Taking the Long Way Home – Adventures on the Atlantic and in Africa

Aloha all,

Ever since my days as a seasick sailor during an attempted Pacific crossing in 2009, I've been a little hesitant about leaving solid ground for extended periods of time. But we're also not particularly fond of the 24+ hours of air travel it takes to get from Europe back to Hawaii. So this year, we tried something different on our way home: a transatlantic repositioning cruise from Barcelona to Miami aboard the Scarlet Lady from Virgin Voyages.

And since we always miss our friends after our long trips, we decided to invite as many as possible to join us. We were thrilled that Bern & Jill from Maui and Angel from Colorado signed up to sail across the Atlantic with us!

Ahoy, Sailors!
Pre-cruise stay with Bern, Jill & Angel
in Barcelona

Including our pre-cruise stay in Barcelona and post-cruise stays in Florida and Colorado, our journey home took 24 days instead of 24 hours. But we got to spend two weeks at sea with friends, set foot on the African continent for the first time, and see 20 baby alligators in the Everglades. 

And, as an added bonus, cruise ship food is considerably better than airline food. All things considered, quite the upgrade! We might trade plane for boat trips again in the future.

Gaudi’s Barcelona
Barcelona is an exciting city! We met Bern, Jill & Angel at our apartment on Plaça Reial, just off La Rambla. The building was constructed in 1850, coincidentally two years before Elisha Otis invented the first elevator. Apparently, staircases hadn't quite caught on yet, either. The stairs to our apartment on the sixth floor were so steep and narrow that they looked as if they had been squeezed into what was originally intended to be a ventilation shaft. 

But once we made it up there (and caught our breath), it turned out to be a great home base for exploring Barcelona.

Our two main objectives in Barcelona were:

1. Seeing as many works by Antoni Gaudi as possible

2. Eating as many seafood paellas as possible

We did pretty well on both accounts!

Just one of many seafood paellas

We decided to use the hop-on-hop-off buses to get around the city. We enjoyed the informative narration, the fun music, and riding around this exciting city on the open-air upper deck. It was a great way to get an overview of Barcelona.

We took a guided tour of Park Güell. Today, this is a very (and I mean VERY, VERY!) popular public park. But when Gaudí designed it between 1900 and 1914, it was intended to be an upscale, gated residential community for Barcelona's upper class. As such, it was a complete and utter failure. 

Only two of the planned 60 homes were built, and only one was ever sold. Apparently, wealthy Barcelonans of the time weren't quite ready to embrace Gaudí's vision of suburban living.

One of many beautiful details of Park Güell

As a public park and tourist attraction, however, it has become a roaring success! We were glad we had a guided tour to learn the background story, discover the hidden details, and understand the symbolism behind Gaudí's genius designs. Without a tour guide, it might have been just a walk in a crowded park.

Another one of Gaudí's many masterpieces in Barcelona was initially considered a complete failure as well. When Casa Milà was built in 1912, it was way ahead of its time. It was so unconventional that it faced widespread ridicule and mockery. People thought it looked unfinished and nicknamed it "La Pedrera," meaning "the stone quarry," as an insult.

It was considered so ugly that finding tenants was difficult, and wealthy neighbors worried about their property values plummeting because of the new eyesore next door.

Gaudi's Casa Mila - La Pedrera

Fast-forward a century, and it has become one of Barcelona's most celebrated buildings. More than a million (!) people each year pay over $30 to tour this unusual masterpiece. And I assume most of them are happy they did, just as we were. In recent decades, they have even embraced the original insult and proudly feature the nickname "La Pedrera."

Not bad for a building that was once considered an architectural disaster. It just goes to show that sometimes all you need is a hundred years and a good marketing department…and a uniquely talented artist.

Unlike Park Güell and Casa Milà, Gaudí's most famous masterpiece, La Sagrada Família, has been a roaring success even before its completion. It's so popular that we couldn't even get tickets to see the inside this time. I'm glad we got to tour it last year. It is spectacular inside and out.

