Namibia: Ship Fever/Been There, Dune That

Sometimes memorable days are quite empty of content. I had read in history books about ship fever, when entire shiploads of immigrants would be struck with cholera, and arrive in a port with three quarters of the souls having been tossed over the side swathed in a sheet, having succumbed to an illness that swept through the close quarters of a confined population. About ten days ago, a virus struck our ship, upper respiratory in nature, with low grade fever, congestion, and a wicked cough. Despite the efforts of our crew to wipe down every possible surface with disinfectant, most of us were tackled. First one person went down, then another, then another---watching the virus spread was like watching the train from Port Jefferson come into Huntington Station, slowly, inexorably, at a stately pace, right to the edges of your feet. First I keeled over, and then Jo, right before we landed in Namibia. It wasn’t an ideal way to start a three-day African adventure, with chills and aches and a cough that started from the bottom of your heels. We’d booked a bed and breakfast in Walvis Bay, however, and decided to go ahead and get off the ship. Since we were both sick, neither of us had to pretend to be feeling up to anything but collapse.

Our bed and breakfast, The Spindrift, was located on the other side of town. Our host, Liz, showed us to our spacious, airy quarters. All the windows and doors were open, and white voile curtains from all sides billowed into the room. A sweet, stupid black lab named Thor nosed around, coming in and out, and a shy, elderly Siamese hovered at the doorway, hoping to make contact, fearing to make contact. It was windy, as seems to be the constant state of affairs on the west coast of Africa, and the trees were rustling a soothing, silvery sound. A spider worked away silently in the ceiling corner, some fourteen feet above my head. We took a quick swim in the cool pool at the back of the house, and then sank into our respective beds. All day, we slept, read, then made some tea, hello Thor, then slept, read, hello Thor again, slept again. Are you hungry? We got up, both of us feeling greatly restored, and took a long walk along the lagoon to meet friends at a restaurant on stilts called The Raft. It was a raucous night, with cheese fondue and South African wine, and five desserts for five people. We played a marvelous game: take two bites, and pass the dessert to the left. (We’d already shared the virus, no need for prevention.) Berry crepes, vanilla ice cream with hot butterscotch, a ridiculous banana extravaganza, and some kind of mystery tart. It was a lovely, terrestrial day. A healing day.

Liz, Thor and the kitchen helper at The Spindrift.

The next morning was quiet as well. I let Jo sleep late while I sat at the kitchen table with our host, Liz, pouring over a map of India, planning the itinerary of her trip in 2011. In between the descriptions of Varanasi, Udaipur, Goa, and Kerala, she told me her story of growing up in Malaysia as the daughter of a rubber baron, of having to leave her home, of returning to Holland and marrying a Dutch engineer, of finding herself out of place in Holland, confined to a narrow, dark house with all the doors and windows shut, the dreary long grey winter with its rain and cold, missing her colonial home that was no more, of their finally settling in South Africa and raising a family. It was one of many conversations that I’ve had in the last month with children of colonials, now all in their early to late sixties, who experienced vivid childhoods in Africa and Asia, who were displaced due to revolution, and then tried to return “home” to England or to Holland or to Germany, only to discover that they were not at home at “home.” Finding a place in the world has not been easy for them, and as one of my colleagues here on the ship said of her childhood in Rhodesia, I can only go home in my memories.

That afternoon we took a trip to the Namib Desert in a four-by-four. Our guide on the desert trip was a critter conjurer, and we all got to hold a black, hairy scorpion, about six inches long, with wildly waving creepy crepe paper legs that felt like dancing velcro, and to pet a gecko, and a shimmering, iridescent sand-diving lizard, and a forest green chameleon with hot pink accents the size of a kitten. The trip in the four-by-four was something like a rollercoaster, going up and down the dunes at great speed, spinning out, with much satisfactory squealing and anxious laughter from the passengers. I loved it when we went slowly down a large dune in neutral, and listened to the dune moan. I didn’t know that dunes could moan, but they can. The phenomenon was explained to us, but I tuned out, as I am wont to do on nature hikes. I simply loath stuff like scientific processes, life cycles, etc, and in this instance, the story was about air pockets around dense, metallic sand particles. I just like to look and listen, and I am telling you: the dune moaned. The visuals in the Namib were stunning. I simply cannot find words to describe what we saw. It was just like being Peter O’Toole in Lawrence of Arabia, desolate, vast, empty, hostile, haunting. I will let Jo’s pictures do the job.

