We spent May 29 walking around the old part of San Juan, Puerto Rico. We explored old forts, ate good food, and sweated out all of the water we drank in the heat and humidity. We started with a hike up the hill to one of the two main forts in the city, Castillo San Cristóbal. The view of San Juan from the top was amazing, and the fort made all the Patrick O’Brian stories we’ve read about early 19th century British navy battles with the French and Spanish come alive. It was easy to imagine Ol’ Goldilocks leading a secretive marine assault on the fort in the middle of the night.
Sam and Shannon at Castillo San Cristóbal
View of Old San Juan from Castillo San Cristóbal
After the fort, we checked out a couple museums and walked down to have lunch at a great local restaurant. Deliciously cold local beer was served in enormous frosty tin mugs…mmmmmm.
A huge mug of local Puerto Rican beer. 1.5 bottles only filled it halfway.
We closed out the day with a beautiful little coastal park that was chock full of over-exuberant pigeons fighting over food from locals and tourists alike. It was wild chaos and flapping of wings. Most of the kids (and many of the adults) in the park were a little freaked out by what felt like a Hitchcock-esque flock of attack pigeons. The video below gives you a sense of the mania.
I had a little bit of free time from the lab yesterday and got to sit in on a lecture Dr. Allen Schoenherr gave about whales and other marine mammals. It was a fun and fascinating talk, and it gave me some things to look for on the rest of the voyage. As luck would have it, shortly after Allen’s talk a couple of humpback whales were spotted surfacing and breaching off the starboard bow. Shannon and I missed seeing them, but we’ll definitely be on the lookout during the rest of the trip.
Allen says we’re also likely to see a pod of spinner dolphins at some point during the voyage. Apparently, they enjoy surfing and jumping in the wake of the ship, and the Explorer rarely sails the Caribbean without at least one encounter. Spinner dolphins get their name from their habit of spinning around and around as they swim and leap out of the water. No one knows for sure why they spin, but Allen thinks it might just be because it’s fun.
I also learned a few fun facts about other whale species. The sperm and gray whales were the most interesting to me:
Sperm whales make a clicking sound that is the loudest sound produced by any animal. The molecules of the ocean are so compressed at bottom of the whale’s dives that the very loud click actually temporarily paralyzes squid and other deep sea creatures, making them easy pickings for a hungry whale.
Sperm whales have the largest brain of any animal.
Sperm whales have a waxy substance called spermaceti in their snouts. When they start to deep dive, the spermaceti cools and compresses, giving them a negative buoyancy and allowing them to take a nap on the way down.
Gray whales always have a menage a trois during reproduction where one male holds the female and the other male gets down to business…ooh la la.
Who knew that academic lectures could get so racy?
We’re back on board the MV Explorer for a couple weeks of fun visiting many different Caribbean islands. We plan to blog as much as we can about our various ports of call, but we’re likely to fall behind at some point because we’re a little busier than we were the last time we set sail. If you’re curious about our itinerary, here’s a link: http://www.semesteratsea.org/voyages/overview/itinerary.php
Shannon and I are both working in the ship’s “casino”, which is to say that she’s behind the library desk, and I’m working in the computer lab. When the Institute for Shipboard Education purchased the MV Explorer from a Greek cruise company back in 2004, they got rid of all those jingling jangling slot machines and replaced them with beautiful rows of books and humming computer processors…much more to our liking and easier on our wallets. The staff and lecturers for this voyage include many repeats from the two voyages we did in Central America last May and others before that, so it feels like a family reunion with hugs and happy hellos all around. Around 50% of the passengers have sailed on some type of SAS voyage before as well, which makes all the staff and crew feel good about the experience we’re giving to them.
The first night we arrived on board, we were sitting out on the back deck of the ship contemplating whether to eat a large chocolate brownie for a late night snack. Our famous friend and shipmate Dr. Iain Campbell solved the dilemma with a bit of biblical wisdom from Corinthians: “Sin boldly, that the grace of Christ might be more manifest.” I haven’t been able to track down the exact verse just yet, but it is definitely the coolest verse in the Bible. I followed this advice, have no regrets, and plan to continue following it in the future.
Thursday night we also both had the privilege of seeing our first green flash. Very cool. On our last voyage every night that we were outside to watch for it, there were too many clouds on the horizon to see it.
The ship is sailing for Puerto Rico, and we’ll be there in just about an hour.
