Two days in Rio de Janeiro

It's now January 21, and in a year I will just have spent two days in Rio de Janeiro. I will have walked along the black and white wave pattern of the promenade along the Copacabana beach, staring in awe at the beauty and elegance of the people sunning themselves. I will have looked up at the statue of Christ the Redeemer and maybe ridden the car up to Sugar Loaf. Lent will be a month off, so I won't have had to fight Mardi Gras crowds, but I won't get to see the parades and costumes either. It will be mid-summer, temperature around 90 F., humidity in the mid-70s. And I can imagine all I like, but it's like an innocent from the provinces imagining her first trip to New York City. Only for me it's the whole world, about which I can at present only poke around in Wikipedia and pore over the itinerary and pretend to myself that I have any idea what the trip will actually be like. In a year I will have been in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and will be on my way to Buenos Aires, Argentina, as in "Don't Cry for Me". Maybe I'll sign up for a tango tour.

This is going to be terminally cool. I won't be, of course. I will be gawking wide-eyed, barely past picking straw out from behind my ears.

you thought I was kidding ...

... about the pirates. And then there's the rebellion in Tunisia which may spread to Egypt, putting the Suez Canal at risk of national instability. There aren't a lot of alternative routes between India and Greece. I wonder what the cruise line would do if they decided we couldn't safely get through the Suez Canal. Go around Africa instead, substituting Johannesburg for Piraeus and Monrovia for Barcelona? Fly us from Dubai to Naples? Put us ashore at Sharm el-Sheikh and let us hitchhike home?

Where I'll be -- January 17 2012

At the excellent suggestion of my good friend Nanette, I'm going to start anticipating next year's cruise.

For instance, today's January 17. Next January 17th, I'll be at sea on the two-day voyage between Recife, Brazil, and Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, having already been ashore at Roseau, Dominica; Bridgetown, Barbaros; Belem, Brazil; and Recife, Brazil. We're sailing south of the equator, having gone past the big bulge in the side of South America. According to the Weather Channel, the temperatures are in the mid 80's and the sky is mostly clear with winds between 10 and 20 mph from the south/southeast, humidity around 60%.

And here I sit on deck*, watching the ocean go by, eagerly anticipating supper (since it's late afternoon) and writing a blog entry about, oh, I don't know, what South America looks like off in the distance as we move south. At the moment, being a total landlubber, I have no idea what 10-20 mph winds do to the sea. Then, I'll know. Stay tuned, I'll tell you all about it.

*My idea of what one does on a cruise ship is very primitive at the moment. I'm assuming one can sit on deck except when the waves are surging and the rain and wind make that a suicidal way to spend time. So I'm imagining scenes from some Cary Grant movie, where I get to be Joan Crawford with a big hat and way longer legs than I actually have, reclining in a deck chair in the sun and flirting with anyone who flirts back and some that won't.

what do you want from where?

Last evening, I was telling a fellow TIP volunteer about my trip, and one of the destimations made her eyes light up. "Oh, I've always felt connected to that place. Would you bring me back something from there?"

Which seems to me like a great idea. I'm going on a round-the-world cruise, but a lot of people I know consider that to be a waste of time since there's really only one place they want to visit. And they'd like to have a souvenir from that one place.

So if you are such a person and want me to bring you back something, just ask. (If you're someone I've never met, sorry, this offer does not extend to you.) It won't be anything massive or unique, but I'll try to avoid handing you something that from, say, the Suez Canal that says "Made in China". I'd love to bring friends along, in spirit, anyway, and if you'd like to have a piece of coral from the Great Barrier Reef (unless that is known to contribute to the death of the Reef by over-harvesting) or a thimble-full of sand from Egypt, just let me know. I obviously can't haul back a bunch of stuff, but I'll figure out how to get you your vicarious souvenir if you'll just let me know where you want it from. Limit of one thingy per person. OK, two if that's what your soul cries out for.

Lord only knows, I'll probably be unable to fit into most of my clothes when I get back, there will be lots of room in my suitcase once I send all my skinny clothes home via FedEx -- or give them to Goodwill in Florida after disembarking.

RIP, me

I'm going to be musing about my death, so if you'd rather not deal with that topic, this is the point at which to bail.

OK. Death. Comes to us all, etc. But the question at the moment is, when?

I could die before I go on the cruise or after I go on the cruise. My health is not bad, but I'm 67. I'm currently recovering from what I'm assuming is flu, though it could of course be bubonic plague or one of those.

