Home!!

We arrived in Miami on December 14, and two days later we were back in Charlottesville! Apologies that I didn't include posts on the long Pacific crossing, our one-day stop in Hawaii, or our three days in Costa Rica.

Instead, those of you who want to see photos from the end of the voyage are welcome to check out the full slide show of our voyage, a total of 374 slides. It is now available through the Google Picasa website at this link: http://picasaweb.google.com/schoppa4/SemesterAtSeaSlideShow2008?authkey=dWRpzshkkWo#.

Enjoy!

Japan

The Pacific crossing was leisurely enough that I was able to catch up on posts for Vietnam and China, but I'm afraid the need to grade 320 "power journals" (the only written assignment in my class) kept me from completing a post on our time in Japan until today. Since our entire family had lived in Japan from 1993-94 and again in 2000-2001, our visit there was all about enjoying time in a country we already knew and loved.

Although we've spent lots of time there, we had never been to Kobe, our port of arrival. We explored it the first day, enjoying some great Japanese food for lunch and dinner and a trip up to the top of the hills overlooking the city.

We had also never managed to get to Kyoto during the peak autumn foliage period, so it was wonderful to have a chance to see Nanzenji (shown here) in full fall colors. We walked along the Philosopher's Trail from Nanzenji up to Ginkakuji and then visited Kinkakuji.

Kinkakuji was a bit of a disappointment because the crowds, which filled every inch of the trails, kept us from getting many clear views of the pavilion, but we managed to get a few pictures. That is part of the experience of Kyoto at the peak of fall colors too, I guess.

The nicest part of our visit to Japan, though, was the chance it gave us to catch up with old friends. Steve and Yukiko, shown here, hosted us in their home in Oiso for two nights, giving us a chance to visit with their son Seiji and enjoy some home-cooked meals. Thanks, guys!

It happened to be one of the two weekends each year when parents of boys and girls in the "shichi-go-san" years (7- 5- and 3-year-olds) take them to shrines to bless them for continued growth and health. Steve and Yukiko took us to their neighborhood shrine to join one of their friends whose daughter was going through the ceremony. Cute!

Then we spent much of the next day with our old friends, the Uesugis, whom we met and spent a lot of time with during the year we lived in Mitaka in 2000-2001. It was a reunion for Isabelle and their daughter Yoko, who had been six when they last saw each other and are now 13. We went to Yoko's middle school to see what that was like. Quite a bit like middle schools were when I taught in them in Kumamoto over 20 years ago! Then we caught up over another wonderful home-cooked meal.

On our final day in Japan, back at the ship (which had moved from Kobe to Yokohama), we enjoyed catching up with the Suzuki's, a family we had met when we liked in Yokohama in 1993-94. At the time, their girls were 13 and 15 and took English lessons with Gabrielle. Now they are vibrant young women in their upper-20s, both working and living on their own (they were still living their parents when I visited the Suzukis a couple years ago). They took us to a wonderful restaurant at the top of the Landmark Tower, and we enjoyed a ride together on the giant ferris wheel.

Japan was an incredibly popular place for the Semester at Sea students, most of whom struck out on their own with rail passes to explore places ranging from Fukuoka, where some went to attend a sumo match, to Hakone, where they went in search of Fuji-views and hot springs. We didn't get to Hakone but got this great view of Fuji from a spot near the Greens' home.

Thanks everyone for making our stay in Japan so pleasant and memorable, and we look forward to seeing you all again!

China

As many of you know, the theme of this voyage is "China at the Center: Then and Now," so all of us arrived in Hong Kong with great anticipation. We had been building up to arrival here in my Global Studies class since the start of the voyage, discussing China's growing involvement in Latin America and Africa and emerging competition with India for access to energy. This visit was a chance to see both the great sites of Beijing, which testified to the earlier grandeur of China, as well as the new skylines of Hong Kong (pictured here), Beijing, and Shanghai, which were signs of how quickly China was resuming its prior position of wealth and power.

Those of you bored with the blog format may want to check out the audio slideshow about our trip to Beijing prepared by Brittany App, our SAS photographer. It features some great photography with commentary from me and some students about our impressions of the visit.

