January

January 17

Oliver, my fellow passenger, has been very kind to let me use his precious internet! I am running out of time, however, and promise to add more pictures as I can. Meanwhile, I hope you will accept mostly text!

January 7, 2020

The social engagements increase! We had a New Year/good bye to departing crew/Happy Birthday to the Captain party on January 4. I asked the Captain how many birthdays he had celebrated aboard a ship. He told me it was too many to count. I enjoyed a variety of conversations, learning more about the “Delta” area in Romania from Engineering Cadet (Mirel) and more about Filipino culture from Stewie, ate a delicious barbeque (I ate a whole squid carefully cooked by Vicente) and enjoyed a bit of karaoke later with Tom Jones and other great singers. I even became Olivia Newton-John.

This is our second day in China’s seas. I watched as we went over a tunnel in the Hong Kong strait. There are two long sections of bridge coming from both shores that each end in a station out in the strait. Gigantic distances.  From each station, cars enter the tunnel. When I told Bosun, that I hope we don’t hit the tunnel, he smiled and said, “That would be a big problem.” Just when I think I am getting used to the huge sizes of everything, including this ship, I see another marvel like this long bridge and tunnel crossing. The fairly big fishing boats that are here by the hundreds appear very puny. When we were in the Panama Canal, Eva called fishing boats “baby boats” even though they are very large boats, compared with let’s say, a canoe! When on the U deck, I heard the large ships blowing their horns: short, short, short, loooonnnnng. This was to tell the fishing boats to get out of the way. 

We’re at an out-of-the-way port in a kind of bay off the Hong Kong strait called Nansha which is a relatively new port and was added to this trip at the last minute. I watch the containers being loaded and unloaded although I don’t go on the U deck at this time since it’s not safe. I haven’t been allowed off the ship yet--the Captain says there’s nothing here anyway. We can’t turn around in this “bay” so a pilot will have to go a long way with us to get us back out. I hope to go ashore later this afternoon in Shekou. I won’t be allowed to go into Hong Kong (our next stop) because of the riots, which is too bad. I hope Jackie Chan isn’t too disappointed in my missing our visit together. He’s always wishing for me to visit him. Andy Lau and Tony Leung too.

they all kind of love me

January 12

We acquired a new passenger in Hong Kong, Oliver (Olivier), and said goodbye to some of the crew including John Paul (Stewie). Our new steward is Carlo. We also have another female aboard, a Wiper in the engine room.

Oliver will be with us until we return to Manzanillo. He is French engineer and has worked in Thailand for over 25 years. He is deciding whether or not he is retired. He has traveled to many places and has interesting stories to tell of his travels. I was intrigued by his trip to Henro island in Japan where he visited 88 temples on a “pilgrimage”. It took him only 37 days to walk the 1200ish kilometres. He showed me a wonderful series of photographs that he took during this trip, of abandoned houses and buildings which were left when the very old died and when the young people left these villages for more lucrative work in the cities. This slideshow had an accompanying soundtrack that suited the loneliness of the empty buildings (countertenor Klaus Nomi singing Purcell). I was moved by Oliver’s work of art.

This song used as the soundtrack

Now that I have a passenger friend, you would think that the Captain’s land rat teasing would be divided equally between us. But instead, the Captain said to me, “Now you have been promoted to Senior Land Rat, he is your Junior Land Rat, and that is the highest rank you can achieve on this ship. Congratulations!”

January 14

I’m fond of our Captain (Piotr or Peter) and enjoy our breakfast conversations in the mess room very much. As you know, he teases me constantly, which I enjoy too. The crew has not experienced a passenger going the whole way around the world, so I’m perhaps a bit of a curiosity to them. So I like to be teased. It makes me feel accepted. 

Being on a merchant vessel means that I am seeing, first hand, the activities of globalization. Our Captain is a thoughtful, intelligent person that considers his role as a sea captain in the implementation of it with mixed feelings. I have been thinking about the benefits of globalization to the extreme poor after reading Steven Pinker’s book, “Enlightenment Now: the case for reason, science, humanism, and progress.” When I pointed out that one of the effects of globalization is that the extreme poor are being lifted up into a better quality of life, the Captain acknowledged this to be true, but sees that the environment suffers for it. He is also saddened by “all countries being the same.”  He says that whatever you can get, see, experience or eat in one country, you can in any other, and that the differences between cultures are becoming lost along with their treasures (or perhaps value) in this new “sameness.” Consider the avocado. He said that we used to go on a trip to Mexico when we wanted to taste an avocado. Now avocados are available everywhere in the world at the cost of destroying the land in which the avocados grow to keep up with the demand. Here in China we also see the cloud of pollution and litter in the water, even quite a distance from the ports. The Chinese are supplying the rest of us with every material item we can think of. They are also leading the way in producing the materials and technology to cope with pollution--hopefully the inexpensive solar panels and energy efficient products will be what we see more of transported to us on the sea!

I find myself sometimes wondering what is in all those containers we are carrying from port to port. You can’t ignore them here. There are thousands of them. I see many more thousands of them in every port. I think about where they are going in the end, how far they’ve come before being aboard the ship and how many people were involved with everything to do with each container’s contents. Who benefitted from a paycheque? How much pollution was caused? 

Like all of us, when we are busy in the day to day activities of our land rat lives, I don’t often wonder about the journey our avocados and cell phones have taken before they came to us. Here I am, outside of Shanghai, with a luxury of time and considering globalization. Yet again, I feel so grateful for this year’s adventures.