20 Nautical Miles into the Southern Hemisphere

12 October 2012

About an hour ago, we crossed the equator, a big deal when it’s done at sea. It triggers a fraternity-like initiation ceremony on board most ships, where passengers and crew who have crossed previously (“shellbacks”) welcome those who are crossing for the first time (“pollywogs”) into the Society of Neptune. The ceremony includes a dousing with some unidentified liquid (this time it was green), a dunking in the pool, a ritual kiss of a recently thawed fish, and an opportunity to kiss the ring of King Neptune, who this year was our executive dean, John Tymitz. Some pollywogs also elect to have their heads shaved. Hat and sunblock sales in the ship’s store are likely to soar.

What made this particular crossing notable was that we did it on the prime meridian. That’s the line that runs through Greenwich, England, marking the division between the Eastern Hemisphere and the Western Hemisphere. So, where the prime meridian crosses the equator, the latitude/longitude is 0/0. In other words, we crossed directly over the point where the four hemispheres—eastern, western, northern, and southern—meet. Someone in the center of the ship, down on all fours, could have been in four hemispheres at the same time . . . for an instant.

I recorded the event by pointing my iPod camera at the in-cabln TV, which, in addition to showing movies, also shows us our exact position, course, and speed at the moment. If the GPS is correct—I certainly hope it is—we were actually 1 second (about 60 meters) east of the meridian centerline when we crossed the equator. But I’m not going to spoil the moment.

For having been onboard at the crossing, we’re now “emerald shellbacks.”

Last night we left Ghana after what was, for me, a genuinely wonderful, powerful, and very enjoyable 4-day visit. It’s impossible to describe Ghana in a blog entry, just as it’s impossible to experience the country and the culture in only 4 days. But it’s fair to say I had a near-total-immersion cross-cultural experience during my brief stay.

The Ghana Experience

We arrived Monday morning (8 Oct) right on time: 8am (08:00). The arrival was memorable for a couple of things. First, entering the port of Tema requires steering the ship through a narrow opening in the breakwater wall that prevents sea swells from entering the dock area of the harbor. Because of some maritime or meteorological phenomenon I don’t understand, those swells are large outside the Tema harbor. So as we approached the breakwater opening and slowed to an entry-speed crawl, the ship started rolling, first no more than 10 to 15 degrees port and starboard, then gradually increasing the roll arcs until we were rocking at least 40 degrees in either direction. The movement didn’t last long—5 minutes tops—but that was long enough for glasses to tumble and toiletries to roll off shelves.

The word is that large cruise ships avoid the Tema port simply because the entry is so uncomfortable for passengers who pay thousands of dollars for a relaxing spin along the Africa coast.

The other memorable moment came when we approached the pier where we’d tie up. Typically, 2 or 3 lone stevedores are waiting on the dock to catch the guide strings tossed from the ship and drag the thick, heavy ropes to the dock and lay them over the stanchions. On the Tema dock, an army of about 30 men had gathered, all dressed in ultramarine-yellow and orange jackets. I thought the Ghanaians had decided to address unemployment in their country by sending the out-of-work to the docks. In fact, other than 5 stevedores, the rest of the greeting party were merchants, armed with vans stuffed full of drums, carved wooden statues, colorful dresses, batik paintings, and every other type of tchotchke the inventive people of Ghana have created.

The moment the engines shut down, the army of sellers went to work setting up their tent city. And for the next four days, that city became the gauntlet through which we had to pass in order to leave or return to the ship. It was a 24/7 operation. By the time we pulled away from the dock last night, the students, faculty, and staff of the MV Explorer had filled the coffers of those interim merchants with US dollars and Ghanaian cedi. That has to be the case judging from the severely diminished stock of goods they were piling back in their vans and the multi-colored dresses, hats, handbags, and backpacks now adorning many of our students and a few faculty.

On Monday morning, I joined a group of 25 students, faculty, and staff to welcome aboard a contingent from the Ghanaian city of Winneba. Winneba, a fishing town on a beach about 50 miles west of Accra, is a sister city of Charlottesville VA, home of the University of Virginia. I had decided to join Shamim, Jim, and the others from Charlottesville—including retired Charlottesville mayor and professor of ecology Kay Slaughter—on a 2-day visit to Winneba. I figured it would be an excellent way of seeing day-to-day life in Ghana in a setting that isn’t arranged for tourists.

What I didn’t want was another “Timland.” During my ’67 world tour with the Michigan Men’s Glee Club, we visited a destination outside Bangkok, Thailand, called “Timland.” The “TIM” was an acronym for “Thailand in Miniature,” and that’s what the place was: everything stereotypically Thai—elephants, snakes, Thai boxing, ceremonial dances—all crammed into a 5-acre plastic village. Timlands exist in Ghana; I wanted the real thing.