La Sagrada Familia

I find it fascinating that a building designed more than a century ago can look so modern. It is clearly recognizable as a church, even though it looks completely different from any other church I've ever seen. There are so many intricate details that even seeing it just from the outside again revealed things we hadn't noticed before.

If Antoni Gaudí is looking down on Barcelona, he must be awfully proud of how beloved his work has become, more than 100 years after he was run over by a tram.

Some more tapas, another seafood paella, and it was time to set sail for America!

Setting Sail Across the Atlantic

Originally, I had hoped to find a transatlantic cruise that would sail past the Statue of Liberty and into New York Harbor, recreating the experience of early immigrants arriving in America. However, we ultimately chose the Scarlet Lady because we liked the concept of Virgin Voyages: no kids and no dress codes! The more southerly route also promised better weather, which we definitely enjoyed.

In front of the Scarlet Lady

Cruising from Spain, via the Canary Islands and into the Caribbean Sea, we followed pretty much the same route my namesake took in 1492.

There were two minor differences between our cruise and Christopher Columbus's voyage: We had better food, and we made a stop in Casablanca! For Sandra and me, this was our very first time setting foot on the African continent!

Casablanca, Morocco

Here's the irony about Casablanca: Our stop there was probably my favorite day of the entire five month trip this year, even though Casablanca itself ranks among my least favorite cities I've ever visited!

We decided to explore Casablanca on our own rather than book an overpriced shore excursion through the cruise ship. Virgin provided a shuttle from the pier into the city. Before the bus had even come to a complete stop, we were assauted by a herd of overly enthusiastic taxi drivers. 

Ironically, a guided tour with a knowledgeable local driver was exactly what we would have liked, and we would have been perfectly happy to pay for one. But the aggressive way it was being offered turned all five of us off. We made a quick escape on foot.

We knew it was less than half an hour's walk to the famous Hassan II Mosque. What we didn't know was what an adventure that short walk would turn out to be!

Just a few turns away from United Nations Square in the city center, we found ourselves in an area where we were the only tourists. 

The back alleys looked like something straight out of a movie set, complete with all the clichés one might associate with an old African city: Partially unpaved dirt roads lined with run-down houses, a mix of busy street vendors and people loitering, women carrying goods on their heads, animals (both dead and alive) for sale along the roadside, and old men who looked as if they had been playing cards since Humphrey Bogart was last in town.

In all my travels, I had never seen anything quite like it. It felt completely different from anywhere I had been before. Not dangerous, exactly, but unfamiliar enough that I didn't feel particularly inclined to pull out my phone and start taking pictures.

The locals mostly seemed to ignore us. They had clearly seen tourists before, but apparently the aggressive taxi drivers around United Nations Square knew better than to follow anyone weird enough to actually walk to the mosque.

And just as quickly as we had been immersed in this completely different world, we emerged from it again. About a block before the mosque, the scenery changed dramatically again!

The Hassan II Mosque

Just one block away from the dirt-poor 3rd world neighborhood stood one of the most fantastical and monumental buildings I have ever seen: The Hassan II Mosque!

Everything about the Hassan II Mosque is impressive. It is 210 meters (689 feet) tall! It can accommodate 25,000 worshippers inside and more than 100,000 if you include the outdoor courtyard! It sits right on the ocean and was partially built even over the water.

It is enormous, yet incredibly ornate in every detail. And what surprised me most was how new it is. It was constructed in just seven years, from 1986 to 1993. Compare that with Barcelona's Sagrada Família, which was started in 1882 and is STILL not finished!

Non-Muslims are allowed to visit the mosque at specific times on guided tours. The whole process was a little confusing, but it worked out better for us than we could ever have planned.

After paying admission, we entered through a side entrance where groups for tours in different languages were gathering. There was already an English-language tour in progress, but we didn't want to crash it, so we joined the next group.

