Preparations for Antarctica

A bit out of sequence, but here are some of the things the Amsterdam had to do to bring us to Antarctica.

1. They had to change the fuel the ship uses. We're now running on a lighter-weight diesel that pollutes less and will evaporate instead of concealing in case of a leak or a sinking.
2. They took on board a specialist in ice. The ice pilot, who has been here over a hundred times on cruise ships, is one of the narrators during the day and has given several public talks on such topics as ice and the International Antarctic Treaty, under which all countries agree not to exploit the continent and not to make war on one another here. It is not, alas! an "in perpetuity" agreement. It's already been renewed once, but I get the sense that the peace is somewhat fragile, and all it would take would be the discovery of a major oil deposit to make it null and void.
3. As we entered the Southern Ocean, the Captain told us, "We're just going to wing it, " and today we found out what that means. He said we will have to revise tomorrow's course because the planned route is so iced up that we couldn't hope to get through. They must keep in frequent communication with the various research stations so they don't have to find out about such things by sailing into them.

And today is an historic occasion: for the first time in recent memory, I had a chocolate dessert that I couldn't finish. It appeared on the dessert menu as "big chocolate cake", and it lived up to its billing. Dear God that was good!

Quotes

Each passenger got a gift Antarctica journal full of information and maps and space to make notes of whatever one might feel moved to make notes about. The notes pages are each headed by Antarctica-related quotations. Here are two of my favorites.

"To anyone who goes to Antarctica, there is a tremendous appeal, an unparalleled combination of grandeur, beauty, vastness, loneliness, and malevolent -- all of which sound tremendously melodramatic -- but which truthfully convey the actual feeling of Antarctica. " -- Captain T. L. M. Sunter

"I am the Albatross
That waits for you
At the end of the earth.
I am the forgotten soul
Of the dead sailors
Who crossed Cape Horn
From all the seas of the world
But they did not die in
The furious waves.
Today they fly on my
Wings to eternity
In the last trough of the
Antarctic winds." -- Sara Vial, 1993

An even more glorious Antarctic day

Yesterday was iceberg with penguins, plus more icebergs, some bigger than the ship, all sculpted in ways that held the eye and the mind and the soul like good art. Does that mean art is meaningless or that the universe has meaning? Discuss among yourselves -- it may be on the final.

Today is even better. We're sailing on an inward passage among islands along the Antarctic Peninsula, the long finger of land that reaches out from the main body of Antarctica toward South America. The sea is quite calm, at times almost a mirror reflecting the stark beauty of snow-covered peaks and glaciers, letting us see some of the submerged curves of the icebergs, and highlighting the darting paths of penguins as they swim quickly away from the ship, which probably computes to "orca" in their brains. It's one thing to see films of little black and white bodies breaking and re-entering the water. It is quite another to watch them out the window as I drink my morning coffee with buttered raisin bun.

Some icebergs have seals on them, others have birds, and the cruise is providing a running commentary that names them for us. It's broadcast on the decks and in the public spaces, with optional access in the cabins via a TV channel. The guy is honest about what he can and can't tell us ("There are birds on that big iceberg starboard, but I can't tell whether they are penguins or blue-eyed skua. Keep an eye on them, if they fly, they're not penguins. "), with the occasional foray into silliness ("Those seals on the tall iceberg to port are crab-eater seals -- females, three-and-a-half years old, left-handed. ") At least, I took it for silliness -- maybe all crab-eater seals ARE left-handed.

It's mostly overcast, but occasionally the sun comes out or shines on the snow, rock, ocean, and ice somewhere where we can see it. Then the beauty is beyond speaking.

Icebergs with penguins on them!!!

The TV has a channel that continually broadcasts what's off the bow -- in front of the ship. It showed an iceberg ahead starboard, and it just seemed worth a frozen tail, so I bundled up as best I could and went out on deck.

There were at least half a dozen icebergs visible including one that was huge, beautifully sculpted by wind and water, and not just white, but also a lustrous turquoise blue. And once it went past, the duty officer broadcast to look on the flat space on its rear: there were a couple dozen penguins gathered there!

I am so happy I could weep. I can almost feel my face again, maybe I'll go back out.

First iceberg!

I saw my first iceberg this morning, courtesy of the nice man who sat down at my table at breakfast. It was white and floating in the ocean to the starboard side. It was a ways away, and I was lucky to see it, since we are often sailing through such dense fog that the ship has to sound it's fog horn every minute or so.

I also had my first cup of Dutch pea soup, which they were serving throughout the ship. It's 28 degrees out, and I have yet to do the sitting-out-on-deck thing due to not wanting to freeze my tail off. The soup was delicious. They do not call it by its proper Dutch name, which actual Dutch person Richard Gering said in a comment is "snert".

Amenities

For those hardy enough to view Antarctica from the decks, Holland America serves hot chocolate at 10:30 am, Dutch green pea soup at 11 am, and bouillon at 2:30 pm. Now all I have to do is track down a nice blanket to wrap up in. I've finished the hat I brought yarn for and have four or five feet of scarf to wrap around my neck. If I manage to get myself established on deck, I'll try to get the wait staff to take a picture after they bring me my split pea soup.

Cognitive dissonance

I just came back from a stage show called "Divas of Motown". I had dim sum, seafood curry, and chocolate pudding cake for dinner, washed down with generous quantities of champagne from the captain to celebrate our release from a mild quarantine protocol to control an outbreak of gastrointestinal ailments.

Meanwhile, the outside air temperature is in the low 30s as we move steadily southward toward Antarctica, a place so hostile to human life that any person on this ship, certainly any passenger, would die if left there unprotected for an hour or two. We will see icebergs. We will be sailing near where Shackleton's men were marooned for months.

Ten days ago, we were in Rio De Janeiro in the tropics.

I am having trouble wrapping my mind around all this at the same time. I'm watching a BBC series on Antarctica being shown on the ship's TV (we can no longer get broadcast channels, since we're too far outside the orbits of the satellites) . The urbane tones of the narrator make statements about the "bittercold harshness of Antarctica" seem even more intimidating.

Oh, good Lord, we're into the episode about how early explorers died trying to be the first ones to the South Pole. I think maybe I will go back to re-reading the "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy". One can only deal with so much cognitive dissonance before one sprains one's cerebral cortex.