We had the pleasure of having along with us, from Vietnam to Hong Kong, my old friend Al Reyes from Oxford days. Al served as an interport lecturer for my class and did a great job sharing with the students the many ways in which China is working to reassure its neighbors and the world that it is committed to a "peaceful rise." When we arrived in Hong Kong, Al served as our guide the first morning, taking us to a delicious dim sum place in the City Hall building, of all places!

Then we went to the Peak where we had excellent views of the Hong Kong skyline. That evening, I had an opportunity to dine on the ship with members of several of Hong Kong's leading tycoon families, including CH Tung. Mr. Tung has long-standing ties to the Semester at Sea since his father was the founder of the Institute for Shipboard Education and supplied the program with ships, but he is probably best known as the man Beijing turned to in 1997 to serve as chief executive of Hong Kong after the handover from Britain. It was great to learn of Mr. Tung's continuing support for our program and of his latest efforts to work for good China-US relations.

As some of you know, that evening in Hong Kong our voyage had its most tragic loss. One of our students, Kurt Leswing, was struck by a drunk driver and killed. The ISE website has more details. By the time the administrative team learned about this accident, I was in Beijing leading a trip there, but Jack Van de Water, Cindy Zomchek and others worked tirelessly in the next few days working with the Hong Kong authorities, the US consulate, the ISE office, Kurt's parents, and others to help everyone get through this difficult time. Students organized a wonderful tribute ceremony to Kurt's memory two nights ago on the Pacific Crossing, but his loss will certainly be one of the sharpest memories of this trip.

I shared the Beijing trip over the next four days with Melina but not Gabrielle and Isabelle since we'd decided before the voyage to take two side-trips in smaller groups: G&I went on a safari in South Africa; M&L went to Beijing. It was a great chance to share some time with Melina on a voyage where she's been spending more and more time with her peers. That's her in this photo taken our first night in Beijing, at the University of International Business and Economics (UIBE), which served as our host. At this evening gathering, our students had a chance to talk with a large group of fluent-English speaking students from UIBE. The kids had a great time realizing they watched some of the same TV shows and enjoyed some of the same music. By the end of the night, the UIBE students were leading ours in line dancing to mostly-American music.

The next day, we headed out to the Great Wall. It was crisp up there in the mountains where the wall runs along the ridge line for thousands of miles, a remnant of an era when this wall helped protect Chinese civilization from invading nomadic warriors from the North (most of the time). It turned out to be a great time to visit, without the crowds that no doubt filled every inch of space during the summer olympics and with the fall foliage flanking the wall on all sides.

After visiting the Wall, we headed back into town for lunch and then a trip to the Silk Market. I don't have any pictures of this shoppers' paradise, but if you ask Melina, she will certainly tell you it was one of the highlights of the trip. The place is known for having excellent imitation goods and a large number of shopkeepers who are happy to bargain. Melina really got into the sport and came away with a large number of items: two designer handbags; two pairs of True Religion jeans (the girls know this brand, I don't); a new dressy coat; earrings; and more. Even I got into it by buying a suit for $80 and a brandname jacket for $30.

The third day, we visited the Forbidden City in the morning. You can see from this photo that this was by far our most-crowded expedition yet. I couldn't believe the number of tourists, most of them Chinese, who came to this place and to Mao's mausoleum across Tiananmen Square. Still, it was fun to get a peak at the screen behind which the Empress Dowager ruled on behalf of her child emperors in the final years of the Qing Dynasty, and all of the grand gates and buildings, most of them restored to their original bright colors.

That afternoon we visited the Temple of Heaven near sunset, and the colors and shapes of that temple were even more spectacular at that hour. Here's Melina, posing in front of the temple with one of her new purses. The crowds of tourists and shops full of goods were just two of the many changes I saw in Beijing relative to the last time I had been there: in 1985 when I was just 23. Then, the streets were full of bikes and jam-packed buses, but there was virtually no traffic. Now there the city is crossed by mega-highways full of cars.

Then there was only one new hotel, the Great Wall Hotel, and the rest were dingy and run-down. The housing was low-rise and basic. Today there are so many hotels and spanking new high rises apartment blocks and businesses that the skyscrapers go on for miles. There are still soldiers in the streets, but at least some of them are smiling and enjoying themselves. I wished I could take my students back in time to see what it was like then so that they would fully appreciate how much had changed in just over 20 years.



