Penguins

We went to a penguin beach near the cape of good hope and frolicked with some penguins! Today we get back on the ship and head to Ghana, time is moving to quickly

Cape Town

Cape Town is one of the most westernized places we have visited yet. My friend Michael has a friend from his home college studying abroad here so he took us around the city to the more non-touristy places. Yesterday we hiked lions head mountain during the full moon. the city was lit up by moonlight. Today we are going to see the penguins that live on the beach here! Then tomorrow I am attending a wedding of some fellow SAS students.

Wine tasting

Today is our second day in South Africa. It is amazing I want to move here ASAP!! Allie, Maddie, Emily, Brittney, many others and I are at a wine tasting. We are visiting four wineries and touring thief vineyards, maybe the perfect day

Pictures

When Using the ship Internet I can't add photos so here are a couple from my phone!! Also we arrived in Cape Town today and it is gorgeous

Mauritius

Mauritius was a tropical paradise. We only had a measly eight hours to wander around and take in the tiny island. When we pulled up to the port we watched a beautiful sunrise; the island reminded me of the TV show Lost, there were mountains covered with green foliage and beautiful agriculture. Once we got off the ship it was around nine and the day was already warm and sunny.  Since we only had a small amount of time we decided to go to the beach. We took a taxi and arrived at Grand Bay beach, it looked like it was straight from a postcard. The sand was white; the water was aqua blue, and palm trees all around. It was incredible I now know why it is one of the top tourist destinations for Europeans. At the beach we laid out for a little while but the water was so inviting we had to jump in. It was so warm and inviting I think we must have stayed in for hours. My friend Tyler had an underwater camera so we went a little crazy with the pictures. After swimming me and my friend Marisa went tubing around in the water while Allie and Emily went waterskiing. The day was ended far too quickly and we had to head back to the ship and get ready to leave for South Africa. It was the perfect day which ended with a delicious BBQ on the ship; I ate my first cheese burger since home, so worth it!

                Once back on the ship we had two days of class then the SEA OLYMPICS, easily one of my favorite days on the ship. The whole day each different Hall is broken up into “seas” and we compete in crazy events against each other. My hall was the Mediterranean Sea and we came in dead last, although I still think that we should win the Miss Congeniality award.  We definitely had the most team spirit. Allie, Emily, and I cornrowed our hair and painted our faces and wore our fake Heely shoes (which we bought in Shanghai). The best two competitions were the Synchronized swimming competition and the Lip-syncing competition. Since the ocean was too rough for us to use the pool for the Synchronized swimming we moved it to on-land in the Union. The team of faculty and children did their swim to livin’ la vida loco and were hilarious. For the lip-syncing each team picked songs or mashed some up and performed a dance. One team danced to Aladdin and was cross dressers, another did Beyoncé, and our sea danced to the final song in Pitch Perfect. I think ours was the best but I guess I am a little biased.

South Africa in three days!!

Neptune Day

Neptune Day has come, and we all became Shellbacks today! The practice of “Crossing the Line” is a ceremony that commemorates a person's first crossing of the Equator by ship.  Those who have already crossed the Equator are nicknamed “Shellbacks”, and those who have not, are called “Pollywogs”.  The day a ship crosses the equator is referred to as Neptune Day.  The ceremonies feature King Neptune, Queen Minerva, and a “court” of Shellbacks that assist with the ceremony. The event is a ritual that dates back to the early 1800’s in which shipboard crew who were “Shellbacks, were organized into a "Court of Neptune" to indoctrinate the Slimy Pollywogs into "the mysteries of the Deep".

We were woken up at 7AM by the crew marching through the halls banging drums while wearing Neptune attire. All the Pollywogs were summoned to appear before King Neptune and his court, AKA the entire ship gathered outside on the seventh deck.   Our King Neptune was Capitan Jeremy who painted his body green and wore a white skirt with flowing white hair. He questioned our loyalty to the MV Explorer then poured fish guts all over us. We then jumped in the pool and kissed a dead fish to prove our loyalty. The other part of the tradition is to shave your entire head. Almost all the boys on the ship shaved their heads and some badass girls shaved their head also. I shaved two of my friend’s heads and did an excellent job if I do say so myself.  Today has been one of my favorite days on the ship and now that I am an official Shellback!!

