Loco

The Captains log this week has tales of sea monsters, storms, seasickness, Spanish brandy, serenades of George Michael and a stash of Nutella. There’s also news of great celebrations - All aboard the Hugo!

Tintin on the Pacific

As I type this the laptop screen rocks slowly back and forth with metronomic regularity, swaying in time with the desk, the floor and the entire room.

I gaze out of the window in front of me to take in the view: mighty waves slipping by; crests breaking; clouds drifting across an azure sky. And endless, endless water, stretching to the horizon and far beyond.

It’s not the most typical of sights. But then isn’t the most typical of surroundings. We are on a boat in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.

Having travelled most of the 21,000 miles we have covered so far by land (with the odd ferry thrown in ) we now take to the water, hitching a ride for 15 days aboard a container ship bound for LA, from the far east of the Pacific to the far west.

The Pacific Ocean - the very words conjure up images of ambition and adventure, it’s a byword for the exotic, the far-flung, the unknown. The neon-lit waters of Hong Kong harbour to the to the surf-bound coast of California - sounds far more interesting then Chek Lap Kok to LAX.

No identikit airports and long, dismal queues, no leg-crunching seats and foul, plastic food. No predictable movies or no 9/11 paranoia, no screaming babies or snoring adults.

Just the two of us and a few crew on a big boat. On an enormous blue ocean. With no land for days.

My primal fears still to stir inside. Drowning, shipwreck, seasickness, scary monsters in the depths below and ferocious storms in the skies above.

Too late.

We’ve hauled the anchors now, cast off the ropes. We’re heading out into the unknown, the unquantified, the unpredictable. There’s no way out at sea. No one can hear you scream…

Deep breath.

Take a look at our surroundings. It’s palatial!

As the only passengers we’ve been given the owner’s cabin - a bedroom, large living room and en-suite.There’s a TV, DVD and Hi-fi, plus a fridge, a desk and large sofa. 15 days in which we can live out of cupboards and drawers rather than the cramped confines of a smelly old rucksack.

No dodgy Chinese wiring here, no leaking toilet or dripping taps, no filthy sheets or cacophonous street sounds. Just a gentle hum from the engine, and the steady rock of the ocean. There’s a laundry and mess room, where we dine with the officers. Three hot meals a day, served to us at our own table. There’s a a small gym, with exercise bike, weights machine, table tennis and darts board. There’s a sauna for Lara and even a mini swimming pool.

We’re are treated as honoured guests: the officers go out of their way to guide us around; the crew invite us to sing karaoke (I wisely turned down), play basketball (I was resolutely thrashed) and ping pong (ditto).

In between eating and fraternising we doze on the deck, stretched out on sun loungers or dip into the boat’s impressive DVD collection.

All the time we little moving world sways gently around, sometimes placid, sometimes vigorous.

This can present certain challenges: how to eat soup in a swell for one, and how to sleep when the boat’s rolling and pitching.

Other challenges lie ahead no doubt, but in the meantime I admire another sunset and gaze at the horizon.

I feel like Tintin, my hero, the daring young reporter.

He regularly set off on his adventures by boat, where exciting events would take place: Snowy would get attacked by a shark; Thompsons would wear old-fashioned bathing costumes and Captain Haddock would invariably get drunk on whisky.

And always there was some shady type on board, a stowaway, or a crooked crew member, usually a shifty Balkan-looking type with crossed eyebrows and a dodgy ‘tasche.

Best keep an eye out. After all, anything can happen at sea.

Wednesday

Whenever we lose track of days we usually find it is Wednesday. On this Wednesday we were given an extra day; Wednesday 3rd December 2008 literally happened twice.

The first third of December started like most others on this ship - the alarm went off at 07:45, with breakfast at 08:00. We have recently discovered porridge on the menu, which makes a refreshing change from the fried meat of the last week. It was a warm, sunny day with a large roll factor. The rolliest we had experienced so far which made doing everything either an uphill or downhill struggle that eventually got the better of my digestive system. The swell was in fact so strong that the front of the ship was damaged, but the ship ploughed on.

I went through the usual routine of writing in the morning, eating at midday, reading and snoozing in the sun after lunch followed by yoga and the exercise bike before dinner at 17:45. The regular evening DVD screening was Son of Rambow (****½) and Bobby (***).

At 22:30 we crossed the International Date Line, 180° longitude, and the day started again. So when we woke we opened the second third of December window on our World in Slow Motion advent calendar.

