Now, lest you think that, as per the last post, TDI voyages are overly eggheady, we wish — with this post — to assure you this is decidedly not the case. We have blood pumping through our veins too.  And since we’re all mature adults here, we can let you in on a secret. We normally don’t publish this in the brochure, but as a special, optional extra available only on our Historic Cities of the Sea, Mediterranean Music Festival,  Journey of Aeneas, and Journey of Odysseus voyages — as well as a devious little departure from your kids on board Voyage to the Lands of Gods and Heroes –

we can take you to a brothel.

Don’t worry. This brothel’s been out of service for 1,928 years. After painstaking restorations, ancient Pompeii’s brothel was opened to tourists in 2006. Known as the Lupanare (after the Latin for she-wolf, which was ancient slang for a prostitute) it contains naughty frescoes much, much more salacious than

this one — which we will not show you, but we won’t mind terribly if you peruse them here. “It’s like a menu,” is what the tour guides like to say. But, according to Spiegel Online, these were highly idealized sexual images; the reality of prostitution in Pompeii was less erotic:

The windowless chambers where the prostitutes worked were separated from the anteroom only by curtains. Archaeologists discovered marks on the stone blocks that indicate customers didn’t even remove their sandals during sex… “In fact, this place where people went in search of pleasure was probably profoundly joyless.” That’s how an article in the German archaeology journal Abenteuer Archäologie sums up what scientists know about the brothel. “The cramped and uncomfortable chambers, stuffy and blackened by soot from candles, couldn’t have offered any very cultivated form of pleasure,” according to the article.

Pompeii’s prostitutes were mainly slaves of Greek or Oriental origin. But that’s only one reason why they were available so cheaply. Former slaves often continued to work in the sex trade. They hadn’t been trained in any other profession, and so they often had no real alternative. And not all women who worked as prostitutes were slaves. Customers had all sorts of women to choose from, and this may have helped to keep prices low.

However the London Times article notes that

There was even some evidence that Roman women frequented brothels for sex with male prostitutes.

It is lucky that we can see the more “adult” side of ancient Pompeii. The Times also notes that

Erotic objects found during the 18th and 19th-century excavations were considered so salacious they were kept in a “secret cabinet” at the National Archeological Museum in Naples, to which only those deemed to be of “mature age and respected morals” were admitted. The objects include a statuette of the god Pan copulating with a goat, and numerous phallic symbols, considered by the Romans to be good luck or fertility charms.

In other words, what TDI offers isn’t your grandfather’s Baedeker cruise.

One of our most exciting travel offerings this year is a late-December exploration of West Africa, beginning in legendary Casablanca, and concluding in Dakar, Senegal, on New Year’s Day 2009 — aboard the 114-guest, all-suite Corinthian II.

You can see the full itinerary here (and it’s really spectacular on its own) but we’d also like to introduce the two scholars who will be exploring this region with us, providing a lecture series en route. They are two Westerners teaching at Al Akhawayn University in Ifrane, Morocco, and their fields of interest are especially intriguing. One thing that makes TDI voyages unique is their ability to put you in touch with cutting-edge, up-to-the-minute research about the world in which we live. “Desert Kingdoms of West Africa” is a perfect example:

Dr. John Shoup, who last traveled with us aboard “Coexistence of Cultures and Faiths” in 2005, is a cultural anthropologist with a BA and MA in Middle Eastern Studies from the University of Utah, and a PhD in Cultural Anthropology from Washington University in St. Louis. While he has conducted extensive field work throughout West Africa, I was especially struck by an essay of his in Transnational Broadcasting Studies: “As it Was, and As it Should be Now: Al-Andalus in Contemporary Television Dramas.”

