Diary

Gave my first lecture last night. One would think that 6:30 is a bad time for a lecture, but Seabourn makes it work beautifully by having bar service during the lecture. Come spend happy hour learning something! It’s a concept! Attendance was fantastic. I figure if 10 percent of the passengers are at my lectures, that’s pretty good, but las night my guess is it was over 15, so yay!

The subject was the Amazon , touching on the massiveness of the river (its volume is higher than the next 7 biggest rivers in the world combined), the ancient civilizations in the area (the real ones, not El Dorado) and contemporary issues like deforestation.

I really enjoy being on the Amazon. It’s earthy, and authentic in a way cruise destinations often destroy over time. We are a very minor thing happening today as people go about their business in Santarem. I like it that way. It’s not all about me and my dollars. In fact, most people scarcely pay us any mind. They have better, or at least more pressing, things to do. I have left them to it, and am now ensconced on the ship, ready for a relaxing afternoon, falling asleep over my audiobook by the pool.

Regardless of how much I have streamlined the process of setting up my little abode on a cruise ship, it always takes a day or two to feel in the groove. Where in the world did I put A, did I forget B, what time is C, on what deck is D? Then, little by little everything falls into place. I have my routine. I know where I am going. I have a sense for the rhythms of the day.

Today is for easing in. We are anchored off Parintins, Brazil, on the Amazon. Outside my window, the muddy water flows past, carrying the occasional tree limb, or floating island of foliage, down towards the ocean. Even at anchor, the ship has a wake, due to the relentless current. The sky goes from blue and sunny to dark gray and pouring down rain in minutes, and as I scan the horizon (which is in this case the far bank of the Amazon),I can see pretty much every kind of tropical weather happening somewhere.

Since I have been to Parintins twice before ( and have the beaded jewelry an tee shirt to prove it!), I am skipping taking the local ferry in to shore ( that’s what is pictured in the photo here). Jane has claimed her chaise lounge near the pool and back here in the room, if my droopy eyelids are any indication, we will both soon be doing the thing that most clearly shows that we have eased into a lower gear—taking a nap!

Sent from my iPad

When I was nineteen , I set off on what would prove to be the biggest travel adventure of the next half-century of my life, when I flew off to Scotland for a junior year abroad at the University of Edinburgh.

I am posting this as I sit at the gate at the San Diego airport, waiting to depart on the biggest travel adventure since then. I am calling it My Year of Living Travelly. I have posted before about the planning that has gone into setting up the opportunity to use my Silversea and Seabourn opportunities to patch together a continuous year of travel, and it looks as if I have managed to set it in motion. So far, so good at least! It is all planned, and now it is up to the cooperation of bigger powers than me.

First up, I am taking a red-eye with my friend Jane, to the east coast, from which we will fly to Manaus, Brazil, 900 miles up the Amazon, and halfway across the continent. Our cruise on Seabourn Quest will take us down the Amazon (my third time!) and across the Atlantic to Cape Verde, which has been on my bucket list since I first heard Cesaria Evora’s smoke-and-honey voice. Then on to a couple of stops in the Canary Islands, and a day in Tangiers before the cruise ends in Monte Carlo.

I will be staying in the Med through mid-June, then set off for a few weeks in the Baltic before heading home in July.

And that’s just the start. I will be cruising in Alaska later this summer, then heading to Montreal for a few fall foliage cruises before a breather in San Diego, after which I fly to Singapore to begin about five months exploration on land and sea of Southeast Asia.

I will spell it out: L-U-C-K-Y and B-L-E-S-S-E-D !!!!

I will be posting diary entries and photos regularly, and it would be nice to know you are checking in from time to time. If you want to know where I am, or where I am headed at any given time, every cruise is listed in the calendar here on my website.

Thank you all for caring and supporting me. Arrivederci!

Put the pedal to the metal—gotta speed up, hurry, hurry!  The last few weeks, actually months, have been that way for me as I get ready to leave for a series of cruises. So much to do! So many new lectures to prepare. So much to think about to be ready to be gone for several months.   Today, however,  I got that lovely, familiar sense of easing up on the gas and Feeling the beginning of a coast.

I leave Friday night for Manaus Brazil, in far better shape than I could have predicted in terms of lectures prepared and things ready for an absence at home, and in far worse shape than ever, physically. I try to lead a life balanced in body, brain, and spirit, but lately I haven’t accomplished that. It was just too easy to keep working.

