A Closing Word . . .

I've abandoned my intention to leave my blog as it was, but circumstances have forced me to come back to it (explanation below), so I thought I would tell you about the advantages and disadvantages of the so-called "real world."

Advantages

• I don't have to share Zoë and the Kid with others
• Zoë's cooking!
• Our coffee!
• Our bed
• Privacy
• Peace & Quiet
  
• Seeing friends and family

Disadvantages

• No ocean
• Loneliness
• Missing friends
• Too much quiet
  
• Work looming
• Lots of meetings in the offing

If it weren't for the "friends & family" part under "advantages," I think we'd all rather be on the ship. Hopefully, in a few years, that will be the case.

In the meantime, I have to print out my blog. Yes, dear readers, you read correctly. I have just spoken with my Dad's widow, a beloved member of our family and its most computer-phobic member. She has not read a word of any of this, or of Zoë's blog, so I am going to print out both and send them to her by snail mail. Who would have thought it would end this way?

But I also want to say thanks to those of you who did read, and who posted, both here and on Zoë's blog. It was wonderful sharing our incredible summer with you all. Keep in touch, and all the best!

The Discourse of Disembarkation

Dear Readers –

I am loathe to inform you that our journey is drawing to a close. It’s 1am, August 21st on the MV Explorer, and in seven hours we will be alongside in San Diego. I am blogging out of sleeplessness, rooted in the desire to make this experience last. Zoë is asleep, and a number of students are upstairs in the computer lab talking. Some have chosen to sleep on the decks outside, despite the chill and the dew.

I won’t blog about Guatemala, not because I didn’t love it, but because my mind is already elsewhere. Suffice to say that Chichicastenango continues to be one of the most captivating places I’ve ever seen, and that Tikal continues to hold all the mystery it held 13 years ago when I proposed to Zoë there.

My mind is on the end of the journey, as it has been all day. Today I finished up my grades, spoke at our graduation/end of voyage ceremony, packed, and went to a party in the faculty lounge. Spending an entire day in the faculty lounge grading was itself an experience. I had a chance to listen to some of the conversations of the "Amiable Retirees" who hang out there all day. They're with S@S through a program called the "Lifelong Learners." This particular groups is perhaps better referred to as the "Lifelong Yakkers." They yak and play cards all day. Among the conversations overheard:

• "I went to Home Depot to get a shovel. I found the shovel section, but I was overwhelmed by the selection. What kind of shovel do you have?" (30 minute conversation ensues about shovels.)
• "I couldn't change money in Puerto Quetzal. I heard so-and-so had trouble changing money Antigua. Oh, you were in Lake Atitlán? Could you change money there? I'm not sure you can change money in Guatemala …

The mood on the ship was bittersweet. A lot of us are looking forward to being home, but we’re also sad that the experience has come to an end. And what a remarkable experience it’s been. I offered the following speech at the ceremony:

They say Semester at Sea changes your way of seeing the world. I’m sure this voyage has done that for many of us, probably in different ways, so by way of bringing our voyage to a close, I would like to tell you something about how I’ve come to understand the world as a result of my own personal voyage. I offer you a brief final lecture, of sorts, about the world as it looks to me from the deck of the MV Explorer.

The world is made up of eight ports and a ship that sails among them. The ship carries a closely-knit community of professors and students, families and friends, adults and children, men and women, passengers and crew, dedicated to visiting those ports so as to study their history, their literature, their economics, their music, their society, their art, their business practices, their dominant language. These ports are arranged in a line that extends from north to south across the equator. Each of these ports has a hinterland that can be visited by various means of transportation, including airplane, taxi, train, and oxcart. Now, some among us have speculated that these hinterlands are connected among themselves into a sort of “continent” that extends continuously along our route. In fact, our library is stocked with maps that portray this hypothesis as if it were fact. But the voyages of the Explorer to date have provided no empirical evidence to support this hypothesis. I suggest to you, instead, that these hinterlands are in fact a series of islands – volcanic islands – accessible only by sea. Yes, you will hear rumors of people who have traveled by air from one island to the other. It is well known that our very own Dean David mysteriously disappeared in one of the ports, only to reappear in another with bizarre tales of travel by air to a place called “France,” a place so preposterous that we can only conclude it was the product of his own delirium. In the absence of any sort of scientific corroboration of his strange tale, I urge you to give it no more credence than you would to stories of alien abduction.