Of course, my personal memory of China only goes back to 1984, so I can only begin to relate to how much change a middle-aged Chinese person has lived through. In class, we've talked about the famine that killed 20 million during the Great Leap Forward and the deprivations of the Cultural Revolution and how that only began to change in 1978. This picture captures for me the change that has taken place over this generation: the young son or son-in-law taking the picture is tall and well-dressed and (perhaps) urban, the parents weathered from a rough life on the farm and many years of living without, posing in front of the image that captures China's arrival as a modern, great power: the olympic Bird's Nest and Water Cube.


I wonder how much China will have changed by the time Melina and the rest of the Semester at Sea kids come back to Beijing, maybe 20 years from now, or most likely sooner. Here she is on the boat across the lake at the Summer Palace, a place that was invaded and looted by foreign troops in 1900 after the Boxer Rebellion. I can't imagine anything like that happening to the new self-confident China.

Vietnam / Cambodia

Once again, it's been a long time since my last post. With just two or three days sailing between Vietnam, China, and Japan, I've been too busy preparing lectures, organizing "cultural preports", and preparing for travels in the next port to get to the blog. But now that we've embarked on our longest ocean-crossing--18 days across the Pacific--I think I'll have time to catch up. We're four days into the crossing this morning, the seas are calm, and the sun is shining.

Our visit to Vietnam and Cambodia was in many ways the most interesting one so far, especially to someone like me who studies and teaches about Asian international relations and grew up during the Vietnam War and Cambodian Killing Field eras. As we approached the port of Ho Chi Minh City, I lectured on the war and the great power competition between the United States, Soviet Union, and China that contributed to the rise of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. We had on board as an interport lecturer a visitor from Cambodia named Kaseka Phon who contributed lectures on Cambodian history, covering not just the modern period but also the period in which Cambodia was one of the richest and most dominant kingdoms in Asia--producing the extensive and beautiful temples of Angkor Wat that are shown in the first photo and more below.

Our first excursion in Vietnam was a visit to the Cu Chi Tunnels, where the Viet Cong hid out in dense forest just outside a giant American military base during the war. This photo shows one of our students slipping into a hiding places used by the Viet Cong fighters. Once the lid was put on top of him, you couldn't see any evidence of the hiding place along the trail. The location also gave us a chance to crawl down into some of the tunnels where hundreds of fighters were able to hide out underground, protected by the bombs dropped on the area and able to pop up to harass the US soldiers sent from the base to pacify the area. Having read and studied about the war mostly from an American perspective, it was quite a change to watch a propaganda film produced by the North Vietnamese extolling the sacrifices of the Cu Chi warriors and visiting a graveyard and memorial showing vicious US soldiers killing Vietnamese.

If we had stayed in Vietnam, we would have visited more war memorial sites, but we had planned to devote most of this port stay to a trip to Siem Riep in Cambodia, which began on our second day. The very first evening there, we visited Angkor Wat and explored this almost 1,000-year-old temple. Our visit would take us to a total of five temples in this area, but this was the grandest and most famous. We were able to view it at sunset and sunrise the next morning and took more pictures than can be shared in a blog (we'll save them to show you in the future).

The temple we visited midmorning the next day, Angkor Thom, was actually more fascinating to me. It told classic tales in carved panels like that shown here. The panels also included scenes from daily life many centuries ago.

The towers, with faces of Buddha, were also amazing. I'm glad we have photos to share since it is hard to describe the mystical, magical feel of this place. This temple complex, built a century after Angkor Wat by another in the line of Khmer kings, demonstrated the incredible wealth of this place in an era when the ancestors of modern Cambodians presided over the grandest regime in Southeast Asia. As our guide, Nin, shared some of this history, it was clear he carried many centuries' worth of grievance against the Thais and Vietnamese who had invaded the Khmer lands over the years and chipped away at the territory to the point where Cambodia today is one of the smallest and poorest of the states in the region.

