from the UK...

Hello blog! Long time no see!

Honestly, when you're on a ship with two little girls, in front of a computer is not the place to be! Well.... that's mostly my excuse... the other part is that we've just been having so much fun, getting along really well with everyone and spending almost all our time being all sociable (if you know me, you know that's a major thing for insecure little me!).

My absolute favourite place so far has been Mumbai. Except I insist on calling it Bombay, because around Christmas time I read Shantaram by Gregory David Roberts, and everyone in that story called it Bombay, so something in my crazy head tells me I should too. Anyway, it was everything I expected to be, only so much more fascinating. The people there are so gorgeous, and city full of people somehow manages to be incredibly diverse while also being so alike in a beautiful traditional way. I'm trying hard to not sound like a tourist who only sees a shallow layer of a place... but that's what I am, so that's probably what I sound like. Sorry. I just totally loved the city and would love to go back to India one day to see more of it. (It'll have to be without Noel again though, because he's been to other parts of India before and hated it. Fine with me, I'm an expert solo-with-kids traveller now!)

Hong Kong has been the only place we've been that I've been to before (apart from Australia obviously!), and it was just as busy and full and fascinating-but-comfortable as I remember. And to make another very touristy shallow generalisation; there's something about Asain countries that makes me feel very comfortable and at home. Mainly I think it's the people themselves... can't put my finger on it but it's also the landscapes and the food and the smells... I dunno.

I didn't cope too well with South Africa. I just couldn't get my brain around all the history and contradictions of that nation (which I know other nations have in abundance as well but Africa is recovering so much more slowly and painfully than other places) to really appreciate being there. I actually got quite emotional for the days/nights we were there and had to keep myself a bit of a distance from people to stop myself getting upset about the whole shallow *tourist* thing.

Anyway, all the days we've spent at sea have been lovely. I've been mostly hanging out round the pool during the day (Tali's swimming is getting great!), and in the big suite or the Funnell Bar at night. Like I said, our group of friends have all been getting along really well. There have been more than a few almost-all-night drinking/chatting/game-playing sessions in the main suite. Lots of fun and lots of great memories.

In Southampton David and Susan were fabulous tour guides and we had a pretty relaxing day. We did a few of the touristy things and had a nice long lunch at what Susan assured us was "the most English" restaurant she knew.

Speaking of memories - only a week or so to go! I can't believe it. The girls are really missing Noel though, so they'll be glad to get home and have big daddy cuddles. And now that I know people from the States and from England I have great excuses to make sure I get back to see them again.

Must go, the girls are "starving, mum!" so we'd better head to breakfast.

Port of Call: SOUTHAMPTON, UNITED KINGDOM.

Southampton.

WIKIPEDIA [general]
United Kingdom.
Southampton.

EMPORIS [architecture / skylines]
Southampton.

LONELY PLANET [tourism]
England.

ROUGH GUIDE [tourism]
England.

My take... but without a lot of ketchup.

I hope I'll get to post more thoroughly in the next week, but admittedly it's a higher priority to soak up every moment of actual living that I'm able to on the boat. I have to agree with Gemma, in large part. While I'd never choose not traveling over traveling, this has been rough. Two months was not reall enough time to get to know Iasi, Romania in 2000, nor was two weeks sufficient to see Ireland. A day, give or take, for Tokyo, for Bangkok, for Cape Town, for Tahiti, leaves me feeling overwhelmed and a little melancholy.

That said, I'm not going to complain too much. South African cuisine in Cape Town is not what it is in NYC, and February in the South Pacific has very little in common with the Midwest. If anything, I feel a little lopey dopey: my schedule and internal thermometer has been completely tangled in climate changes - we've passed between temperate and tropical zones seven times so far, and have crossed the equator at least four.

If there's one overall impression I've retained so far, it is the size contradiction in the world. We've been able to come within a few hundred miles of half the world's population in the last few months, yet we've also been traveling by boat, and I am even more impressed by the extent to which humans have access to humans. But the other side of the coin: human experience is so dense, so thick, so numerous and rich and varied that one just has to throw their arms up and admit to being overwhelmed.

This was echoed in an experience I had a couple days ago. There have been a series of lectures on the ship, dealing with modern politics, history, culture, and so on. I originally meant to hit many of these, but they first one I went to was so dull, and between seeing places and working on my thesis, I didn't think that I had much time. It's a choice I don't regret.

Still, yesterday, being danced-out and dined-out and half-tired but not feeling like sleeping, I found myself attending a lecture on terrorism, it's causes and solutions, and so on. It's a subject that, important as it is, I've heard so much of in the last few years that I can't listen openly anymore. Everyone knows what they think, and I'm too worn out to argue.

This was the view of the man sitting to my left throughout the lecture, and when the speaker told a joke (about flies mating, of all things) we were the only two who got it and laughed. We ended up having a conversation after the talk was over, and I came to learn that he was also a writer, interested in fiction, specifically experimental fiction. He is just married for two years, recently turned twenty six, and was sent on this cruise by his uncle who is connected to oil interests in Indonesia. He is a practicing Muslim, an Indonesian citizen, with Chinese heritage. He has taken a leave of absense from his writing program, which is in London, but he has been refreshed during the trip and hopes to finish his thesis-type project by September. His name is Joyo. We walked up to the Lido deck for a drink, and there I met his wife. We ended up talking, the three of us, for the next two hours, and finally exchanged email addresses, and agreed to take a look at each other's work. I'm still struck by how much, and how very little, we have in common.