Sadly, despite the rigor of our academic program, other such rumors and unsubstantiated legends abound upon our ship, and even pass for incontrovertible fact. The most nefarious of these rumors entertain the notion that the world has not always been as I have described it, that the ship is an artefact of human manufacture, and that therefore the shipboard community has not always existed. And if one interrogates these crackpot assertions, one discovers that they are only the tip of an iceberg of lies. The rumormongers speak of a putative ninth port named “San Diego,” on the shores of a ninth island that does not appear on any map worth referring to. These people want us to believe, moreover, that the shipboard community has its origins in the prehistoric migration of its members from dozens of locations on that ninth island and even beyond. They go so far as to give these locations names – all of them obviously fictitious – like “Collaraedo,” “Charllote-is-vile” and “Pittsburgh.” They litter the ship with bogus documents meant to shore up the dubious credibility of their “theory.” As if all this weren’t enough, these false prophets speak of an impending apocalypse, an even they refer to as the “disembarkation,” the imminent undoing of the shipboard community upon its arrival at the ninth port, its inevitable dispersal through the reverse reenactment of the migration that gave it birth.

My friends, I speak as your professor and your friend to give you reason and hope in the face of these dark and unwarranted speculations, this ideologically distorted “Discourse of Disembarkation.” I bring to your attention an obvious fact: the supply of iceberg lettuce and chocolate croissants in the ship’s cafeteria has never failed us. It seems to be without end, in fact, and therefore, most likely, without beginning. I myself have eaten a chocolate croissant every single morning I have been on board, sometimes two, and have no reason to believe that this has not always been the case, nor that it will one day come to an end. This has lead me to the reassuring conclusion that we will not have to say farewell to each other anytime soon, that there is no “San Diego,” that we will keep sailing forever, that there will always be a port to look forward to, something to teach or to learn, a meal to share, a friendship to forge, announcements to ignore, synchronized swimming to perform, bad coffee to drink, and so forth and so on, forever and ever, until the world is undone, amen.

The Lion and the Lamb

We’re on the ship now, after our time in Guatemala, and I’m enjoying the calm before the grading storm. I thought I’d take advantage of the time to tell you about Nicaragua. Guatemala will come later.

After two days on the ship grading and playing Trivial Pursuit (it turns out that Tom, the Assistant Dean, and I are a killer team), I went off to the city of León to meet with Sergio Ramírez, the writer who had graciously offered to show us around the city, the setting for the novel of his that we had read in class. There were about 20 of us, including almost all of my students, the Gieses and the UVA grad students. We arrived in León at 10:30am, after an hour-long bus trip on which we read some Rubén Darío poetry, talked about modernismo, the poetic movement he spearheaded, and discussed his importance to Nicaraguan and Latin American literature. After a cup of coffee, we met with Sergio in front of the León Cathedral.

Sergio, a member of the original Sandinista junta, a former vice-president of Nicaragua, and one of the country’s leading answering our questions about Margarita está linda la mar. We saw Darío’s tomb in the cathedral, where the poet lies under a statue of a weeping lion. Sergio was clearly a celebrity. Everyone in town seemed to know who he was, and we got to bask in the glow. After the writers, took us around the cathedral and the city, showing us the places where the novel was set, telling us about the importance of the city in Nicaragua’s cultural and political history, and tour, he and his wife took us to a restaurant in an indigenous neighborhood, where we ate fish, listened to music, drank very cold beer, and enjoyed each other’s company. The day ended at the Rubén Darío museum, with some conversation, a brief reading, and a reception. Sergio patiently autographed all of our books before leaving for his home in Managua.

One of my students, Lindsay, later made the observation that León had not been what she had expected it to be. Knowing that the city was the scene of not only one but several of Sergio’s novels, and that it had historically served as the center of Nicaragua’s intellectual life and the incubator of its most progressive political figures, she had expected León to be obviously monumental, lively, and attractive. She was disappointed that it was none of these things, at least not visibly so, to visitors who were there only a brief while. She wrote about the disconnect between the León she had seen and the city she had imagined while reading. There was a lesson here about the relationship between reading and traveling, about the role of literature in forging collective memory, about what a place means to insiders and how hard it can be for outsiders to perceive that place in the same way. I’m hoping that my students, in their final papers, can get at some of these issues.

Once the day with Sergio was over, most of the students headed back to the ship, while I took off for the city of Granada with David and Janna Gies. After a few hours in a car, we pulled into the Hotel Darío in Granada. The lights went out shortly afterwards. Nicaragua is rationing electricity, and Granada has no power from 8-11pm or so. We walked the streets in darkness, using my cell phone as a flashlight, looking for a restaurant that ended up seeming uninteresting. Back at the hotel, we ate lobster and drank Chilean wine before turning in, right after the power came back and the air-conditioning kicked back on.