Incredible India

The Ship arrived in Cochin which is located on the southern tip of India. Once we debarked the ship hundreds of tuktuk drivers came running up to us to get us to take a ride with them. It was a bit overwhelming but we finally found a good diver.  Allie and I had our tuktuk driver take us all around the old city. He showed us the old Chinese fishing nets, Churches, where the women do the laundry, and some small shops. We ended up going to his house and drinking this marsala milk tea and meeting his family. The traffic was crazy, in most of the streets there is no median line, so vehicles just drive wherever and pass each other as they please. It’s a good thing we trusted our driver.  It was an awesome experience for the first day and getting to know Cochin.

The next three days I went on a SAS trip called the eco-trek. We trekked through tea plantations 8,000 feet above sea level and wandered through some local villages located in the mountains. There were tons of goats, oxen, and stray dogs. I made friends with some goats they seemed to love us. I had no idea that was the landscape of India, I pictured Slumdog Millionaire but that is only one of the many parts of Inda. I was in Beautiful Mountains with rolling hills of green tea leaves and bright and colorful villages. In total we trekked about eight miles, it was a great work out and way to see India. We came back to our camp, ate traditional Indian food around a huge campfire, told stores, and slept in tents.  It was one of my favorite SAS trips to date.

My last two days I went with my friends Claire, Chip, and Nate to Allepe and stayed on a houseboat for the night. We were taken around "the venice of the east" along lots of channels all emptying into a lake. We took so many forms of transportation getting to and from Allepe, a bus, train, tuktuk, and by foot. All that was missing was airplane. Allepe was a tropical city on the west coast of India. We spent the day on the boat taking in the views and culture around us. At one point we heard the Muslim call to prayer which lasted a little over ten minutes. It was broadcast from megaphones connected the palm trees along the river. It was like nothing I had ever heard before. We next watched the sun set over a giant field of rice. The sunsets here are hard to describe, they are not what we are used to. The sun appears as a large orb in the sky with orange and red hues as it sets. We woke up on the houseboat and decided to head to the beach then back to the ship. I got to put my feet in the Indian ocean, three oceans down and one to go!

Now we are headed to Mauritius and Neptune day is coming up, it will be an exciting next couple of days. 

Myanmar

Myanmar was just recently opened back to the world for travel, so it was a huge privilege to be able to port there. Our port was about an hour outside Yangon. My first day at port I had a field lab for my International Marketing class, our class got to go to the Shwedagon Pagoda and a night market. The Shwedagon Pagoda is  a 99 meters high gold pagoda over 2,600 years old. It is the most sacred Buddhist pagoda for the Burmese. It was so gorgeous and awe inspiring. We got to see the sun set right next to the Pagoda and I may or may not have done a head stand near a statue of Buddha.

Our next couple of days I stayed around Yangoon and walked around the city, there were large outdoor markets, endless street food, china town, black markets, crazy traffic, monks, and some of the kindest people. We ate specifically at one restaurant and talked to our waiter for hours. At one point my roommate Allie and I asked if the restaurant sold ice cream. He replied no and started looking over the railing to the street, then he then told us that he would run across the street and get some for us! We felt like we were talking him off a cliff trying to tell him not to go for us we really didn’t want it that bad. He was too sweet and made our experience that much better.

Our last day a couple of us took a taxi to Bago, which was about two hours away from Yangoon. We took a taxi, which ended up being $7 a person (pretty steep!!).  When we got there we went to a local restaurant and happened to run into a tour guide who offered to take us around for the day. So we got in a tutu and headed off. A tutu is a motorbike with a carriage attached to the back, really fun really bumpy. We went to the world’s largest reclining Buddha, the world’s tallest Pagoda, and watched the neck dance at the snake monastery. The snake monastery was un real, there was an 124 year old snake who was a reincarnated monk. The snake was disgustingly large and it had just eaten 42 kilograms of chicken three days ago and was napping…yikes. The second I saw it breathing I was out of that hut as fast as possible. We then saw snake dancing which happens once a year for three days. There are 37 songs and at the beginning of each song the snake takes over the mind of two villagers and they dance. It was like nothing I had ever seen before. On our bus ride back to the ship they bus was playing Titanic, of ALL the movies they play Titanic as we are driving back to a massive ship! Myanmar was like nothing I had ever experienced before, I would love to go back one day and see the progress they make and new technology they adopt.