Poor, neglected blog. Normal life as an Indianapolis software developer just isn’t as exciting to write or read about as three-legged dog-riding monkeys in Belize. Be that as it may, I do have a little something to share with the world today…and hopefully we’ll have more entertaining travel stories in the near future.
Geek Post Warning – those of you who are here for entertainment and are not particularly fond of the geeky software talk might want to skip the rest of this post.
I’ve been doing quite a bit of side development with Google App Engine for Java and the Restlet 2.0 framework as a backend server for a couple of different iPhone projects lately — Google App Engine is badass technology suite for web developers, but more on that some other time. JSON is a pretty important data interchange format for iPhone development, so I tried out a whole bunch of Java-to-JSON and JSON-to-Java serialization/deserialization open source libraries. There are plenty of options and lots of strengths and weaknesses to compare and contrast, but I eventually settled back on the first JSON serialization framework I learned, the JsonPlugin for Struts 2. One problem…I’m doing Restlet work now, not Struts 2. It turned out to be not too difficult to remove the Struts dependencies from the JsonPlugin code, however, and I’ve decided to release my changes back to the open source community under the Google Code project named “json-libre” – it’s the Struts2 Json Plugin code, freed from its dependence on Struts. Head nod to Garrett for helping me come up with a name.
I’m not crazy about forking projects, so I wrote the Struts Development team to see if they’d be interested in somehow making this part of the normal codebase. If I hear back from them and they’re interested, there’s a chance that this project might get deprecated and moved back into their codebase. For now it’s out there and free for your use.
Since we’ve been back home in Indianapolis, we’ve had lots of questions from our friends and relatives about our trip. We love to talk about our experiences, but it’s really difficult to sum them up concisely. We didn’t have one favorite country–we loved them all in different ways. Belize’s vim and vigor stole our hearts. Guatemala’s turbulent history–much of it thanks to our very own CIA–made us cry, but its gorgeous river canyon and lovely waterside dwellings warmed our souls. We fell in love with Costa Rica’s gorgeous central highland region, probably because its cool breezes and cloud forests gave us a welcome break from the 98% humidity of 95-degree tropical temps. Nicaragua–the biggest surprise of all–was delightful in every way, and it’s a place we’d like to return to in the future. Jamaica’s beautiful beaches and reggae welcome made us smile. The Panama Canal blew our minds…twice!
But all the wonderful archaeology, flora, fauna, literature, history, cuisine, and gorgeous terrain cannot hold a candle to the people we met on ship and shore. In every port, we encountered friendly faces and learned something new about the land and ourselves. We drank up sunlight, moonlight, starlight, and the sound of the ship moving through the ocean with our awesome shipmates. We saw the Southern Cross for the first time! We solved all the world’s problems together on decks 4, 5, and 6 aft, and it’s weird to go back to normal, everyday life after all that. The MV Explorer is part of our history now. Our experience on the ship is forever defined by the wonderful souls we got to know on board. It was the people, rather than the itinerary, that made this the trip of a lifetime…so a photo montage of them seems appropriate right about now. It takes a while to load, and remember to turn your volume down or plug in your earphones if you’re at work!
Eleven-year-old Nick Whittaker is the voracious reader/poet extraordinaire you see with us in the photo below. To end this final post about our fantastic voyage, we leave you with the poem he wrote just before disembarking from the ship for the last time. The blag will go blagward. It just won’t be about sailing through the Panama Canal anymore. But, we still have our memories…and the rest of our lives to get back to the MV Explorer for, as Iain says, another “taste of the lotus flower.”
It’s time to say “bye”
To the MV Explorer
Our lovely experience
Is now all but over
It’s hard to leave
This wonderful cruise
‘Cause this is the one ship
We always would choose
To sail us across the sea
And go to many places
Like Belize and Jamaica
And see many new faces
So we are sad to leave
Even shed a tear or two
MV Explorer
We’ll always miss you
–By Nick Whittaker–
Much of our Latin American voyage has been fascinatingly, breathtakingly beautiful, but there are a few things we saw that broke our hearts. One is the living conditions of animals in nearly every country we’ve visited. When the people themselves are struggling to eke out an existence, animals get bumped down on the priority list or are neglected altogether. Sometimes, they are pointedly abused. We understand that the closer people in these countries move towards greater economic, environmental, and social success, the closer stray domesticated or wild imprisoned animals come to a chance for a happy life. You might remember our photos of Gumbo the monkey at Jaguar Paw in Belize, the dolphins at Anthony’s Key in Roatan, or Buttercup the sloth in Costa Rica. These are the bright spots of our trip–Latin American organizations that are setting a positive example by treating animals humanely. Everything was not, unfortunately, all sweetness and light:
We saw skinny, mangy dogs in every country completely ignored or kicked away by children and adults. In the countryside and the cities, we found sickly monkeys, goats, dogs, chickens, pigs, and donkeys tied by their necks to trees with no more than a couple feet of give on the rope. Ferral cats were everywhere, and like the dogs, they all exhibited symptoms of severe skin and eye disease and malnourishment. Some dogs and cats would come to us when offered food or love, but most shrank away in fear. Animals born to be companions were hurting, and animals born to roam the wild were tied up. The worst of it? Tourists–mostly American–pay to keep wild animals in their obvious misery. A few dollars for a photo opportunity or a chance to pet a wild or exotic animal, and in return that animal is caged and used for income. Upon death it is replaced with another…and the cycle continues.