The next day we spent the morning frenetically seeing all we could of Granada, which is known primarily for its charming central plaza. We helped a student celebrate her birthday by smacking the crap out of a piñata in her hostel with her friends, and did some shopping. Granada, it turns out, is home to some of the worst religious art I have ever seen in Latin America. The city was burnt to the ground by William Walker, the American who attempted to make himself ruler of Central America during the 19th century, and the city lost almost all of its colonial treasures in the fire. The granadinos have compensated for the loss by surrounding many of their most revered religious images with Christmas tree lights, which were unfortunately turned off during our visit. My favorite piece, however, was a statue in the church of La Merced, graced by – I kid you not – a stuffed lambie donated by one of the parish children.

Of course, my post about Nicaragua cannot compare with Zoë’s tale of eco-tourism a lo folclórico, but lest you think that I did not share in their suffering, I will have you know that my lobster was a bit over-cooked and my air-conditioning altogether too chilly.

From Over-Rated to Under-Developed

Zoë has already shared with you everything there is to say about Costa Rica, a country that I find looms a bit too large on the horizon of US tourists. Yes, it’s beautiful. Yes, the people are wonderfully welcoming. Yes, the infrastructure of Costa Rican tourism, particularly that of ecotourism, is impressively well-developed. Yes, it’s a country that you have to admire for abolishing its military and dedicating those resources to education and health care. But I don’t know if it’s as interesting as some other countries in Latin America, or even in Central America (my apologies, Michael G!). It’s not more beautiful than other places in Central America, and it doesn’t have the rich indigenous culture of Guatemala. Nonetheless, it provided a much-needed break from the hectic pace established by Peru and our Peru-to-Costa-Rica run. Getting to Machu Picchu and back was exhausting for all involved, and instead of rest, we were all met with three intensive days of academic work which included the 2nd of two papers for the controversial core course.

Now we’re docked in Corinto, Nicaragua, and people are heading out for various adventures. I’m very happy we’ve come here, precisely because Nicaragua is nowhere near as well-developed for tourism as is Costa Rica, and is therefore little-visited. Electricity is not reliable. Many roads are unpaved. Buses are rickety and dangerous. Streets in most towns are unnamed, and houses unnumbered. Daniel Ortega, the leader of the Sandinista party (FSLN) is president and is engaging in controversial reforms. Some students are setting off for beaches and surfing trips, utterly wasting, in my mind, the opportunity they have here, but many have plans to see Nicaragua’s two colonial cities, León and Granada, and should come away with some insight into Central American life outside the tourist bubble.

My novel course is headed to Leon in two days to meet Sergio Ramírez, a former vice-president of Nicaragua (under the Sandinista regime of the 80’s) and author of a novel we’ve just read, Margarita está linda la mar. The novel deals with the fame and death of Rubén Darío and the assassination of Tacho Somoza. A good book, but one that’s turned out to be beyond the level of even my best students. Nonetheless, everyone is looking forward to the visit with Sergio. We’ll be seeing León through his eyes, then having lunch at a restaurant in an indigenous neighborhood.

We’re spending today on the ship, and perhaps in the port, a town of only 20,000 people. I have grading to do, and Zoë did not want to do anything too involved before she and the Kid set off tomorrow for a three-day trip to the Domitilia Wildlife Refuge and the city of Granada. I’ll be on my own tomorrow and on the 9th, the day after the visit with the novelist, and am unsure of what I’ll do. Whatever it is, it’ll probably be quiet, removed from the S@S crowd, and, hopefully, immersed in something quintessentially Nicaraguan. I don’t think that “something” will be Flor the Caña rum, but I’ve promised my mother a bottle, so a shopping trip will definitely be in order.

Loyal respondents:

• Kassia, glad to see your priorities are in order!
• Marcela, have you tried Charlie Vergo's Rendevous? Best ribs on earth.
• Leslie, I don't mean my prior comment to imply an opinion about KC BBQ, which I have never tried. Sorry to hear about the navel ring! My watch, btw, is at the bottom of a river in CR. I'm down a pair of glasses (Peru), a watch (CR), and a pocketknife (Ecuador).
  
• Mami - ¡Que disfrutes de NJ!
• Susan - He takes after his dad ;-)

Oh, an addendum. I can't believe I forgot the following Boat Person:

• The Extra-Blonde Blonde: Are we supposed to believe they're real?!!?