10. Easo, Lifou, New Caledonia

Wednesday, 17 OCT 2012

Easo is the name of the village on the small island of Lifou of the French possession of New Caledonia. There is no port, so the Volendam anchored in the harbor and launched several of its lifeboats to serve as tenders. This stop was a nice change from all the other westernized ports and hyper-organized tourist activities. Those who wanted to could go ashore and enjoy the beautiful beaches and wander through the vendor tents. They had some gorgeous fabrics, probably not local.

Here is one of the lifeboats loading passengers.

On the head at left is a small church with a great view. I made the hike to the top and spent over an hour taking pictures.

 

Our "floating palace" as the natives call it, at anchor in the bay.

Retrieving one of the lifeboats:

 

 

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9. Port Vila, Vanuatu

Tuesday, 16 OCT 2012

Vanuatu was formerly a French possession known as New Hebrides. Port Vila is the capital and largest city (40,000) in Vanuatu. English and French cultures coexist with each other and with the native Melanesian people.

The four-masted schooner in the harbor was seized by the government for trying to smuggle in firearms.

 

I got a kick out of the signs in pidgin English, the common language for the natives who suffer with dozens of non-mutually-intelligible dialects. It is one of three official languages in Vanuatu alongside French and English. Many of the words in pidgin can be deciphered if you pronounce them just as they look. "Blong" comes from "belong" and is the possessive, equivalent to standard English "of". This sign reads "National Museum of Vanuatu".

"Sandroing" means "sand drawing"; "spesel kastom" means "special custom". See if you can find the pidgin meaning "a (one) project of the Vanuatu Cultural Center".

Here is an example of sandroing blong Vanuatu, by the native who also demonstrated a couple of musical instruments.

A poster about a traditional resource management program:

"Yumi" shows up frequently in pidgin. No, it doesn't mean yummy. It's the plural personal pronoun ("you-me") equivalent to we, us, our ( as in "blong yumi").

One more example. You should be able to figure this one out:

 

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7. Pago Pago, American Samoa

Thursday, 11 OCT 2012

First a word about phonetics. The typical American would pronounce the name of this city "Paygo Paygo". However, if you read up (Wikipedia is a great resource) you will learn that there are certain consistencies across several of the Polynesian languages, including Maori of New Zealand and native Hawai'ian. Among these consistencies is the pronunciation of the sound called by linguists the "engma" and represented in the International Phonetic Alphabet by a single character that looks like a fused nj. Consider the difference in how we say "singer" and "finger". The former is the pure engma, whereas "finger" is pronounced with the engma followed by hard g: "si<engma>er versus "fi<engma>ger". The g in Pago is properly pronounced as a simple engma. So far this gets us to "Pango Pango", as in the expression "bang on" . However Americans, including the staff of the Volendam, who have visited the island and have heard that the g is actually ng usually say it "Pang-go Pang-go, . This is still incorrect, not only because of the addition of the hard g, but also because the vowel a should be pronounced ah, thus: "Pahng-oh Pahng-oh".

There is a further subtlety that is totally lost on most Westerners. Linguists recognize a distinction between two types of "p", the aspirated and the unaspirated p. The former is common in Indoeuropean languages like English. It is represented in the extreme in words like "please" pronounced "puhlease!", or by "Popeye". The unaspirated p occurs unintentionally in English sometimes in the middle of a word or phrase. Think how you would say "Hopalong" or "deep enough" quickly, sloppily, and without emphasis. It's like a b but without voicing. That's the P in Pahngo Pahngo. Westerners, hearing it spoken by a native, easily mistake it for "bongo".

So now you know, and you can surprise and impress all of your Polynesian friends. And, by the way, the island of Tonga is pronounced

. . . All together now . . .

"Tong-ah" as in " a song a day keeps the blues away".




Here is the entrance to the harbor with its world-famous landmark, McDonald's.

 

In September 2009 the island suffered a tsunami triggered by a major (magnitude 8) earthquake in the Tonga trench, a very active subduction zone that stretches from just south of here all the way down to New Zealand. More than 30 people were killed, including a few predictable candidates for the Darwin Award who hurried out onto the beach to collect fish when the initial sea withdrawal exposed the outer sands. In the aftermath of extensive damage in the lowest areas, one of Samoa's two largest employers, Chicken Of The Sea tuna cannery, decided to close down and move the production to (I suspect) a highly automated modern factory in Georgia, despite the higher per employee labor costs. This threw 2000 people out of work. The other major employer is Starkist (Charlie the Tuna), and they are still going strong. The beach areas have been pretty well cleaned up, but we could still see ruined derelict buildings.

Here is an iconic tourist photo of an offshore island.

We saw several hermit crabs. This was the largest. There were also some very small ones with shells less than a centimeter in size.

 

This is Tyler taking a video of the crab as he scuttled about.

These luxurious busses transported us to Two Dollar Beach for a native show.

The girls and the boys each have their distinctive type of dance. The girls' dance includes lots of hula-like hip swinging and hand motions. The boys' dance is testosterone-fueled and warlike, sort of like the Mauri Haka.

 

A spectacular sky as we sailed out of Amerrican Samoa.

 

 

 

 

 

Posted from Tyler's iPad

6. Crossing the Equator

Tuesday, 9 OCT 2012

For the past couple of days we have been sailing SSW close to the 165th West Meridian of longitude, and this morning around 3:00 am we crossed the equator into the Southern Hemisphere.