Photo, second try

Getting photos to the blog from my Android tablet while cruising at 56 degrees south and 56 degrees west is proving to be a challenge. Here's a second attempt.

Ashore on the Falklands

There is a certain degree of smugness in that blog title. The past two years, cruises that scheduled stops here were unable to make them because of rough seas. Stanley, you see, doesn't have docking facilities for big cruise ships, so the ships drop anchor out in the bay and send passengers ashore in small boats called tenders. (The tenders for the Amsterdam are the largest of the boats we would use to evacuate in an emergency.) The tenders are certainly seaworthy in rough seas, but "seaworthy" is not the same as "luxuriously comfortable". On the way over we got fairly liberally sloshed with sea water, which, I can personally testify, is indeed salty.

Stanley is a q British fishing village transplanted to the end of the Earth. Before the Panama Canal, it was a crucial stop for commerce between the western Pacific and Europe as well as for the whaling fleet. Now its 2000 inhabitants live on fishing and tourism. Yesterday, it was mostly the latter as two cruise ships, the Amsterdam and the much larger Star Princess both disgorged passengers onto shore, crowding the half-dozen gift shops near the pier and clogging the streets and pubs. Several tours offered transport to the penguin rookeries, which are, understandably, at the far end of the island. I'm holding out for Antarctic penguins, so I chose to just wander the streets, admiring the tidy houses with their beautifully tended, brightly blooming gardens. A stop at the Victory Pub (named for the British victory in the 1982 war with Argentina over control of the islands) for fish and chips and beer seemed like a good idea at the time, but when I stumbled on the downhill trek back to the pier and gouged a deep scratch across one lens of my glasses, I had to wonder whether I just can't hold my liquor reliably. I'm fairly sure I brought a backup pair of glasses, but I can't find them. So I'm trusting to my brain to see past the scratch. Thus far, that seems to be working.

It was on the way to Stanley that I realized that I had left Dmitri behind on the ship. And of course everywhere one turns in Stanley, one sees images of penguins. Penguin hats, penguin shirts, penguin pins, penguin refrigerator magnets, penguin shot glasses, penguin hand-knitted sweaters and scarves, penguin coffee cups, penguin pendants. If I had brought him, I would have been hard-put to find a place to pose with him that didn't already have a penguin something-or-other in it.

Off to Antarctica!

I am not entirely sure there will be Internet connectivity as we cruise around Antarctica. If not, you won't hear from me for a while, but I will keep writing blog posts, which will appear once we get back in a few days. Aren't you impressed by how much faith I have in Holland America?

A wonderful day at sea

We are scheduled to arrive at the Falkland Islands tomorrow, but if the ocean continues as it is, we won't be able to go ashore. The islands have no pier facilities to handle so gargantuan a ship as the ms Amsterdam, so we would have to take tenders from ship to shore. If the seas are too rough, it won't happen, and consensus among the passengers at the moment is that the seas are currently too rough.

But the sun is out, the temperature on deck is, if not warm., at least not chilly, and the sun on the ocean is incredibly beautiful with whitecaps everywhere and spray blowing off the breaking waves and substantial navy blue swells marching to the horizon. There are two talks I thought I'd attend this afternoon, but I can always watch them on televised replays, while the ocean is much better live.

Oh, and one peculiar note about the Falklands. The Falklands War between Britain and Argentina for control of the islands (Falklands to the British, Malvinas to the Argentines) left behind areas of the islands that were sowed with anti-personnel mines. These areas are fenced off and well marked with warning signs. But they have turned out to be excellent breeding grounds for island penguins, who are too light-weight to detonate the mines, and who benefit from the protection that the mines provide from people.

Random thoughts #1

1. We are still under constraints due to the GI illness. We still can't serve ourselves salt or pepper or coffee or cookies. We still need to ask the librarian for books instead of picking them out ourselves. The laundromat is still closed, though there is now a sign on the door that says "Inconvenience Is Highly Regretted". Yet somehow the slot machines in the casino are as available as ever. Maybe gamblers don't spread germs.

2. Newly installed racks of white paper bags (referred to by a friend as "gag bags") have appeared beside every elevator door. It is unclear whether these are related to the GI illness or to our upcoming transit around Cape Horn.

3. The ocean is calm, the sky is clear, the sun is bright, but it is noticeably chilly on deck, probably because we are moving south from Montevideo toward the Falkland Islands and thence to Antarctica. I am knitting furiously on the hat intended to keep me warm once we get there.

And so then what the heck

Having made that unanswerable case against going ashore, I decided to go ashore. Even bought a necklace of brightly dyed wooden beads from a vendor in a city park. But I can tell you almost nothing about Uruguay or Montevideo. City streets, narrower than some; relatively clean sidewalks paved a long time ago for pedestrians more sure-footed than the ones where I come from; people going about their business, the young ones often smiling, the older ones less so. There are at least three cruise ships in port, so it may be that most of the people I saw were, like me, wandering in hopes of finding a bargain or a souvenir or something deeply representative of the innermost soul of Uruguay.

The downtown area closest to the piers is the oldest part of town and has some beautiful buildings, many of them in apparent disrepair. It may be that the life of Montevideo happens somewhere else, and the old town is left to banks (of which I saw many), shipping companies (of which I saw a few), cafés serving bankers and shippers, and purveyors of brightly dyed wooden bead necklaces and other tourist tchotshkes (and I apologize to any Jewish readers, that's as close as I can come to spelling that invaluable Yiddish word).

So now we have a conundrum. When visiting a new country for a day or two, should one (a) take a packaged tour, which will acquaint one with the tourist version of the country , (b) wander on one's own, possibly encountering a unique insight into the country and more likely just getting a bit of exercise and/or a close encounter with the new country's criminal elements, or (c) nap on deck and watch the container manipulation machines lift and shuffle identical containers around and wait for the other people at one's table at dinner to provide one with the Readers Digest version of the country?

At the moment, I'm going with (b), since it's the only option that ends up with a nice necklace of brightly dyed wooden beads around my neck.

On not going into Montevideo

We're docked in Montevideo. For the first time since Barbados, we are not bombarded with "Ooo, watch out for the pickpockets and muggers, this is a dangerous place, do not venture forth from the ship in groups of less than ten including two heavily armed guards" warnings. We're docked in a semi-industrial area, but the downtown area is within sight, and it is apparently OK to walk around once one exits the ship.

