My Trip Around the World

August 17, 2007

For four months I lived and studied on a ship. It was a floating university of sorts, a small cruise ship named the MV Explorer. It housed five hundred university students and about a hundred and fifty crew and staff. There was Internet, fresh food and clean linens every day. For being in the middle of the ocean, the amenities were downright cozy. Rumors abound when one lives on a boat. The amount of fresh food was staggering and theories were generated constantly about the ship containing its own greenhouse and grow centers. Or about pirate sightings or exotic diseases infiltrating our ranks. For a while there was a very real concern that we weren’t going to be able to dock because too many passengers had come down with TD after our stop in Vietnam. After India, we were without Internet—what had been deemed as a luxury early on in the trip had by that point been totally taken for granted. When you have a ship full of young, angsty college aged kids, taking away their Internet can cause something of a tailspin amongst the group. People were convinced that a monkey had eaten through the router wires. I heard several first hand accounts of this happening.

While there were no monkeys on board (at least, I think not), and there was no greenhouse hidden deep inside the ship’s bowels, there was an operating room, and rather morbidly, a morgue. While at sea, most nights we would not see any other ships. It is roughly eleven miles from the deck of a ship to the horizon, and rarely does one feel so deliciously, utterly alone as when one gazes out from the railing of a ship and into that vast, undulating darkness.

The entire trip seemed so quaint, a throwback to the days when Magellan and Columbus sailed the oceans blue with nothing more than wood and sail. While they lacked the creature comforts that now pervade modern boats—Internet, GPS, water filtration and far more advanced food preservation techniques, we all still struggled with the mighty force that we call the ocean and reality that we call our existence. At times the water stretched out around us as limitless and infallible, and it went a long way to constantly remind me just how big this little world of ours is.

You can see the world by plane. You can see the world by bus, train, automobile or hot air balloon. While all of those routes give you a robust feeling for the Earth, it virtually neglects the Water all together. There is something about sailing into the Mekong River Delta and watching the water slowly change from a deep blue, to shades of turquoise and then, suddenly, to a startling, milky brown, that stays etched in your mind forever and, hopefully, influences you somehow.

I will always remember the trip best by thinking of the wind rushing through my hair and the birds (or flying fish) that would lazily catch the air currents along side us and would come in so close that you could feel like you could almost reach out and grab them. And in turn, the water would open up to you, dark and enticing and mysterious. Suddenly the world would become incredibly simple, like the very waves themselves, of a constant shift of ebb and flow.