We hosted a lunch for the Winneba folks onboard Explorer—one of the best meals of the trip—then all piled into two buses for the 65 (or so)-mile trip to Winneba.

Traveling 65 miles between a national capital and a major town (Winneba’s population is about 300,000) wouldn’t take much longer than 90 to 100 minutes in most Western countries. But in Ghana, every trip length doubles. The issues are the conditions of the roads (almost all are 2-lane, and most are pock-marked with unfilled ditches) and traffic, traffic, traffic. Compounding both are the Ghanaian drivers, who, while modest, soft-spoken, gentle, friendly people interpersonally, adopt their own rules on the road. They pass each other within margins that make all body orifices pucker. Sometimes, they don’t quite make it when trying to get around, for example, a slow-moving bus or 18 wheeler. In these case, the oncoming car or bus or truck will swerve onto the narrow shoulder in order to avoid a head-on collision, honking the horn and flashing the lights to express displeasure. The pucker factor is much tighter. Riding in a car in India is genuinely terrifying. Riding in Ghana is a close second.

The 65-mile trip took 3 hours.

After a brief tour of Winneba, we checked into our hotel, the Windy Lodge. The rooms were sparse but adequate: concrete walls and floors, an LCD-screen TV that didn’t work, air conditioning, and what’s called en suite, meaning a private bath. The switch to turn on the hot water for that bath, though, was located in the outside hall, 15’ from my door, a fact I didn’t discover until my second morning. The room had no internet availability, though we did discover internet in the lobby, so the lobby became a gathering place for us during the brief times we weren’t touring the town, eating, or sleeping.

The local university—The University of Education in Winneba (UEW)—hosted a reception for us Monday evening, giving us a chance to meet students and faculty. The university has no formal relationship with UVA, but several among our group are lobbying for some sort of exchange/study-abroad program, particularly for Virginia students.

The students and faculty welcomed us very graciously, we listened to a couple of speeches by UEW administrators and students, then we were entertained by a local choir, which performed three songs: a hymn (Ghana is a very Christian country, where businesses carry names like “Jesus Is Love Bakery” and “God Bless Enterprises) and two traditional tunes.

The traditional numbers were very African: multi-rhythmic drumming, antiphonal chanting that repeats over and over, and a simple but catchy tune. Before long, students from UEW were guiding SAS students to the area in front of the choir, and the dance was on: clapping, singing, and dancing that went on for at least 10 minutes during each of the traditional songs—I called them Ghana’s answers to “Bohemian Rhapsody.” We left the reception at 9:30pm, all very tired.

On Tuesday morning, we visited Winneba schools. The planned purpose of the visits was to deliver books to the school libraries, books donated by the Charlottesville Public Library. But the real purpose was to give us a chance to view Ghanaian schools in action. Each school—three public, three private—included children ranging in grade from kindergarten to the equivalent of 9^th grade. We didn’t visit a high school.

The children are straight out of the pages of National Geographic: each dressed in a crisp, clean, perfectly pressed uniform; big smiles; bright eyes; energy flooding out; and, of course, completely distracted by these (mostly) white invaders from across the sea. Seven- and eight-year-olds swarmed me at several of the schools. They all wanted to touch this peculiar covering of skin. “What does that feel like? Can I touch it?” asked one little boy, staring at my forearm. “It feels like yours. Go ahead and see,” I replied, and suddenly my arms were covered by little hands rubbing up and down in amused amazement.

Sitting in on the classes was fascinating. In a few of the schools, the class sizes were modest: 25 to 35 students sitting at double desks. But in a few others—the private ones, especially—the class sizes were much larger: as many as 60 in one of the rooms I visited, where students were sitting 4 to a desk.

The facilities are, in a word, austere. The children sit at desks that obviously have been in place for many years. Some are held together by one or two nails and a scrap piece of 1X6. The blackboards (we saw one whiteboard in one of the private schools, but no big-screen LCDs or any other type of technology hanging from the ceilings) have been in use for more years than the desks. Many of the boards are riddled with large spots where the slate has worn or chipped off, leaving a useless space. And the boards have no trays! The teachers place the chalk and erasers either on their desks or hold them in their hands while talking.

The classrooms themselves are simple concrete rooms with open windows and doors that lead to a gathering area. This was the design of each school we visited. Surrounding the gathering area—a combination playground, assembly room, and, in a few cases, dining room—were all of the school’s classrooms, each identical concrete blocks with open windows and doors. The result is that, sitting in one class, one hears talking, laughing, reciting coming from many or all of the other classes, the sound bouncing and reverberating among the concrete walls. And, of course, when the younger grades are in the gathering space for recess, running and yelling add to the sounds. The result is a cacophony of noise that, to my ear, would prevent any learning from happening. Yet each class I visited was disciplined, the children were listening and (apparently) learning, and order seemed to prevail. It’s all a matter of what one is used to. Obviously, these kids have learned to filter out extraneous noise and hear only the sound of their teachers’ voices—a valuable skill.

