On the second day in Salvador, I take a trip with friends over to the Island of Itaparica in the Bay of All Saints, which turns out to be both pretty and pretty quiet during what is the off season.  In summer (November through February down here) many people have second homes on the large island and it is a bustling community.  It’s also got a lot of capital construction projects underway renovating historic buildings and squares.  Like much of Brazil, they seem to be taking seriously the Olympics in 2016.

One of our friends brings a kite and sails it off the stern of the ferry boat.  It is amazing how flying a kite can make you feel at least forty years younger.  I got to take a turn on the line.  It is the first time I ever got a chance to fly a kite—let alone do it in Itaparica.

A couple of people decide it’s too desolate for them so they go back across the brilliant blue bay in short order.  But Karen, one of the nurse practitioners on the ship, and I stay and do a good amount of walking.  We find many worthwhile sights and can recommend it in any season although the long taxi cab drive back across the island to the ferry boat launch in Mar Grande is a little strange.  Or we are so ready for something bad to happen that we read too much into an ordinary attempt to get the best deal on the trip in a taxi whose doors only open and close with wrenches from the outside.  Anyway, we make it to the pier safely and for the agreed amount of fare.

After four months of travel in taxis from ports and through cities we do not know, either well or at all, I can honestly say that one of the hardest things to judge on the front end is a good taxi ride.  It is constantly a precarious decision.  Only occasionally do we find a good, honest, dependable driver; when we do, we make every effort to use them for everything and refer them to other people.  We’re also ready to pay them almost anything they want.  Some of the better off students have figured this out and they engage driver/guide services before they even get into port.  It costs more but it seems to be worth it.

There are many scenic views on the island—looking towards both Salvador to the west and mountains to the north—and what must be vibrant shops to serve summer visitors.

As we head back to Salvador the skies turn dark with rain clouds and a rainbow breaks out directly over our ship in the harbor.  (People frequently ask me for photos of the ship but it is very difficult to capture its entire length.  Being out on the ferry coming back in gives me a chance to try.  On the other hand, it is dwarfed by the large cruise ships that sometimes dock with us in the harbors.  An enormous ship comes in late in the night and we ask our crew how many people are likely on it.  They tell us that the way to calculate the total number of passengers and crew is to count the number of lifeboats.  They count enough for 3,000, compared to our near-1,000.)

Later that night Karen and I take a taxi, again, to go a mere two blocks to attend a concert of Mozart and Beethoven symphonies by the Orquestra Sinfonica Da Bahia under the conductor Rodrigo Blumenstock.  The music is first rate with both conductor and players quite young.  The perfect venue is in the Lower City (Cidade Baixa) in the historic Igreja da Conceicao da Praia.  Built 1739-1765 and featuring the Portuguese pedra de lioz, a marble-like stone brought in the trans-Atlantic sailing ships as ballast. It is a baroque feast for the eyes and senses—particularly beautiful in candle and gaslight.  Both the famous trompe-l’oeil ceiling and acoustics are superb.

Living in rocky, hilly terrain on a heavily-wooded lot in Knoxville’s Lakemoor Hills, I don’t get to see many sunsets.  When we lived at Lanntair Farm there were far more chances to watch the sun go down because our lakeside pasture looked directly to the west and barn chores were often at just the right time for the show.  On this voyage, however, the ship affords unparalleled opportunities to see sunsets over the oceans from an exceptional vantage point and so I suspect that I have reached my lifetime limit on this trip.

As we approach the last port of our voyage, it occurs to many of us that there are many other lifetime limits we need to appreciate in these last few days.  One especially: The last chance to spend so much time with the same group of people, many of whom have become lasting friends.  We know friends and family at home over the course of many years but nowhere else than a voyage around the world over the course of such a long time as four months can we really get the chance to get to know the same people in an intensive way at just the same time we are travelling to visit many new people in many different cultures.

It has been, indeed, the chance of a lifetime.