This problem is not unique to the Caribbean or Latin America, and animal welfare organizations exist there like they do here–but fewer, with much less funding and almost no public support. See World Animal Net’s Country Directory for contact information. Animal welfare issues are a worldwide problem, and several international organizations are working to improve the situation by promoting awareness and supporting local groups in each region of the world that work to make a difference:
Life on the ship was crazy busy during the last couple of days of our voyage, so we had little time to blog and reflect. Good thing we missed our connecting flight to Indy thanks to rain delays in Fort Lauderdale. We finished the Belize post! Good thing our bags didn’t make it on the plane with us to Indianapolis…it gives us a reason to take advantage of the free Wi-Fi at the Indy airport to write this post! As a certain someone’s cell phone ring suggests, always look on the bright side of life.
From the moment we stepped back on the ship after Belize, the computer lab was hopping with tons of people needing help checking e-mail, confirming airline reservations, and printing out boarding passes. Oh yeah–did we mention that Sam was hired to work in the ship’s computer lab while at sea for the last two weeks of this trip? This was way cool because:
a) Sam received a much-coveted “red shirt” and was entitled to all the privileges and benefits therein
b) We are much more “hire-able” for future voyages now that we both have experience working on the ship
I was also swamped with a surprising number of in-depth reference questions, computer questions (though I only cover 2 computers to Sam’s 20-some) and a never-ending stack of books to re-shelve in the library. Among this chaos, we still had one more port to enjoy: Jamaica, mon!! And did we ever.
After taking many wonderful but highly structured day-long tours in each port, Sam and I just wanted time in Jamaica to max and relax with fellow staff and a few of the ship’s awesome lecturers. Because it’s such a popular spot for tourists, we were all a bit surprised to find a pretty healthy reef with great snorkeling at a small but beautiful beach in Montego Bay called Doctor’s Cave. We spread our towels under a shade tree and inherited some rented chairs and umbrellas from fellow shipmates who left them behind. Warm sun, refreshing aquamarine waves, Red Stripe beers, lunch delivered to our beach camp, delish Piña Coladas, and great music (thanks to Courtney’s pink power radio) made for one of the most restful and relaxing days of the voyage. It was a great way to wind down our month at sea, and it just proved to us even more that, while all good things must come to an end, it’s never easy to say goodbye. So, we didn’t. We just had some fun and saved the goodbyes for June 5.
Back in Belize for a second visit, we hired a cab to travel up into the jungle and go cave tubing (floating down a jungle stream and through a number of large caves on inner tubes). The trek through the jungle to get to the start point for the tubing inspired us to make an 80′s butt rock music video of our experiences, but it will necessarily be rated R (hey–it’s Guns ‘n Roses–what other rating can it have?) so we won’t be posting it on the blog. The video is still in “post-production,” but it will be available upon request for those of you with less refined sensibilities.
The tubing experience itself was awesome and definitely felt like a Goonies adventure — “That’s what I said, booty trap!” The water was aqua, and the caves grew very dark in the middle so we all wore headlamps. The inside of the caves was a beautiful orange color, and bats and spiders were hanging out on the ceilings. Singing “Thriller” and other great songs through the caves with Courtney, Aaron, Graham, and our guide Miguel made the whole experience even more fun. When we arrived back at the Jaguar Paw Resort, we were charmed with the place. We had a traditional Belizian lunch and hot chocolate (we were all a little cold after floating through dark caves for 2 hours). We all decided that the resort, which is really more like a retreat and quite affordable, would be worth another trip back to Belize.
