It’s been almost a month since I wrote a real post! I had intended to “catch up” by writing about each adventure in Vietnam, Malaysia, India, and so forth but our voyage has been overtaken by the worldwide coronavirus scare. We’ve had to skip right past many countries we’d hoped to visit and rework our
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Mekong Delta Land Loss
For almost 100 millennia when vast amounts of seawater was tied up as continental ice sheets across the northern hemisphere, the coast of Southeast Asia extended hundreds or even thousands of km farther out to sea than it is now, stretching across what’s now the maritime continent toward Australia. Seas rapidly rose hundreds of feet
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Ho Chi Minh City
Arrived yesterday in Ho Chi Minh City, which locals still call Saigon. It’s a sprawling tropical city of 14 million people. Sweltering, vibrant, prosperous, polluted, insanely crowded, boisterous, overwhelming. Surprisingly (to me anyway) it feels much happier than Japan. We visited a Buddhist temple in Chinatown which was very different than our experience with temples
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At Sea: Japan to Vietnam
Because of the coronavirus outbreak, we had to skip our scheduled stay in Shanghai and therefore have been sailing straight to Vietnam. On our last day in Japan, we went into Kyoto to visit a street market and historic neighborhood. On the bus back to the ship, the tour guide asked me how long it
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Kōya-San Monastery Visit & Overnight Temple Stay
January 26-27 [I got behind on my blog while in Japan, and then we sailed back out to sea where we lack connectivity, so this post is 4 days later than the experience described] The high point of our time in Japan was an overnight trip to the monastery town of Kōya-San. The extremely rural
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Fire Festival in Nara Japan
Jan 25 2020 We struck out on our own to visit the city of Nara, the first “permanent” capital of ancient Japan in the 8th Century. Transit in Japan is fantastic – fast, efficient, cheap, and unbelievably punctual! No trouble at all getting a train directly from the port to Sannomiya Station in central Kobe,
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Kobe Japan, Jan 24
We are so happy to disembark in Japan! The Pacific crossing was a wonderful adventure – teaching, learning, getting to know people, adjusting to life at sea. And yet the sheer physical act of crossing the endless ocean at 15 mph for 3 weeks was just exhausting. The work schedule is very demanding: no weekends,
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Last morning at sea before Japan!
It’s dawn Thursday on our last day at sea before Japan! We’ve really enjoyed these three amazing weeks of life at sea. For me, the deep involvement with students and teaching has been just wonderful. Also, the isolation of the ocean crossing with the intense physical nature of the changing sea has been so novel
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Sea Change
Lat = 26.5 N ; Lon = 156.5 E ; Depth = 16,500 feet ; Dist to Kobe = 1206 km Yesterday we crossed a sharp boundary between the easterly tropical Trade Winds and the westerly winds of the Earth’s mid-latitudes. After a glorious morning of tropical sunshine and smooth following seas, we suddenly encountered
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Halfway from Hawaii to Japan
Lat = 25; Lon=168 E; Depth = 19,000 feet; Distance to port =2400 NM; Sea temp=22 C; Air temp = 23 C Lovely sunny morning of pretty Trade cumulus, with clouds shearing off toward the south. The sea is gorgeous – sun-sparkled water of deepest blue, the first day we haven’t had white caps. The
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