In charge of a floating, flying, free-form classroom

A writer gets set to cruise the far corners of the globe, teaching college students along the way.

By Janet Eastman

August 21, 2005

MANY life-changing events happen in a flash without warning. Mine is coming with a detailed itinerary and enough time to pack.

I leave Thursday to cruise the world for 101 days and teach writing to college students enrolled in Semester at Sea. The 42-year-old academic program transports young Americans from their fairy-tale lives into settings straight from the pages of National Geographic and, sometimes, U.S. News and World Report. We will fly in hot air balloons over Kenya's Masai Mara game reserve and wander through a cloud forest in Venezuela. But we will also see poverty, experience political tension, read censored newspapers and witness ways of living drastically unlike our own. I'll share these experiences, the good and the bad, on my blog, beginning later this month.

This is no Pizza Hut tour of Europe but a journey few tourists could duplicate. With iPods and malaria pills, the 700 students aboard our floating campus, the 590-foot Explorer, will visit orphanages, stay overnight with villagers and receive cautionary warnings on how to act before entering 10 countries.

Making this trip unforgettable: Nobel Prize winner Archbishop Desmond Tutu of South Africa will join the group in Salvador, Brazil, and travel with us as we prepare for our five-day stay in Cape Town.

During my time away, I will be remote and afloat. No cell phone, bills in the mail, filling up my gas tank to commute on the 405. I'll be leaving behind everything familiar, everyone I love, everyone who makes me laugh as well as my jobs as a single mother, journalist and gym dweller.

In return, I will be substituting Trader Joe's jasmine-scented white tea for a cup at a real Chinese teahouse, Wahoo's fish tacos for some on a Brazilian beach and 24-Hour Fitness yoga classes for those taught near the Taj Mahal.

The timing is perfect. My only child, Eric, has moved to San Francisco to attend law school. He's launched. Now the spotlight is on me. What do I want? It's a big question but one I don't need to answer until I return in December.

Like my students, I am willing to shake off my hesitations and my need to have all my resources at my fingertips and always feel safe.

I'm an adventurous traveler, with some of my past excursions feeling more like fact-finding missions with the CIA than relaxing vacations. I was behind the wall in Berlin in 1985; in Cuba in 1991; Belfast in 1999. But the longest I've been away from my Southern California home base, except for college, has been four weeks. This time, I'll be away almost a third of the year. I will not be with my friends and family to celebrate Labor Day, Halloween, Thanksgiving, a few of their birthdays and my 30th high school reunion.

Instead, I'll have time to know the people who live in the places I only read about. When Lilly, a manicurist at Elite Nails in Villa Park, asked me where I was going in Vietnam, I told her Ho Chi Minh City. "No," she said, looking stern for the first time. "It's Saigon!"

Living remotely, I'll be keyboarding my way through online banking, booking travel and communicating with loved ones. Will some of my single friends become engaged? The older ones stay healthy? The younger ones stay on the right track?

I'll have to wait and see. I'm packed and ready with a passport and six visas. I've had 10 shots and filled five preventive prescriptions. I have a wallet of "starter" currency to pay for transportation from the port to a nearby city. I've reduced my household holdings to things that don't need a human touch.

My life will change. I'll keep you posted.

Semester at Sea

Preparing for a four-month trip

By  JANET EASTMAN

AUG. 25, 2005

12 AM

TIMES STAFF WRITER

Preparing for a four-month trip takes a lot of pre-panic planning, especially if some of the destinations are so far off the map that Starbucks hasn’t found them.

For the college students who will be leaving on a world voyage with Semester at Sea, plotting what to bring and what to leave behind has kept the program’s message board churning for months. There are unfiltered questions from the students: Are there hangers in cabin closet? Blenders on board? Pilates? And there are hard-core answers from alum: “Bring lots of crappy clothes” to protect from the ship’s laundry service.