It has taken tins of peanuts, circling torches, diagrams and protracted discussions with the Navigator for me to understand why my life will always now be a day longer than stated on the calendar. It’s something to do with standardising time so that night is always dark and day is always light the world over and so that everyone is living the same day as in Greenwich, London. But perhaps more importantly, every step eastwards is now a step closer to home.

The second third of December began like the first. Alarm at 07:45, porridge at 08:00. It was cloudier and windier than the first third of December but the nauseating rocking had subsided. Everything carried on pretty much like it had the first time round except that the reading and snoozing took place indoors as there was no sun.

After the gym the day took an unexpected turn. A note on a chair inviting me to take a stroll to the bow was followed by games in Morse code and signal flags. Then I was led to the edge of boat where surrounded by nothing but Pacific Ocean on three sides Tom got down on one knee and popped the question. I took my chances and said yes.

That evening we celebrated with the Filipino crew who gave us Spanish brandy, a serenade of George Michael and sang love songs to us on the karaoke machine. The German Captain shared his private stash of Nutella with us. You can’t beat that for history repeating itself.

You can read past blog entries here.

Loco2 would like to say a huge CONGRATULATIONS to Lara and Tom on their engagement!

While Lara and Tom are sailing across the Pacific to the USA, out of touch from the world-wide-web and in touch with the big-wide-world, we visit South-East Asia through their eyes for the last time. To keep us going in their absence they have provided us with a ‘Dos and Don’ts guide to South-East Asia’, but first we hit the tracks from Hue to Hanoi.

Hue to Hanoi: letting the train take the strain

In Hue we elected to tackle the next leg of our route by train. We were looking forward to getting back onto the rails again, rather than onto yet another bone-rattling, leg-twisting, ironically-named ‘sleeper bus’.

The photojournalist Tim Page, who’s rattled along a few Vietnamese railways in his time, puts this better than me:

Train travel allows the mind to wander, the eyes not really focusing on the passing countryside, the heady clackety rhythm becoming white noise, a mere sound tapestry to meditate upon…On a train you actually have a sense of getting somewhere, denied the traveller sealed in an aluminium tube zooming across the sky.

Inside the small dusty waiting room, we occupied an entire row of flimsy plastic seats, our enormous bags dwarfing the slender locals hemmed in around them. I poked my head around the door to glance at the platform: it was uncomfortably quiet, hardly a soul moved, let alone a train.

As the minutes ticked by and the time dragged well past our designated departure time. Still no train.

The locals seemed unconcerned, dozing in the seats, nonchalantly sipping green tea and gazing at the traffic outside.

Finally, 50 minutes later it was action stations: a guard stirred, a tinny loudspeaker croaked out some kind of announcement and we were allowed onto the platform. People plus baggage began shuffling onto the platform. Hardly a great swarm of people like you’d have to contend with in China, more a trickle of the unhurried.

A group of men crouched down on the platform, lay a battered old briefcase on its side and immediately started playing cards. They fingered their dirty old dong notes whilst others crowded around, watching the gamblers.

A young couple strolled up and settled down on the bench next to us, resuming the cooing they had been so rudely interrupted from back in the waiting room.

And still no train.

I began to wonder what it could be that was causing such a severe delay. Mexican bandits? The wrong type of snow? Richard Branson?

Finally, an hour later than scheduled, the noise level seemed to pick up, passengers stirred and, to much whistling both from its driver and the sundry guards on the platform, a train appeared, its headlights piercing through the descending gloom.

The dusty green carriages hauled up in front of us, the grimy windows obscuring the interior. We quickly boarded, hauling our bulky loads through the narrow corridors as the rabble pressed up eagerly behind us.

Peering into our cabin we found it already occupied: a large family, big enough to fill a small village stared back at us, their grubby kids sprawled all over the beds. Cue frantic hand signals and pointing at beds and tickets before finally the guard came along and turfed these stubborn train gypsies out.

Although ‘soft sleeper’, our cabin didn’t quite live up to our expectations: it held six beds rather than four, crammed in so that each bed had about two and half foot of space between it and the one above. Grimacing as I adopted a contortionist pose I squeezed my slim frame into a bunk at the top, hauling my pack up behind me.

There was a jolt, and we started moving: ten hours through the night to the capital.

A short night, abruptly ended at 5.30am. Raised voices, doors slamming, a knock at our door: we’d arrived. Hanoi.