While most of us will likely never be able to do this again, some on the ship are already planning to come back again.

Archbishop Desmond Tutu, who serves on the board of directors of Semester at Sea and its parent institution the Institute for Shipboard Education, will be guest lecturer on the next voyage around the world in  Fall 2010.  One of the lifelong learners has calculated that it costs her nearly as much to live at home as onboard so she has already registered.  There are some real advantages to three meals a day and all housekeeping done by a highly competent cabin steward.

For those who can mainly attend courses, it is a great life.  For those of us who must work, it is still a very good life despite all the frustrations of working with limited space and tools.

Many of us discuss how perfectly natural it has become to live in a cabin space of less than 200 sq ft.  A number of us do almost all of our own laundry by hand and find it an easy chore to keep up with.  Although I am not sure how cost efficient shipboard education really is, there is no question but that being in relatively tight quarters encourages a sustainable approach to many aspects of life.

I don’t miss housekeeping, but I do miss cooking terribly—to the point where I’ve started (quietly) working with one or two of the chefs onboard although I’m sure they’d just as soon I leave the cooking to them.

Almost everyone’s biggest complaint is how slow the ship’s satellite Internet access is and how inadequate is the total available bandwidth, particularly when all of the students are in the midst of researching and completing their final papers and exams.  On the other hand, there are plenty of occasions when being able to contact family and friends back home by email feels like an absolute miracle under the conditions of rough seas in the middle of a very big ocean where no land is in sight for many miles and the stars seem closer than anything else on earth.

I lead a full day trip to a tropical forest reserve on land owned high up in the scenic mountains above Accra by our inter port lecturer Professor Kofi Asare Opoku where we volunteer to plant tree seedlings.   The comparatively good road rises steeply up through the villages of Kitase, Ahwerase, Obosomase, Tutu and Mompong.  The reserve contains a variety of fruit trees and is open to local people to take food for their needs.  There are also very large specimens of protected, indigenous silver-cotton trees.  Professor Kofi takes us on an extended tour of the reserve, much of which is truly a jungle of vegetation.  (I would have advised that he get some work out of all of us before he traipses us all over the mountain side but that is apparently not in the playbook of hospitality.  Many of the adults, in particular, are wilting by the minute in the heat and humidity.  Later I wonder why we don’t see more wildlife, although we see a lot of domestic fowl and hear a peacock on a neighboring farm, but perhaps they know better than to be about in the heat of the day. We do see some huge spiders and their webs—appropriate since the reserve’s name is Ananse Kwae meaning “spider forest.”)  He has quite a number of friends and workers at the site so our efforts are largely ceremonial but he turns the event into an opportunity to show how his tribesmen and culture welcome visitors on to its lands and homes.

It is a very hot—did I mention how hot it is, yet?—and a very full itinerary, but it also proves to be an extraordinary trip.  Two additional professors from African University accompany us and we are also joined by six of their students.  I’ve wondered why we haven’t had students from local universities on more of our field trips.  It is such a great way for the students to get the chance to have extended conversations about the countries they are visiting that go a long way past the exchanges they have in shopping at vendors’ stalls.

On the trip up to the reserve the students are excited to see a fenced-in compound along the highway of Bob Marley’s recording studio, where his widow lives part of every year with a retinue of 34 relatives and friends.  Presumably, Marley’s royalties are enough to transport that many people back and forth across the Atlantic!

Professor Kofi takes us on to two additional side trips—one to the Aburi Botanical Gardens and another to Tetteh Quanshie’s Cocoa Farm, the oldest in Ghana, dating back to 1879.  Ghana is one of the world’s leading suppliers of cocoa beans for chocolate.  Later, on the way back to the ship, our guide points out the immense silos near the Tema port where the cocoa beans are fermented and dried prior to export.

Students at a public elementary school we pass as we leave the cocoa farm.