Funny how I think of cruising as an escape from the normal and typical, but now I very much want that normalcy back, in the form of more attention to that healthy balance in my life. I’m glad I  kept that pedal to the metal until now,  but it’s time to slow down and let the rest of me catch up.

You know the expression about juggling a lot of balls. It’s stale, to be sure, but so apt much of the time in our busy lives. For me, the better analogy right now is being the nucleus of an atom with gazillions of electrons whooshing around mercilessly.

I do this to myself willingly because I want a life that is not just busy and productive but also varied and growth-oriented. To this end I am pursuing the next year as the golden opportunity for travel that my cruise lecturing permits. More about that soon in another post, but for right now what I am juggling is a bit nerve-fraying even for a veteran multi-tasker like me.

I am in the middle—actually way past the midpoint—in preparing around two dozen (!) new lectures and revising others for this year and well into 2019. I am also renting out my condo and dealing with everything necessary for an absence of more than  a few weeks. When I leave on March 15, I won’t be back for over three months, so just holding mail, for example, isn’t an option. It’s like what you have to do to plan a vacation, but squared. No, maybe cubed.

Everything has to be done now, now, now.

I find myself withdrawing, in a liminal zone where part of me has already left mentally, and the rest just doesn’t have the energy for anything or anyone not essential to getting the job done. But I know what is coming:that blessed sigh of relief when I cross the line, and whatever is done is done and what isn’t just has to wait. I will roll my luggage to the airline counter and say, “let the adventure begin!”

As always, I find myself drawn to stories of women who should be more honored in history than they are. I just finished preparing a lecture for later in the year on the convict women sent by the British government  to Australia, and I am feeling more than my usual  pride in my gender right now.  These girls and women, some as young as  twelve,  were transported  after first convictions, in many cases, and almost always for petty crimes, whereas the men who were sent were generally repeat offenders of far more serious crimes. This only makes sense when you know the whole troubling story.

The men the British authorities  most wanted to get rid of were the hardened criminals.  Makes sense.  The convicted girls  and women were another matter, since they were still what any penal formula might consider salvageable.  Why not just let them serve their time and get on with their lives?  It’s partly because at the time even petty crimes were deemed worthy of capital punishment, and it was hard to fathom how that much legalized government killing would have squared with the British people’s sense of their basic decency.  So these girls and women needed to be sentenced to death, then have the sentences commuted to transportation either for seven years or life, depending on the case.  If they died of disease or neglect, at least no one had to witness them dangling at the end of a rope.

Not a single woman was sent for prostitution for the simple reason that prostitution was not a crime.  Rather, they were sent for stealing a silver spoon, or a lace collar, because the few pennies to be gotten from pawning these were often all that stood between themselves (and in some cases their children) and starvation. And yet, the stories that are focused on are of the “floating brothels” they sailed on, or the criminal acts of some women who formed “flash mobs” in the colony as a means of rebellion. These first arrivals to Australia were bad women. Bad. Bad. All of them. Or so it would seem…

It appears that the one redeeming characteristic they possessed, in the eyes of British officials, was their wombs.  Convenient, it was, to send young pickpockets and thieving kitchen maids  off to where their nether regions could make them useful  either to populate the colony or serve its sexual needs.

It is genuinely cringeworthy to hear how the pretty ones were auctioned off to be house servants (with benefits—to the master at least), or if they weren’t so “lucky,”sent into what amounted to slavery in what were (sort of) euphemistically  callled female factories.

Some women were quickly swallowed up by this inhumanity, but others prevailed and even thrived.  They are the nation’s founding mothers as well as some of the first successful business owners, ranchers, and more.

One of them, Mary Reibey, went on after serving her sentence to found the first bank in New South Wales, and is pictured on the Australian  twenty-dollar bill.   I am feeling a familiar  buoyant pride in  the great honor it is to share a gender with these souls who echo Maya Angelou’s great words, “Still I Rise.”  I will lecture in their honor.  I can’t wait!

Last year I bought a t-shirt that says “Home is where the anchor drops.”  Right now my anchor has dropped in my little condo in San Diego after a great trip with a particularly fun group of people. I had trouble getting photos to post the second part of cruise,  hence the silence. Still not sure how to fix the problem, but I have a little time before leaving for Manaus, Brazil in mid-March. Will be posting my itinerary for the first half of 2019 soon. Hope to see you aboard!

