The Boat People

I’m sitting here in David Gies’s office (I kept my key after my stint as interim Dean, and am availing myself of this space as the sole perk and/or payment for the job), with a stack of papers in front of me. I have 5 left to go before I finish with one class and can start with the other. So, of course, I’m blogging.

I wanted to tell you about the boat people, that is, my fellow voyagers. My post is prompted by last night’s auction. This was a charitable event in which donated goods and services were auctioned to raise money for various charities in the ports we are visiting. The Kid, for example, auctioned off two Spanish lessons. Others donated their time-share week. There was a dress, and a nautical chart signed by the officers, as well as breakfast in bed served by the deans. This morning, Zoë, the Kid, some of the UVA grad students, and I sat around marveling at the prices that were paid. $1600 for a weekend in a Manhattan brownstone. $300 for the right to steer the ship for 15 minutes. $75 for the Kid’s Spanish lessons. Of course, it was all for charity, so you had to be happy that so much money was being raised, but we couldn’t help but be astonished by how much money there was to be spent. And these were not just the grownups bidding: the students were right in there. One student dropped over $2000 on two items.

So, when people tell you that S@S attracts a lot of rich kids, they’re right. There are students on here with apparently endless supplies of parental cash. There are also students who are on financial aid, or who have taken out loans, or are on work study. Often, these are the students that have the most interesting experiences. Since they can’t afford to fly off to Machu Picchu or San Pedro de Atacama, they have to make do with what’s in the port, or what’s nearby, and so they’re the ones who end up visiting poor neighborhoods, going on service visits, volunteering in orphanages, checking out local schools. Theirs is not a tourist trip, but an educational one. I wonder what would happen to the educational value of S@S if the program put a cap on how much students could spend in port?

But lest everyone believe that the S@S population can be understood purely in terms of a hierarchy of available wealth, I offer the following catalog of shipboard types, which I’ve collected over the course of the summer. The types are not always mutually exclusive, and I am painfully aware that my list is nowhere near exhaustive. Here it is:

• The Ingénue – Has never left the US. Began the trip absolutely innocent about what it might mean to travel abroad. Earnest, eager blank slate. “Quito”? What’s “Quito”? Happy to learn the answer to this and other questions.
• The Sophomoric Traveler – Already knows everything there is to know about travel and about the countries to be visited. Will gladly list the number of countries he/or she has visited, and will recount anecdotes at the drop of a hat. Anecdotes reveal little insight or wisdom.
• The Proud S@S Veteran – Begins every conversation about shipboard life with the phrase, “On my previous voyage…” and proceeds to speak in detail about what things were like then. These details are interesting to no one but the speaker.
• The Bonehead – Dude, I got so wasted in Guayaquil! Can’t wait to go skiing in Chile! What, you mean there’s a paper due today?! Bummer . . .
• The Earnest Youth – Like the ingénue, but much better informed. Extremely respectful of other cultures, almost to a fault. Getting his or her Peace Corp application ready to be mailed upon docking in San Diego.
• The Underpaid Staff Member – 350 copies by tomorrow? How much are you paying me to do this? I thought I was going on a free trip!
• The Glorified Tourist – Immune to real learning. Eager to add jewels to his or her crown of touristic glory. Has forked over cash for Galapagós, Easter Island, Machu Picchu, and Tikal. Doesn’t care that this means not seeing much of Ecuador, Chile, Peru, or Guatemala.
• The Ship Kid – Let’s play hide-and-go-seek in the Union! When are they going to fill the pool again? Machu Picchu was awesome!
• The Ship Baby – Gurgle. Smile. Sleep. Gurgle some more.
• The Young Scholar – Speaks intelligently about his or her class work. Finds the much-debated core course valuable, and understands the connection between it and the port visits. Does the reading. Writes good papers. There are more of these than you might suspect.
• The Self-Righteous American – Can’t stand the leftist bias of the professors. Believes that laws in foreign countries are only suggestions from which he is exempted when convenient.
• The Faculty/Staff Spouse – What do you mean I don’t have unlimited internet access? And is it really my turn to watch the kids again?
• The Sensitive American – I can’t believe my country has done such horrible things to these poor people! Oh! Look at those lovely ponchos . . . How much?
• The Amiable Retiree – Retirement home? I’d rather play dominoes on the MV Explorer. Wake me up when we get to port.
• The Debutante – Well, if the only way to get to Machu Picchu is on the super-first-class Hiram Bingham train for $500 round-trip, then I guess that’s what I’ll have to pay. Know any good hotels in Acapulco?
• The Hippie – Yes, they’re on the ship as well! They have not seemed to notice the little bottles of shampoo and conditioner in their cabin bathroom.
• The Frazzled Professor – No weekend? When am I supposed to grade all these freakin’ papers? Who assigned them?!?! Oh, yeah … I guess I’ll just throw up my hands and blog …