So why am I telling you about it instead of setting off to have adventures? Not entirely sure. Probably a collection of small dissuaders. I slept badly last night and a nice nap in a deck chair sounds real good. Coming back from a Buenos Aires yarn shop yesterday (nothing special, unfortunately, about a dozen people from the "Sit and Stitch" group on board went to buy yarn which we all expected to be really good and really cheap, and it wasn't either), my right knee decided, as I was exiting the shuttle back to the ship, that it wasn't going to play any more. I tumbled to the pavement, doing no particular damage except to my dignity. (If the shuttle bus had stopped five feet further on, I would have landed in a rather oily puddle, so on the whole, I think it has to count as a win.) Still, this morning the knee feels tetchy. And it's almost lunch time.

On the other hand, when will I be in Montevideo again?

On the other other hand, it's almost lunch time. Maybe I should wait and see how I feel after lunch. And a nice nap. By which time it's nearly too late to go anywhere. (Yesterday, two couples were not back at the time set to raise the gangway. The PA announcer asked a couple times for them to call the front desk, and finally the Captain came on to reassure us that they had been found -- they had disembarked the shuttle at the wrong ship! I can totally see how one could do that -- the ships are so huge, all you know is that you're next to this enormous maritime entity whose actual name is written half a block away. No one from the ship's staff waiting on the pier would be so discourteous as to suggest they had never seen you before until you try to go through security on the MSC Opera with your ms Amsterdam room key. I suppose at that point some sort of confrontation would occur. But I saw the dining room steward ask someone who was improperly dressed to leave, and it was a masterpiece of diplomacy. I'm in an open parenthesis. I'd better get out while I still can.)

Time Zone Tango

It's not nearly as bad as air travel. We don't go to sleep, travel for eight hours, and wake up before we went to bed. But moving around the world does require adjustments to the clock,
We started out in Ft. Lauderdale, Eastern Standard Time, Greenwich Mean Time - 5 hours. By the time we got to Recife, we had moved three time zones east, typically losing an hour in the middle of the night every few days. Fairly painless.
Then we went to Buenos Aires, our first significant move west, and gained an hour, like going from New York to Chicago. 3 am turned into 2 am. We're now headed eastward back out of the Rio De La Plata for a day's stop in Montevideo, which requires that we drop the hour we just gained, so 2 am will magically become 3 am in another couple hours.
All-in-all, from here on in, we will gradually gain 27 hours one at a time as we sail westward around the world. This does not include the Mardi Gras we lose crossing the International Date Line east to west. I am coming to feel that the names we give units of time are entirely arbitrary and should be ignored much more often than they are.

Plague!, cont.

Second letter from the captain within the last 24 hours, this one explaining that bread will not be served in open baskets on the dinner table, but will be served individually on request by the wait staff as will salt and pepper. I just dragged my laundry bag down to the laundromat, only to find it locked, "until Montevideo", the courteous young woman at the front desk informed me, apologizing for the absence of explanatory signs on the doors.
"We understand that these measures may seem drastic and perhaps may be an overreaction; however, our guests' well-being is our primary concern," the captain concluded before another reminder to wash our hands at every opportunity and a request that, should we experience symptoms, we report it to the front desk and isolate ourselves in our cabins until we are symptom-free for 24 hours, during which period full room service will be provided.
I assume that full room service would include access to the Russian disinfectant recommended in Victoria's comment below. Might not do much to settle a queasy stomach, but it could, as I understand it, lighten the burden of quarantine.

Plague!

Well, not exactly. But apparently some of my fellow passengers have begun to suffer digestive distress. We got a letter about it with the Explorer daily newsletter last evening, reminding us to wash our hands and use the ubiquitous hand sanitizer dispensers and assuring us that our health and safety is a top priority for the ship's staff, yada, yada, yada.

But this morning, I can't serve myself at the breakfast buffet. The foods are displayed, but behind a rope line, behind which an unfailingly polite and helpful waiter in latex gloves fetches for me my bowl of mueslix and my raisin bun and the paper-wrapped pat of butter to smear on it. At the coffee urn, another rope line, another waiter hitting exactly the right balance of courtesy and discipline as he fetches my coffee with cream and Splenda. Even the salt and pepper grinders on the tables are replaced by little paper packets to keep Person A from any possibility of direct contact with the comestibles of Person B. All done so gracefully that there is no implication of dirtiness or danger.

They let people off the ship to go on excursions into Buenos Aires, so I assume we're just talking a minor stomach bug of some kind. I wonder what they would do if it really was plague. I feel sure they would handle things elegantly, efficiently, and effectively. Do you suppose there's a protocol for dumping all passengers at sea and steaming rapidly away? I am sure Holland America would never do such a thing. Costa, on the other hand...

Rio : the CtR statue

I'm trying to think of monumental art that is actually artistic. And failing. Of course, it's the middle of the night, and I can only think of two -- the Christ the Redeemer that I saw yesterday (henceforth referred to as CtR for convenience) and the world's biggest Lenin head in Ulan Ude that I saw in 2007 during my ride on the Trans-Siberian Railway, but with both of them, you kind of think, "Wow! That's really big!", and then your attention wanders.

The CtR has the additional disadvantage of being on a platform from which the view is spectacular. Rather than craning my neck to look up at the rather bland lines of the statue, it was much more exciting and inspiring to look down at Rio -- the harbor full of ships, the tall downtown buildings, the red tile roofs, the beaches dotted with umbrellas, the favelas spreading in fine-grained detail on the slopes below the towering granite peaks, the vibrant green of the jungle covering everything that wasn't nearly vertical stone. And not just in one direction. Rio is spread out before me in a 360° panorama. The settlement started inside the bay on one side and has now spread around to the ocean shore to the south, around the bay to the northwest and across the bay to major suburbs reached by a nine-mile-long bridge that has worse traffic than Seattle's, plus expanding over the lower hills between the mountains -- everywhere you look is Rio or jungle or granite rising vertically to the sky. That holds your attention.