Among the other three temples we visited, the one that stands out most is the "jungle temple." The authorities who have been restoring temples in this area since they were "rediscovered" in the jungle in the 1850s decided to leave in place many of the large trees that had grown up in and around this temple.

When French archaeologists first came to the area, all of the great temples from the Khmer kingdom had been covered over by dense growth. They removed these as they restored Angkor Wat and Angkor Thom, but in the jungle temple the trees had merged with the structure to such an extent the removing the trees threatened to bring them down. These two photos capture, again, the enchanted feel of the place.

In between these temple visits, we had a chance to explore a floating village on Lake Tonle Sap, one of the largest freshwater lakes in the world. This lake grows during the wet season when surplus water from the Mekong flows up a tributary into it. Then the flow of water reverses and water flows out during the dry season. We happened to be there as the lake approached its maximum size, flooding large areas where local residents build their houses on stilts. The lake contains a bounty of fish, and entire floating villages, complete with churches, schools, and libraries have grown up around the fishing families that park their boats to take advantage of the best fishing grounds and move them with the seasons.

While the inherent beauty of Cambodia had a great to do with why we enjoyed this visit so much, our stay was made even more pleasant by the opportunity it gave us to get to know our guide, Nin. He was incredibly kind and compassionate, and by sharing some of his personal story--about how he had lost his parents to Khmer Rouge brutality when he was just a child and how his life continued to be difficult because of the poverty and poor governance of his country--and juxtaposing this with the grandeur of the Khmer kingdoms we were viewing, he helped us get a sense of how Cambodians see much of their history as a grand tragedy. And yet they are warm and friendly, and make us feel more welcome than we've felt in any visit so far on this voyage. Thanks, Nin.

Penang, Malaysia

I'm going to keep this one shorter than the last two, but that is only because the ports are coming fast and furious now and not because Penang was a disappointment or anything. In fact, along with South Africa, it was the most pleasant of our port stays. The city was just an easy "tender" ride from the ship (our first and only port where we had to take lifeboats to and from the dock). From the dock, you could walk in one direction and be in "Little India", walk another and be surrounded by Chinese restaurants and signs. A bit further and there was the E&O hotel, where they offer a sumptuous lunch buffet with samples of food from each of those places, together with Japanese and Malay dishes.

As you can see, the food was one of the highlights. We went to the E&O buffet for Gabrielle's birthday on the 23rd, plus one other occasion. Also on that day, we toured the blue Cheong Fatt Tze Mansion (shown in this photo), which offered a fascinating introduction to the life and times of the Chinese who set up show in this trading city in the 19th Century and struck it rich. It also featured an amazing range of feung shwei designs, including a lovely open-to-the-sky atrium in the center of the house that let the rain (and fresh air) fall into the middle of the home.

Another day we toured a series of three gardens: the botanical gardens, a tropical spice garden, and a tropical fruit garden. The last of these was my favorite, with a chance to see all manner of unusual fruits growing and learning about how they are used before sitting down to a buffet of all-you-can-eat tropical fruit. So yes, the food again!

The tropical spice garden also gave us a taste (not any samples this time, but figuratively) of the spices that attracted the Indians, Muslim traders, the Chinese, the Portuguese, the Dutch, and the British to Penang island. As you've already realized, the diverstiy all of this trading activity left behind is one of the major attractions of this place. The best of many cultures (and cuisines).

Lest you think we did nothing but eat in Penang, we had another fun outing that was part of an organized SAS trip: Penang Arts and Crafts. It took us to a batik "factory" where several batik fabric artists were producing works in a shop that set aside some space for visitors to give the craft a try. The fabric I worked with was pre-stamped with a wax design, but it was still a challenge to work with the dye and try to shade and mix colors. Isabelle and Gabrielle did even better work, which they can show you when we get back.

If you've noticed an absence of Melina in the photos from Penang so far, that's because she chose to take off to a neighboring tropical island, Langkawi, with a group of friends. She tells us she had lots of fun and stayed out of trouble. Next stop: Vietnam where the whole family will be flying to Angkor for a tour of the temples there.

India

Apologies for the length of time since my last post. Mostly that's because it took 11 days to cross the Indian Ocean, our longest stretch without stepping off the ship for the entire voyage. We did stop for refueling in Mauritius, on a beautiful day when the place looked very inviting, but it wasn't quite the same as a port stop. So everyone was extremely ready to get off and explore India when we got to Chennai on October 14.

