Maybe this isn’t something you’ve thought about but I have spent several hours, at least, thinking about the possibilities of uprooting literally each person on this ship’s life and turning it into a life aboard this ship. Parents with young children already have them here which would at least minimize the instances of broken homes and our community and our groups would only continue to grow stronger with further time together. We’d have student life events every night, oscillating wildly between outrageous themes along the lines of the most creative college frat parties, but only with much more welcoming environments and absolutely no objectification of women, and formal dinners where each person does indeed dress formal because at this point they’ve been on the ship for so long that they have been able to garner a formal wardrobe extensive enough to attend an event on the level of an upscale wedding three times per week without others being concerned about the pace that they are rotating their formal wear.

Over time people will grow up. College students will find themselves in relationships with their peers that develop into marriages and families and that is alright because we are only at about a third capacity of this ship right now. I worry about the crew members because most of their families are at home and so perhaps we will need to continue allow them to rotate at a set period of months which is desirable to them and also strikes a nice balance of familiarity to us, lest we not be friendly with our bartender or cabin steward.

My communications team will continued to report on the state of our community and the status of our now indefinite voyage. International attention will only continue to grow the longer we are outside of our initially only 26 day itinerary. Our blog posts will slowly and almost imperceptibly take on a tone of much grander importance. Our record will be the record of note for this renegade group and sometime hundreds of years from now a classroom full of space children will have these blog posts beamed into their brain helmets where they will almost certainly marvel at my brevity and wit and ability to so viscerally communicate a situation. In anticipation of an entire generation emulating my writing style, I will continue to attempt to run on the treadmill every day and yet I will still need to brace myself on the wall using my right hand for a yet to be determined amount of days or perhaps years.

And so if you’re onboard, literally and figuratively (I apologize), for this plan then here is what we will do. We won’t need a disappearance or anything of such dramatic proportions and instead a simple press release will suffice as long as it begins with ‘For Immediate Release’ and concisely details our plans to never stop sailing and never go home and never go back to our jobs and apartments even though we like them but feel like we are in an entirely different place and time while we are on this ship, so much so that we are not sure how we will re-enter a mindset such as the one we were comfortably in and not planning on changing anytime soon before we left only two weeks ago. We will outline our request that what we will affectionately call ‘real life’, but what we actually now know not to be real life, simply pause until we decide we’re done. This request won’t be granted but it will alleviate any concerns about unpaid bills and ruined credit in the short term. By the time those things become any sort of reality we will be so entrenched that we won’t care and we will worry about finding a way to have money later on.

And then we’ll do it. Sail until we would like to visit a country and then leave that country after somewhere between three and seven days and repeat the process for what we hope to be the rest of our lives but that kind of commitment is not something any of us are ready to give because we are just sailing and enjoying each other’s company and having fun and we don’t ever want this to change.

At the highest point in Lima, the site of a battle between Peru and Chile in 1881, the dichotomy of Lima, Peru and the rest of Peru, or at least the Andes Mountains which are in the middle of Peru, hit me hard. Peru covers 496,225 square miles but because I have a job on our floating home, I only had the chance to cover far fewer of them than would have been ideal. The promise of what lay in the Andes mountains, merely a half day’s plane flight away, cast a relentless pallor over anything I could have experienced in the urban sprawling Lima. Knowing that mountain villages full of men in muted ponchos and woven hats that shadow their eyes and women in colorful skirts whose smiles somehow seem able to communicate the entire culture of Peru were within a feasible distance but unattainable because of time and work was difficult. I lamented the loss of my still elusive plans to eat a guinea pig and ride an alpaca or a llama, depending on the circumstance and region.

Instead I found myself in the capital city Lima. The city is Peru’s largest and most fearful. Lima is a gigantic and dangerous concrete golem with people scurrying out of every orifice and over every exposed surface punctuated by cliffs that mark the beginning of the Pacific Ocean so breathtakingly gorgeous even in their overcast modesty they make suicide seem like a pleasant way to spend an afternoon. As a point in a perhaps simmering but completely unnecessary pity party, I distracted myself by wearing muted colors and speaking Spanish like only a half drunk American dead set on proving his absence of anything associated with being a tourist can.

