port louis, mauritius

well its only been five days since my last blog and i have a feeling the blogs will come quicker as we begin to spend more time in ports than at sea.

today is monday, march 2, 2009 and we left port louis, mauritius four days ago. we were in mauritius for one day. mauritius is a gorgeous island filled with beaches you only see in vacation magazines. the water is multiple shades of greens and blues and the sea life is a rainbow of colors-unfortunately i did not have time to snorkel.


i had no idea that the dodo bird really existed-i always thought it was something you only saw on the flinstones but the dodo bird
was big in mauritius.

mauritius has a population of 1.2 million people and the island is filled with tons of diversity-french, indian, creole, chinese, dutch and the list goes on. 52% of the people are hindu, 28% are christian, 17% are muslim and 3% are other.



i spent the day at the beach-trou aux biches before heading to the local market in town. i must admit right here and now that i spent the day with the witwer-dukes family AGAIN! however, in my defense, this time i asked other folks to join us. :) we arrived at the beach without getting lost and when we walked to find a lunch location we only walked around the corner from the beach. i know you can't believe it, because neither can i, but we did not get lost once while we were in mauritius-not sure if it was because we had other people join us, we only had one day in mauritius or because we were on an island. as i swam in the indian ocean, enjoying the eighty degree water temperature, it hit me that i was actually swimming in the indian ocean-i never would have thought i would be swimming in the indian ocean!

as we left mauritius, the sea olympics began with the opening ceremony that evening. my sea was the brown sea (i know, that ain't right) sea olympics if filled with a day of events in which students, staff and faculty compete against each other in volleyball, relay races, poker, pictionary, photo scavenger hunt, spelling bee, tug-o-war, workout relay, paper boat float, hula hoop, dodgeball, twister, mashed potato sculpting, human knot, limbo, flip cup, m&m find and synchronized swimming. i participated in the paper boat float and the mashed potato sculpting and even though we did not win a medal in any of those events, in the end the brown sea tied for the bronze. our mascot was the ups man-"what can brown do for you" and our cheer was, "we are the shit!" although we had to change it at times when the children on the ship were around. we were the only sea that had our own tshirts with arabian sea written on the front and all the students names written on the back-our tshirts were even brown! the sea olympic captains on my sea were amazing-they order the tshirts on line (we got them when we arrived in cape town) and they held three sea meetings to make sure we had enough participants for each event. i still think our mashed potato sculpture of a lion should have taken the gold :)

we are now on our way to india and should be arriving there on thursday morning. yesterday we were in a part of the indian ocean known as the horse straits-when the ship would not move they threw horses over the side to lighten the load and if that did not work they threw slaves over. can not even describe to you how i felt when i heard that tidbit of information.

last night the faculty and staff spent some time as a wine tasting social in which we tasted eight different wines from south africa. a crew member (mehmet) of the mv explorer shared with how to taste the different wine with our senses by looking at the color and clarity of the wine, smelling the wine and tasting the wine.

i have been a little busy with conduct over the last few days talking with students about possession of alcohol on the ship, dock time, disrespectful behavior towards staff and crew and use and abuse of alcohol. overall, the students are still doing great!

for those of you in colorado, we are now 12 hours and 30 minutes ahead of you. we had to add 30 minutes to our clocks in order to be on the same time as india.

today we passed the equator again! (except this time is was at an angle)