Jo holding a Scorpion.

On our last day in Namibia, we took a small boat ride out into Walvis Bay to see the colony of seals and other marine life. We fed pelicans from the boat, and seeing them in flight was magnificent. We were also visited several times on the boat by savvy seals with unfortunate names like Goggles and Waggles who swim in the bay and know the routine: climb aboard the boat, slither across the middle seat, and beg some fish from the captain. So we were up close and personal with some lovely seals who were sort of stinky, but very sweet. They have big, soulful brown eyes, and respond to cooing and petting just like a dog. Their flippers are black and hard and feel like the smooth side of an emory board, but their skin is very soft, and oddly dry, once you penetrate the outer oily layer. Seals are big, and bob up and down a lot, and when they are nine inches away from you, a little scary. I didn’t want to bring one home. Neither did I want to bring home a black hairy Scorpion, but the elusive old Siamese kitty at The Spindrift---now him, I could have brought on board as a stow-away..

There is an old custom at sea. They call it Neptune Day. When a sailor crosses the equator for the first time, he must roll around in fish guts, kiss a fish, and shave his head. Jo did the first two, and I did all three.

LH

Louise and her fellow initiates on Neptune Day.

Rough Seas and Morocco

The Rock of Gibraltar from my room.

The seas were very rough between Spain and Morocco, and we were unable to bunker in Gibraltar as planned. This meant we got to Morocco a day later than anticipated which threw off a lot of travel plans. It also meant that we spent two days lurching around the Straights of Gibraltar. The weather was wintry and wet, and so windy you couldn’t go outside on the deck for fear of being blown over. I can only express it this way: the sea was angry. The ship would lift up in the front, and slap down onto the surface of the water with a crack, sending the hull into a spasmodic shudder. After trying to navigate the hallways, I finally decided just to go to bed. It wasn’t that I felt ill---I didn’t. I was worried that I was going to be thrown against a wall, or down a set of stairs. Crawling into bed seemed like the safest thing to do.

As we were finally coming into the Port of Casablanca, the captain’s mellifluous British accent came over the intercom at dinner and warned us that in ten minutes, the ship would be taking a “giant dip” when we made a ninety degree turn without our stabilizers on. We were going to find ourselves in a huge wave, caught in our own “back water.” We were admonished to secure everything in our cabins, and to go to a safe spot. I ran downstairs to my cabin on the 4th deck, put my computer safely on the bed, and proceeded to watch the turn---and the giant dip---from my window. Everything flew off all surfaces in my cabin---books and course materials came crashing in a heap on the floor, the entire contents of my bathroom counter were swept into the sink, and two glasses shattered. From my window, the ship looked as if we were first headed directly into the water, then we suddenly were jerked upwards into the sky, and then came crashing down again into mouth of an eighteen foot, grey green wave. My window was suddenly covered with water, and I couldn’t see. I thought for sure: this is it, we’re going to die at the bottom of the sea. But then we righted ourselves, and it was all over.

They say things will get rough again when we go around the Cape of Good Hope.

I am trying very hard to be mature about this. No one had mentioned the need for physical courage in the Semester at Sea brochure. Physical courage is not on my list of attributes, my years on the perilous mountain roads of northern India notwithstanding.

The port of Casablanca was a tough one. Unlike Cadiz, where you could walk off the ship, cross the street, and find yourself in the middle of an elegant eighteenth century European town, the port in Casablanca is full of cranes and huge container ships---in a marginal part of a sprawling, industrial city of 13 million on the north coast of Africa. Jo and I traveled to Fez with two friends, Joan one of the ship nurses, and Lori, an administrator from the University of Virginia. We took the train, a journey of about four hours. When we got to Fez, another friend had arranged for us to have a “guide.” I had initially scoffed at the idea, believing myself to be an intrepid traveler, but when Joan---who has been around the world several times before---insisted, I relented. As it turned out: Joan was right. We could never have negotiated the medina in Fez without the protection of Abdullah. I was also glad to have Lori and Joan help me keep an eye on Johanna who is easy prey, being tall, blonde, and beautiful. Upon maternal urging, she had pulled her hair back in a bun, and dressed conservatively, but still many male eyes were upon her, at times with a degree of predation.. To no avail---she was surrounded by a trio of harpies, and Abdullah too hovered around her. I can say to her father in all honesty: Jo would not be sold into white slavery. (While she loved Fez, I think Jo was very happy to escape from the scrutiny of the matrons, to get back to the ship---and to resume her social life with the other faculty kids. She is a pack animal, this third child of mine.)

