Neptune, Namibs, and Safrica

Holy Moly… I have quite a lot to catch up on. Sorry to be behind and then to getcha with a HUGE update… I’ll break this down into smaller parts so you don’t feel like you have to read it all at once.. It’ll go: 1. Neptune Day 2. Namibia 3. South Africa

1. Neptune Day
I have posted some pictures on facebook, as many of you may have noticed and there are a few that involve me in a wading pool getting green goo dumped on my head (Nickolodeon style). These pictures are but a peek into what was a really intense, ritual-filled day of festivities called Neptune Day. Apparently the traditions we practiced on Neptune Day hail back to much older times and ships have, for hundreds of years, marked their crossing of the Equator by shaving their heads, kissing a fish, and getting fish guts dumped on them. Actually, it’s only “guppies” or first time Equator crossers who have the privilege. Those who have gone through the ceremony before are shellbacks (aka I am now a shellback, like when Squirtle becomes that bigger badder turtle). I actually think the word guppies is wrong.. I think it’s something else but you get the idea. It was really cool though because classes were canceled and the entire faculty and staff got painted green and blue and all dressed up and paraded through the halls at seven in the morning banging on things and making noise and then everyone went through the ceremony and then just hung out by the pool all day. There are a LOT of shaved heads. Some of them are kind of badass and others freak me out. Like there are a few female professors who did it and now they wear scarves and they look a lot like chemo patients. Actually EVERYONE looks a lot like chemo patients. So… There’s that fact. Last thing about Neptune Day is they had this really really really great BBQ. We all get pretty desperate for good food after awhile at sea (the food isn’t too bad but there is a lot of pasta and potato involved) and hamburgers were SO good. And ice cream. MMMM.

2. Namibs!
Namibia is one of those places I might never have ever gone had it not been for Semester at Sea and I’m really really glad I did go. First of all, I just want to let you know that a lot of us called Namibia “Namibs” so that’s what’s going on with bullet point 2. The very first thing I did in Namibia was to participate in an SAS sponsored trip. I rode a four-by-four vehicle into the desert and my guide, JAKO! (I put an explanation mark because that’s how he pronounced it: YA-KO! Exclamation marks actually also designate clicks in African click languages, so don’t be confused. Those are in South Africa, anyway, not Namibs as much.) told us a LOT about the desert and about Namibs in general. It became clear to me that Namibia is a pretty great place to live if you have a little money and want to do extreme sports. Literally the drive into the desert was on a highway with the ocean on the left and giant desert dunes on the right. The ocean went as far as the eye could see and so did the dunes. We visited what’s called the “Moon Landscape” which I guess has been a sight for a lot of scenes in movies (including the moon scene in Apollo13, according to JAKO). We also stopped and looked at these weeeeeirdo plants that were hundreds of years old. They didn’t look that old but the youngest ones I saw were in their thirties. Some live to be thousands of years old! Aaaaaand we climbed this massive dune called dune 7, rumored to be the 7th largest dune in the world (I totally don't buy it). That was hard work! The executive dean on the ship was on the trip with us and he’s known for being super buff and fit and so my number 1 goal was to beat him up the dune. I did. I may have had a head start though…

