At Sea - Feb 29th

Joani won her ping-pong match today, garnering two more "Big-O" points and more importantly accumulating 60 total points, enough for the long-coveted Oceania-logo long-sleeve dry-fit shirt that she will now claim in Singapore (possible world record for hyphenated adjectives in one sentence).

Tomorrow is the Maldives - Bob is SCUBA diving again; and Joani is booked on a submarine coral reef and marine life viewing excursion. The big question is if Joani's submarine ride is the real deal or just a tourist trap. Enquiring minds want to know ...

Can't believe we're one-third of the way done. Seems like we just got on the ship. The next two months are the real heart of things: Delhi and the Taj Majal in India; Yangon (Rangoon), Malaysia and Kuala Lumpur, Singapore, Bangkok, Angkor Wat in Cambodia, Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon) and Hanoi in Vietnam, Hong Kong, Shanghai, Beijing, Seoul, Hiroshima, Kyoto, Manila, Borneo, Brunei, and Bali and Komodo in Indonesia.

We are excited.

The Seychelles - Feb 26th

The Seychelles are located out in the middle of nowhere in the Indian Ocean, but for some obscure tectonic-plate related reason are considered to be part of Africa. This makes them the unexpected answer to the trivia question, what is the smallest country in Africa?

Diving here is supposed to be unbelievably good. It was.

Tiny fish are swimming inside the coral if you look closely above

The one above is called a unicorn fish. I had never seen one.

The guy above was a really big one

Zanzibar - Feb 22nd

Zanzibar is an island 20 miles off the Sultan Coast that was for centuries the center of the East African slave trade. Arab dhows carried slaves into and then out of Zanzibar to plantations all over Africa and Asia, including Madagascar and Mauritius, to work on sugar cane, spice, cocoa and other plantations. And to all over the Middle East as well.

Artist Clara Sornas created this slave memorial on the site of the slave market:

This dungeon held 75 slaves at a time packed so closely some suffocated due to lack of air from the small windows. The slaves were chained closely together by the neck, as our guide demonstrated.

Stone Town is the major city, so named for the construction of the buildings from “stones” that are actually chunks of coral held together with a limestone cement:

The Sultan of Zanzibar, though independent, was always a member of the Omani Royal Family. The Sultan fought the shortest war in history when he resisted British efforts to impose a protectorate. The Royal Navy lobbed a few shells into the Royal Palace and he capitulated. It is known as "The 45-minute War." A few years after independence, the Sultan was deposed and Zanzibar elected to merge with Tanganyika and form Tanzania.

We visited the Sultan's palace, now a national museum. For years it was known locally as the “House of Wonder” because it had electricity, hot water and flush toilets. Here is the Sultan's sitting room, complete with a throne chair for receiving visitors and supplicants informally.

Note that the coffee table height dates back to the pre-Western sit-on-pillows-on-the-floor times. The Sultan didn't buy his first Western-style dining room set of table and chairs until the mid-20th century,

Tomorrow: Diving in the Seychelles

Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania - Feb 22nd

Dar Es Salaam was the first of 3 stops on the Sultan Coast, controlled by Persian sultans beginning in the 10th century; with Arab sultans gaining control in 1260; then 200 years of the Portuguese rule starting in 1500; and finally coming under the Sultan of Oman in 1700. In the 1890s first cousins Queen Victoria and Kaiser Wilhelm divided the area up into German East Africa (Tanganyika) and British East Africa (Kenya), thus setting the stage for Robert Redford and Meryl Streep to star in "Out of Africa." Zanzibar became a British Protectorate and retained its Sultanite. Germany ceded Tanganyika to the UK in 1918. Britain granted the whole area independence in the early 1960s.

Wooden dhows made by hand are still used extensively for local trade and transport:

Local dhows

We visited the Tinga-Tinga art co-op featuring a distinctive local painting style. Below are some examples. The vendors pursued us very aggressively.

Kilimanjaro, the highest peak in Africa, is in Tanzania. They slap the name and image on everything – the Kilimanjaro Cement Co, T-shirts, paintings, and of course, beer. One of the best beer labels ever:

So this is Tanzania: dhows, Kilimanjaro, aggressive street vendors, and the origin of man. Yes, the origin of Homo sapiens. You remember Dr. Louis Leaky, his wife Mary, and their archaeological discoveries at Olduvai Gorge? No? OK then, visit the Tanzanian National Museum in Dar Es Salaam:

Mesopotamia may be the cradle of civilization, but Africa is the cradle of human origin, particularly the Great Rift Belt in East Africa, as the above depiction of major hominid fossil discoveries shows.