As he explains it, beginning in 2001, Arabic satellite television has been broadcasting a number of excellent historical dramas. Their first broadcast is scheduled during the traditional Ramadan lineup — guaranteeing maximum viewership — and all have been concerned with Al-Andalus, or Moorish Spain and North Africa. Dr. Shoup notes,

The choice of Al Andalus is interesting; a place no longer Arab or Muslim, but where the Arabs, Berbers, and local peoples produced one of the most brilliant periods of Arab/Muslim civilization. Yet, it is gone today, with only glimpses into what it was through architecture, music, and poetry. The loss of what was the confidence and strength of Umayyad Al Andalus, the multicultural and multi-religious nature of the society, the tolerance and understanding between peoples, can be contrasted with the current Arab world in which there is little tolerance or understanding.

Dr. Shoup details the historical plotwork of these dramas, and finds that the analogies to current events are unmistakeable:

Arab states are weakened from the outside by military threat, but the real weaknesses – the ones that really matter – are internal to the Arab and Muslim world. The series ends with the question when will the Arabs and Muslims be great again? When will the social strengths so exemplified in the Andalusian model be realized in the modern Arab Muslim experience? According to the serial’s logic, it is clear that neither multiculturalism nor religious diversity prevented Arabs and Muslims from becoming a great power in the past. On the contrary, these were among the characteristics that made Al Andalus such a vibrant civilization. The problem is not that Arabs and Muslims are battling external military threats, whether from Israel or the United States. Instead, the problem is that the Arabs and Muslims no longer believe in their own possibilities, and when they revive this belief, then they will “recapture” the spirit of Al Andalus and not before.

The remarkable thing about these shows is that they are cooperative ventures between Syrian, Jordanian, Moroccan, and Emirati TV, and feature well-known actors from all these nations as well as Egypt and Saudi Arabia. Actors are both Muslim and Christian, playing characters who are Muslims, Jews, Animists, and Christians. The shows are largely financed by the United Arab Emirates. Dr. Shoup writes, “Andalusian society is shown to be tolerant of others and does not reject ideas from non-Muslim sources. The scientists at the court of Amir Hakim I and Amir abd al-Raman II quote the works of classical Greek scholars. All of the serials emphasize the common cultural heritage of Islam and Christianity.” Dr. Shoup concludes,

What is…interesting is the emergence of a new self-criticism. While self-criticism in film and television is not new, its application in these series is. Instead of blaming the current conditions in the Arab world on foreign intervention or past colonialism, the weakness of the Arab-Muslim world is placed firmly on their own shoulders. As portrayed in these series the fall of Al Andalus was due to the lack of unity and commitment by not only its rulers but also its people. Weak and corrupt governments produce an apathetic population who feel they have no stake in the state… Such self-criticism is a new and positive change within the Arab world, and, it is ventured here that it is the reason for the great popularity of these historical dramas.

Read the full essay here.

Our other lecturer, also from Efrane, is Eric Ross. Born in Turkey, Eric Ross is a Canadian citizen with degrees in Geography (BSc. 1986, MSc 1990 Université du Québec à Montréal) and in Islamic Studies (PhD 1996, McGill University). He is a cultural and urban geographer and has conducted extensive research on Sufi brotherhoods and Muslim towns in contemporary Senegal. The resulting book, Sufi City: Urban Design and Archetypes in Touba, was published by University of Rochester Press in 2006. Since 1998 Ross has been teaching a variety of geography and methodology courses at Al Akhawayn University in Ifrane, Morocco, and earned the rank of Associate Professor in 2006. He regularly conducts field trips across Morocco and has visited many countries in north and west Africa and the Middle East. In 2001-2002 he contributed to a multidisciplinary study on cultural heritage, tourism development and urban planning in Essaouira, Morocco, and is currently researching the historic trans-Saharan trade in Arabic-language books and manuscripts. He has written numerous encyclopedia articles and has expertise in cartography and the use of satellite imagery.

As you can see from this precis on his book Sufi City, Professor Ross will be invaluable in considering the geography and urban planning of Islamic cities, and the religious iconography that informs these cities’ physical layout.