Pre-Columbian Stair Master

First of all, thanks to all the lurkers who have come out of hiding to post on the blog. To all of you who posted since last time:

• Kassia, are you married now? Is that why you’re in Massachusetts? Please remember that being away on your honeymoon is no excuse for not keeping up with the blog.
• Fred, no HP spoilers, please! We are reading avidly, but only at the rate of one or two chapters a night. Our efforts to see the HP movie in Lima were frustrated by the plans of our ship’s captain to depart this evening. The matinee hours featured only dubbed versions: one had to wait until the evening for subtitled ones, and we had to be on the ship at 9pm. We chose to postpone our HP movie plans rather than sit through an afternoon of Harry and Co. hablando en español.
• Mami, it’s not a typo. “Turkey jam” is “Turkey ham” if you pronounce it in Spanish. Which reminds me that Zoë and I have failed to report about another favorite English usage, a brochure found at our hotel in Chile which explained that the woven items available from local handicraft merchants were made from “camelidos and sheep woolies.”
• Speaking of camilidos, Katy, your vicuña is snoozing quite comfortably under the bed. We’ve named him “Sparky.” Could you elaborate about the weird priest and the toothpick farm? I had no idea that toothpicks grew on farms.
• José, no we didn’t visit Tadeo Torres because we didn’t know the name of the orphanage. We very much wanted Santiago to see it. We will have restaurant recommendations for you when you go. Cuenca was gorgeous!
• Leslie, we are indeed, as you suggest, laying down the boogie. As long as you mean “going to sleep early and cursing the alarm clock in the morning.”
• Chris, say hello to your mom! Glad to hear you were hippie-free.

Speaking of hippies … Machu Picchu draws them like a magnet. Forget the pictures you’ve seen of the place. Not a single one does them justice. And make your plans to go now. It’s on my short list of truly exceptional places in the world, along with the Sistine Chapel, the Alhambra, and the Yosemite Valley, places that you don’t want to leave because you know the real world is a poorer place. Part of the magic is the ruins themselves, and part of it is the setting. The mountains there are impossibly steep and covered in mist. Not even Stephen Spielberg could have made them more mysterious or enchanting.

We got to them on our third day in Peru, after a day in Lima and a day of travel from Lima to Aguascalientes, the town closest to MP, by way of a place called Ollatantaymbo. Thanks to Ross for talking up Olla with us. It’s called the “last living Inca village” because there are houses there that were built in Inca times and have been continuously inhabited by indigenous people since. Some very cool ruins, too. Lima is not so cool. It’s big, it’s crowded, it’s crime ridden. But it does have some neat things to see, including an impressive cathedral and Franciscan monastery, as well as the oldest house in the Americas, the so-called “Casa Aliaga,” built by one of Francisco Pizarro’s cronies and continuously inhabited by his descendants ever since. Needless to say, the house is quite luxe.

The cathedral in Lima, however, pales by comparison with the one in Cusco. There, the gold and silver abound, as do the masterworks of the colonial “Cusco School” of painting. Everyone’s favorite, including ours, is a massive painting of the Last Supper which features an Andean delicacy, cuy (guinea pig) as the main dish. Many of the folks on S@S, by the way, have sampled cuy, but not us! The Kid has adamantly insisted that none of us should be eating anything as cute as that.

But lets get back to the hippies. Ross, co-author of The Moon Handbook to Peru, which I highly recommend to any and all of you planning a trip to these parts, calls Cusco “the mecca of the Gringo Trail.” And indeed it is. As charming as Cusco is, with its colonial streets, its Spanish buildings piled on top of Inca foundations, its lovely central square, it too is crawling with hippies. They are less noticeable here than in San Pedro de Atacama. Cusco is much bigger, so there are locals to contend with. Many of them were marching around in uniforms of all kinds, celebrating Peruvian Independence Day, an extendo-celebration that begins long before the day itself (today, the 28th) and shows no sign of ending afterwards. There are also plenty of non-hippie tourists, some of which travel to Machu Picchu in style, even on helicopters ($1200 a person). But the hippies are well represented, and can be spotted at Machu Picchu hugging the rocks.