Jo modeling a headscarf.

Abdullah was a Berber, a man of about 45, well over six feet, dignified, a gentle giant, dressed in a floor length grey jellaba that made him look like a medieval monk, particularly when he put up the hood. Abdullah took very good care of us, and seemed to be a minor celebrity in the medina. He was the seventh of nine children, and his brothers still lived in their home in Fez that had been in his family for over 250 years. He was university-educated, with French, Arabic, two kinds of Berber, Italian, Spanish, and English at his command, and knowledgeable about the architecture, the history, and the culture, and helpful with our pitiful attempts at bartering. As is de rigueur with tours of this type, we were marched to and through his friend’s ceramic factory, carpeteries, both Fez and Berber, and a few other handicraft industries. At times I felt captive, particularly in the carpet store where we were served glasses of lovely, sweet fresh mint tea, and forced to listen to the story of the cooperative of orphans and divorced women who allegedly tied the hundreds of knots per square inch of the rugs that were flopped down in front of us by a small army of Moroccan men, one after the other, in a dazzling sequence of abstract patterns and lush colors, particularly the Fez blue and the Islamic mint green. I always feel so pressured by these bartering dramas, and guilty for the tea, for the labor involved in making the carpets and displaying them, for those orphans and husbandless laborers, but the fact is: I didn’t really want a carpet. Joan bought one, however, which redeemed us all. At least in the ceramic factory, I was able to bring out my credit card and buy a trivet---to cover the cost of two glasses of tea.

Abdullah.

Following Abdullah through the medina.

What can I ever say to properly describe the medina in Fez? It lived up to my memories from 1969. Indeed, little has changed except for perhaps there was less hashish and in places, better pavement on the winding, precipitous streets, and maybe slightly fewer donkeys. But the donkeys are still carrying most of the cargo in Fez, and they stop for no one. At one point, I had to grab Joan to keep her from being plowed over by a donkey who was hurtling down the cobblestones, his cargo swinging wildly from right to left, touching either side of the narrow alley way. His owner was barking out, “Balak, balak,” which triggered no response in us, but later we learned it meant, “Watch out! Watch out!” in Arabic. As Abdullah put it, “Donkeys don’t have brakes.” They do, however, wear special shoes made of car tires to give their hooves some grip.

The donkeys of Fez.

The Berber carpet store.

For centuries, Fez has been the cultural and spiritual capital of Morocco. It has a twelfth century mosque that can accommodate 20,000 people at prayer. (As non-Muslims, we could only peak inside.) Fez also claims to have the world’s oldest university, the Medersa Bou Inania, and you can still visit the courtyard of its main theological college. Built in the 1350s, the building is an exquisite combination of tile work, plasterwork, and elaborate cedar wood carvings, all pieced together in elegant Islamic style. (I love the symmetry and simplicity of this architecture, even when being ornate.) We also went to the famous tanneries where the super soft leather of Fez is processed and dyed, and it’s possible to lean over the terraces of the leather shops and watch the workers knee-deep in red or green dye vats, coloring the animal skins just as their predecessors did in the fourteenth century. The tanneries really stink, by the way, as does the poofy, green leather footstool I purchased for my new little house in Northport. My cabin currently is redolent of dead goat.

The Medersa Bou Inania.

The tanneries of Fez.

It rained off and on all the time we were in Fez, magnifying all the senses. The smells and sounds of Fez reminded me very much of being in the lower bazaar in Shimla, and the puddles of water and mud and donkey dung and slick vegetable peels on the semi-paved alleys reminded us of walking through McLeod Gang in Dharamsala during the monsoon. Everywhere the smell of burning cedar was in the air, and devotional and pop music poured out of stalls. The smell of fresh bread would assail your nose every block or so from the large, communal bakeries that baked all the bread for the neighborhood. (Abdullah introduced us to a delicious, anise-flavored bread that we picked right off the hot baking tray.) Hawkers peddled their wares. Women were filling large brass vessels with water at the brilliantly tiled public fountains, leaning under canopies of intricately carved wood to seek respite from the rain. In a public square, the metal workers pound, pounded, pounded brass plates with their anvils right through the rain. Chickens about to be killed on the spot were singing their last songs, and every hour or so, there would be that eerie, evocative call to prayer. My favorite thing: everywhere there were cats, some sleek and happy, some not. I had not remembered the cats of Morocco, but they were in every shop, on doorsteps, and huddled in the corners of the alleyways. I’ve since learned that in Islam, the cat holds a place of reverence. Muhammad loved cats, and believed them to be more highly evolved than dogs. It’s almost enough to make me convert.