In addition to the tubing, a highlight of the day was a three-legged rescued howler monkey named Gumbo. He was raised with a pack of puppies and spends his days alternating between riding around the jungle on the back of his favorite canine companion and sneaking into cab vans when visiting touristas aren’t looking. After we had lunch at the hotel where he hangs out, we caught him snuggled up and taking a siesta with his doggy brother. He’s such a cute little guy. He even let Shannon pet him and scratch his back a little bit.
Eeeeeaaaaheeeeee-e-e-e—eee–eeee-ahEEEE-EE-EE!!! That’s dolphin for “I like fish. I want some more! I will kiss your sweaty face if you’ll give me some FIIIISH!!!” And on our second visit to the island of Roatán in Honduras, we learned a little bit of dolphin from our new water-bound mammalian pal, Anthony. Anthony is a 3-year-old male dolphin who lives at the dolphin education and research center at Anthony’s Key Resort. You might think that sharing a name with the key and the resort itself would give him an out-of-control ego, but Anthony lives in a pod of 20+ dolphins. He’s still a calf, and he’s learned to keep any egotistical tendencies in check because most of his companions are older and larger than he is. If you’re only a measly 200 pound three-year-old, you don’t want to mess with the 26-year-old big papa of the pod who weighs in at a hefty 600 lbs.
Anthony’s Key is a really cool place because all of the dolphins live in the Caribbean Sea rather than Sea World-esque tanks. They are cared for and observed by marine biologists doing behavioral studies out in the open water. Anthony, though, was born in captivity and lives in a huge area cordoned off with underwater nets that allow smaller fish to swim in and out. The staff is committed to providing dolphin-human interactions on the dolphins’ own terms. Being naturally curious, dolphins have a friendly and fun demeanor that leads to easy-going socializing with humans. We tried to sign up for the encounter and the snorkeling session, but only the encounter was open. In the snorkeling session, humans get to swim around freestyle with the dolphins for a half hour. The dolphins do not perform “tricks” and therefore are given no rewards–their nature takes over and they just have a good time. So, we were able to participate in an encounter session where a trainer helped us to hold Anthony and also receive kisses from him. He, in turn, received tasty fish for his efforts. A little fish seems a fair payment for smooching on what is often a sweaty sunscreen-slathered homo sapien. (After our turn, however, Anthony clicked and whistled to me that he’d have been happy to smooch on the ship’s librarian even without the fish.)
Quite a few of Anthony’s pals and cousins were swimming around us while we petted and played with him. Occasionally, one or two of the other dolphins would come rushing up to us, interrupting one of Anthony’s many astounding tricks and inviting him to swim away for a few minutes. Anthony didn’t take much convincing. After Anthony’s trainer described him as “mischievous,” we quickly figured out that he is really just a teenage rascal within the pod social structure. That made us love him all the more, so of course we all clapped and cheered like crazy to encourage his misbehavior.
We rounded out the day with a trip to the West Bay beach, where we snorkeled and enjoyed beach life with quite a few of our MV Explorer shipmates, including the previously mentioned Piano Man, Bob Falstein:
Remember that episode of Sesame Street where they show a trip to the crayon factory? That was always one of Shannon’s and my favorites. On our final visit to Costa Rica (back on the Caribbean side again), we toured a pineapple plantation and put together our own clip to show how pineapples are processed and packed up to be shipped around the world.
There are four grades of pineapple ripeness and shape that determine what happens to any given pineapple on the farm. Grade 1 fruits get shipped to the U.S., Canada, and Europe. Grade 2 are too ripe to be shipped and are sold in the local markets. Grade 3 are sliced and dried, and grade 4 are sent straight to the juicer. In addition to an interesting trip through the production facilities, we sampled more than our fair share of this fruit which symbolizes welcome and hospitality. We had fresh grade 2 pineapple, fresh grade 3 pineapple, grade 3 pineapple that was warm from having been in the drying ovens for about 4-6 hours (that was our favorite), and fully dried grade 3 pineapple. Our stomachs and taste buds were about to burst with all the fruity goodness we consumed. As you’ll see from the video, we also walked around the factory. We felt like we were in everyone’s way, but the workers were so kind and smiling and they just worked around us with speedy dexterity. Ticos seem to be a very friendly and happy bunch of people. We learned so much, but the main lesson we’ll take with us is to warm the grade 1 pineapple we buy at our Indy grocery store in the oven prior to eating it from now on. If you try the same at home, let us know what you think!