The Dos and Don’ts of South East Asia

Sun, sweat and scooters; trains, temples and tours; bananas, buses and lager. The tourist infrastructure in Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand and Laos turns traveling into a wonderful holiday. However, alongside the tourist trade come touts and tricksters to be wary of. So to supplement your Lonely Planet/Rough Guide (delete as appropriate) here are World in Slow Motion’s top tips for S.E. Asia:

Do:

- Take a sheet sleeping bag. There is a curious lack of bedding in these parts.
- Carry plenty of U.S. dollars cash. They are a useful back-up and the currency of choice in Cambodia.
- Drink bia hoi on plastic chairs in the street in Vietnam. 20p for a glass of draught lager.
- Drink fruity drink and coconuts with a straw. You can spot a fruity drink stall by the glasses of chopped fruit to which condensed milk, coconut milk and balls of sticky rice are added and served with crushed ice.
- Eat amok. This creamy Cambodian curry is the among the best food in SE Asia.
- Take the sleeper bus. A bus with beds is a sight to behold and an experience not to be missed, but don’t expect to have a good kip.
- Have a massage at Seeing Hands in Siem Reap or Phnom Penh. These blind masseurs know what to do.
- Help out at Big Brother Mouse. Either chat with the children in English or buy one of their books to help promote literacy in Laos.
- Get up early to see monks collect alms at sunrise, a special sight in Luang Prabang, Laos.
- Go to the flag lowering ceremony in Hanoi, Vietnam. A triumphal affair every night at 9pm at the Ho Chi Minh memorial.
- Learn to say “no thank you” in the local language to keep the hawkers and touts at bay.
- Stay at Golden Temple Villa in Siem Reap. Excellent value and unlimited free bananas make it a winner.
- Stay at Hong Thien Hotel II, 46 Chi Van An Street, in Hue, Vietnam. Tien at reception is very helpful, but don’t book a Halong Bay tour through them (see below).

Don’t:

- Stay at Greenfields in Hoi An, Vietnam. Poor value and dreadful service.
- Rely on your guidebook for accommodation and eating recommendations. Use the Web, get tips from others and explore by yourself to find some real gems.
- Go on a Halong Bay, Vietnam, tour with Tuan Linh travel agency. These tours are sold through Kim Adventures and various hostels in Hanoi. The boat is broken and the guides lousy. If your boat is called the Duy Tan Junk 02, don’t get on it. Electricity is intermittent and the motor may give out.
- Use the travel services at Victory Queen Hotel (formerly Old Darling Hotel), Hanoi, Vietnam. They take a whopping commission without telling you.
- Buy shoes at Cham H’Mong, 495 C’ua Dai Street, Hoi An, Vietnam. They fall apart within hours.
- Buy your Cambodian visa at the ‘Cambodian Consulate’ in Aranya Prathet, Cambodia, it’s a scam. Buy it at the desk once you’re through Thai immigration.
- Take any price as given - accommodation, food, things - all are up for negotiation. Pay what you think is fair.
- Sleep at the back of a sleeper bus. The bounce prevents sleep.
- Lose your temper with a local. If you cause someone to lose their temper they will lose face and make your life very uncomfortable as they try to regain it.
- Expect a peaceful sunrise at Angkor Wat, Siem Reap. You will be joined by hundreds of tourists all jostling for the same perfect sun-rises-over-ancient-temple photo.
- Wear shorts and sandals in Khao Yai National Park, Thailand. The leeches will eat you for breakfast.

We are sailing…

So, farewell Asia.

After four months on the road and rails across this mighty continent, from the low mountains of the Urals to the warm waters of the South China Sea, we will finally bidding a farewell to this huge, diverse chunk of the planet.

Tomorrow we set off into new waters…literally. For the next two weeks our new home will be the CMA CGM Hugo, a container ship sailing across the Pacific Ocean, from Hong Kong to Long Beach, USA.

Beyond the ocean lie the delights of another continent: North America?

But first we have the small matter of a large pond to cross.

Laying my trusty Michelin out last night I realised that the Pacific covers a good third of the planet. It’s going to be a long and (hopefully) fascinating voyage.

See you on the other side…

You can read past blog entries here.

As well as sending back various letters/blogs, which you can read here, Kate filmed some video diaries on her digital camera. We’ve edited them together for you to watch!

Loco2 - England to Costa Rica by Cargo Ship from Rosa van Wyk on Vimeo.