That night, reunited with my friends Kendyll, Ali, and Whitney (Carly was on a safari), I ate dinner at a restaurant called The Raft. It was reeeeally cool. It was this little hexagonal building on stilts on water and it looked all the way out to the ocean. In the water around the little restaurant there were flamingos and other crazy Africa birds and we feasted on pizza with spinach and feta that was called Popeye’s Punching Bag. Our friend got ostrich and let us try a bit.. that was cool too. The ladies at the table next to ours were really friendly. There were two middle-aged ladies, one young girl who turned out to be 18, and one middle aged man. They asked us where we were from and we told them and then I asked one of the women what she was drinking (it looked like some sort of sweet desert baileys kind of drink). She told me it was called Amarula and they bought us each one. It was REALLY good. She said it was the drink of Namibia. We kept talking to them for a while and got to know them, particularly the girl, Carmen, pretty well. Weirdly, at one point, the moms pointed to me and told Kendyll, who was sitting closer to them than I was, that I looked “naughty.” I have never ever ever ever ever EVER been told that I looked naughty EVER before in my life. And you know what? I’m NOT naughty. So we had a good laugh. My friends called me naughty Martha for pretty much the rest of the trip. We ended up going dancing with Carmen and her mom which was really nice. I really miss my mom so it was cool to hang out with a mom, even one I didn’t really know. Dancing was really fun until I danced with this creepy guy named Ivan who was too old to be interested in me but too young for it to be cute and funny. Meanwhile Kendyll and Ali were making friends with this guy named Jeff. He was our age too and he was from South Africa. We ended up hanging out with him and two of his friends in Swakopmund, a little German style beach town like 15 minutes from Walvis Bay, the next day.
The next day was pretty lazy. It didn’t really get started until the early afternoon and it mostly involved sampling Namibian beers, eating, and hanging out at the beach. We got talking with Jeff and his friends Brock and Wynand about politics and race and it was pretty eye opening. They were just kind of unapologetically racist. A little clue was that they weren’t very respectful when they spoke to waiters (all of whom were black at the restaurants we ate in). Jeff couldn’t believe my friends and I were attracted to non-white men, specifically, I think, black men. It really began to hit home, as we talked to him, how recent the end of South African apartheid really was and how it still impacts people’s lives. We ended the day at this bar that everyone had told us to go to (JAKO as well as numerous other Namibians) called Tiger Reef. It was a really cool place. The entire floor was just sand because it was pretty much outdoors and it opened up onto the beach! There was silly tiki décor and this little boat you could sit in (on the beech, not in the water). It was nice. A LOT of Semester at Sea people showed up which made it weird but fun. We were told in our briefing that the 1000 people on our ship would make up 10% of Namibia’s tourism for the whole year… So I guess we weren’t that surprised when we all ended up at the same bar.