In October, Travel Dynamics International retraces The Aeneid in the Mediterranean. Today, in the Chronicle of Higher Education, we learn about a new approach to Virgil’s epic:

For more than 2,500 years, classical epic has been the province of men: written by, for, and about them, and passed down through the centuries by male translators. One could certainly describe Virgil’s Aeneid as a manly poem. From its arms-and-the-man opening to its climactic blood bath on the battlefield, the Latin epic tells a tale of exile, combat, and slaughter, with a body count rivaling that of Homer’s Iliad. Women figure mostly as collateral damage.

In what appears to be a first, however, a woman has finally tried her hand at bringing Virgil’s dactylic hexameters to a modern, English-speaking public. This month Yale University Press publishes a blank-verse translation by the poet and classicist Sarah Ruden…..

[The Aeneid] raises an urgent question — What price empire? — even as it creates a foundational myth of how a great empire came to be. In an age that has had its fill of war and foreign adventures, Virgil’s epic, written 2,000 years ago, still speaks volumes…..

Our own recent, bloody history makes it easy to hear echoes in Virgil’s tragedy. That has made the Aeneid even more appealing to a post-Vietnam generation of translators.

“Particularly when you get meaningless wars like World War I, Vietnam, and Iraq, the legitimacy of death gets questioned,” says Richard F. Thomas, a professor of Greek and Latin and director of graduate studies in the classics department at Harvard University. “This is a poem that activates that question pretty well: Is Rome worth it?”

After completing her doctorate, Ruden found her first teaching job at the University of Cape Town. Living in South Africa, a country still gripped by turmoil at the end of apartheid, she says she came to understand how Virgil felt about the brutality of civil war….

“How imperial conflict works itself out isn’t an academic matter for me,” she explains. “The Aeneid isn’t a stiff antiquarian pageant. It’s immediate and primal. ‘They’re taking our stuff! They want all of it! They’re killing us for it! Let’s kill them first!’”

“I don’t believe I put the slightest strain on the Latin in trying to echo Virgil’s defensiveness and helpless grief,” she says, “but first I had to understand it, and Africa gave me that gift.”

Read the whole article here, and learn more about Virgil’s epic on TDI’s fascinating voyage — an epic of its own — here.

…on The Road to Timbuktu and the Rivers of West Africa.

TDI’s textual archaeologists have been digging, and they have unearthed a rare find: an epistle by the writer Mary Lee Settle on the lure of ancient cities. We think it captures the essence of where we travel, why we travel, and how we travel, and it bears quoting in full. She writes:

How many miles to Babylon
Three score and ten
Can I get there by candlelight?
Aye, and back again.

FROM THE NURSERY RHYMES THROUGH the fairy tales and into the yearning to travel that comes after - the city is there, the one that has caught the rhythms of dreams and silence. I can go. I can find it - Baghdad, Ecbatana, the Cities of the Plain, Troy and Carthage and Trebizond and Petra and Lhasa -whatever legendary city has been in my mind and sometimes in my dreams since childhood. I must unearth it, or crawl through labyrinths, or dive, or go by donkey, or simply sit and dream.

A legend is a story that no one can take away from you. It is secret. It must be as far away in place as Shangri-La, as deep in time past as the dreams of Miniver Cheevy and in time future as adolescent hopes - neither mundane here nor mundane now. It is a place to be discovered on one’s own, whether in reality, as Heinrich Schliemann did when he followed his own dream to the Troad, or in poetry.

We hope for the rose-red city half as old as time, the kingdom by the sea, Xanadu or Innisfree - and all the cities of the Bible that we know are there somewhere under the sand, whether they have been found yet or not, as Babylon was sought and found, Babylon that had fallen, that great city. Some day, some time, we promise ourselves in the evening or in winter or in times of yearning for something beyond what we see out of our own windows, we will go to those places. And when we get there, we may find the Ecbatana that no one says exists. We will stand on the hill at Hisarlik where Schliemann found nine layers of his Troy; we will sit in the sun on a stone that once was Carthage, or follow Sir Leonard Woolley to the Minoan cities of Crete.