[Several redacted paragraphs. Maybe some other time.]

Despite my melancholia, newly recaptured occasional angst and what we all can tend to think, positives in most non-alarming situations almost certainly outweigh negatives. Bet on positivity and have a fucking awesome weekend in Lima.

Moments:

1. I find myself in a bar where my companions and I are the only white people. As superficial an observation like this is, it adds a layer of satisfaction to most anything a traveler can find themselves doing. As the night hit a comfortable pace, American hip hop gave way to Spanish pop, most of it at a tempo which felt vaguely unfamiliar to my feet while my hips seemed to gain a certain rhythm that was absent two songs ago.

2. The deep satisfaction of conversing mostly competently in a foreign language that you have used your intelligence and persistence and gregariousness to make somewhat less foreign.

3. The continued rediscovery of my taste for meat. Apparently the poor boy-esque steak with a fried egg on top that I ate in a dirty cafe down a busy block in Lima is a traditional Peruvian dish. I hadn’t eaten a steak since I became vegetarian more than six years ago (and quit being one about four months ago). Cutting it was visceral. Eating it was primal. I felt powerful and like a man.

4. Surfing on a beach that was rumored to be closed due to an epidemic of dead dolphins. The last time I went surfing was on a beach in Cadiz with my friend and then roommate Har Rai. We were students on Semester at Sea at the time and his sense of adventure was much more finely honed at the time than mine was. I felt the pain of every one of his patient days spent doing something easy with me as I paddled out today and vowed never again to do something less adventurous than is absolutely possible. My surfing was poor but the water was warm and lessons learned were invaluable. I saw no dead dolphins.

5. I originally wrote this on several title pages torn from Tom Bissell’s book The Father of All Things. It’s violently destructive travel writing coupled with long historical asides about Vietnam and it makes me a better writer simply by having it in my backpack. I’m now sitting on a lawn chair on the top deck of our ship, the MV Explorer, and dictating my scrawled words that flow past and over Bissell’s introduction pages as we carefully navigate out of the Callao harbor and towards Ecuador. As much as it seems like I am making this up, there are fireworks being shot off of a Navy ship not 500 yards from us.

6. A travel hostel can be a powerful magnet, a force pulling like minded travelers into the same kitchen while a Peruvian man casually mixes Pisco Sours. Pisco Sours are some sort of alcoholic drink that seems to exist only in Peru and includes an entire raw egg. They’re great and only made better by talking to six vividly blonde Norwegian and Finnish women as my travel companions napped two doors over. I met a man who’s spent the last six months bouncing across South America. Later this week, he’s leaving Peru to drive long haul trucks full of fruit across Europe. He gave me an entirely new angle to consider when considering a career in long-haul trucking.

The Finnish girls were fascinated by my American roots and asked endless questions in broken English about what my apartment in Portland is like. In my black Levi’s, white Vans, and gray zippered hooded sweatshirt I stuck out my jaw and never felt more proud to be American (and so monochrome). They went out to find their friends to go out, and I went to wake my friends and attempt to guilt them into coming out and not sleeping away a still young night in Peru before we all shared knowing bleary-eyed looks over breakfast the next morning.

7. Two days until Ecuador and I almost don’t want to get there. This ship and the sea feel like home more than I could have possibly thought. My name is quite literally on the wall as a Semester at Sea supporter, adding a sense of pride and ownership. As a more unofficial contribution, two students in a cabin on the third deck of the ship sleep each night not knowing that on the back of the painting hanging over their beds is a short paragraph of advice from myself. I wrote it six years ago, and I don’t remember if it was wise or if it is not.

Each night waves reach their crests up our hull, trying to touch me as I lean over the railing and peer into the ocean. I am fulfilled and happy.

Etc:

Meals:

Friday

Breakfast: Large pile of eggs and bacon, MV Explorer

Lunch: Boxed lunch including Bologna sandwich, bus in the outskirts of Lima

Dinner: Salad, Peanut Butter & Jelly Sandwich, MV Explorer

Saturday

Breakfast: Large pile of eggs and bacon, MV Explorer

Lunch: Salad & Beer, Pedro’s, Lima

Dinner: Pollos a las Brazas, Pollo Picante, Lima

Sunday

Breakfast: Roll with jam, Dragonfly Hostel, Lima

Lunch: Aforementioned Poor Boy Steak, cafe of forgotten name, Lima

Dinner: Salad, Peanut Butter & Jelly Sandwich, MV Explorer

Taxis ridden: 2

Our 259 college students arrived at the ship today, fresh faced and and oddly mostly dressed in athletic gear. The main thing I learned is that sometime in my four or so years as an alleged real grown-up, college students have started looking like babies to me.