We were very glad we did, because our tour guide, Mohamed, was amazing!

He was a practicing Muslim and explained, in a very informative and entertaining way, "how easy it is to be a Muslim." But what really surprised us was how open and honest he was.

Here are a few quotes I never expected to hear on an official tour of a mosque:

"It's really not necessary to have a fancy building like this. It means nothing for a true Muslim."

"There are good and bad Muslims."

"We don't like listening to the speeches before prayer. They're boring now that the government censors them."

"I'm not sure why there are so many conflicts between Muslims and Christians. We love Jesus! He is one of our prophets!"

I wish everyone could take a tour with Mohamed. The world would be a more peaceful place. His openness and willingness to talk about his faith, including its challenges and contradictions, made the experience particularly memorable and thought provoking.

Inside the Hassan II Mosque

The inside of the mosque is enormous. By some measurements, it is even larger than St. Peter's Basilica in Rome. But I was perhaps even more impressed by the basement, where they have endless rows of washing stations for the up to 25,000 worshippers who attend prayer services here.

There might be some, but I don't remember seeing a single washing station at St. Peter's!

We were surprised that the tour didn't seem to end when we exited the mosque. It wasn't until we were just about to board a tour bus that we realized that, the entire time, we had actually not been on an official tour of the mosque at all. We had inadvertently joined a completely different tour group!

That explained some of Mohamed's rather unexpected comments. Best mistake of the entire trip!

On the way back into town, we took the oceanfront route. It was slightly longer and very scenic, but considerably less exciting than our walk through the back alleys.

Our first day in Africa

By this time, we were getting hungry, which is a rather unusual feeling on a cruise. We wanted our one and only meal in Morocco to be a little more authentic than the modern mall by the cruise ship pier, but perhaps not quite as authentic as the fly-covered food stands along the roadside.

That middle ground seemed surprisingly hard to find. But by pure coincidence, we walked from a busy street straight into a peaceful courtyard with a fabulous, casual restaurant serving an array of colorful Moroccan dishes.

Exactly what we had been looking for!

Our colorful Moroccan lunch

The only other thing we wanted to see in Casablanca was the market. To be honest, that was less interesting than we had expected. One section was devoted to fresh fish and seafood, which wasn't really what we were "in the market" for. The rest was mostly cheap tourist souvenirs, clothing, and Berber rugs.

Bern and Jill spent some time considering the rugs, partly because apparently they are completely fireproof. We opted for something a little easier to fit into our luggage: a cup and a bottle as souvenirs from our first day in Africa.

Departing Casablanca

Las Palmas, Gran Canaria
Our next port of call was Las Palmas on Gran Canaria, by the way: the same place where Columbus stopped in 1492.

After our wonderful experience with the hop-on-hop-off bus in Barcelona, we decided to try the same thing in Las Palmas. We quickly learned that not all hop-on-hop-off buses are created equal.

This one provided almost no historical background, very little information about the sights we passed (sometimes none at all), and not even the fun music we had enjoyed in Barcelona. So we hopped off the bus in the old town and explored the town on foot.

View from the tower
of the Cathedral of Santa Ana

We toured the very impressive Cathedral of Santa Ana. Pope Leo had beaten us to it! He had visited just a few weeks earlier, on the first and only papal visit to the Canary Islands.

Inside Santa Ana

I enjoyed the audio-guided tour, the view from the church tower, and the impressive number of statues of Saint Christopher. Since my namesake is the patron saint of travelers, he was particularly popular in the Canary Islands, which were a common stopping point along the crossroads between Europe, Africa, and the Americas.

Just one of many
Saint Christopers in Gran Canaria

We also visited the Canary Museum, where we learned quite a bit about the shared identity of the Canary Islands and the Hawaiian Islands:

Both island chains were formed by a volcanic hotspot, both were first settled by humans a little over a millennium ago, both were subsequently taken over by another country, and both are facing similar challenges today because of their reliance on tourism as their main industry.