Some people, of course, want to take pictures of CtR. Again and again, it goes like this : person A stands with arms outstretched and person B lies down on her back on the tiled floor of the observation platform and aims a camera up to get a shot of person A and CtR against the sky. It is not possible to be anywhere that is not impinging on someone's photographic composition, except maybe that of the idiot atop the barrier, who I'm almost sure didn't actually fall off, though it was crowded and I may have missed it. The crowds were generally quite good-natured, thanks surely in part to the samba music on the train on the way up.

Man overboard!

No, not one has fallen overboard. I was just reading on deck when I overheard part of a training session for the crew that included what to do if you see someone fall off the ship. Just two things : yell "Man overboard!" and keep your eyes on the person in the water. Tell someone else (and keep yelling until someone else comes) to call the bridge to dispatch the rescue team, but keep your eyes on the victim. "As fast as we're going, if you lose sight of them, our chances of finding them again are much less."

Not just the streets of Rio where serious danger is right there next to me. One would have to do some fairly stupid things to fall off this ship, at least a passenger would. But yesterday morning I saw a guy climb up on the waist-high barrier around the observation deck below the Christ the Redeemer statue so his girlfriend could take his picture. Right above the several hundred feet of empty air. Right over the "Do not climb on barrier " sign in Portuguese and English.

Rio really

I don't want to leave the impression that Rio De Janeiro is a grim place with starving bandidos lurking behind every corner. So here are some random impressions not based on my inability to wander the streets unaccompanied.

Copacabana beach goes on for three miles, bordered by the bay and a strip of what look like fairly pricey hotels. The sidewalk along the hotel side is tiled in black and white in curves that look like they are dancing samba. The sands apparently get so hot you can burn the soles of your feet, so the hotels pay to string piping from the street to the water to moisten pathways that are cooler. There were lots of people on the beaches, though I didn't see anyone in the "dental floss" bikinis our tour guide said might be there. I also didn't see any of what we gently term full-figured women there. Some full-figured men, of course -- men don't seem to know when they really need to get a bigger size swimming suit.

The best of the graffiti is exuberant, bright colored, and creative, more so than a lot of the more conventional public art, which tends to be somewhat pompous. The plant life is so energetic that plants even root themselves on other plants. It's very common to see an orchid blooming on the branch of a street-side tree, and a form of cactus that hangs from trees is currently "in bloom" with little pearl-like spheres on its stringy dangling shoots. The tour guide assured us that the cactus wasn't parasitic on the trees, it just liked to grow with some altitude.

This morning, as we rode the train up the side of Corcovado Mountain (in order to ride the elevators in order to ride the escalators in order to wander below the feet of the Christ the Redeemer statue) a band of samba musicians boarded to serenade us on the 20-minute ride. What amazing enlivening joyful music! It really makes me sorry we are a month too early for Carnival. They have three tiers of samba schools  that compete during Carnival, each one proceeding down a half-mile course between rows of bleachers packed with onlookers, the dancers dressed in school colors in fantastic costumes complete with elaborate creations of feathers and sequins on beautiful lithe bodies. The last place finishers in each tier get relegated to the next lower tier, and the winner in each lower tier gets promoted, just like in soccer in England. Rio is Samba Central, so much so that the winning performers get to dance again the next weekend, even if it is, technically, during Lent.

This sort of attitude seems characteristic of Rio. Our guide told us how jealous Sao Paulo, Brazil's biggest city, is of how much fun people in Rio have. "We just tell them, 'You go ahead and make all the money, and we'll have a good time spending it. '"

Rio is set among a whole collection of mountains that are essentially big chunks of granite. Sugarloaf Mountain is 1300 feet high and rises virtually out of the sea. It's one solid mass of granite, though one tour guide said there was uranium inside that was probably worth less than the mountain's value as a tourist attraction. Corcovado Mountain, on which the statue of Christ the Redeemer stands, is almost twice as tall, and even that is not the tallest granite monolith in the greater Rio De Janeiro area. I'm really curious about the geological history of this dramatic landscape, but whatever it is can't detract from the delight and wonder it inspires.

Have you ever heard of jack fruit? I have, but I had no idea what it was. Turns out this is jack fruit season and you see it in all the forest/jungle areas around Rio, of which there are many. In shape and color, it resembles a pear, but it's the size of a football, and the way it hangs from the trees, it looks like some sort of cancerous tumor. The guides say it's very tasty, but smells awful. "Don't take one back to the ship or your cabin will stink for a week, " one warned.

And apparently my take on poverty in the favelas was overly simplistic. Today's excursion took us within sight of a couple of the more accessible favelas. The guide explained that people come to Rio from the really poor areas in the back country -- living in Rio's slums is a step up for them. It used to be that if someone built a house on a plot of empty land, if the land's owner didn't say anything for five years, the home owner got title to the land. Not so now that land values have gone up so dramatically, but people are still streaming into Rio, and to make room, they add stories to existing structures, resulting in four- and five-story buildings based on structures that were hovels to start with.

Oh, and one more correction: it's not just the poor whose homes get washed away in heavy rain, today's guide said. Of course, the non-poor are more likely to have insurance and other resources to rebuild with. And I still didn't get to stroll along Copacabana beach, people-watching and taking Dmitri's picture on the black and white tiled curves of the sidewalk.

Dang! Will I be forced to come back here some time?

Thunderstorm addendum

When it rains as it did tonight, the hovels of the poorest, built on the slopes, are often washed away resulting in deaths and the loss of even the few possessions they have.

Thunderstorm

Right now I'm sitting on a padded deck chair enjoying a tropical thunderstorm. I'm on the water side of the ship, so the view is limited to blackness punctuated by lightning and the lights of a few passing boats. The rain is clearly not Oregon rain. For one thing, there's way too much of it. It's dripping -- no, it's pouring off overhead structures. Then there's the thunder, which is seriously loud, which makes me indefensibly happy. I am about to run out of battery, so you will have to imagine the rest of this Brazilian downpour on your own. I'm going to sit here for another few minutes and watch it subside.

Rio

I did a fairly standard bus-based excursion into Rio today and will do another one tomorrow -- today's involved riding the cable car to the top of Sugarloaf, tomorrow's will be to the Christ the Redeemer statue -- but what is on my mind is all the warnings we've gotten about the streets. "Don't look like a tourist -- wear nothing, carry nothing with logos, they will pick your pockets, they will grab jewelry off you. Never go out by yourself!" And the warnings come from official and unofficial sources, and they are consistent and intense.