But the really interesting possibility is: what if I die while I'm on the cruise? Think of the possibilities:

• “Portland Woman Felled by Curare-Tipped Dart on Tour of Amazon”
• “Falklands War Re-ignites, Oregonian Is First Victim”
• “Leaping Orca Snatches Portland Tourist from Cruise Ship”
• “Easter Island Head Topples, Crushing Nearby Oregon Tourist”
• “Portlander Dies in Botched Malacca Straits Pirate Kidnap Attempt” (And we've got a second shot at this one when we do the Suez Canal and go past Somalia.)
• “Angry Camel Stomps Oregon Tourist en Route to Pyramids”
• “Portland Tourist Succumbs to Delight While Dancing on Greek Beach with Zorba”
• “Oregonian Insults Mafia in Sicily, Sleeps with Fishes”

Given my druthers, if I die on the cruise, I would prefer it be a solitary event. No collisions with icebergs – that's been done – no successful pirate attacks that take over the whole ms Amsterdam, no rogue waves that slosh a dozen or twenty of us overboard.

I'm all set up at home for it. Spiffy new will in a plastic bag in the freezer compartment, agreement with my sister Jenny (who does that sort of thing professionally) to serve as my executor, mortgage paid off to simplify the estate. Last summer my daughter Lizz cleaned up my condo, so no one will have to face the decade-long accumulation of crud that was there before. Nanette, who will live forever because the universe needs her spiritual strength, will give Ochi a new home.

And thousands of dollars will be spent repatriating my remains, if any (see orca and Mafia scenarios above), and the kids should have me immediately cremated and eventually scattered at Little Big Horn battlefield. (Kids, Omega Funeral Home over on SE 122^nd can handle the cremation for you. They'll do a good job and they won't rip you off.) Lizz will have my name and birth and death dates chiseled onto my father's tombstone, which she's already researched. And the world will go on without me, as it inevitably will in any case.

Advantages of ocean travel by boat

1. No jet lag. You cross time zones at a civilized pace with which your internal clock can easily keep pace.
2. If the medium through which you are traveling decides to become uncooperative, you can see it -- big waves towering over the boat in Hollywood disaster movie fashion. My ex-husband assures me that, even in the Caribbean, a cruise ship that encounters the tail end of a hurricane is dwarfed by the size of the waves. If you're on an airplane, "turbulence" gives you no clue that you're about to be tossed about. It also gives no clue to the pilot, who relies on weather forecasts to know that things are about to get a bit bumpy. True, there are no icebergs in the air, but then, on the other hand, given that we'll be cruising around Antarctica for three days watching icebergs float by us, that is not an unalloyed disadvantage.
3. Good food. Once I get going on my cruise (in 452 days, 18 minutes, 25 seconds, according to the app on my Android smartphone), I shall regale you with tales of what we're being fed, and you can compare that for yourself with what you would get on an airplane.
4. I'll be able move around without clambering over people. I've got these fantasies of walking several times around the lower promenade deck each day to partially counteract the results of point #3 above. Even just getting from cabin to dining room on the ship requires more actual physical activity than is possible on an airplane.
5. My own bathroom, in which I expect I will be able to turn around without advance strategic planning.
6. Amusements that go beyond six-inch screens you have to pay exorbitant amounts to watch.

And these are only the first six things that occur to me on a Sunday afternoon 452 days, 10 minutes, 55 seconds away from departure.

I think I may have at least as much fun being smug about going on this cruise as I will have actually being on it.

First cruise dream

It's 456 days, 5 hours, 58 minutes until my cruise begins*, and I've had my first cruise dream. I think it was a fairly standard anxiety dream taking cruise form -- we were going from our pre-cruise hotel to the ship, and I had to pack. I was stuffing things into my suitcase and another suitcase of uncertain provenance, not choosing what to take and what to leave behind because somehow I thought they'd keep the hotel room for me until we got back. It was snowing -- we seemed to be leaving from Seattle. The roof of my hotel room was leaking. A fellow traveler had confided her hopes of romance with someone I didn't know. The suitcases were moved out to the bus. I found I had failed to pack a little wooden cubic box containing go stones, and I wandered around looking for someone with spare room in their suitcase. We got on board. The boat left the dock, leaving behind it a wake like a speedboat. I realized my camera was in my suitcase, but I was so elated, I didn't care that I was missing pictures of The Departure.

I apologize to anyone reading this. Other people's dreams, unless one is a psychiatrist and is paid listen to them, tend to be rather uninteresting. But this seemed a Significant Milestone in my progress toward January 6, 2012, and I don't want to forget it. Even if it probably had nothing whatsoever to do with the cruise. I won't afflict my readers with any more dream narratives unless the dream itself clearly predicts the end of the world.

*Courtesy of my Android phone "Days Until" app.