Talking to the gentleman working at the museum entrance for 20 minutes turned out to be considerably more informative than one hour of the narration on our hop-on-hop-off bus.

There was one big difference between Gran Canaria and Hawaii, though: At the Canary Museum, they were displaying human remains from the early native inhabitants, almost proudly. That would be a very definite no-no in Hawaii!

Tenerife – Remote Villages and Tiny Masca
Our third port of call was Santa Cruz on the island of Tenerife.
We wanted to see more of the island than just the town and had considered renting a car, hiring a taxi, or booking a guided tour. We know that shore excursions booked through cruise ships are notoriously overpriced, but in this case, we were very glad we booked one anyway.

Tenerife is terrific!

The tour was appropriately called "Remote Villages and Tiny Masca." It was worth the $160 per person just for the privilege of not having to drive those roads ourselves! The narration and lunch were extra bonuses.

The roads were as winding as the Road to Hana, steeper than the road up to Haleakala, and narrower than the road around the West Maui Mountains. 

Masca in the Mountains of Tenerife

The tour was scenic, informative, and exciting. We got to see a very different side of Tenerife, with spectacular mountain scenery and tiny villages tucked away in the hills. 

It was a great way to explore the island without having to worry about that oncoming traffic in the narrow switchback…or an overheated engine like the other bus in our group. Coincidentally, we had been on that other bus at first, until Bern got us to switch with surprisingly wise foresight.

The Dragon Tree

Life on the Open Sea
From there, we had more than a week on the open seas.
Friends who knew about my failed Pacific crossing asked whether we weren't worried about motion sickness. Others wondered whether we wouldn't get bored with so many days at sea.

I'm happy to report that neither turned out to be a problem!

It turns out that a modern 912 foot long cruise ship is slightly more stable than a 40 foot catamaran. There were times when we could feel some movement, but never enough to make any of us sick. Apparently, the secret to enjoying an ocean crossing is to choose a boat that is approximately 872 feet longer than the one that made you seasick!

Boredom was even less of an issue.

How we had pictures life on board...

...and how it actually was:

Party on the pool deck during "Scarlet Night"

To be honest, we had expected quite a bit of downtime. Time to sit in our hammock or by the pool, play games, read a book, or simply enjoy the endless ocean views.
Little did we know about the quantity AND quality of the onboard entertainment offered by Virgin Voyages!

Pretty much at any time on any day, there were multiple options: lectures, games, trivia contests, workout classes, concerts, pickleball, scavenger hunts, dance classes, dance parties, comedy shows, musical & acrobatic performances...and even a hilarious comedy show by a trained opera singer.

Unfortunately, Bern and I had to skip some of the dance classes just to squeeze in enough board game time.

We were also very impressed by the "Happenings Cast" and the rest of the crew. Everybody on board was friendly, upbeat, and helpful. The crew was incredibly international. For one scavenger hunt, we had to find crew members from as many different countries as possible. In less than an hour, we found 30 different nationalities and didn't even win the competition!

One of the reasons we picked Virgin Voyages was the lack of formal dress codes. Still, I didn't expect things to be quite THIS casual.

The atmosphere was wonderfully relaxed and inclusive. You could dress as casually, as fancily, or as ridiculously as you wanted and still feel like you fit right in.
After a few days on a cruise ship, it becomes particularly convenient when sweatpants count as perfectly acceptable attire. 

Cruise Ship Food vs. Airline Food
The Scarlet Lady has about 20 different places to eat, all included in the cruise fare, and all delicious.

You can go to any of them and order whatever you want. The portions were relatively small, but we were actively encouraged to order extras. Can't decide which appetizer you like? Order them all! And that vegetable entrée makes a great side dish!

In other words, the ship was practically designed to encourage overeating. And we were happy to cooperate.