 

This was an opportunity for "boys and their toys". I have a personal locator beacon, brand name SPOT, which records GPS location and every 10 minutes transmits a fix up to a satellite which relays it to a web server so you can track where we are and where we have been. I only turn SPOT on from time to time, and the satellite coverage here in the middle of the pacific may not be very good, so until I get to an Internet connection ashore I don't know whether any of this is actually getting through. Anyway, I set SPOT up last night in a nice open place and let it run, so we may have a record of the ship's track as we crossed the equator.

The URL, if you would like to see the track, is

http://share.findmespot.com/shared/faces/viewspots.jsp?glId=06Zs9aknPRupnm05cUUS576ZMvYGKCUVk

There must be a simpler form of the URL, which I will post once we get online, but the above should work if you copy it and paste it into the address box of your web browser.

Paula sat out on the stern veranda, well back in the full shade, for several hours yesterday doing some sewing and learned the painful way about the hazards of bright sunlight reflected off the open water.

You can see how effective her sunglasses are!

Coming next: Pago Pago, American Samoa, on Thursday.

 

Posted from Tyler's iPad

5. Hawai'i

Friday, 5 OCT 2012

Yesterday we docked in Hilo on the east side of the Big Island of Hawai'i. We visited the largest traditional Japanese garden in the US, the Liliuokalani Garden. Started by one of the beloved queens of the short-lived kingdom of Hawai'i, the garden was extensively remodeled and expanded after WW2 by a crew of experts from Kyoto as a gift to the US from the citizens of Japan who were grateful for our liberating them from the cruel tyranny and deception of the militaristic ruling class - - and, I suppose, for not eating their children as they had been assured we would if we invaded their sacred homeland.

 

This morning we pulled into Honolulu and have until 11:00 pm to explore. For time reference, Hawai'i does not observe Daylight Savings Time, so their time is GMT-10 hours, whereas EDT is GMT-4, so we are 6 hours earlier than Michigan.

 

Here is the iconic Aloha Tower, which is adjacent to the cruise ship pier. As we approached the harbor, the Aloha Tower was completely dwarfed by the modern skyscrapers behind it, so I was not able to pick it out until we actually entered the Harbor.

 

 

The Bishop Museum in Honolulu is one of the major attractions, and we had neglected to visit it during our only previous visit to Hawai'i, so that is where we spent our time today. I recommend it highly.

 

This is their whale, Moby Hueilo.

This evening we had dinner with Eileen Thom, sister of my brother Kerry's wife Marlene. It is always good to see Eileen. Several years ago she hosted our visit to Hong Kong when she was living there. And if you read our New Zealand blog from March 2010 you will see that we ran into her in Christchurch while we were each independently visiting, quite by serendipity. Unfortunately we neglected to take a photo this time.

Next stop is Pago Pago, American Samoa. We arrive Thursday, 11 OCT 2012 after another 5 days at sea. I am eager to discover what kind of Internet connection we can find when we get there. My iPad has Verizon cellular capability, so if Verizon serves Pago Pago we are all set. If not, maybe there will be an Internet cafe - perhaps even a McDonald's with wifi!

 

Posted from Tyler's iPad

4. Life Aboard the Volendam

Tuesday, 2 OCT 2012

The sea has been calm so far. It was a bit choppy on Sunday, but now we are several hundred nautical miles southwest of LA and it is very smooth. Here is Tyler in one of his most characteristic endeavors:

Our cabin is a special one. We are in the stern - the last cabin at the very back of the ship - with a partially obstructed view, on Deck 7, the Navigation deck. This is the deck where a lot of rich people are in their veranda cabins (their own private balcony) for which they paid twice as much as we did. Right outside our room is the stern veranda that is a landing for the outside stairs up to the dining cafeteria on Deck 8. But very few people ever use that staircase, so we essentially have our own almost private veranda. The steward was kind enough to put a couple of deck chairs out for us, so here we are in the lap of luxury for the price of an interior room!

 

Here is a view of the stern veranda:

 

Here is the sunrise out our window.

 

The laundry facility is adequate. The machines take quarters, and the ship's front desk is happy to sell you some. There seem to be enough machines that Paula doesn't have to compete much for access.

 

As the sun sets in the west it entertains us with a beautiful display off the bow.

 

 

 

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3. Aboard the MS Volendam in Long Beach Harbor

Saturday 29 OCT 2012

 

Two days ago (Thursday) we flew from Midland, MI, to Los Angeles. Here is Paula in the MBS airport:

 

We stayed Thursday and Friday nights at the Westin Long Beach Hotel, which is only about a mile from the Queen Mary and the cruise ship terminal.

 

Here is the Queen Mary:

 

The Volendam:

The Volendam is today considered to be a mid-size cruise ship, in the 60,000 ton class. She carries 1400 passengers and a couple hundred crew. There are a few ports that can't accommodate her size, and Holland America owns at least one smaller ship that visits such smaller ports. But Volendam can dock at most tourist locations, and if necessary can even anchor in a harbor and off-load people via shore-based tenders or even her own lifeboats. I've heard that there are now mega ships of more than twice her displacement and carrying 5000 passengers. I have no more desire to be on one than I do to fly on that giant Airbus A380.

The cruise ship terminal:

 

And the terminal building showing its proximity to the Queen Mary:

 

While we were there we saw this blimp framed above the container cranes:

 

The ship is scheduled to leave this afternoon at 5:00 pm PDT. Coming next: 5 days at sea to Hilo, HI.

 

Posted from Tyler's iPad