How to occupy your time? You will spend much of it disconnected. Mobile signal only appears sporadically within the proximity of villages. Though that doesn’t stop the populace from abusing the phones anyway: video games, music, downloaded content. So be on your smartphone. I’m not the jury nor the judge (nor the plaintiff). Now as I don’t have one, the boat regime hardly made a difference. Didn’t even open my tablet for offline writing: not once during the days spent hovering the littered Ucayali river. I did listen much to the MP3 player though. Tougher without the music. Though manageable. Philosophically. Now why so many others refuse the headphones, I can only speculate. As for the remainder, what does that leave?
Plenty. Write in the paper notebook. Read that book. Read poetry. Write some, if you have the creative energy (a challenge with the fluvial nutrition). Play card games, board games, social games, or mind games. Prepare your vegetable salad. Slice an orange.
But better yet, be a philosopher. Ponder. Brainstorm. Compose lists. Practice Latin. Practice Capoeira. Speaking of that, do exercise. Seriously. Nobody will be exercising. But you will: you, and the band of kids delighted to exert a boatload of energy. Everyone else will just wane and wane in those hammocks. Nothing inherently wrong with that. But not for endless hours. Don’t rot away like that. Move around. As a matter of fact, hammock-fastening (and laundry-hanging) metal rods everywhere extend through the ceilings. Use those for pullups. Never encountered such an abundance of pullup apparatus. A pullup utopia, that cargo ship. Then meditate. Indifferent to the noise. Or wash your laundry. It’s the same thing. Reflect on the simplicity of things. On the rusticity. Observe the visuals, intake the audio. You are traversing Amazonia. Glamorous surroundings abound. Jungles on end. Little dolphins hopping along on a rare occasion. Boat vendors. Garbage. Albatross. Figuratively speaking.
Lest I forget. Do converse. In great probability you’ll make the only foreign face around the ship. And you will draw endless glances of curiosity and (what might appear) stupefaction. But feel free to engage, especially the passengers in your part of the deck. Especially at mealtime. For one needs to be a philosopher at mealtime. Mock your own self destruction.
Questions, comments? Connect.