3. South Africa

South Africa was really really cool. When we first arrived in Cape Town, I attended a lecture in the ship’s union given by three South African authors, Maxine Case, Dawn Garisch, and Thembelani Ngenelwa. They talked about their latest books, their writing processes, and what it means to write in and about South Africa and they read to us from their books. It was really interesting and a nice introduction to what turned out to be an awesome port.
After that, my friends and I explored Cape Town a little. The dock where we were parked was this really tourism-focused shopping area. We were right up against a mall and there were street performers all day every day. It was actually kind of nice, if you knew how to get away from it and experience the REAL South Africa. Oops actually we didn’t explore Cape Town then that much because we climbed Table Mountain! So yeah right after Authors in Cape Town, we hiked Table Mountain. It was INTENSE. I had my parents look it up for me: we hiked 3,000 feet vertical! We had just the most incredible views of the city and of the cape on the way up but when we got to the very top we were in a cloud. It was unreal. We were absolutely surrounded with impenetrable fog and I felt like I could have been anywhere in the world, but I knew I was in Africa. Cool sensation. We took a gondola down, opting out of another killer hike. And then we went to dinner on Lang Street (means long street). We ate at this place called the Royale Eatery that reminded me and Ali SO much of Portland. It was really hip and had cool vegetarian menu items. We went to several bars after that, one called Mama Africa where we had the extremely popular Springbok shots that consisted of Amarula which I mentioned was “the” African drink plus some sort of mint flavor. Then we went to this place called the Dubliner where they basically had this guy singing professional karaoke. He was the band, but he sang along to karaoke backup music. The place was overflowing with Semester at Sea people and we all loved singing along to Aerosmith, the Spice Girls, and other bands like those.. It wasn’t very South African but it was fun.
The next day I woke up early and got on a bus that took me to a nearby township. I spent the day building the roof of a house in the Habitat for Humanity program. It was really cool to spend a whole day in a township and it turned out to be really interactive with inhabitants. We went on a walk towards the end of the day with our group leader who had, himself, grown up in that township, and I could really see the difference Habitat for Humanity was making there. We walked past fields of trash with lean-to style houses around them. There were houses made out of scraps that Americans would pay to have removed from sight. But there were also tons of Habitat houses as well as houses made by a similar program from Ireland. Our leader took us to a preschool where probably 30 little 3 year olds sang us nursery rhymes in an African dialect (I’m embarrassed to say I don’t know which). They all wanted to snap thumbs, like give a thumbs up and touch their thumb to your thumb. It was super cute. One of the girls in our group bent down when we were walking down this street and picked up a little packet of tiny papers. When we all looked at it, we realized that it was meant to be a little pretend slider cell phone, with all the little buttons written in. It was so creative and so cute! We put it back where we found it and finished our walk.
After Habitat for Humanity I met back up with my gang: Kendyll, Ali, and Carly, and we met up with Amy (from Pomona!) and her friend Mike for dinner. She invited me to dinner at her house the next night. It was suuuuper nice to see her. basically we wasted the next day on the internet and in the mall and eventually my friends left for a rugby game and I took a cab to Amy’s neighborhood. I have to now take a moment to teach you some South African slang (mostly in Afrikaans I think):
Brei: BBQ
lekkar: awesome
jol: party/good time
robots: traffic lights (this one really confused us when we got directions in Namibs)
So I went to a brei. My taxi driver took me to the wrong girls school in Amy’s neighborhood so I called her and she said she’d come get me (on foot). She showed up with a boy named Joel and Zach. Zach is another Pomona student, one I don’t know very well but seeing two Pomona students (and Joel) coming towards me made me SO happy. Note that this is a theme that would continue all night that night. I had NO idea how much I missed my PEOPLE. We walked back to Amy’s house where I was surprised and delighted to learn that there were even more Pomona people at the brei than I had expected: Amy, Zach, Michael Larsen, Evan Stalker, Brian Gillis, Alan Feidorek, Kira from the soccer team. It was wonderful. And their non-Pomona friends rocked big time too. It was a lekkar jol. For sure. I really really really miss my friends. In fact, if you’re reading this blog I more than likely really miss you. We ate hamburgers, pasta salad, and played games. Did I mention it was wonderful?
I spent the night because I didn’t want to take a cab alone at night but I had to wake up early the next day to get back to the ship. I was meeting my friends at 9:00 to go to the winelands. The COOL thing was that Joel had friends on the ship that he was also meeting at 9:00 because he was also going to the winelands! So we took a minibus together. Minibuses are NOT a jol. They are sketchy. To give you an idea, my cab fare, with tip had been about 15 USD the day before. My minibus fare for almost the same distance was 50 cents. It was like this big van that everyone pretended was a bus and the guy who drove honked the whole way to get people’s attention. But one of the passengers decided eventually that the driver was honking too much and his soliciting was slowing us down. So they got in a fight. It consisted of the two of them telling each other how stupid and poor the other was. Eventually they said things like the F word and that they’d hit each other if they weren’t in a car… Joel and I were a BIT uncomfortable. Nothing happened though. If that had happened in New York they would have just said “F you” a couple of times and shaken their heads and shut up but they did NOT stop they just kept telling the other one that he was poor and stupid….
We survived and wine tasting was INCREDIBLE. The winelands in Cape Town are SUPER green and lush and the wine is LEKKAR. It is way good. We went to 4 vineyards. By noon I was tipsy but then that wore off. We sampled just tons of wines and cheeses and we had this really wonderful driver, Janni, and his assistant Kelly. They were terrific guides. They did not cheat us one bit, and they taught us all about the winelands and made negotiations for us. The first wine tasting was at Paarl. It was led by this woman Kirsten who gave us a tour of the cellars and took us step by step through wine tasting, how to etc. It was totally personalized and extremely informative: the perfect way to start the day. Janni and Kelly eventually dropped us off at Stellenbosch, one of the most famous vineyards. They had this deal where you could pet cheetahs there so I got to hang out with Enigma, this cuddly cheetah. That was awesome. And then we had dinner at this super luxurious restaurant there called Spier (I think that’s how it’s spelled). This place was unbelievable. There were tree houses everywhere where you could sit and little private couch areas with curtains you could have around the bar. We did this huge like 5 or 6 course buffet, all of African foods. It was to die for. And there was live music and they painted our faces. Get ready to fly to South Africa in several years because I’m getting married there someday.
Janni and Kelly came back and picked us up. We spent our last day on one of those red double decker tourism buses which took us all around Cape Town. We had a relaxing day visiting the botanical gardens and a few beaches and then we got back on the ship and here I am!
Sorry to overwhelm you with news! Upcoming: Mauritius tomorrow (I’m snorkeling with my marine bio professor) and the day after that are the Sea Olympics onboard the ship.

Whew!
Love to you all!
Martha