This afternoon at the end of the excursion, we went to a fabulous restaurant across from Copacabana beach, which definitely deserves its own post. But at the end of the meal, one woman wanted to do a little shopping, so she walked out of the restaurant while the rest of us sat in satiated stupor trying to decide whether we would ever be able to move again. A few minutes later she was back. A clerk in the first shop she went to told her not to continue. "She said the poor people come down from the favelas and they will grab anything off you that looks like it might be worth something. I wouldn't be safe."

I can look out at the beautiful dramatic hills around the city, and if the overcast mist clears, I can see the hovels where people live who are so desperately poor that I would not be safe beside them on the public street. I'm finding that hard to grok. It's like when my mother died and I had to understand that I will die too. It's something you can know in a cool, distant, contained corner of your intellect, but it still comes as a shock when you have to confront it 3D technicolor standing stone-faced in front of you making the world you thought you were living in go all wobbly.

Rio tomorrow!

Tomorrow morning we sail into the harbor at Rio De Janeiro, which the captain described as the best natural harbor in the world. I've set an alarm so I can be on deck to watch our arrival under the outstretched arms of the huge Christ the Redeemer statue. I'll try to remember to take pictures, but they won't do justice to the experience. I'll be taking a standard halfday tourist excursion once we dock, trying to remember all the cautions I've received from everyone from Valde the Recife taxi driver to my tablemates about the ubiquitous pickpockets. And I'm sure I'll buy some irresistible nonsense, hoping not to find a "made in China" label when I get back to the ship. But it's that arrival I am really looking forward to.

I won at bingo!

So I figured, "What the heck, I've got an hour to kill, why not try bingo?" I quickly found one reason why not: the caller was phenomenally obnoxious. Like a comedian whose audience has stopped laughing, he pushed harder and louder, making his audience less and less likely to respond. At one point he instructed us that anyone seeking a win on a game requiring having the B and G rows filled must claim it by doing a dancing version of the BGs' hit "Stayin' Alive". I won, but simply yelled "Bingo!" He did not insist.

I won two of the four games we played, gaining $67 for the $10 the cards had cost. I was sitting beside a charming woman from Vancouver, BC, who explained the game to me and sympathized with my distaste for the caller's antics. At dinner, I bought wine for my table with my ill-gotten gains.

Two things militate against my playing again. First, of course, would be the caller. But after winning the first and third of four games, I found my hands shaking with excitement during the fourth. Bingo is as purely a game of luck as slot machines, since there is nothing one can do to make a card more or less likely to win. I don't like that jittery feeling. On the other hand, one of my tablemates said he felt the same way on that last game, which required having a card with every space filled to win. The process goes on for a long time -- 24 numbers minimum. Maybe I just have no taste for excitement.

There is no Mardi Gras!

I just realized something appalling : on the ms Amsterdam 2012 World Cruise, there will be no Mardi Gras. We go to bed on Monday, February 20, and wake up having crossed the International Date Line to find ourselves on Ash Wednesday, February 22, plunged directly into Lent with no compensatory bacchanalia to exorcise fleshly desires.

But what am I saying? This trip is one long four-month mobile Mardi Gras. The problem is not missing Mardi Gras, but ignoring Lent, since I seriously doubt the quantity or quality of the sensual delights will diminish in the slightest after February 22nd.

I suppose I could give up dessert or stop having a roll slathered with butter every meal. Lent, perhaps, is in the mind (or mouth) of the beholder.

More from Valde

He is not a fan of George W. Bush. Apparently, before the attacks of 9/11, taxi drivers could park right where the cruise ships docked. But now, cruise ship passengers must ride shuttle busses to the passenger terminal, and the taxi drivers must wait for them there. "George Bush thinks taxi drivers are terrorists," Valde told me, "so we have to park over there." I hadn't realized how ridiculous the rule was until we came back and I saw that the gangway was roughly half a block from the terminal. (On the way out, we circled around a couple blocks and the absurdity was not quite so obvious.) Since foot traffic is forbidden in the port area, I had to ride a bus that half block. I was the only passenger. I suspect that half-block ride was the most inefficient use of fuel in which I have ever participated.

Valde claims to speak half a dozen languages that he learned working as a longshoreman when he was younger: in addition to English, he said he knows German, Dutch, Polynesian, Japanese, and Chinese, all acquired outside classrooms.

Valde is very enthusiastic about his town, Recife, and very dismissive of Rio De Janeiro. "If you gave me free airplane tickets and free hotel, I wouldn't go to Rio", he told me. He complained of the violence, the crime, and the corruption there, warning me of criminal gangs that station one guy in the bank to see who is getting cash so he can phone a confederate outside with a description of who to rob for how much. Fortunately, while I'm in Rio, I'll be in guided tours and won't need to be lucky enough to find another taxi driver like Valde.

Shopping with Valde in Recife

OK, to tell this story properly, I need to give you TMI -- too much information about myself. I have problems with incontinence which require me to wear protective pads. I thought I had arranged with Holland America to get supplies for the trip, but there was a mixup in communication, and I got much less than I will need. This meant I could EITHER fight with the front office to (a) communicate the problem and (b) negotiate a resolution and (c) wait anxiously to see whether I got what I needed, possibly requiring a return to (a); OR I could figure out how to acquire what I need on my own.

I chose the second approach. The ship's Travel Guide, a American woman of roughly my age, hence someone relatively easy to talk to, gave me the name of a pharmacy in Recife that she said would have what I needed. OK, I thought, I can do this.

I was wrong, but I was lucky. As I walked toward the bus stop the tourist info people in the terminal pointed me to, Valde offered me his taxi service, assuring me he spoke "very good English", which wasn't entirely true, but his generosity of spirit more than made up for it.

Valde is about fifty, maybe 5'6" to 5'8" tall with salt-and-pepper hair and beard and a stocky, muscular build. (If I had thought to take my camera, I could post a picture, but I was minimally equipped for the shopping trip and left it behind.) I'm sure he has as much machismo as any other Latin American male, but he walked with me through the whole process -- or, rather, I walked with him. I had brought an empty package of pads, which he took and showed to various store clerks, asking directions to where the "geriatricos" supplies were, explaining what we were looking for, telling me how many Brazilian reals to get out of the ATM, checking back with me when the price seemed too high to him, carrying the bulky packages onto my shuttle bus, all done graciously and with no sense of embarrassment or distaste or, for that matter, of smarmy servility. He was a knight in shining taxicab who saved me from a fearsome, overwhelming dragon of a shopping trip -- imagine me with no Portuguese trying to pantomime what it was I was looking for! -- and the fact that he kissed me on the forehead by way of farewell just puts the icing on the cake.