But an even bigger surprise is lunch.  It is at the mountain retreat of the former Ambassador to the United States and his wife, Kwame and Gladys Adusei-Poku.  An enormous variety of Ghanaian dishes is on the buffet in a garden built to routinely welcome many visitors.  The Ambassador is a great host and we feel honored to be so generously welcomed.  Entertainment is provided by the Dza Nyonmo Dance Ensemble, a group that includes at least a dozen drummers who are far better than any I have ever heard.  I get one of their cards at the end of the afternoon and give it to the music professor on the ship with the recommendation that we contact the group the next time Semester at Sea comes to Ghana.

By late afternoon we make tracks to get back down from the mountains and across the city to the port.  We are in good time but at least two of the other field trips are very late.  Like I said, many of the roads need a lot of work.  A motor trip that would take two hours in the US takes fifteen or more here and there do not appear to be any alternatives by air.

A dead tree at the Aburi Botanical Garden in the process of being carved in the traditional Ghanaian manner by a local artisan.

Tema, the main port of Ghana, is located 19 miles south of the capital city of Accra.  As one of our guides reminds us, it is in nearly the middle of the world, lying very close to both the prime meridian (0 degrees longitude—otherwise known as the GMT or Greenwich Mean Time) and the equator (0 degrees latitude).

Just like the ports of India, we can smell Tema a long time before we dock.  Later we find out that that is because, in part, and just as in India, much of the rest of the developed world ships its electronic and other waste to Ghana for recycling.  Europeans who think they are doing a good deed, individually, to pay 50 Euros to have a computer or other electronic device recycled responsibly are actually paying 49 Euros to profiteers to ship those items for 1 Euro to Ghana where some of the components are recycled but far more is burnt—at tremendous cost to both the environment and the health of workers, some as young as five years old—to recover metals as cheaply as possible.  One of our professors takes an environmental risk class to visit one of these waste fields where over 60,000 families live in slums with no schools, no clinics, no power, no piped water or sanitation of any kind.  Just open ditches and a road coming in and going back out.  Despite the deplorable conditions, the community’s leaders are concerned that the class’s visit and associated publicity may harm the pipeline of waste without which its people have no livelihood.

And people even in this “wasteland” are still amazingly kind to us as visitors.  When a student slips and falls into one of the many black pools of sludge in the narrow lanes of the squalid slum, all of us laugh—faculty, students and slum dwellers.  The student is not happy, obviously, but what really shocks him is how quickly people haul small buckets of water from their shacks and bring rags to help clean the filth off him.  It is a moment in one of the many lessons we learn about how hospitable people in grinding poverty still try to be.

Recently named the “Second Least Failed State” in Africa, after Mauritius, the country of Ghana is basically a success, no matter how much of a Third World country it looks to visitors.  And that may mostly be a testament to an exceptional, charismatic, far-seeing leader who fought for independence from the British in 1957 in a largely peaceful campaign and yet who is now pretty much forgotten outside of Africa—Kwame Nkrumah.  Born in the Gold Coast area that would later become Ghana and educated in Britain and the US in the 1930s, he is remembered as the first African to lead his nation to statehood.  Today he is revered alongside Nelson Mandela as sub-Sahara Africa’s greatest leaders.  In addition to articulating a compelling vision for Ghana that pulled together the many tribes in the country—in stark contrast to what is happening in so many African countries with ethnic violence—Nkrumah also sought to advance the cause of peaceful cooperation in pan-African unity.  But a military coup in his own country removed him from power in the 1960s, apartheid forestalled a more gradual integration of blacks and mixed races in South Africa and Zimbabwe (previously Rhodesia), and the political elite in Ghana accelerated a course of rewarding itself that has now become a system of endemic corruption not unlike that of India.