What matter if when we stand in the ruined holy place that once was the Artemision at Ephesus - where St. Paul preached against the Diana of the Ephesians, the most powerful goddess in all Asia - there is only a drained swamp with a single column where once was a great temple? What matter if little is left because what was not destroyed by earthquake, the Empress Theodosia took to Constantinople to grace the Santa Sophia, and that we were brought there in an old Chevrolet or a jeep from World War II, what matter any of that, if we can conjure up the dreams that brought us there?

The past requires a way of seeing, not an object, as one might see still that youth and beauty haunt an old woman’s face, or glimpse the young soldier when an old man stands to attention at the sound of a national anthem, or sense even in a tourist-ridden place that if we go slowly enough, listen closely enough, we could catch a shadow or hear a sigh.

In the corridor above the chapel at Hampton Court, haunted by Jane Seymour, in the Tower of London in the legendary city that is layered under the presence of modern London, in the Place de la Bastille, in the Colosseum, in the Domus Aurea of Nero, at the ruins of Jericho, in Topkapi watching over the Bosporus, beyond the traffic of Athens to the silence in winter of the Acropolis, in the Winter Palace or at Versailles, or at the base of those worn stairs at Canterbury, what has passed in those places becomes timeless.

The facts we have learned desert us. Only the legend is left, the residue of all the years of garnered power or prayer or murder. Even the curiosity we came with deserts us and we let ourselves dream and listen.

It is an archeology of vision, the completion of a column that lies on the ground or has become a doorsill, the edge of a house that long ago was incorporated into another and another so that there is a calendar of uses over the centuries, the mental building of a great wall from a heap of stones, the coloring of a statue from a fragment of paint that is left. We all care for ruins and for hints because they are incomplete and because we are called upon to raise them into wholeness from the shards of their survival.

We, too, can sit among the ruins and think of the deaths of kings. The wind that blew on the face of the sibyl blows across our faces at Delphi, the meltemi that rises in the afternoon in the Aegean caught the prow of Odysseus’ ship, and the call of the night birds is like the Sirens’. What if in Jerusalem the Via Dolorosa is filled with peddlers of holy trinkets? The stones are sacred, and there is a way to see it still, to be there in the legendary city, and leave behind the noise around you.

Those moments when the legend and the reality meet must always be surprises. They cannot be willed; there is no trying. There is only waiting and patience and being there. I lived once in the town of Bodrum, on the Aegean coast of Turkey. I wandered in its castle, built by the Knights of Rhodes, picked flowers when the anemones and the wild tulips covered the hillsides. I knew that it had once been the city of Halicarnassus, and that one of the Seven Wonders of the World had been built to look over its harbor. I had even seen what there was of the Mausoleum in the British Museum. But it was not until I walked one day around the outer walls, nearly seven miles long, that ringed the ancient city, and stood at the western gate, little more than a pile of rocks in a field now, that I looked down on the city that Alexander had laid seige to. I could see the places of its temples and its stoa. It was as if a plan lay there in the distance under the modern town.

I lived for six weeks in the city of Perugia and I thought I knew every turn, every bit of history, the medieval gates, ruined arches, fountains, fragments of old palaces. I knew with my head all that had happened there, the blood feuds, the battles, the prisoners, the sanctuaries, year on year piled on that hill overlooking the fought-over valley between Perugia and Assisi. I found a Roman temple turned into a Christian church, and I studied the harsh paintings of the Umbrian saints, the color of earth.

Then, one day when I did not expect it, or watch or look or try to conjure it, I realized, passing through a great thick gate, that I was walking into an Etruscan citadel. Something of the strength of that almost unknown culture brushed past my eyes.

These are the glimpses and the surprises that come from the past. But what about the legends of cities of the future, the cities of hope? No matter how travel-stained the dream might be, New York is that, the newest frontier, the place for the young and the courageous and the fugitive that the Old West once was. And what about Hong Kong Central, with its future rising in glittering high-tech towers that catch the glinting of the South China Sea, while the street-corner altars still scent the air with joss; or San Francisco, the newest of all, perched on the western edge of the continent, the most Eastern of the Pacific cities that reflect the vision of Asia?