We knew we would be in for something different from all of our ports so far even before we began pulling into the harbor. When we stepped out onto the balcony to watch the city get closer, the smell of industry in the air was incredible. It reminded me a little of the smells of the Kawasaki industrial zone from the highway, probably because the pollution was coming from similar petrochemical and other heavy industry. Even if we had no sense of smell, we would have known we were entering a dirty-air zone because the ship's crew had covered all of the outdoor furniture and the pool bar with plastic and put cardboard over the carpets near the entrance to prevent us from staining them with tracked-in soot.

When our family left the ship to explore the port later that morning, we found the air at the street level similarly thick with the exhaust of two-stroke auto-rickshaw engines. One of the most striking things about India, I think, is the chaos and cacophony of the streets: not only auto-rickshaws (which are most numerous in the center cities) but also bikes, bike-rickshaws, motorbikes, cars, trucks, buses. The lanes are only suggestions, so that our tour buses often straddled the lane lines and drove full bore ahead into oncoming traffic in order to pass slower vehicles.

What was amazing, however, is that the chaos somehow worked. The auto-rickshaws twist and turn and get through and around the traffic. And the drivers were incredibly CALM. They honk, of course, but none of those who drove us around cursed at another driver or showed any sign of emotion or upset. The driver who drove us back to the ship the first day calmly zipped in and around all manner of obstacles as he told us how he had been driving Semester at Sea visitors around Chennai for many years. Just that morning, a former homestay visitor to his home from eight years ago had visited his family, and he was going to be getting together with this old friend and his brother (a student on our voyage) the next day. The older brother had stayed in touch all of these years and sent money, at times, to help his son afford private school. He was proud that his son would soon be going to college. I don't know what proportion of our students are making connections like this during our brief times in port, but it was great to learn that some are.

On day two in India, we flew from Chennai to Delhi for our first big trip (all four family members, multiple nights away from the ship) of the voyage. The flight was great, and we had a nice tour of the Gandhi memorial, seen here. After having learned a lot about his philosophy and impact on modern Indian history in our two Global Studies classes, it was great to see the large groups of Indian school children and many others honoring this great man.

Then we were off for the final leg of travel that day, a train ride to Agra where we would spend the night before devoting the next day to seeing the Taj Mahal and other sites nearby. The train ride itself will probably end up as one of the most memorable part of the trip, especially for Isabelle who had been worried since we planned this trip to India about how dirty it might be. There is an excellent express train that runs once a day between Dehli and Agra, and we took this on the way back, but on the way to the city we were on a "deluxe AC intercity express" that wasn't very deluxe or AC or express. It took almost six hours to cover a distance the other train covers in two, getting us to Agra, where dinner was waiting for us, near midnight. The AC in our compartment was broken and windows sealed, leaving us to sweat (see photo). And there were cockroaches crawling on the walls and seat backs. Most of the students on the trip were good-humored about it. As we say, you've got to be flexible when you travel the world.

The flexibility was well-rewarded the next morning, though, when we got up early to see the Taj at sunrise. The Taj Mahal, which means "my chosen one," was built by Mughal Emperor Shah Jahan to honor his favorite (seventh) wife after she died in childbirth. I had been there myself 35 years earlier with my parents, when I was just nine, and it was amazing how much I recalled from that earlier visit as Gabrielle, the girls and I explored the place together. Its symmetry and color and the quality of the workmanship with all of the inlaid marble have a way of imprinting the many views of the place on your memory. Still, it was great to have so much time at sunrise and again that evening at sunset to walk around viewing it from many angles and distances, while also watching all of the people.

Our day in Agra was in many ways a journey back to the heyday of the Mughal Empire, with the Taj as a hook to get us wondering about how this group of Muslin interlopers from Uzbekistan and Afghanistan were able to sweep in and take over virtually all of the Indian subcontinent. After a couple hours at the Taj and breakfast back at the hotel, we went out later that morning to the "lost fort" in Fatehpur Sikri, about an hour away. This fort, seen in this photo, had been built by Akbar, the Mughal ruler who was responsible for most of the expansion in its heyday. He built it in just four years and then occupied it for just 14 while he used it as a base to establish his dominance over provinces nearby before moving the capital back to Agra. Few of us on the trip knew about this fort before our visit, but most us found its story and the irony of something so long-lasting and beautiful having been used for just 14 years, quite intriguing.