After day 11 Kate didn’t take any more videos, probably because she started having too much fun, and didn’t feel the need for so many diary-room contemplations…

As we all know from rhymes at school, “in fourteen hundred and ninety-two, Columbus sailed the ocean blue”, and since then a very large number of ships have crossed the Atlantic and the other seven seas. Unlike the Santa Maria, in the 20th century the vast majority of them have been powered by a fossil fuel of some kind. On Wednesday I read an article in the Guardian about an idea that could change that, at least to some extent. Putting sails back on ships could be a way to make them greener, and crucially for the shipping companies, consume less fuel (which like all fossil-based fuel in the world is becoming increasingly expensive).

Companies such as Skysails are promoting this technology as a cost-saving measure for freight shipping companies, with the slogan “Turn wind into profit” (which reminds me of an amusing advert). Because of the significant contribution to climate change caused by shipping (due to the large number of goods we trade around the world), making freighting by greener must be a good thing (although localising economies so less stuff is shipped is a key part of the solution too).

But how green is cargo ship travel for passengers? Various people have taken this option as an alternative to flying (including Kate, the founder of Loco2; you’ll be able to read blogs about the experience soon) but as yet there is little information available about the CO2 emissions per person because of the fact that the ships are (of course) primarily carrying cargo, not people. This makes it difficult to ascertain the contribution of individual passengers to the overall carbon emissions.

One argument (discussed here) says that because the ship is travelling anyway to get the cargo to its destination, the passengers’ travel is irrelevant, and therefore the journey can be seen as carbon neutral. That’s all well and good whilst we’re talking about a small number of pioneers taking the opportunity to have a trans-Atlantic adventure, but it’s not going to work for large number of passengers (the main risk involved with scaling up passenger numbers is that we’ll go down the polluting cruise ship route).

A way to look at cargo ship travel that takes into account the passenger contribution is to work it out in terms of weight. This is the method that the mighty Barbara Hadrill used to calculate the emissions on her massive adventure to Australia. Barbara worked out that the freight ship leg of her adventure (Singapore - Darwin) produced 285,760 grams CO2 for 2350 miles (see her August 2006 blog).

Calculating in terms of weight is far from an established method, but it is logical, and should help us to think about the comparative advantages of each mode of transport, both in terms of CO2 and fuel efficiency (which is an increasing concern for all of us given massively rising energy costs).

Right off the top of my head, the method goes something like this (I may come back and improve on this as I talk to people about it):

Think about a humble passenger cabin on a cargo ship where all other space is used as efficiently as possible (because the more cargo the ship holds, the more cost-effective the freighting). This is going to be far better in CO2 terms than a decadent cruise ship where not only the cabin, but the whole ship is engineered around comfort and entertainment, rather than simply getting as much cargo (human or otherwise) from A to B on as little fuel as possible. For a cruise ship calculating the CO2 emissions per person is simply a case of dividing the total emissions by the number of passengers (as that’s the only purpose of the voyage), but for a cargo ship we need to take into account the fact that it’s carrying cargo as well.

Let’s assume a cargo ship can carry 3000 tonnes of cargo (that’s 3 million kg) and that a person weighs 65kg (about 10 stone). In this situation (if my calculations are correct) the passenger would be responsible for 0.002% of the overall CO2 emissions of the journey. I couldn’t find a fuel consumption figure for a typical trans-Atlantic journey (the nearest I got was here) but we can safely bet that 0.002% of it isn’t very much. Now obviously this assumes that to carry everyone that efficiently we’d need to cram all the passengers into containers like they were cargo, and that would be mental, but it does give us a useful indication of the terms we can view the issues in.

The basic conclusion (and we probably didn’t need to do such ludicrous calculations to work it out) is that using space more efficiently when travelling is a good thing. What it doesn’t tell us unfortunately, is a comparable CO2 per km figure for passenger cargo-ship travel versus air travel (or other means). There’s still work to be done on this, and I’ll be continuing to dig around places like the New Scientist and sustainable shipping sites to try and find more answers.

In the meantime, I’ll leave you with two thoughts:

- there needs to be a clear distinction between greenhouse gases that cause climate change (a very pressing global concern) and other pollutants such as Sulphur Dioxide that cause local environmental damage (an immediate concern for some, but not something that will affect all of us)
- we need to think about the feasible efficiency advances available in shipping/ferries (such as solar power) versus the feasible efficiency advances available in aviation (such as airships) and then make bold decisions about mass transportation on that basis