As you might have guessed, I loved Fez. This is my kind of travel.

Coming out of port in Casablanca was actually worse than going in except that we were emotionally prepared. The students all went up to the large open reception hall which had been cleared for the dip, and lay down shoulder to shoulder so that when the boat dipped, they rolled together en masse. Others were in the Union, and the stage fell on two boys, breaking two arms. (Both are now splinted and drugged up until we get into port in Namibia in seven days.) Another student may have broken a hip falling from the lurch in his room. One adult passenger split his head open on the bathroom step when he foolishly tried to get up from his bed; another has a displaced shoulder. Jo did the dip with her friends in the reception hall, and I went up to the faculty lounge and did the dip with mine. I figured if I was going to die and sink to the bottom of the sea, I’d just as soon have company.

Some have asked: doesn’t the ship have stabilizers? And the answer is yes, it does, but she is built for speed and capable of doing 30 knots per hour. Furthermore, she has a shallow draft. So we pay for the speed with the rocking and rolling. I don’t think the folks at Semester at Sea can do much to make things better---we are, after all, in a tin can bobbing up and down on the surface of a deep and capricious sea. Usually I can tolerate the bobbing, but the dips are truly terrifying. I noticed when I staggered up to the lounge that some faculty were already draped over the screwed-to-the-floor tables, and had obviously been drinking for awhile. I was one of the few foolish enough to be sober.

I’m thinking of doing the Cape of Good Hope looped. If I’m going to die anyway, why not go out giddy?

LH

Making Memories/Spain/January 31st, 2009

Jo and Louise at the Necropolis in Carmona.

Forty years ago, I traveled to Spain in my 19th year, roaming around with two friends in a turquoise VW, camping in a pup tent, sleeping on empty beaches and under white-netted olive trees. We almost never ate out, subsisting on bread and cheese and wine. Those were the days of Frommer’s Europe on Five Dollars a Day, and a hundred dollars got me through almost a month. At that time, Spain was under Franco, and we were visited every night by soldiers in three-cornered hats and floor-length capes, poking their machine guns into our tent to inquire about who we were and why we were there. We were broke, and so was Spain. Tourists were an oddity.

I hardly recognized the Spain of my youth. Franco has been dead since 1975, and Spain is now a healthy democracy. To my eyes, it looks as if Spain has a standard of living very close to other E.U. countries. The cities we visited---Cadiz, where we docked, Seville, and Cordoba---were clean, prosperous looking, and bustling with activity. With wide avenues, sporting elegant shops, modern cities have grown up outside of the Centros Historicos. The noise of the traffic was deafening. (The use of the horn is a mode of expression in Spain. Unlike the staccato beeps of New York that just say---MOVE IT---the horns of Spain whine in sentences, sometimes whole paragraphs.) Tourists are no longer an oddity. Spain knew that we were coming, and indeed had created an entire industry devoted to our comfort and exploitation.

Here is the sad fact: We can’t afford to travel in Spain. Thank goodness the major items such as hotel, and car rental, were not only reasonable, but cheap by U.S. standards, but the costs of staying hydrated, fed and caffeinated were astronomical, and admission to any tourist sight was usually eight Euros. (And it really galls me to pay to enter a church; it ought to be free.) We collapsed at a sidewalk café in Cadiz for lunch, ordered one small 8 inch plate of Manchego cheese, a miniature loaf of bread, and a Coke that we split--- the bill was almost thirty dollars! Our best, and least expensive meals, were in rest stops along A-4, the four-lane highway we took between Cadiz and Seville. There we had fresh, hot tapas for under eight dollars, a garbanzo bean stew, hot potatoes in a gooey white sauce, and café con leche that would grow hair on your chest. Pizzas too were a bargain, and delicious with goat cheese and fresh verduras. Another favorite was something called Chocolate con Churros, a deep-fried dough dipped in a chocolate glop so thick that you couldn’t drink it. But the bottom line: my hundred dollars a month of yore had turned into a hundred dollars a day, and that was just to maintain metabolism.

Manchego Cheese.

Chocolate con churros.

