother immediately pulled out the photo album for a “daughter” who had married, and wedding pictures were all over the walls, so that is a particular point of pride for them, to be able to marry off a daughter in that fashion. What impressed me was how nice the homes were -- they looked kind of like a Northwest scout lodge -- and how happy and well-educated the children were.

While the ship’s students were playing soccer with the kids, I wound up talking to Vipin Das, the village director. (He assumed I was the “teacher” and in charge of the group, because everyone else in our group was under 25). He said most of the children speak both Hindi and English, and all were in school or vocational programs. They appear to do a good bit of testing and try to help find good educational fits for each child so they have a chance at careers. I think this is definitely a good organization to keep on your radar, if you’re looking for charities to support. I know this will be a memory of India that I keep in my heart.