Dinner with the Captain

Last evening was my turn to dine with the Captain and officers of the ship. It was a formal night on the theme of the Black and Silver Ball, which followed dinner.

I can't complain at all about what was offered to us -- a preliminary reception at which the wine and champagne flowed freely, a six course meal in the ship's Pinnacle Grill with more wine, and the gift of a little piece of Dutch pottery of sufficient elegance to come with a certificate of authenticity. There was a wrapped object inside that I thought was a tulip bulb, but was instead (I just discovered to my delight) a really good chocolate. Our table was hosted by the ship's purse, a slight, handsome Brit who looked like the doctor on "Love Boat", a resemblance he admitted while reviling the show itself for its absurd portrayal of cruising.

But the poor man was stuck at a table with five single older women, four Americans and a Canadian, three of them recent widows, one of them rather drunk from the reception. The conversation was clunky at best and embarrassing at worst. I don't enjoy social events like this generally, and seeing the purser forced by professional obligation try to stay civil and pleasant in the middle of a hen party made me very glad when it was over. I did not, of course, attend the ball. Sorry to those who hope I will find the love of my life on this cruise, but if it's going to happen, he's going to have to meet me on deck or in the library as I struggle with the daily sudoku. Actually, one of my tablemates offered to help me with the sudokus, but he is a stereotypical southern Californian who reminds me a lot of a lover from some time ago, my connection with whom does not bring happy nostalgic smiles to my face. The man of my dreams must at least be able to ask questions about someone else and take part in conversations not entirely about himself.

Answers for Victoria

The cruise lasts 112 days, ending April 28. In my estimation, most passengers are over 65. One of my tablemates is 89 and hoping to take next year's world cruise to celebrate her 90th year. There is one 8-year-old child, the only minor aboard.

Food

One of my tablemates did not rate his dinner entrée as excellent, so our waiter, a tall, handsome young man from Bali named Iwan, brought him tomorrow's menu by way of apology. None of us understood how this was supposed to placate the dissatisfied guest -- Iwan is gorgeous and a graceful server , but his English has its limitations -- but I got to bring a menu back to the cabin with me so I can reassure anyone who fears I may not be getting adequate meals.

Starters -- papaya with a rainbow of fruit and/or crostini with fresh tomato, basil and prosciutto and/or malassi caviar and butterfly jumbo shrimps and/or grilled scallops and shrimp

Soups & Salad -- lemon turkey spinach barley soup and/or cream of four mushrooms and/or chilled apple vichyssoise and/or baby spinach and button mushrooms

Entrees -- grilled Chinese five spice tuna and crispy tortilla salad and/or gnocchi with roasted squash and/or salmon with basil, tomatoes and capers and/or surf and turf (petit filet mignon and lobster tail) and/or whole roasted beef tenderloin and/or roasted rack of veal and/or parmesan crusted chicken breast and/or spicy vegetarian chow mein.

And those are the specials. Available daily are jumbo shrimp cocktail, French onion soup, Caesar salad, baked potato, salmon fillet, chicken breast, and/or 8-ounce top sirloin center-cut steak.

I don't have the dessert menu, but there are always six or eight choices, different every night, ranging from the reasonable (e.g., pineapple sherbet or fresh fruit ) to the seriously indulgent (e.g., chocolate decadence or butterscotch sundae).

And tomorrow's menu, which I just reproduced for you, won't matter for me personally because tomorrow evening is my turn to dine with the captain and officers, which one of my tablemates, who has done this before, says makes an "ordinary" ms Amsterdam meal seem like an outing to a down-at-heel MacDonald's. Reception to begin at 5pm in the Piano Bar.

I am not sure I can do justice to the occasion.

Belem, Brazil

We are at anchor in a river some miles inland near Belem, Brazil. I'm not signed up for any excursions here, but if I wanted to go ashore on my own, it would mean riding a brightly painted tender for half an hour just to get to shore, then taking a shuttle bus for an hour to get to Belem town center, and it doesn't seem worthwhile. Besides which, this is great weather for napping. So far today, I have eaten breakfast, napped on deck watching the brown river water carry dark cloud shadows downstream, eaten lunch (luscious chicken saffron soup and a main dish of salmon, rice, and vegetables), done the daily sudokus and failed to do the NYTimes crossword, and napped in my cabin. I can most likely make it to dinner without another nap, but should one call my name, who am I to resist? Tomorrow night Is have dinner with the captain and staff in formal dress, and two days after that we get to Recife, where I have shopping and beach walking to do. One needs to rest up for bigtime events like that. And there is a mile of teak deck calling my name -- unless one of the deck chairs grabs me first.

Crossing the Equator

Right now, the time on board is 10:26pm on Thursday, January 12. The ship's clocks are two hours ahead of Florida. Twice already we have gone from 1:59pm to 3:00 pm as we sailed southeast to get around the eastern bulge of Brazil. Our current position is 47°58.06'W and 00°43.87'N. In case you're not properly impressed with that second figure, it means we're REALLY close to the Equator and should be crossing it within the hour. I'm not sure whether I am enough of a geek to stay up to watch the N change to a S. The ship plans no particular ceremony to mark the crossing, probably assuming most people will be sound and sensibly asleep by then. Someone at my table said that on one's first Equator crossing, it is customary to kiss a fish, in which case I'll be happy to make my crossing a more private event.

There was another event this evening that I have been anticipating : for the first time, I left my cabin with the card key inside. I do that at home every couple months and have to get one of the security guys to help me get access to my spare key. Much simpler here. They have my picture in the system, so they know it's me when I trundle meekly up to the front desk. They reprogram my cabin's lock, make me a new card key, and smile without visible contempt as they tell me to just throw away the old one.

I wish I thought that would be the only time I'll do that.