Women seem focused on hair care and nutritious snacks (peanut butter becomes gold bullion by the time they cross the International Dateline); the guys fret about plugging in complicated electronics and splitting the cost for extreme excursions like Great White shark diving. A female student volleyed one of many gender jokes by posting that the guys have a lighter load since their two biggest concerns, free condoms and soap, are already on the ship.

For those struggling to meet the baggage weight requirement, someone suggested: “Pack up everything that you plan to take with you and carry it all around the block a few times. Now decide if you really need all that stuff.”

There are also moments of “whoa” on the message board, as in “when did it hit you that you’ll be going on this trip?” One wrote, “I was called to baby-sit last night for [Aug.] 29 and was like, ‘No, sorry, I’ll actually be out of the country. And no, the next week won’t work either. I’ll be back in December though ' and then it hit me: Going around the world.”

One calculated that a similar cruise to the same number of ports would cost $49,000, more than double what these students are paying for tuition, room, board, passports, visas, shots, excursions and souvenirs (“Buy flat things, like a Chinese kite or small rugs”).

The voyagers-to-be are being guided by alum who have truly survived the seas. “I was on the spring ’05 voyage and yes, that was the trip where we almost died,” wrote an encouraging veteran. “Ask me anything.” In February, the MV Explorer collided with 50-foot waves in Alaska’s Aleutian Islands. Two of the crew were hurt, the engine died and the ship was repaired and escorted by helicopter to Hawaii. In July, the 59-year-old captain died of a heart attack while at sea.

What adventures will face this group, weighed down now by concerns about accessing cash and obeying the rules for bringing alcohol? Check back later.

Next: Saying goodbye to Mom, Dad and unlimited non-peak cellphone minutes before boarding the ship in the Bahamas.

https://www.latimes.com/travel/la-tr-sea21aug21-story.html

Six class days, no weekend, then Brazil

When waves reach six feet or higher underneath the Explorer, students and faculty feel it. They bump along the hallways to classrooms and, during the lectures, professors steady themselves with a hand on the podium. Students have learned to take notes on swaying desktops.

The biggest difference, however, between a land-based campus and this floating one is there are no weekends. Class meetings alternate between A and B days while at sea, and there are no sessions when the students and their professors hit the ports.

So far in this young semester, classes are well attended, even by those battling seasickness. The occasional bolt out the door is left unexplained; a green pallor tells the story.

Semester at Sea participants really have a great excuse for sleeping through morning classes: To keep sunrise at a normal time, clocks will lurch forward 21 times during the voyage, sometimes losing an hour for five or more days in a row. Overnight, a dreaded 8 a.m. class becomes a torturous 7 a.m. one. It’s the maritime version of Daylight Savings Time meets “Groundhog Day.”

There is another oddity on these hallowed decks: The ship was built in 2002 for a now-bankrupt luxury cruise line. Classrooms are carved out of corners of the chandeliered dining room and lounge areas, and the original nightclub, with its circular dance floor, wrap-around seating and stage lighting, is now the Student Union.

Students also hang out at the library, which was designed to be a bar. They spend free time slumped in bar stools, elbows on the glass counter. The librarian stands behind the counter, guarding sought-after guidebooks on shelves that were to hold liquor bottles. She listens to stories and dispenses advice, as any good bartender would.

Students and faculty spend most of their days at sea together. We eat in the same two dining halls and it’s not unusual for discussions to continue late into the evening.

A few nights ago, many of us were out on the deck lingering under Venus as the ship passed Trinidad. The biology professor talked excitedly about the ecosystem, the oceanography professor about ancient man’s excellent ways of navigating with “chart sticks” and another piped in about the constellations. An instructor who joined us later was slightly regretful about missing Trinidad. “Too bad,” she sighed. “I was getting a pedicure in the spa.”

We then made a pact to not tell loved ones back home about our “work.”

Next: Partying with Brazilian university students, then Archbishop Desmond Tutu comes aboard.