One incident perfectly illustrates just how accommodating the restaurants were, and it also provided one of our biggest laughs.

After a fabulous dinner, Bern ordered a "port" with dessert. We still had some bar credit left, so why not enjoy a little port wine with dessert?

Well, our server heard a "k" instead of a "t." She was so eager to give passengers whatever they wanted that she didn't question the unusual request.

You should have seen Bern's face when he was presented with a full plate of sizzling pork chops instead of bread pudding for dessert!

Out of all the restaurants, "The Test Kitchen" was our favorite. It's an experimental restaurant serving dishes I had never heard of before. They also experiment with combinations that might never make it onto a regular restaurant menu, but some of them worked surprisingly well.

This is not a mushroom,
it's a dish made of mushroom
in the shape of a mushroom

The dessert served with wasabi cream made me laugh out loud when I tasted it. I'm not quite sure why I laughed. It actually worked surprisingly well! I'd order that again if it makes it into the mainstream.

For those who know how much my family reveres the food at "Les Alpages", our favorite little hotel in France: Yes, The Test Kitchen was THAT good!

Florida – Back on Land
After crossing the endless seeming Atlantic, you might think we would have been excited to see land again. But we really weren't! For one thing, we arrived in Miami in the middle of the night. More importantly, we would have loved for the cruise to last a little longer. Or even a LOT longer!

Miami Harbor - Back in the USA

We said farewell to our fellow sailors in Miami, while Sandra and I stayed another three days in Florida. We had hoped to go scuba diving in the Keys, but unfortunately, the weather had other plans, and our dive trip was canceled.

At first, Florida was swaying just about as much as the Scarlet Lady. But again, not enough to make us sick and it stopped after a couple of days. Once in Miami, we rented a car and started by touring the impressive Vizcaya House and Gardens:

Vizcaya House and Gardens in Miami

The next two days were spent exploring Key Largo and Key West. We even got a little presidential history and a little National Park fix.

Although Harry Truman might be our favorite president, we hadn't known that he had used a home on the Navy base in Key West as his "Little White House" on multiple visits during his time in office.

With Harry Truman
at the Little White House
 in Key West

Cuban Society at the San Carlos in Key West

Iguana in Key West, invasive, but pretty cool

It's always nice to discover a little history & interesting critters, even if it wasn't quite the underwater adventure we had originally planned.

We also visited Everglades National Park. The boat tour through the backcountry canals and lakes was very nice, but our favorite part came at the very last stop on our way out.

Right underneath a boardwalk in the swamp, we saw a mama alligator with 20 tiny baby alligators!

Alligator with her babies

You have to look closely, but if you zoom in, you can see some of the 20 baby alligators on that picture. So cute! Fortunately, they were far enough away that we weren't tempted to pet them.

Colorado and Homeward Bound
On our way home, we also stopped for three days to visit our Colorado ohana.

We got plenty of game time with Kelly and Paul and even saw a MLS soccer game. We had two very nice dinners with Bunt and there is some pretty exciting news: He's moving back to Maui soon!

Dinner with Bunt & Kelly
at "The Perfect Landing"

We certainly understand the urge to return to Maui. As much as we love traveling, we're pretty darn excited to finally be home after five months on the road, in the air, and on the seas.

It's been an incredible journey, with wonderful friends, fascinating places, plenty of adventures, and an almost unreasonable amount of good food.

Unfortunately, there has also been bad news. While we were gone, a friend on Maui passed away and one is currently very sick. There is also a sad update to my last blog post from Europe, when I was raving how well my parents were doing. My mom took a fall and broke her femur. She is currently in rehab. We are tempted to go back and help out. But sitting in a plane for 24 hours does not feel tempting. I'll start looking for a repositioning cruise from Hawaii to Germany.

And that's the news from Lake Atlantic, where all the sailors were happy, all the food was delicious, and the sea was definitely less angry than average.

Aloha,

Chris & Sandra