It doesn't take a giant leap of imagination, and especially during this trip, to start to see everything in this way. I took a walk out of the tourist districts of Bangkok and it seemed, in many ways, more similar to Detroit than Detroit is to New York or Chicago. I know, numerically, demographically, that this is not so, but I don't automatically distrust my gut impressions just because I cannot easily explain them. Likewise, I felt an intimacy, almost an affection for the deep waters of the Pacific ocean, in some ways more than I've ever felt for the Atlantic or the great lakes, even though this is one of my first experiences with the ocean.

I'll go back. I'll write more about the South Pacific, China and Japan, New Zealand and Australia, India, Africa, and all of the places we've visited. Ultimately, however, travel becomes its own justification. Even in this sort of luxurious cloisters of the QE2, I can't completely escape from certain common facts, certain human truths, that are everywhere, and are pervasive.

Omygoodness.

That was a lot of not blogging. Unbelievably, it's only a couple of weeks before we hit the United Statesland again. Which is a long journey still for Sumara and the girls, but is hometown for me.

We've seen a lot of amazing things in the last month or so, since whenever it was that last I blogged. From what my playwriting teacher in high school once called "the eponymously named Bangkok" to India, which I've been dying to go to all my life. I was a little bit fogged up for some of East Asia, as Julie and I broke it off right before we hit Shanghai. It's been strange—a breakup on a boat like this is like a breakup at summer camp or the like, in that we are one another's community, and cannot be otherwise, cannot even make fake overtures at being otherwise. She's right there, I'm right there, and she's friendly enough with the rest of our crew and good enough with the girls that we haven't been able to just cut off contact with one another (though she has promised, kindly, not to read the blog), even if it were possible not to see each other every day. So that's been complicated; it's had a few weeks to improve, which is nice, but for that week I didn't feel like blogging at all. (After that time was when I got spacey.)

I'll try to update sometime soon on Southern and Eastern Asia and even the rest of our little oceanside adventures, or the rest of the crew can fill in the blanks, but what I want to write about right now, since we left only recently and it's been the most intense for me, is Cape Town. I spent a few months living there on an abroad program when I was in college, and I was eager to show my friends this city, which among this particular crew of Americans felt like it was uniquely mine. I spent a couple of years in college up to my ears in South African history and culture surrounding that trip, information I was perhaps a little too forceful in sharing with my friends (sorry, guys), and the days we spent in this gorgeous city were enough to convince me that I really, really, really want to go back to it, in a more fixed and permanent way. To describe: we arrived on Sunday and I immediately dragged the willing members of the crew in a hike up Table Mountain, the long, flat mountain that, along with its two companions Devil's Peak and Lion's Head, surrounds the city center, allowing it to be known as the "city bowl." The willing crew was pretty small: Clara, Garrett, Malcolm, Julie, Susan and I hiked the trail, while everyone else took the cable car from the foot of the mountain a couple of hours later in order to meet us for lunch. It was the same trail I'd taken when I first climbed the mountain four years ago, arduous, gorgeous, scrubby. Clouds, known as "tablecloths" for the way they look from a distance over the flat mountaintop, were blowing over by the time we arrived; Tali and David and Susan's son Christian were running through them ecstatically. We ate at the café, with me translating the more obscure kinds of South African food for our tourist purposes (Connor was particularly into biltong), and the tired hikers reluctantly agreed to join everybody else in the cable car down rather than hike again.

I took my friends to different spots I remembered—the Africa Café, my old guest house, the beach at Camps Bay—but in South Africa in particular, knowing in detail its fraught and confusing economic past and present, I was uncomfortable being a tourist. I'm grateful for this cruise for the surface look I've had at dozens of nations, but it's also leading me to realize I can't travel like this again. I need to be really engaged with where I am. Two-day tourism doesn't qualify.

That's all for now; Amber and Jess have kindly been waiting for me, but they really want to go to dinner. And I could stand to do so as well, now I think of it. I'll be sure to write at least once more before we dock again.

Port of Call: CAPE TOWN, SOUTH AFRICA

Cape Town.

WIKIPEDIA [general]
South Africa.
Western Cape Province.
Cape Town.

EMPORIS [architecture / skylines]
Cape Town.

LONELY PLANET [tourism]
Cape Town.

ROUGH GUIDE [tourism]
Cape Town.

Port of Call: DURBAN, SOUTH AFRICA.

From last Friday.

Durban.

WIKIPEDIA [general]
South Africa.
KwaZulu-Natal Province.
Durban.

EMPORIS [architecture / skylines]
Durban.

LONELY PLANET [tourism]
Durban.

ROUGH GUIDE [tourism]
Durban.

Port of Call: PORT LOUIS, MAURITIUS.

Wow. I almost forgot to post this and the next entirely!

Port Louis.

WIKIPEDIA [general]
Mauritius.
Port Louis.

EMPORIS [architecture / skylines]
Mauritius.

LONELY PLANET [tourism]
Mauritius.

Port of Call: PORT VICTORIA, SEYCHELLES.

Wow. I almost forgot to post this and the next entirely!

Port Victoria.

WIKIPEDIA [general]
Seychelles.
Mahè Island.
Victoria.

EMPORIS [architecture / skylines]
Seychelles.

LONELY PLANET [tourism]
Seychelles.

The Ship.

It sunk.