After practicing his construction and architecture technique on Fatehpur Sikri, Akbar then went on to build the Red Fort in Agra as his new base of power. It was in the courtyard of this fort that Shah Jahan met his "chosen one" when she was selling jewelry at a bazaar for the nobility. Shah Jahan also added to Akbar's structure grand palaces for himself and his family members. Many of them have beautiful views, like this one, of the Taj Mahal by the river. Shah Jahan was ultimately imprisoned in this fort after his own son turned on him in his grab for power, so this was his view of his creation and the memory of his favorite wife in his final days.

At the end of this long day, after another stop at the Taj and some shopping, we took (a much nicer) train back to Dehli. Isabelle's favorite part about our trip to India was our stay in the very nice Hotel Intercontinental that night, and the breakfast bar the next morning. But our stay there was brief as we hit the road again that morning to see, among other things, the Red Fort of Dehli, which Shah Jahan planned and began building at the end of his reign.

After returning to the ship from Agra, Melina and I took off again the next day for sightseeing nearer to Chennai that took us back to a period long before the Mughal Empire when the seventh century kingdoms of the South gave birth to some of the grandest Hindu temples built up to that point. Here is just one image of the Shore Temple carved out of granite just off the shore line in Mamallapuram.

For our family and many others, our time in India was probably the most exhausting (but interesting) for the ports we've been to so far. Gabrielle and Isabelle decided to rest on the ship the last day rather than joining the seven-hour bus ride to see Hindu temples. All of us wished for a day off after we sailed, but of course classes were scheduled to begin immediately the next morning. The ports are coming more frequently now, with just three days between Chennai and Penang, and three days then to Vietnam.

south africa

Wow, what a beautiful city! Cape Town has been the highlight of our trip so far, in so many ways. First, the location where the ship docked, right on the waterfront, adjoining luxury hotels and loads of shopping and restaurants, has made staying here a pleasure. Unlike the first two ports, where going out to dinner required walks of at least 15 minutes past warehouses and stacked containers and (in Salvador) some risk of having your backpack or purse snatched, in this port we've been able to enjoy meals and coffee and so forth with ease and comfort. You can get a sense of the attractiveness of the place in this photo, showing the view from the ship. Susan and Mike Timko had us over one evening for wine on their balcony with this view as a back-drop. One other item of interest in this photo is the giant yacht owned by Paul Allen (one of the Microsoft founder), who was pulling into the port area as I took this photo. Also spotted in the waterfront area: Dave Chappell.

Next, there is the beauty of the city and surrounding area. This photo was taken from the top of Table Mountain, which Mike and I climbed on Tuesday. If you click to enlarge it, you can see the Explorer in the port below.

Here is one more photo from the top of the mountain. It shows Lion's Head and Signal Peak and surrounding neighborhoods. One of those neighborhoods is home to many of the area's Cape Coloured people, a group that trace their lineage back to forced laborers who were brought to the area from the Indonesian islands, Malaysia, India, and East Africa. Many of these folks are Muslim, so there are many mosques in the area. One of the days in port, I visited this neighborhood on a Semester at Sea trip titled "Cape Malay Cooking" where we were taught how to make a type of chicken curry popular in this community. Along with cooking tips, we learned about Islam since the cook was a devout practitioner of this faith. She could not join in eating the food she cooked for us because it was Ramadan, a period in which Islam expects you to fast from sun-up to sun-down. Yesterday, Ramadan came to an end and the Waterfront mall was flooded with young Muslim men and women out to celebrate the occasion in dresses and nice outfits designed to be shown off on special dates like this. Although I knew the Cape area was home to immigrants from India and the East Indies, I had no idea it had such a rich Islamic culture.