Salvation by laundromat

Remember how I was complaining about feeling useless? Well, I just did my first load of laundry in the self-service laundromat down the corridor and I feel much better. I even ironed a couple blouses, something I probably haven't done in decades at home. And I feel much less useless. Plus which I'm on a boat. I am happy.

Little bit seasick

So I'm skipping lunch to do a blog post. A friend advised me that, in his experience, seasick only happens when he can't see the horizon. I just went for a quick walk on the teak deck, and apparently, for me, actually being in the presence of the ocean settles my stomach right down, even if I have to struggle mightily to open the door against the wind.

Damn! I just realized. If the wind is against opening the door on the port side, it should be helpful to opening the door on the starboard side. I'll have to check that out.

The air outside is thick enough to cut with the edge of a fork. But it's on the ocean, so it doesn't make me feel suffocated like St. Louis did. They've taken in all the pads from the on deck chairs -- I need to find out whether that's something I can ask them to get. Almost certainly the answer is "yes". There's a lot of "yes" around here.

Meanwhile the captain, who gives us navigation and weather information every day around 12:45, just said the air and water are both around 82 degrees, and the wind, a "fresh breeze", is blowing at 30 knots. I'm on a boat, people! I'm happy.

I'm getting this under control

I just finished my mile walk, three and a half times around the teak deck outside my window. Bright sun on the ocean, enough breeze to ruffle my curls and bring a bit of salt spray to my lips. I walk slower than anyone else, but I'm in no hurry and most of the people who pass me smile and say "Hi!"

We're out of the Caribbean and into the Atlantic en route to our first stop in Brazil, Belem at the mouth of the Amazon. This was the stop that the CDC said I'd need the yellow fever shot for. Nothing I particularly want to do on shore in Belem, but three days later we stop in Recife. A Brazilian man at my church told me the beaches in Recife are beautiful, and maybe instead of the teak deck that day, I can do my mile on warm sands. As an Oregonian, I am entranced with the idea of ocean water you can wade in without screaming in pain at the cold.

Well, I guess I need to decide whether I want to be waited on for lunch. My life is such a trial!

Me and Dmitri in Barbados

Prow of the Amsterdam in the background.

Barbados!

I am actually off the ship and On Foreign Soil! Well, on foreign floor tiles in a big tin warehouse next to the dock where there is free wi-fi! There was a steel drum band playing as I got off -- real Caribbeans playing real steel drums. And as I sit here not using up my Amsterdam minutes, the shop and kiosk merchants are speaking to one another in a gloriously lilting singsong which does great things for what is nominally English. And I have my first Dmitri picture, which I shall append forthwith.

Well, that's not working. Damn! Didn't I used to be able to do this stuff? I suppose I could go back to the ship and try to track down their tech guy, but (a) having just whined about having nothing substantive to do, it seems hypocritical to refuse the challenge, and (b) having humbled myself to ask for help, he'll probably know nothing about Android anyway.

Well, I did figure out how to connect to the photo, but the upload speed is too slow. So I am vindicated, but you don't get to see Dmitri and me in front of Barbadian flowers in front of the prow of the Amsterdam. Stay tuned. I've got over 100 days to figure this business out. Maybe I can email the pix.

January 9 -- why a world cruise may not have been such a great idea

I am feeling anxious and a bit trapped. It is not comfortable for me to be useless, and I am facing four months of total uselessness. The ship is structured to infantilize the passengers, Are you hungry? There are several places to eat, all of them offering endless, excellent food. Are you bored? There are lots of activities, organized or casual. Did you make a mess? Your friendly room steward will clean it up for you as invisibly as possible. Veteran cruisers can put together their own excursions or interest groups, and the ship will facilitate practical details. But one simply cannot do anything that is not entirely self-centered.

I know, I know, it's supposed to be a vacation, why don't I just lie back and enjoy what I've looked forward to for over a year? Well, I didn't know it was going to feel like this to be waited on hand and foot, and I didn't know it would feel so claustrophobic. Can't I contribute anything besides my money?

OK, after writing that, I went stomping out to walk the deck a bit to decompress. And after a couple circuits, I sat down on one of the wooden benches and looked out at the dark ocean streaming by, the full moon lighting a path to my feet, the wake splashing below. I am where I want to be. I'm going to sail around the world. If it is necessary to wrap me in cotton wool to allow that to happen, then it is. Lord knows, I really have no skills that would render the Amsterdam safer or swifter or more elegant. And every evening I can sit on deck and watch the dark ocean streaming by and be calmed and exhilarated all at the same time.

I should probably start skipping some dining room meals, though, if only to minimize the amount I have to get waited on. I can at least carry my own dinner plate from the buffet to the table now and then.

January 8

OK, we may have solved the problem of composing a blog entry offline to save precious online minutes. One of my tablemates also blogs, and told me I can send an entry via email. Let's see.

There were a couple things I wanted to blog about. I wanted to brag about today's schedule, which offered a guided meditation, a Protestant worship service, a tai chi session, a knitting group, a talk about waves from a professor of oceanography, and a qi gong session, and those were just the activities I found interesting. They also publish a compendium of the current New York Times plus daily sudoku and crossword puzzles.

On the other hand, there are some things about this world that are already making me a bit cranky. They keep giving us things. Tonight my room steward Achmad handed me a brown canvas carryall imprinted with "2012 Grand World Voyage ms Amsterdam". I already had one the travel agency gave us, black with "2012 GRAND WORLD VOYAGE Cruise Specialists" embroidered on it in green and white. The Holland America one had inside it a world voyage sticking, a leather card case, a mini first aid kit, and a leather-bound journal to write in with world maps in the back and pages numbered Day 1, Day 2, etc., with "Voyage Log" at the top of each page. That last one, of course, completely won me over.

But I still needed to dispel a certain degree of emotional indigestion, so I went for a walk around the deck. Turns out after supper is a great time to walk the deck. Far fewer people, and the ones there are aren't grimly slogging out their daily exercise prescription. Instead they, like me, are enjoying the full moon on the ocean and the feeling of the sea wind in their hair and the sound of the ship's wake churning past the hull.

Well, there is another qi gong session tomorrow morning I'd like to wake up for, so I'm going to mail this off and see whether this way of posting works.

January 7 -- no, I did not fall overboard

This blogging business is going to be more complicated than I thought. But then, everything is more complicated than one thinks, and it all turns out interesting.

