Steve and Cathy's Blog

Well, another Sea Day, and Steve and Cathy are awake at 5:00am.  Probably because we sacked out the night before around 8:00 after returning from our river trip.  We order cappuccino from Room Service and it arrives in no time, with the steward apologizing because the foam went down enroute from the kitchen to our stateroom.  Cathy and Steve raise hell because of this and demand more foam!  No, seriously, we could care less.  Just glad to have some caffeine this early.  Gave us a chance to check email and plan our day.

Yes, we went to Waves as usual.  At 9:00am, we both go to hear an Enrichment Lecture from Peter at 9:00 about our next port of call, Fortaleza, Brazil, as well as the continuation of his lecture entitled Voyages of Discovery and European Colonization.  Cathy then heads off to needlepoint after that and Steve stays in Insignia Lounge for David Smith’s photography lecture on Light and Color.  The lecture consisted primarily of him showing us his photos as examples of creative use of both.  He is a phenomenal photographer – an artist, really.  Then Cathy returns so we could hear Angela Schneider give a talk on the history of Brazilian agriculture.  You would think that watching paint dry might be more interesting, but that is not the case at all.  If I don’t get too windy on this post, I’ll get into it.  The history is very different from that of the United States, and the reasons for that are thought-provoking.

But first, let’s go back to the time after breakfast and before the lectures.  Cathy and I have parked ourselves on Deck 5 so Slavy (pronounced Slah’ vee – he is from Russia), our steward, can make up our room.  Our friend Kerry comes by with a very interesting story about her and Larry’s experience on yesterday’s Guama River Experience.  Please recall in our last exciting episode that Cathy and I ended up on the small boat for the river cruise, and we envied all the people following us that would be on the larger, more comfortable boat.  We last saw all those folks as we returned to our boat.  They had just disembarked and were beginning their 45-minute rain forest hike.

Crew members on the other boat we are discussing

Well, we got back to the ship at 6:00.  They, on the other hand, got back at 9:00 and 9:30.  Why?  Because their big boat [see the photo that is at the top of this post] became grounded at the dock in the village!  You see, the river is tidal. In fact, there is a ten-foot tide, and somehow the captain of the big boat didn’t take that into account, and their boat ended up mired in the river bottom.  Apparently, there was an effort to pull it off the mud into the middle of the river, first with one boat, then with two boats, all to no avail.  Finally, after a couple of hours of fruitless effort, the boat line sent for three smaller boats.  All 150 people were loaded on to these boats and taken back to Belem.  To make matters worse, they couldn’t dock near the tenders, and so the passengers then had to be  taken by shuttle bus to the pier where the tenders were.  It was a freakin’ nightmare.  All those people got back so late that the ship’s 10:00pm departure was delayed.  But apparently the general attitude was pretty positive, according to the folks we chatted with who had been there. Good thing. Imagine this: stuck in the mud in the Amazon River in the dark in a mosquito infested rain forest. We were lucky. I can’t imagine what Destination Services had to deal with today.

Well, after thanking our lucky stars that we avoided that mess, we headed to all our lectures.  Peter gave us all kinds of info on Fortaleza and actually made some progress with the Voyage of Discovery portion.  United States history is taught in such a America-centric way that we never really get the big picture as to how the European explorers radiated out from Europe in the 15th century and what were the factors that determined where they went.  Suffice it to say that wind direction and ocean currents played a huge part, and the Portuguese were the first ones to take full advantage of them.

Angela Schneider’s lecture on the history of Brazilian agriculture was, as I said before, fascinating, and it gives us an appreciation of how differently the United States was organized.  In a nutshell, Brazil’s agricultural development was a series of booms and busts where the economy concentrated all its efforts on one given commodity at a time.  Angela refers to it as a cycle of monocultures, and it had a devastating effect.  When the Portuguese came to the country, they brought with them their worldview and their social structure, which was centered around monarchies, monarchies whose rulers dispensed favors only to certain nobles and elites.  So in the 16th century, the colonial economy was based on a product found there which the Europeans wanted, in this case Brazilwood which yielded a red dye very coveted by the gentry.  The Portuguese monarch divided the land into enormous fiefdoms granted to favored nobles, who established these land grants in this new world as their own personal kingdoms.  They prospered tremendously, but the benefits of the developing economy did not trickle down to anyone else.  This inequality exists to a great extent to this day – more on that later.

The next crop, introduced by the Portuguese in the 1600s, was sugar.  Now they developed a slave-based economy, again with a very few controlling the entire industry.  The nobility enriched itself, and built their entire economy on this product.  Around 1660 was the high point, but shortly afterwards, the monopoly disappeared as competition from the Caribbean sugar industry came on line.  The price of sugar crashed, and the Brazilian economy along with it.  Next in the 1700s came the discovery of gold and diamonds.  Again the few who controlled everything went all in, and they made a mint, particularly because the monarchy in Portugal had a free trade agreement with England who bought tons of the gold especially.  The gold and diamond extraction played out and that was replaced by cattle raising in the 17th century.  Coffee was the next product, and again the entire 18th century economy became based on that one product, and by 1840, Brazil was the world’s dominant producer…until someone began growing the stuff in Martinique.  The monopoly collapsed, and the economy along with it.  The next boom was in rubber, begun in the late 1800s.  Yet again, the entire country went all in, with control in the hands of a few, and the labor supplied mostly by indigenous peoples who were exploited horribly – as slavery had finally been abolished in 1888, the last major economy on earth to do so.  That boom lasted until 1920, when the Brits began growing rubber trees in Ceylon.  Crash went the Brazilian economy again.

