Twenty years ago I took three months away from college to take a ship around the world. Well, not me personally. I didn’t drive the thing, but I was on it. It left from Vancouver, British Columbia in September of 1992 headed for Japan, followed by Taiwan, Hong Kong, Malaysia, India, Egypt, Turkey, Ukraine, Spain, and Venezuela. It was only three months, but it changed my life forever.
It’s an amazing thing. Semester at Sea is a school, so its not all fun and games. But what blows my mind is the freedom the students have. The ship lands in a country – for anywhere from 3 to 7 days – and just lets you go. Bye. Be back in a week. When I did it, cell phones and text messaging and Foursquare and Google Earth and Trip Advisor didn’t exist. Once you left the ship nobody had any idea where you were. You were gone and then you came back.
I was twenty years old at the time. And I did all sorts of stupid things. I rode a moped through Toroko Gorge in Taiwan, with no helmet (they didn’t even offer them) and a fellow student trusting me with her life holding on behind. Crazy. I drank snake blood in Taipei. I wandered through the streets of Cairo and got lost. I got a horrible case of food poisoning in Luxor. I sang karaoke–a ridiculous idea of fun that I was sure would never make it off the island of Japan. A shark rubbed up against my leg when I was swimming in the Andaman Sea off Langkawi Island. I rented a car in Caracas, Venezuela, fully expecting there to be some sort of organizing principle on the roads. I was in over my head at almost every turn.
I did things, out of sheer ignorance, that I would never do today. Not that I don’t still try. They make up some of my fondest memories. I learned more about the world in those three months than in all the rest of college combined (note: the rest of college combined consisted almost entirely of beer.)
When I got back from my journey, landing in New Orleans on December 21, 1992, it was a tough transition. You can’t talk about your experiences to people who think the entire world takes place in Texas. And it’s hard to sit still once you truly find out how big the world is. I would often fall asleep thinking to myself, “right now Muhammed is practicing one of his twelve languages on tourists, driving them in his horse drawn taxi through Luxor.” “Right now villagers in India are cooking dinner.” “Right now someone in Keelung is completely butchering Elvis’s discography.” “Right now someone in Japan is buying a beer the size of a propane tank out of a subway vending machine.” “Right now someone is getting in an ill-advised Raki drinking contest with a bull-necked Turk.”
Semester at Sea opened up the world to me. It provided a small sample of different cultures and languages and places and people and left me desperate for more. It started me on my life-long passion for seeing as much of the world as I can. It also taught me the value of making things up as you go. To this day my preferred mode of travel is improv. I don’t like to know what I’m doing next. I learned, all those years ago, that if you don’t know where you’re going, you can go anywhere.
Semester at Sea is still around and still going strong. To learn more about Semester at Sea (they also take adults) go here.
