Tag Archives: Semester at Sea

Beach-slapped in Barbados

This year, our voyage has had very few days at sea and many, many days in port. That is awesome because we get to see lots and lots of different countries, but it’s easy to wear yourself out if you don’t pause and take it slow every now and then. In Barbados, we decided to […]

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A Whale of a Tail

The island of Dominica (pronounced “doe mee NEE kuh”) is a volcanic island rich in natural beauty and vastly undeveloped to date. Like most of the eastern Caribbean islands, tourism is the main economy, but at Dominica the focus is on eco-tours to the rainforest, hot springs, and waterfalls as well as small mom ‘n […]

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Come On Ride the Train…and Ride It

The island of St. Kitts is a wonder to behold. Sugar plantation subsidies from Britain and the rest of Europe have dried up, so the country is in the process of switching primary industries from sugar production to tourism. Because the island remains largely undeveloped, its natural beauty and beautiful coastline is unmarred by highrise […]

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Forts, Food, and Pigeons

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 […]

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Whales Chasing Tail

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 […]

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If you’re going to sin, sin boldly.

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 […]

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Saying Goodbye and Summing Up

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.  […]

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Animal Welfare in Latin America

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 […]

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Life’s a beach.

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 […]

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Totally Tubular

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 […]

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