And there is the greatest legend of all, the city you have not seen. I have never been to Venice, and yet I seem to know every stone, the paving stone in front of San Marco where Proust stumbled, the street where Hugo von Hofmannsthal placed Andreas, the carnivals and the wide-angled facades of Guardi and of Canaletto. I have mourned with Thomas Mann, and I have been there with Isak Dinesen. So Venice, and Florence, and Prague, too, the cities I have not seen, are my legendary places, the places that I can foresee. But I know that when I go there, I must not seek out only what I already expect. I must wait and wander as I have done before, and let the legendary city come to me.

From the London Times, we get a rapturous travel report on the breathtaking Namibian desert:

Before long I’m transfixed by the ever-changing shades of the golden, grassy savannahs, dwarf plants eking out an existence along the misty coastline and the multitude of uses these plants offer local tribes.

But we can do better than words. Here’s what it looks like:

And this is just one moment of one day in our month-long voyage along the Atlantic coastline of Africa from the Cape of Good Hope to the Rock of Gibraltar.

The New York Times reviews William J. Bernstein’s impressively comprehensive “A Splendid Exchange: How Trade Shaped the World,” a new history published in the last month. “‘A Splendid Exchange’ is a splendid book,” the reviewer concludes, and so much of this book’s territory is TDI’s as well:

Ancient Mesopotamia was richly endowed with fertile soils and water from the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, but it lacked stone and wood for building, and metals like copper for tools and weapons. The Sumerians, however, had surplus food to trade, so they could bargain for stone from near the headwaters of the rivers, wood from what is now Lebanon and metal from Sinai, Cyprus and elsewhere.

The scope of ancient trade was immense. A single Bronze Age shipwreck around 1350 B.C. near Bodrum, a Turkish coastal town, yielded no less than 10 tons of copper and a ton of tin ingots along with other merchandise like ivory. (The ideal ratio of copper to tin for making bronze is 10 to 1.)

By Roman times vast armadas ferried Egyptian grain, Greek wine, Spanish copper and silver, and a hundred other commodities around the Mediterranean. India has yielded rich troves of Roman coins that reached that subcontinent to pay for spices the Romans coveted, especially pepper. Chinese silk — literally worth its weight in gold — traveled through the heart of Asia on the Silk Road to reach markets in the West.

As the West collapsed at the end of antiquity, so did its long-distance trade. Few Roman coins dating later than A.D. 180 are found in India, as the Roman economy began to run out of gold and silver. The Arabs came to dominate the major trade routes of the Indian Ocean after the rise of Islam. And as Western Europe revived economically, a lively trade developed between rising powers in Venice and the Middle East. (Venice supplied slaves from the Crimea and Caucasus in exchange for spices and sugar.)

When the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople slammed shut the sea route to the Crimea, Europe began seeking other routes to reach the resources of the East and eliminate the middleman. Columbus sailed west in 1492 and stumbled onto the New World. Vasco da Gama reached India in 1498, having rounded the southern tip of Africa. The modern world began, thanks to trade.

The history of global trade is so long and so vast that Mr. Bernstein could have easily produced a toe-breaker of a book. Happily he has not. By treating many aspects thematically rather than strictly chronologically, he shows in fewer than 400 pages of readable type how people and nations have faced the same problems over and over and often solved them the same way.

The poor soil and scant rain of ancient Greece, for instance, meant that the terrain’s ability to grow grain was limited, but grape vines and olive trees grew in abundance. To export its wine and olive oil, Athens developed a pottery industry to supply the jars in which those products were transported. As Greek trade, and colonies, flourished across the length and breadth of the Mediterranean and the Black Sea, naval power was needed to suppress piracy. To control choke points like the Dardanelles and Bosporus, which led to the rich grain lands of what is now Ukraine, the Athenian empire developed.

A good book to take on board for one of our Grand Voyages, without a doubt.