Yes, you read that correctly, “hugging” the rocks. These are not standard hippies, but New Age hippies who come to MP because of its magical power. Unlike me, they do not use the word “magical” in a figurative way. They press up against the rocks, particularly the sacred ones, to absorb their cosmic forces. I overheard one of them saying to another, “Can you feel that feminine energy?”

The primary force experienced by Zoë, the Kid and me was gravity. This is the force that one has to fight to get up the many hills and the endless staircases that make up the lost city of the Incas. Up you go to the guardhouse. Down you go to the gate. Up you go to the pyramid. Down you go to the secret initiation cave. For eight hours (including a break for a fabulously over-priced but delicious buffet lunch) the three of us traipsed around MP, dodging hippies, getting away from Argentinians screaming on their cell phones (¿Lolita? Oye, Lolita, estamos ahora en las ruinas. Sí, están espectaculares. ¿Qué tal si nos encontramos para la cena? ¿En el restaurantcito de la esquina, donde fuimos para el cumpleaños de Estefan? Sí, claro que me acuerdo. ¡Qué bien que lo pasamos! etc.), eavesdropping on New Agers, reading aloud from our guide to MP, avoiding the tour groups, and pinching ourselves to see if we were indeed, actually where we were. Our legs were sore from the climbing, our feet ached, and we kept going. Every time we stopped a new perspective opened up, a new detail revealed itself. We saw eagles. We saw vizcachas (an Andean rabbit that has a squirrel’s tail and that hops like a kangaroo). We watched the mists roll over the city and its mountains, and then clear away, only to return later. We arrived at our crumby over-priced hotel that night exhausted and aching, ready to collapse into our hard beds, incredulous that we had been where we had been, that we had seen what we had seen.

(P.S. I’ve just read this to Zoë, and she tells me she will tell you more about the hotels.)

The Age of Aquarius

OK. Chile. But, first things first. My last post elicited comments from two former lurkers, Katy and Kassia. As a reward for their comments, I offer the following pictures of the synchronized swimming routine in which I participated as part of the ship’s Sea Olympics:

John, the Executive Dean, and I, preparing to enter the frigid water of the pool for our synchronized swim. Note the stylish shower caps. Despite our proximity to the equator at this point, the outside temperature was in the 60's, at best. The routine was designed to delay our entrance into the water as long as possible. Musical accompaniment: "Play that Funky Music White Boy."



Here we are in the water. Note the clockwork synchronicity of our routine. Oddly, we didn’t even place!

Note, other lurkers, that commenting is rewarded! Post your thoughts, your reactions, or your just your hellos!




Now, Chile. As usual, Zoë has beaten me to the punch with the pictures and the blow-by-blow of our memorable trip to San Pedro de Atacama, so I will limit myself, as usual, to editorializing. Her post should vividly demonstrate how spectacular are the landscapes near San Pedro, the salt flats, the Valley of the Moon, the Tatio geysers, the altiplano. “Beauty” is not the right word for it, since it suggests something attractive, hospitable, perhaps even inhabitable. This landscape, by contrast, was shockingly desolate and hostile, even exhausting. The sky is big, and the horizon far. Mountains that are over 150 kilometers away are the only thing there to arrest your line of sight, and there comes a point when such expansive views become overwhelming. This happened for me when we emerged from the salt cave in the Valley of the Moon, and all of a sudden found our eyes traveling many kilometers rather than mere meters. That afternoon, we spent some time in the hotel lounge reading, and in town shopping. In part it was just because we were tired and needed downtime, but I also think we felt this need for enclosure, for shelter. Very strange. The Kid and I bought San Pedro t-shirts, while Zoë picked up some great copper earrings.

Now, what I had expected were the hippies. San Pedro is one of a series of towns scattered around Latin America – San Cristóbal de las Casas, Mexico, Panajachel, Guatemala, Baños de Tungurahua, Ecuador, are some others – that are linked together by a route of backpacker tourism known as “the gringo trail.” I find these places delightful. In these towns, tourists seem to outnumber locals, and even the “locals” are often transplants from other parts of the country. The draw of such places, for both foreigners and domestics alike, is not just the surrounding scenery, but the relaxed lifestyle that unfolds in these towns underneath the protective umbrella of patchouli and marijuana smoke. In San Pedro, it’s hallucinogenic substances, the ones used by atacameño shamans over the 14,000 years that the place has been continually inhabited by human beings. First the atacameños, then the Inca, then the Spanish, and now the hippies. French hippies. US hippies. German hippies. Spanish hippies. Argentinian hippies. Chilean hippies. They rode around on bikes in tie-dye and seemed completely unfamiliar with a product called “shampoo,” but they seemed harmless and were often quite friendly. Many of them have day jobs at little restaurants with impressively slow service, shoddy roofs (who needs a roof in a place where it never rains?) and dining-room fireplaces. One of them, Beth, included a lovely translation for “jamón de pavo.” Rather than “turkey ham,” it called it “turkey jam.” The Kid later made up a commercial jingle for “turkey jam.” We sought out neither hallucinogenic drugs nor meat-based preserves, but we were willing to wait quite a long time in a chilly San Pedro restaurant for some dulce de leche crêpes. They were almost as other-worldly as the Valley of the Moon itself.

