Goodbye Brazil, King Neptune, and The Reverse Middle Passage

2/8 – 2/14

Day 17 – Today I finally caught up on some much needed sleep and slept past 11 for the first time since Colorado. Robyn, Kait, and I had a short afternoon in Pelourinho where we stopped at one of the several internet cafes strewn about the town square. Unfortunately the computers ended up being nostalgia pieces from the early 90s and were incredibly slow and unable to accommodate my aim of uploading photos so we were only able to check a few emails and of course make an obligatory check of Facebook. While walking through the streets we came across a bunch of feral cats with a litter of kittens which actually seemed commonplace. We also went back to the Marcado Modelo where we wandered around through the plethora of open air markets and I finally got a Brazilian painting. I was able to haggle it from 40 Real to 10, so I was pretty happy with a 75% off deal!

Day 18 – Robyn, Kristen, and I spent our entire day from 0800 – 1730 on an FDP that took us all around the state of Bahia. We made our way up to Praia Do Forte to visit the Tamar Project which works for the preservation of various types of sea turtles. It was interesting to sea all the different types of turtles as I hadn’t realized they could get to be so large! They will only hatch from their eggs and head to the sea at night. Also when relocating turtle eggs one has to take special care to maintain the exact orientation the egg had when it was laid or the baby turtle will die! Also at Praia Do Forte we got to walk around on what was once a coral reef which surfaced and dried out with falling sea levels. It was a very bizarre and alien landscape. Afterwards we made our way to a petrochemical outfall site where the waste water from Bahia’s Titanium factory is expelled. We also visited a mangrove forest. Mangroves are the only known plant that can filter and use saltwater by secreting the salt through small gland like openings in the leaves. To cap off the evening we had an excellent barbeque back aboard the ship to celebrate our farewell to Brazil.

Day 20 – The ship is beginning to experience a bit more rocking as we are entering the deeper waters of the South Atlantic, but nothing too severe.

Day 21 – Oh that’s right! There’s school on this here ship! We had our first Global Studies exam today and to spice things up a bit I’m in a pool of 5 where the low score buys a round at the next port… I studied quite a bit but unfortunately Global Studies is a horrendously unorganized class with tens of different speakers and scattered reading assignments making it difficult to figure out exactly what is important enough to be tested on. Anything from knowing that Perry Christie is the current Prime Minister of the Bahamas to knowing the names of the Condomble deities is fair game. Tonight we’re losing our second hour of the last 3 days so I’m beginning to think that death by sleep deprivation is not out of the question. I also caught some spectacular stargazing tonight with Kate, though the lights of the ship are still bright enough to limit what we can see. Nonetheless we saw a couple shooting stars and got to see the moon set between the flashes of lightning of a distant thunderstorm!

Day 22 – This morning I received a blessing from the Gods of class. My 8 am class was cancelled so I got to go back to bed and get a bit of bonus sleep. They’ve been showing pretty great movies lately so Kate, Kait, Robyn, Sarah, Rebecca, and I watched the Shawshank Redemption, which three of them had not yet seen! We chose this over tonight’s Wild Animal Dance Party. It was interesting though as they had a camera on the dance available on our cabin TVs so we had an amusing time of watching our drunken ship mates stumble around in crazy costumes oblivious to the fact that they were on screen.

Day 23 – Happy Singles Awareness Day, and apparently also Neptune Day! Today we were awakened a 7, 7:30, and 7:45 to the sound of whistles, drums, cymbols, and shouting outside the cabin and before long the Voice came on and in pirate speak informed us that his Imperial Highness King Neptune and Queen Minerva had boarded our ship and had demanded our presence on the aft deck. Most of us struggled out of bed to answer the call and a short while later I was having fish guts poured on me afterwards I jumped into a pool and was then instructed to kiss a rather large cod or some similar fish before being stood before King Neptune himself and commanded to bow to my knees and kiss his ring as a symbol of my worth. And following with this greatest of traditions Teneya shaved my head. That’s right this pollywog has officially become a shellback. I am now acutely aware of even the finest breeze and never before has a pillow felt so close to my skin! I’ll try and get photos of my new look up when we get to South Africa in a few days!