I describe Ghana as having a “it’ll do” attitude about many things: their roads, their schools, their businesses, their homes. By US standards, Ghana appears to be an extremely poor country. By US standards, it is. Many of the roads are in poor shape (I don’t think Ghanaians have discovered preventive maintenance yet), most of the businesses operate out of ramshackle buildings that look like kids’ forts: cobbled together from scrap corrugated metal, found pieces of lumber, cardboard, paper. The homes are the same. And I don’t want to know about sanitation.

But Ghanaians’ personal appearance is impeccable. The kids go to school in perfectly pressed uniforms; the women attend to shopping in beautiful long dresses of multi-colored, traditional fabric; the men wear brightly colored or crisp white shirts, pressed slacks, occasional ties. It may be a poor society, but they have decided what’s important, and it’s not the trappings that most of the rest of us worship. For the externals, it’s “it’ll do.”

And, as I said, they are among the friendliest and, seemingly, happiest people I’ve met. On the last voyage, students ranked Ghana as #1 among their favorite ports. I suspect this voyage will be no different.

Tuesday afternoon, we visited the home of the chief fisherman of the town, asking his blessing on our voyage. Then we went to the outdoor market, crammed with stands selling fish, vegetables, pork, clothing, pots and pans, fabric . . . just about anything and everything a family in Ghana might need. The smells—a combination of acrid and sweet—can be neither duplicated nor described adequately. But it’s the smells—of both the chief’s house and the market—that I’ll remember most vividly.

Tuesday evening, most of the SAS group returned to the ship, but I stayed in Winneba with two others to take advantage of our proximity to Kakum National Park and Cape Coast. The national park, preserving a portion of Ghana’s rain forest, is notable for its canopy walk. And Cape Coast, a city 30 miles west of Winneba, is known for its infamous castle, built by the Dutch, “upgraded” by the British in the 17^th Century, and used as a holding point for African slaves bound for the Americas.

On Wednesday, Andrea Smith, her husband, Matt, and I hired a Winneba car and driver to take us to the park and the coast then return us to the ship that evening. We spent the morning at the national park and the afternoon at Cape Coast.

The park reminded me very much of the Daintree rain forest in Queensland, Australia: triple canopy jungle, lots of birds and wildlife, very moist, very warm. The park’s canopy walk is a suspension bridge linking 6 to 7 massive trees that form a large rectangle about 300 to 500 feet above the forest floor. The bridge is made of rope, a few safety cables, and a series of 8-foot, 1X8 strips of lumber. Connecting each of the trees, which are 100 to 200 yards apart, is a rope-net hammock. At the base of the hammock, the builders attached the lumber strips, which provide the platform for the bridge. And the entire assembly is linked to the trees by wire cables.  As you walk along the wood strips, the strips lean one way then the other with each footfall, which makes the whole experience feel very unstable. The guides assured us that every inch of the assembly is inspected every day. Still, the experience is unnerving . . . fantastic, exciting, beautiful, but unnerving. I have pictures.

That afternoon, we spent 2 hours in the Cape Coast castle. I’ll say only that visiting this site—one of several existing castles along the West African coast—is sobering. How humans could have treated other humans the way the slave traders treated the Africans is unimaginable. Of course, we’ve seen that type of treatment repeated, even to today. A walk through the dark, filthy dungeons is genuinely horrifying. Archeologists have determined that the base of a small cell holding a couple hundred imprisoned Africans was at one time covered by a 4-foot layer of human excrement. For many weeks, sometimes months, that layer was the floor and bed for the men and women waiting to be transported to North and South America. Seeing all this in a tour group that includes Ghanaians and African-Americans makes a white man feel very self-conscious. I also felt a need to apologize, but I didn’t.

The 90-mile drive back to the Tema port took almost 4 hours, 1 of which we spent in a long line of traffic trying to merge into a roundabout. Driving in Ghana is exhausting.

Thursday was a catch-up day for me. I had a stack of papers to grade and revisions to upcoming classes, so I stayed on board. The internet connection on my balcony is stronger than inside my cabin—go figure—so as I graded, I also watched the parade of shipmates running the market gauntlet as they returned to the ship from their travels.

The Ghanaian merchants aren’t shy. They walk up to a prospect—maybe “mark” is a more accurate term—shake his or her hand, put an arm around the mark’s shoulder (touching is more acceptable in Ghana than it is in the stay-out-of-my-personal-space US), and not so gently guide the mark into the makeshift store like the Sirens luring sailors onto the rocks. Few of the people I watched left a tent empty handed.

We sailed Thursday night at 20:00 (8pm), straddling the prime meridian. Whales have been leaping and flying fish soaring as we continue south of the equator and into spring.