Above, a depiction with fossils of the part of the hominid family tree leading to modern man

Above, as almost everyone except US fundamentalists agree, modern man (Homo sapiens) emerged in the east African great lakes region one million years ago. Slowly spreading across sub-Saharan Africa for 900,000 years, a small band went north and crossed the Red Sea only 100,000 years ago. Descendants from this group diffused throughout the entire world.

The stretch of former Arab East African trading ports encompassing Dar Es Salaam, Zanzibar and Mombasa is also called the Swahili Coast. This originally Bantu dialect became the common trading language (lingua franca) of East Africa. Much is borrowed from Arabic and it also incorporates some German, Portuguese, English, Hindustani, and French. There are only 15 million native speakers, but it is the national language of countries with over 200 million people. So Masai warriors speak Masai as a first language and Swahili as a second language. If you are still reading this far down, you are really hard core.

Tomorrow I will post Zanzibar.

Kenya - Amboseli National Park – February 23rd

We flew a small prop plane from the port of Mombasa to Amboseli National Park nestled in the folds of “Kilimanjaro rising like Olympus above the Serengeti,” as Toto put it:

I have wanted to see this mountain and stand in this place since I was 14 and read Hemingway’s anthology, “The Green Hills of Africa” that included “The Snows of Kilimanjaro.”

Flying in, we saw herds of elephant but more significantly Cape buffalo, which Joani and I had never seen before:

Once on the ground in safari vehicles, we saw a hippo pod in one of the lagoons fed by the underground flows that run off Kilimanjaro:

We saw tons of elephants (literally) and many zebra, but as we posted lots of those in South Africa, we will skip right to the hyenas. Well, plus maybe one elephant video:

We saw wildebeests in much larger herds than in South Africa. As usual, the wildebeests were grazing alongside herds of zebra. We were able to get much closer for better shots. We got some great shots of zebra, wldebeests, and baboons; but as we posted zebra and baboons from South Africa, here is a great wildebeest video. Well, I also can’t resist one zebra video too:

We did get a good video of baby monkeys playing:

We got a picture of African black ibis to complement our pictures of Brazilian scarlet ibis; and a video of an African secretary bird:

And I have no idea what kind of birds these are, but they are spectacular:

This bird, however, is quite clearly a Marabou Stork, identifiable by the red spot on its chest:

Here are Joani, our pilot and our friend Drew from BC in front of the little prop job we flew in on. I had the co-pilot seat on the way out and Drew on the way back.

Our group from the ship took five small planes to Amboseli. Here is one of the other planes as seen from our plane. Notice that the aperture speed on the iPhone camera is fast enough to “freeze” the propeller (engineers are easily impressed by things like this):

Here is what the landing in Amboseli looked like from the cockpit:

All in all, a totally amazing day.

We have a couple of days at sea on the way to the Seychelles, so I will go back and post Dar Es Salaam and Zanzibar.

Swimming with Turtles & Hanging with Lemurs – Madagascar Feb 19th

Madagascar is a former French colony; the native language is Malagasy. The primary schools are taught in French but those who go on to secondary school or university also learn English. The people were extremely warm and friendly.

We tendered from the Insignia to a small pier on Madagascar’s major tourist location, an island called Nosy Be situated 5 miles off the northern tip. From there eight of us took a small boat island hopping, first to Nosy Tanikely to snorkel, then on to Nosy Komba to see lemurs. You have probably already figured out that “Nosy” is the Malagasy word for “island.” Here is Joani on the beach from which we snorkeled to a coral reef:

I was able to buy an underwater camera in Cape Town (you can buy just about anything in Cape Town), and the following sequence of shots is amazing – it seems like a sea turtle and a big angel fish are playing tag. I guess I was playing too since I was right behind them:

Here are some of the tropical fish that we swam with. The water was amazingly clear and warm – the water temperature had to have been 90 or 91 in the shallow lagoon. Joani really likes the tropical fish. The blue-green one, probably a parrot fish, was her favorite. “Swimming with the fishes” may be hazardous to your health in New York; but not in Madagascar.

Here are pictures of me with a lemur, a local snake, a chameleon and a land tortoise on Nosy Komba, which means island of lemurs in Malagasy. Usually you get pictures of Joani but today it was my turn to shout as the Aussies might say.

Here’s the Insignia anchored off Nosy Be as seen from our speedboat going between islands.

Day at sea tomorrow followed by three east African stops: Dar es Salaam, Zanzibar, and Kenya.