Also visible in the photo above is Robben Island, where Nelson Mandela was imprisoned f0r 18 of the 27 years he spent in jail while opposed to the Apartheid regime. Although we were not able to get to the island because the boats to the island were booked up immediately after we arrived, we did get to other places that gave us a sense of the Apartheid history of the area. This sign is from the District 6 Museum, which was set up to help visitors remember the forced relocations that took place with the white-minority government required blacks and coloureds to move out of choice neighborhoods like this one and into crowded and inconveniently-located townships. Much of the neighborhood was leveled after forced relocations in 1966, and the area became a battleground in the anti-apartheid movement as former residents returned to burn down new construction by those who sought to build on their confiscated land. Much of this area, with great views of the harbor, is still vacant land, a stark reminder of the scars left behind by this history.

We also visited some of the townships (including Langa, shown in this photo) on an SAS tour. Although it was awkward to barge into an impoverished neighborhood on a luxury tour bus, I think it was useful for the students (and our family) to see how the majority of South Africans live. One of the residences we were shown, a dormitory that has been converted for family use, houses two families to a room, with each family sharing a single bed.

And this area in Langa was actually nicer than some of the townships that are home to the most recent arrivals, many of them housed in tin shacks thrown up on whatever land they can find. This photo shows one of these areas, but it cannot capture the sense of the challenge South Africa faces in trying to house its massive impoverished population that you get when you drive by mile after mile of housing of this type. The Cape Flats is home to well over a million people.

The kids still know how to have fun in neighborhoods like this. Here is one picture I took as our group interacted with children in the neighborhood. Melina made two additional trips back to this area to learn how some people are trying to improve things by building houses (Habit for Humanity) and feeding hungry kids (Operation Hunger). All together, something like 200 of our students went out on service visits of this type.

One of the big questions our program faces, I think, is the question of whether activities like these township visits and service projects are a meaningful way to introduce students to the poverty experienced by so many people in the countries we are visiting. One day service visits may give students a false sense that they've helped solve the problem when in fact the challenge is much more daunting and structural. I know that Richard Handler back home is a skeptic, and I'm still not sure. It will be interesting to see what kinds of conversations students are having as we set sail from Cape Town this evening.

I've already talked a little with Melina and think she came away from the multiple visits realizing that the smiles on the kid's faces that we all saw on the first township tour didn't reflect the sense of powerlessness and need felt by most residences. On the Habitat for Humanity visit, the residents who were living in a shack next door while waiting for Melina and other volunteers to help build their new home, cooked them a meal of potatoes and gruel. I think that meal, more than anything else Melina did while here, showed her what a huge gap there is between the townships and the Waterfront restaurants where we've been enjoying great food from all over the world. She's remarked on the disconnect and guilt and other confusing feelings like that she's experienced.

Just to drive home that disconnect, we spent much of our time here enjoying the natural beauty and nature that you can access if you have the money to live in these places (or travel there). One day, Melina and I went on a Cycling in the Winelands outing where we took mountain bikes up into the hills above the Stellenbosch (seen here).

And then stopped at two lovely wineries for wine tastings. Stellenbosch was one of the most conservative, white-dominated areas during apartheid (and perhaps still today). This winery was so nice that Melina has penciled it in as a location for her future wedding (no imminent plans!).

Then yesterday the Timkos and our family took a tour of the Cape peninsula with a hired driver. What a beautiful coastline! Here is a photo of our family at Cape Point, on the southern tip of this continent. If you could look beyond the horizon, you'd see Antarctica somewhere out there.

Along the way, we saw penguins, baboons, and whales. This photo shows Isabelle on the beach, with a whale waving from just off-shore. Here are a few more photos from our outing:

A final special moment in our stay in Cape Town came when I had a chance to introduce Archbishop Desmond Tutu to the students assembled in the Union in one of our last days in port. Tutu was incredibly inspiring with his words about the potential of humanity to do good: the ability of most people to put the divisiveness of apartheid behind in South Africa; the willingness of so many young people who volunteer, for example, to the Peace Corps, to sacrifice for the good of others.

Missing from this account of our stay are details of the safari outing that Gabrielle and Isabelle went on during our stay here. Please check Isabelle's blog (schoppa-family-at-sea.blogspot.com) for more information on that trip. They took MANY great pictures and enjoyed it a lot.