Our long return voyage to Valparaiso culminated in a delicious dinner at a place called the Café Turri, a somewhat touristy but delicious restaurant that overlooks the bay in this charming, bohemian city. It was nice to be in a restaurant where we didn’t have to keep our coats on. Unfortunately, our flight back from San Pedro was delayed, so we didn’t get to see much more of the place, and completely missed Pablo Neruda’s house in town. Another time, I’m sure.

Now, on the eve of our arrival in Peru, Pablo Neruda is all the rage. The field trip to his home on Isla Negra, Chile, was a huge hit. Apparently, all involved read and discussed his poetry on the bus on the way there, and then saw things in the house that resonated with the imagery. (I wasn’t on it, since it conflicted with our trip to the Atacama.) Brian has put an English translation of selections from Neruda’s The Heights of Machu Picchu, for everyone to print out and take with them to the ruins. In the computer lab, people are printing out the pages, and folding them up to take with them. I plan to take a copy myself …

Tomorrow, though, it’s Lima, and our S@S excursion, “Colonial Lima Through a Historian’s Eyes.” No one can tell me who the historian will be. It’s not Brian, or any of the S@S faculty. I hope that by “historian” they don’t mean a regular old tour guide who did well in Peruvian history while in high school … In any case, we plan to dump the tour somewhere in downtown Lima so we can eat out, and perhaps even catch the new Harry Potter movie. Not very Peruvian, but vastly important, particularly to the Kid. Post if you’ve seen it, and tell us what you thought of it. OK?

Mutiny!

I am writing from San Pedro de Atacama, Chile, where we have just spent a few glorious days exploring the desert, and where I am now struggling with a Spanish keyboard, so forgive me.

Chile will have to wait until the next post. First I have to tell you about my ill-fated tenure as Interim Academic Dean. I had agreed to serve as such on the first week of the voyage, when David Gies asked me to take his place while he went off to the meeting of the International Association of Hispanists in Paris. He left from Ecuador, and I was to be in charge until he rejoined us in Chile. "Dont worry," he assured me, "you just have to go to a meeting every morning with the other dean types." Since David is a good friend, I agreed instantly.

Well, it turns out that every voyage has what one repeat faculty member calls the "mid-voyage crisis," and our crisis hit during the Ecuador - Chile leg, on my watch. It was triggered, I think, by the workload. This leg was the one when many faculty gave midterms, or assigned papers, and the students found themselves stressed out. Many of them had signed up believing that this voyage would be like other SAS voyages, light on the homework, only to find themselves on the business end of UVAs attempt to infuse the program with rigor. They rebelled, and their rebellion turned on the content of the one course required of everyone, variously called "Latin America Today" or "Latin America Between the Local and the Global." Some students circulated a petition complaining about the historical structure of the course, saying that too much time was being spent on the colonial period, and not enough on current-day affairs that students needed to master in order to approach their port stays intelligently. They wanted a change in the content. 180-plus signatures.

I remember now that one of the folks in the study abroad office back home had warned me that strange things happen on ships. Rumors circulate quickly. Emotions become contagious. Discontent soon turns into anger and frustration. And you cannot get away from any of it. For two days or so, it seemed that all anyone would talk to me about was Latin America Today, blah, blah, blah. We called a meeting for the whole community to discuss the intellectual rationale for the course, and to remind everyone that there were days scheduled into the syllabus designed to provide the sort of current-day info that they wanted. Throughout, no one ever thought to ask why we were studying the colonial period, so I thought I would volunteer it. I had thought out what I wanted to say, about the way the past weighs heavily in Latin America, the way nothing can be understood without understanding the colonial period. My speech brought me to tears, and I had to leave the room. Brian made a similar speech, I am told, and was also visibly moved. Both of us are still trying to figure out why or how all of this brought us in touch with the emotional and personal basis of what we did.