But sticker shock aside, we had two great days in Seville and Cordoba, with a day in the countryside between them. Jo and I traveled with another faculty member on Semester at Sea, Jodi Cohen, who teaches Communications at Ithaca College in upstate New York. Jodi did all the driving, and I was supposed to be the navigator, but Jo ended up taking over the map. Once we got into the tangled knots of narrow, one-way medieval streets in both Seville and Cordoba, I not only made NO contribution, with my dyslexia, I was a liability. (At least I was partly responsible for Jo’s presence in the world. Among the three of us, Jo was hands-down the most competent.) Jodi managed the stick shift with skill, and more importantly, with good humor. True, her shoulders were hunched up around her ears when we were hopelessly lost during rush hour in Seville, but she never lost her temper or her equanimity.

In Seville, it was a great pleasure to watch Jo experience her first European cathedral, complete with stained glass, soaring Gothic arches, the biggest altarpiece in the world, a gilded extravaganza with over 1,000 carved figures, and inside the southern door, the tomb of Christopher Columbus. (Whose bones may, or may not, be buried there. The Dominican Republic claims that Columbus’s remains are in Santo Domingo. The fact is he’s been shuffled around and sifted so many times post-mortem, what’s left of Columbus may be in two places at once. That poetry might have pleased him.) We also climbed up to the top of La Giralda which used to be the minaret of the mosque that once stood on the site. Seville lay at our feet in all directions, looking peaceful and pink, and full of trees laden with oranges.

Cathedral at Seville.

Our second day we got off A-4, and wended our way to Cordoba on back roads. We spent mostof the morning in Carmona where I bought a mink blanket, Jodi bought a bra, Jo bought a jacket made in China, and we went to a Roman Necropolis. Carmona has an active archeological site where they are unearthing a vast Roman city of the dead, as well as an amphitheater. We spent an hour or so poking around the ruins---we were the only living visitors there. When we first arrived, a young woman at the reception desk asked if we wanted to see a film about the excavation. She then led us upstairs to a large room with a screen and a set of long benches, and after setting up the film and darkening the room, she closed the doors and disappeared. Jodi and I decided that we were going to do some stretches. We were creaky from being in the car, so while we watched the film, Jodi did yoga on the benches, and I loosened up in the corner with tai chi and some animal poses from Chi Gung. (I did both the Rhinoceros Looking at the Moon, and the Phoenix.) Jo sat stationary in her chair and made cracks about what it’s like to travel with two insane, post-menopausal women. When the film was over, we went downstairs, and Jodi asked at the reception desk for a book about the Necropolis for her class. “For your yoga class?” the young woman asked. That was when it dawned on us: we’d had an audience for our exercise, probably via a security camera. For all we knew, the entire museum staff had been having a good laugh watching us at the closed-circuit TV. An hour or so later, as we were leaving, a guard waved at me from the top of the hill. I couldn’t see his face, only his profile, but when he raised his other hand in the air and turned slowly to the right and then to the left, I knew: For sure, we’d been seen. It was definitely a Spaniard doing Rhinoceros Looking at the Moon.

Jo and Jodi among the Roman dead.

We got to Cordoba too late for anything but getting lost and eating dinner, but this morning we got up early and went to see La Mezquita, that masterpiece of Islamic architecture, with its rows and rows of terra-cotta red and white arches that seem to go on and on into a dark infinity. When I’d been to the mosque with my friends in the spring of 1969, we were the only visitors. I remember sitting alone on the cold floor for quite awhile in the dusky light with my back against a pillar. Today, after forking over 16 Euros, the mosque was full of cultural pilgrims, with guides spewing information in many languages around clumps of intense tourists, and people staggering in and out of the shadows with audio guides clasped to their ears. No one could, or would, have sat alone on the floor. It was still wonderful to be there, but now no one can experience the mosque at Cordoba privately. All must be experienced publicly, mediated through the trappings of touristry.


View from our hotel in Cordoba.

La Mezquita.

Will Jo go back to the necropolis in Carmona in forty years, and remember how she and her mother and another crazy lady roamed through a Roman city of the dead all alone?

We’re on our way to Morocco. The institutional food and bad coffee notwithstanding, we’re both glad to be back on the ship. It was so much fun to see our shipmates at dinner, everyone showered and full of stories, running on adrenaline---a sort of manic post-trip energy. I’m so looking forward to sleeping in my little cell, under my new mink blanket.

I wonder if Fez will have changed as much as Spain? Will it measure up to my memories?


LH

A cat from Cadiz.