I'm sitting at a computer in the Explorations Cafe, with the monitor at a window beyond which I can see the ocean all the way to the edge. We're riding a gentle swell that lifts the ship and then lets her down. I took a walk around the promenade deck earlier, and when the ship settles down into the waves, she leaves a glorious brilliant white wake, splashing up not all that far, but enough to be hypnotic. I walked around the ship twice, equal to a little over half a mile, happily letting the breeze disarrange the curls Becky Elliott gave me to make my look like I actually have a normal amount of hair. When the sun comes out, the ocean becomes a deep, elegant blue like the background of the stars on the flag.

I still haven't unpacked. My cabin is a disaster area. I'm sure eventually I will stow everything away (Notice that nautical term, "stow"? I'm at sea. I'm on a boat in the middle of the ocean. I'm happy.) somewhere, if only back into the suitcases and thence under the bed. Right now I'm watching the ocean go by as I blog.

Blogging is going to be a bit of a hassle, I'm afraid. Sometimes, I can connect to the Web from my cabin -- without telling anyone, Holland-America has extended their routers to provide wireless access throughout the ship. Unfortunately, connectivity seems somewhat arbitrary, so sometimes I can connect from the cabin and sometimes I can't. And composing on my tablet, then uploading it to the blog is a process I can't seem to figure out. Which means when I blog as I am now, with the ocean streaming past just beyond the monitor (I'm happy!), I'm using up my first installment of internet minutes. Ah well, everything has its price.

Dinner on board last night was wonderful. The menu would have done any high-end restaurant proud, but there was one entree marked as a gourmet chef's creation. I figured, what the heck, if they're going to offer cuisine, who am I to order hamburger? Chicken with cornbread stuffing. Tender, flavorful, luscious. Really, really, really good. If you ask, they will serve you a reduced portion, which is plenty. And yes, I had dessert (red forest cake, good, but not up to the standards of the chicken), and no, I did not have a reduced portion of that. Good company at table, including a woman who has been on 30 -- no, really, 30 world voyages. She's in a wheelchair, traveling with her daughter. 30 world voyages.

So far, one is almost more ecstasy than I can stand.

Dinner went fine

Martha, a fellow-traveler I've been emailing with, recognized me from pictures we exchanged, and we sat together, so it wasn't all total strangers. Food was good, mandatory rah-rah speeches were mercifully brief, I returned to my room replete and into a sound sleep on a sybaritically comfortable bed.

And in about an hour, they will bus us to The Boat.

The TV news here in the hotel bar where I'm waiting just announced that Mt. Etna erupted. I need to go google Mt. Etna to see how close we'll be when we stop in Italy in April.

In Ft. Lauderdale

I am in the hotel in Ft. Lauderdale trying to gather my courage to go down to the "Bon Voyage" party. Sailing around the world, sure, bring it on! Walking into a room full of strangers to eat dinner, not so much.

Roberta Gets Moving

So here I am at Portland International Airport, embarked at last on my great adventure. It's about 1:15am, very quiet here except for the moving sidewalk behind where I'm sitting, which is in need of lubrication, and the periodic announcements over the PA assuring me that Portland International Airport is really glad to see me and will do everything in its corporate power to make my time here pleasant and comfortable, with the possible exception of turning off thA for a couple hours.

My plane doesn't leave for four more hours, but since I wouldn't be able to sleep anyway, I figured what the heck, I might as well be insomniac at the airport as anywhere else. A group of young African-Americans was sitting next to me for a while. One of them would intermittently sing a few lines of songs I didn't know. His voice was stunningly beautiful -- pure and clear and melodious as larksong. While he was singing, mostly to himself, he transformed the space around him from weary, wary, stale airport waiting area to a place the heart longed to remain. But then he and his friend moved off to find somewhere to sack out, and I was once more here at the airport, where in just four hours my plane will take off for Florida.

Yet another deadly peril

The ship could be struck by falling space debris! Here's what's happening to the failed Russian attempt to send a rocket to Mars.

"Like UARS and ROSAT last year, Phobos-Grunt is making an uncontrolled re-entry, and it’s not entirely clear where it will fall. Odds are it’ll be over water, since the majority of Earth’s surface is ocean. The predictions I’m seeing look like it’ll be on or around January 15th. The actual location of re-entry won’t be known pretty much until the moment it comes down; it’s moving at several kilometers every second, so being off by a few minutes in the time means being off by thousands of kilometers in the location! "

On January 15, ms Amsterdam will be on its way to Recife, Brazil, plowing the waves of the equatorial South Atlantic. So if it turns out that Phobos-Grunt lands nearby, I'll try to get a good photo of its re-entry. And if I do, I'll be able to sell it for enough to pay for the trip! (I have no idea if that's true or not, but it seemed such an appetizing prospect that I decided to affirm it anyway.)

And the "-Grunt" part of its name is a word for ground, though it's more German- than Russian-sounding, if you ask me.

Am I up for this?

Yesterday, I went to my son's house to watch the Rose Bowl (Go Ducks!) and took my passport to use his scanner to copy it. It was an exciting game that came out the right way, and in all the to-do, I managed to leave the passport there when I came home.

Now this is not a big deal. My son texted me about it this morning, I'll go over and pick it up this afternoon, it is a minor oversight, everything will be just fine, EVERYTHING WILL BE JUST FINE, no, really, it will be, just fine.

The cruise now looms so large that it's very, very difficult to think of anything else, perhaps to think at all, but I walked out of his house without something I need to get onto the ship. Admittedly, I'm not sleeping well with excitement and anticipation, so the occasional glitch is only to be expected, but forgetting my passport?

If you haven't seen the post from last October about the time I lost my passport in Moscow, you might want to flip back and take a look. Losing passports is not a good thing. It sort of argues against my being competent to travel anywhere outside the national borders.

But I'm sure, if I can just get from here to Friday afternoon without losing it again, Holland-America will take over care of my absent-minded self. And I'll be on the ship. I'll actually be on the ship. On the ocean. On lots of oceans. And exotic ports. And I've got copies of the relevant pages of the passport in pictures on my gmail account (a suggestion from my daughter Lizz), which won't entirely substitute, but it's available from any internet cafe.

I'm sure everything will be just fine.