The meeting was good, though. The students felt that they had been heard, and not a few seem to have learned from our little outbursts. That night, I drank caiperinhas in the faculty lounge and danced to bad 80s music. The next day, at Sea Olympics, everyone got to unwind. This was a whole day of silly competition in which, among other things, the Executive Dean and I performed a stunning synchronized swimming routine, and the students put on the best lip synch show ever. Lip-synching to the Eric Cartman version of "Come Sail Away" was sheer genius.

Two days later, we were in Valaparaiso. Spirits were once again high, and David was back on the ship. I had never been so happy to see him in my entire life.

Is that the sky falling on me?

Thanks to the guilt trip inspired by Leslie, et. al., I am returning to my long-neglected blog to report about our adventures. We’re sailing south along the coast of Peru, on our way to Chile, where wintry weather awaits. As you may have seen on Zoë’s blog, Panama was a pleasant surprise. The Canal was much more interesting than we’d expected, and the food was very good. If you’re in Panama City, try the restaurant Casuale in the Casco Antiguo.

After two frenetic days of class, we pulled into Guayaquil. After getting off the boat, we headed for Guyaquil’s shiny new Malecón, and its not so shiny iguana park. The park is actually one of the traditional squares in the city, but it’s called the iguana park because of all the – you guessed it! – iguanas that live there. I discovered the hard way that one should not stand too long beneath a tree crawling with iguanas, since all of them eventually have to relieve themselves, even if it might be on the head of a hapless Spanish professor.

The afternoon got us on a flight to Cuenca (barely), the small city in the mountains where we had decided to spend a few days. I went under duress, remembering the rather dull time we’d had in Cuenca 15 years ago (Rather dull? We actually considered taking Benadryl to sleep through the rest of our stay . . . Another story), and was surprised to found out how fabulous the place was. Cuenca has none of the monumental grandeur of Quito. Not one of its churches, museums or mountain peaks stands out as a spectacular “must-see,” world class attraction. But the whole city just drips with charm, making it the perfect place to walk around and make small discoveries.

The real surprise in our visit, however, was the day we spent with the Community Tourism program at the Centro Cultural Mama Kinua. “Community Tourism” is the name given to a nation-wide effort to bring tourists into direct contact with indigenous groups. Indigenous communities throughout the whole country invite visitors into their lives, and the money the tourist pays goes to support the community by financing things like health centers and schools. (My cousin Patricia, it turns out, is going on a visit of several days to the Hoarani in the Ecuadorian Amazon later this month. Imagine blow guns, huts in the rain forest, and no indoor plumbing for miles around. Go, Patricia!!!) The CCMK took us out to a local Cañari community, where Don Alfonso, a Cañari man, fed us, played music for us, lead us on a hike through an old growth forest to teach us about local medicinal plants, and generally told us everything we wanted to know about Cañari culture and about being indigenous in contemporary Ecuador. After years of traveling to Ecuador and seeing indigenous life from the outside, I was thrilled by the opportunity to spend the day with an indigenous person and have him tell us about his life from inside. Zoë and the Kid loved it too. There was a hint of sadness to it all, though, when you realized that Don Alfonso was doing his best to shore up a beleagured culture, one threatened by globalization and American influence. I was left wondering if his cute young grandkids would still speak Quichua when they were his age.

Now I’m writing from the ship, where I’ve agreed to serve as interim Academic Dean while David Gies goes off to Paris to attend the meeting of the International Association of Hispanists. The job is keeping me busier than I had expected, since it’s midterm season on the ship, and the students are stressed out, anxious, and frustrated with their workloads. It reminds me of UVA at finals time, when the Starbucks on the Corner becomes the seventh circle of Hell. I hope our attempts to make the program more rigorous haven’t gone over the top . . .

It’s incredibly hard to get work done on the ship, since the whole thing is designed for relaxing and socializing, not for study. I was up until 2am preparing a lecture on the invention of America. To some extent this was because PowerPoint is a hideous trap designed to consume time extravagantly (Did I pick the right animation? How can I get it to zoom in on that detail from the map?), and in part because the culture of chit-chat, as I like to call it, sucks time like you wouldn’t believe.

In any case, a lot of the chit-chat last night took the form of reports from friends returning from Quito, Cuenca, the Amazon, and Galapagós, full of enthusiasm for Ecuador and plans to return. There was less enthusiasm from those who had chosen to spend the whole time in Guayaquil. Guess the iguanas got to them as well.

(For pictures, see Zoë's blog. The 'net is too slow for me to post any right now.)