Want to get away from it all?
You know the “it all” of which we speak.

The “it all” is pretty comprehensive across the globe these days, and unless you’ve got the constitution of an ox, $20 million not otherwise occupied, and some time to kill on a waiting list, it’s unlikely that you’ll be getting beyond the gravitational pull of the planet’s “it all” any time soon.

The good news is that, after 40 years sailing around the globe, Travel Dynamics International knows where the “it all” isn’t all that. In fact, the “it all” isn’t very much at all in these places.  It’s hard to get “it all” when you’re 2,088 miles from the coast of South America and 1,750 miles from the coast of South Africa: in other words, smack dab in the middle of the south Atlantic with nary a cellphone tower around.

We’d like you to meet a friend of ours. His name’s Tristan. Tristan da Cuhna, to be proper, and we should be proper, since he is British, after all. That’s his picture up there, at the top. Attractive gent, isn’t he? A bit austere, but dignified, with a noble profile. He doesn’t really understand the meaning of “it all,” because he’s the most remote inhabited island on Earth.

Tristan only got television reception in 2001. In 2005, finally, Tristan got a UK postcode which is very fortunate because its main town, Edinburgh-of-the-Seven-Seas, was getting confused with its northern namesake — and that’s a few degrees of latitude further than a British postman wants to travel.

Tristan’s population of 271 has a total of only 8 family names: there are the Glasses, the Greens, the Hagans, the Lavarellos, the Repettos, the Rogers, the Swains, and — as of 1986 — the Pattersons. And they serve up a fantastic dinner: the entire island survives on lobster fishing, and because Tristan is so remote, so inaccessible to the overfishing trawlers, they grow big here: 40-pounders are not at all uncommon.

We’d like you to meet Tristan on our voyage “The Route to Distant Islands.” We’ve scheduled this itinerary so that you can also meet one of his good friends, South Georgia Island:

They may be distant, but I think you’ll find Tristan da Cuhna and South Georgia Island are both excited to meet you.

They went to Delphi, the Earth’s center, to visit Phoebus’ Oracle, and prayed to him to grant them his aid in their misery, to give them some oracle that would restore their health and put an end to the evils of their great city. The ground, the laurel tree and the quivers which the god himself carries, all trembled together and, from the depths of the shrine, the sacred tripod uttered words, making the listeners’ hearts quake with fear… (Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Book XV)

Up on the slopes of Mount Parnassus, in the time before Time, the young god Apollo slew the monster Python and founded a shrine commemorating the event. It was the omphalos, the navel or center of the world, and Pegasus swooped in and stamped his hoof and cracked the ground from which came forth the Castalian Spring, pluming underground waters bearing a sweet perfume. (Of the last, so said Plutarch.) Down in an enclosed subterranean chamber, the Pythian Sibyl sat on a three-legged stool, breathed in the vapors surrounding her, swooned into a trance, and uttered delirious visions that would be translated, by the Pythian Priestesses, into prophesies that would command the fortunes of the kings of the world.

The Sibyl was a huffer.

In 2001, geologists discovered that two geologic faults intersected directly beneath the ruins of the Delphic Shrine. About every hundred years, earthquakes rattle the faults, heating the adjacent rocks and vaporizing the hydrocarbon deposits stored in them. The result: ethylene vapors, which, inhaled in concentration, produce a sense of disembodied euphoria. It is no longer a myth or a tall tale: that’s how the Pythian Sibyl received her visions from Apollo. Read more about the Delphic Oracle’s drug use here and here.

See Delphi and get a whiff of myth on Travel Dynamics International’s Landmark Sites of the Mediterranean: Greece, Sicily, North Africa, and Spain from November 9-28, 2008.

If you are lucky, as you’re sailing with us aboard the Corinthian II in Antarctica, you might catch a glimpse of these absurdly beautiful banded icebergs. Formed by the pressurized compression of ice, plus rapid melting and re-freezing, they are truly stunning to encounter. Click here for some astonishing images.