Today the economy is much more diversified.  Brazil is still the world’s largest coffee producer, but they now export $50 billion worth of agriculture products of all kinds throughout the world.  In fact, since the mid-20th century, Brazil has grown to have  the world’s second largest beef industry, with 225 million head being raised on 500 million acres.  The downside is that this industry has accelerated the deforestation of the country, and the Brazilian government is now trying to regulate this destruction by closing down illegal ranches.

Okay, that’s about enough about that subject, but you can see that I am still fascinated by such radically different development of one of the world’s largest economies.  There is constant complaining in America by a certain political party which shall go nameless that America has an inequality problem.  I suggest that they come to Brazil to see the inequality fruits of hundreds of years of dominance of an economy by the few.  We saw it in Belem, or, rather, we saw it starkly on our river cruise.  The indigenous people just getting by while, a few short miles across the river, the high-rise cityscape of Belem illustrates a modern, bustling economy.

Well, after the lecture, we return to our room to prepare for lunch.  At noon, the captain makes his customary announcement about our progress and the weather.  But his announcement today is anything but customary.  It turns out that while we all were sleeping, stuff was happening.  Because of the river cruise fiasco, with hundreds of guests getting back late, the ship left Belem late, probably around 11.  But that was a minor problem.  Two hours later, a medical emergency arose with one of the guests – an emergency so severe that it couldn’t be dealt with on board.  Therefore, the decision was made at 1:00am to turn the ship around and head back to Belem in order to evacuate the sick passenger to a hospital.  By the time they had accomplished this evacuation, it was 4:00am and  the ship sailed once again from Belem.  The resultant affect on our schedule was this: instead of arriving at Fortaleza at 10:00am on Saturday, we would arrive at 7:00pm.  All excursions were of course canceled and refunds would be made.  The ship would only be in port until 11:30pm that day.

Cathy and I had the same thought: Wow, that could have been any of us that needed such attention.  We were impressed that Oceania reacted the way they did.  Their priority was the right one – take every measure necessary to treat the passenger, even if it means turning a 600-foot ship around and heading back to port.  I guess you could say that they had no choice, but we were still impressed.  Everyone we talked to on board felt the same.

So we will have a forced Sea Day tomorrow, with our arrival at 7pm with a departure 3 1/2 hours later meant that most of us would stay on board.  Wandering around a Brazilian city we know nothing about in the dark where, obviously, they don’t speak English, and apparently have a problem with petty crime and pickpocketing did not seem all that appealing.

Okay, so with that news, we head for lunch.  I think we ate in the Grand Dining Room.  Isn’t that ridiculous?  It’s less than 24 hours later, and I can’t remember where the hell we had lunch?  Cathy isn’t here right now to straighten me out, so I am giving you a vivid example of why I am writing such long posts.  If I didn’t, the entire trip would be a blur.  Pathetic. [We both had cream of potato leek soup, Steve had cajun spiced skirt steak over salad, Cathy had salad nicoise with grilled tuna]

Oh, wait!  Now I remember.  It was the Grand Dining Room, because we chatted with Brian and Barbara on our way out as they were arriving for lunch.  Whew.  There are still some memory cells left.  Anyway, we are having dinner with them tonight.  Cathy and I head back to the room for our daily quiet time.  Both of us are reading spy thrillers, and both of us also try to get some brain downtime.  After that, it’s more writing.  Because I just can’t seem to allow myself to leave out the teeniest detail, this stream-of-consciousness writing takes a fair amount of time.  But I am really enjoying it and feel that it serves a good purpose.  It’s an investment, if you will, in our trip.

We meet Brian and Barbara O’Dell for dinner, something we have been looking forward to since we met them.  They have asked if it would be okay to invite some others that they have met, and we enthusiastically agree that that would be fun.  So we all meet at the Grand Dining Room at 7:00pm.  Along with B & B, we are seated with Viola, a very nice elderly lady traveling alone, Steve and Rhonda Sugarman from Scranton, PA, and a delightful lady named Pat from Toronto making the around the world journey.  Emanuel from I-don’t-know-what-country is our waiter.  He has waited on several of us before and still remembers the name.  He adds a lot to the convivial atmosphere.  The dinner is a great deal of fun.  It is fun to meet other people to learn about them and to compare notes about the cruise, and we look forward to spending more time with them soon. [Steve had avocado fritters which were slices of avocado fried in fritter batter, served with chipotle aioli, Cathy had chicken consommé with tiny diamond-shaped dumplings, main course for Steve Cuban spiced chicken with beans and rice, for Cathy duck a l’orange with potatoes Anna and red cabbage]

When dinner ends, they all head for the entertainment.  It’s now well after 9:00pm.  Cathy and Steve praise them all for their stamina, but decline their invitation to join them (big surprise there, eh?).  It’s back to the room and lights out.  We certainly had an interesting day – again.