Luxury ships are such a pleasant cocoon that one forgets the outside world. This can be a good thing, but occasionally I am reminded of how easy it is to let wonderful things pass by. Today I had a last-minute chance to escort a tour to the Hawaiian Botanical Gardens outside Hilo, and it was such a gratifying experience just to be out breathing in the wonderful green world of tropical plants and luxuriating in the presence of flowers. Ahhhh, thanks!  This sleeping butterfly needed that!

Today I visited the Iolani Palace, home to the last monarchs of Hawaii. It was really disquieting to see how clearly they had chosen western culture over their own. The palace had all the trappings of European court life—the velvets, and damask, and gilt, and really it could have been anywhere, except the royal faces looking out from the ballgown and military style dress in the photographs  were brown.

I get it. I just wish it weren’t so, that the palace was something less European and more like the fabulous  palaces and lavish surroundings of the great Asian courts. But of course these were already flourishing before westerners came along, and the emperors of China or Japan were hardly likely to say, “wow, thanks for showing us how royalty is supposed to live.”

It made me a little sad to roam around the Iolani Palace and contemplate not just how much of the indigenous culture the royals had willingly.sacrificed, but the betrayal that was to come. Indeed, the daughter of the king who built the palace would be the last monarch, deposed by westerners she and her forebears had so desired to emulate.

I had to breathe, so I ducked out of the palace and saw this hula group practicing on the grounds. Now there’s a twist. Coolness has traded places. Western wannabes?  Forget it!  This class, a mix of innumerable ethnicities and backgrounds, just want to claim a little  of their “inner Hawaiian.” I bet Kamehahmeha and his descendant kings and queens would be pleased.

I have always been annoyed when people say Shalom” in Hebrew is the word for hello and goodbye. No it isn’t. It is the Hebrew word for peace, and Jews say that in place of hello or goodbye because it’s a more meaningful sentiment. Back in my college days we used the word “Peace” the same way to greet each other, and it conveyed a bond of understanding of the world and ourselves as actors in it

Yesterday I gave a lecture on ancient Pacific Islanders and their brilliant navigational skills.  There has been a rekindling of interest and pride in their accomplishments in the last few decades, spearheaded by the Polynesian Voyaging Society in Hawaii, and realized most concretely by the replica voyaging canoe Hokule’a, which has returned recently from an around-the-world voyage using only traditional navigation techniques, and no western instruments.

All day today I have not been able to get out of my mind the importance of the accomplishments of Hokule’a and the Hawaiian most associated with its success, Nainoa Thompson. Among the nastiest spawn of western colonialism is the view indigenous people were encouraged to internalize—the cancer that said they knew, did, thought, and believed nothing of any real value compared to what they could accomplish  if they just forgot about all that foolishness and “improved” themselves by becoming westernized.

Today I also found myself thinking about, and looking into articles on the meaning of the word “Aloha.”  It too has suffered the same fate as Shalom. Aloha doesn’t mean hello and goodbye, it means—well, Aloha.

There seem to be about as many different ideas about how to interpret the word as there are articles about it on the internet, but the essence seems to be that it conveys an understanding of our place in the universe, and what that calls upon us to try to be. It conveys something like “my best self and my purest intentions greet your best self and your purest intentions.” It says “I see and honor you.” There’s something about the real and deeper meaning of the word that requires us to step up and be worthy of the wonderful privilege of life—to love our Mother Earth and to not squander our days or our gifts.

There’s something Hawaiians call the Aloha Spirit, but the word “spirit” is so often trivialized as well. We’re not talking rah-rah, or friskiness or any of the other things we might call “spirited.” Aloha Spirit calls up the deeper meaning of that most powerful of words, the force that as Wordsworth put it, “rolls through all things,” and is at the core of all our beings.

So while I am in Hawaii I am going to be mindful of this word and not just throw it around. If I say it, I am going to mean it the right way. I want  to belong to it and it to me if I use it,  as it does in the Aloha tradition indigenous Hawaiians  did not allow to be lost, as it does for those who raised up the wonderful symbol of all their strengths in making  Hokule’a a reality, and  who built this beautiful culture it is my good fortune to glimpse.