In my reading I learn that the presence of malarial mosquitoes in the several countries of the Gold and Ivory coastline in West Africa helped prevent white settlers from coming in and claiming large tracts of land.  The heat and malaria both meant that resources and labor were contracted through local tribal leaders.  That made the drive for independence and its aftermath much less difficult because—in contrast to South Africa and Zimbabwe—there were not large numbers of prosperous white farmers or miners in residence.  Basically, the British colonial administrators were relieved to leave the country.

Sorry for the history lesson but I learn a good deal about West Africa because I am asked to work with both the inter port lecturer and inter port students from Ghana who join us in South Africa for the days of class at sea coming to West Africa.  The inter port lecturer is a well-educated and respected member of Ghana’s African University faculty and it quickly becomes apparent that the two students consider it disrespectful to disagree with any of the older gentleman’s views.  They stick to non-controversial facts about the country and he speaks about proverbs, widespread tribal and ethnic harmony, progressive social programs and the need for Ghanaians to mostly work on restoring their cultural heritage and self confidence.  I don’t get anywhere in trying to get them to address the tough issues of tribal/ethnic strife, child labor, and inadequate public infrastructure.

Later we hear a different story and get a much more complete picture when we speak to a young Ghanaian, ‘Michael’ Fifi Quansah, a former student who has worked with Warner while studying at the University of Virginia (both pictured above in front of Favourite Fast Foods).  He fills us in on the considerable ethnic conflict and widespread corruption.  He and other young people, educated in both Ghana and abroad, would like to be active and involved in a more progressive government but their participation is discouraged by the older political elite.  The latter want the younger generation to serve their dues for many more years.  Meanwhile, a wide gulf of inequality in the society persists as the elite and civil servants reward themselves and corruption becomes institutionalized—again much like India.

Having said all of this, the economic situation in Ghana is gradually improving and has reportedly come a long way in the last 10 years.  But it seems to have a long way to go in our eyes.  Again, like India but not quite so badly, the infrastructure is a patchwork and roads are clogged with vehicles in bogged-down traffic.  Expensive gated communities are surrounded by shacks in slums which, in turn, are ringed-round with even more gated communities and busy dirt roads and highways.  On-site, handmade concrete blocks are the building material of choice, so the McMansions here take a long time to complete.  We learn that interest rates are exorbitant—25% or more—so most do not borrow but build very incrementally.

A surprising fact we learn about Ghana—as well as much of Africa—is the astounding growth of Christian churches on the continent, especially in the sub-Sahara, with one professor predicting that the next heads of both Catholicism and Anglicanism could well be from either Africa or South America.  Many of us on the ship have spirited discussions about what this means for the future of these countries, still deeply entrenched in poverty and corruption that forestalls a much wider sharing of the very real and rich resources they contain.  Billions of dollars of wealth have been extracted for many decades but are clearly not being used to benefit the society at large.  Could African Christianity really make the difference in a peaceful transfer of more resources to the poor while they are alive, or will it go the way of colonial Christian models that put off any social justice to the afterlife?

To go the 19 miles from Tema to Accra is a big deal, at least an hour each way and far more in a jam, so going out to travel the country is not a decision made lightly.  On the first day in port, Warner, Nancy and I hop the very first shuttle out and are deposited in Osu, a part of Accra where governmental offices and shops are located.  It’s a rude first landing because we can’t match up our map with the streets or landmarks and for a good while dozens of us pass each other going in circles.  We have a lunch meeting at the Favourite Foods Restaurant with Warner’s student, who now lives back home in Accra, but we can find no one who can tell us how to get to it.  After much walking and a couple of taxi drives in misguided goose chases through the city, we finally find a policeman who knows where it is.  That turns out to be within two blocks of where we started when the shuttle dropped us off next to a garish purple and pink, high rise night club.  (Taxi drivers in many of the cities we visit on this voyage often don’t know the town they’re driving in.  They are often from another country.  It can make it very hard to choose a good one or feel confident they’ll get there.)

In the midst of all the running around, I am glad to get the chance to make a quick visit to the tomb and memorial park of Kwame Nkrumah near Independence Square.