My recollection of myself as a college student was that I was super cool and confident and put together but I can practically smell the anxiety in the air around these kids. It’s a concept that I’m only vaguely familiar with, but this sentiment of mine may be called maturity.

I’ve fallen in with the student life team, resident directors and such. They’re a team in every aspect of the word, so much so that I’m touched they’ve adopted me as their own. And I’m really glad to have made friends.

I’m busy beyond anything I could have anticipated. My bag sits unpacked and neglected in my cabin. A blight on an otherwise wildly productive few days punctuated by nights of revelry. I’ll take it.

I have almost no sense of Costa Rica. It’s a country I’ve spent in busses wondering what it is about Spanish greetings that causes people to reply like they wouldn’t to the same greeting in their own language and hotel casinos winning and losing hands of blackjack and breakfast at a corner table, leering at my new colleagues, suspicious of anyone so lively before at least two cups of coffee before focusing on my eggs and the sheer joy of eating a meal you didn’t make yourself. I was starting to think I could get used to this, tropics these and a life lived at the pace of a snail but that changed last night. In between rainstorms and after meetings I grabbed a colleague and shambled down the gangway before we found ourselves watching soccer in a bar full of Costa Ricans and lit mostly by the television and the streetlights. I had no allegiance to either team but logic dictated we fall in easily with what we perceived to be the team of favor.

It was a moment lived content in the smallness of my existence but also just kind of enjoying my company and being a gringo in a bar with an intriguingly beautiful woman watching a sport I would absolutely not be watching had I been back home. We drank some sort of off-brand Costa Rican rum and ice and I wondered vaguely about the medical implications of the slowly melting ice in my drinks before deciding that the alcohol would likely neutralize any bacteria that could cause chaos in my digestive tract.

And this is where things became the stuff of adventure. As we walked back along the beach we decided to take a swim in the almost impossibly and unbelievably warm Pacific Ocean. And so we dove in. No moon, no stars and no romance, just the black Pacific, as welcoming in it’s warmth as it is ominous in its appearance.

I guess this is where I need to give context.

I’m on this ship in this country with these people going on this fucking incredible adventure because I am the communications coordinator for the Short Term 2012 voyage of Semester at Sea. Semester at Sea is a college study abroad program that takes students around the world on a ship. They’re in class while they are on the ship and free to roam when in port. In this case, it’s a quick jaunt through Central and South America in between semesters.

There are moments in your life that feel like a sea change. Sometimes they come in reeling, kicking and screaming. Knocking things down and making themselves known. Sometimes they creep and step quietly and impart themselves before you know it.

This is the latter. You finish college and flail around for awhile before finding a comfortable job with reasonable upward mobility and benefits. You start to feel ok but you’re also still young. Your youth lurks inside of you and dies in tiny painful increments every day. It’s the adventures you should be taking while you still can—a nagging voice remind you that in a few years your handsome days will be behind you and the thought of a taking a ship through the south of Central America and the north of South America will be laughably irresponsible and possibly even morally questionable.

So here I am, a chance at personal advancement as I head a team that serves as the dual chance to embrace my youthful tendencies towards adventure.

I’m about to travel around Central and South America, on a ship. I’m in charge of a team who is in charge of writing a blog and making various other social media outlets lively for Semester at Sea.

I like to think that my big decisions in the coming month will be things like whether or not I can pull off a traditional Panamanian hat, but more likely it will be the small things inherent with managing and inspiring talented creative people (and myself). I hope our team meshes and finds that rare form of chemistry and that they’ll speak about us in hushed tones in abandoned hallways as the god damn gold standard of voyage documentation excellence, especially punctuated by the writer at the head of it all who did things in travel writing that nobody realized was even possible but that he did because he is a fucking champ.