Day 4 (24/01/2012)

We slept well and long, although sharing the child size duvet is still a bit of a problem. Luckily in these overheated temperatures it’s not really a necessity. We could ask the steward for another cover, but he seems to be pretty busy trying to fit all his work into the shortened days. As soon as breakfast is over it’s the new nine o’clock. Once again we had fried eggs, cucumber slices and bread. Tomorrow I’m just having cereal or toast. I don’t like eating all these eggs, especially since this cook doesn’t seem to do as many inventive things with them like the one on the Hanjin Yantian. The grapefruit juice was still present.

Jenny and I then played some post breakfast ping pong, she must have been practicing in Vancouver, although she assures me that she hasn’t. I had to venture down the ladder into the now empty swimming pool to retrieve the ball at one point. Our longest rally is now 50, so we have to try and beat that.

We then waited around in our room till just after 10.20a.m. when the alarm sounded for the practice evacuation to the muster station. Gathering our immersion suits and lifejackets we went down the outside steps on the starboard (this is the right-hand) side to the muster station on deck A. Oddly everyone seemed to be there already, as though we should have gone before the alarm sounded, and as we found everyone in their orange hardhats realised we should have taken them out of the cupboard too and put them on before our descent. The assembled crew was much akin to a bunch of disorganised school kids. The second officer (in charge of safety) was meant to have thought up a scenario about a fire in the engine room, but claimed to have not have had the time to do so. No-one seemed too certain of their duties, although the steward was quite aware that he was meant to be looking after the passengers. The crew and passengers fumbled with the lights on their lifejackets, I don’t think I really got to the stage of understanding how to switch it on. It did not help matters that there are so many different nationalities on board and they all seem to have trouble understanding one another. I’m really hoping we won’t be having to evacuate the Flaminia for real.

‘Steward’ then proceeded to lead us up the seven flights of stairs to the bridge where the passengers were to hang around until the crew had completed all their procedures, including a boarding of the lifeboat, which we decided to decline the offer to participate in. From the charts it looks like the cold front is coming ever closer, and is occupying a large portion of the North Atlantic, the South of which Captain Czerwinski doesn’t seem to want to tell us that we’re heading into, he’s not denying it though. Perhaps it will be time to crack open the Piggly Wiggly cola soon and locate our sea sickness bands.

The Captain seems quite jovial and definitely not as scary as the Hanjin Yantian’s captain, despite being equally tall. While talking to us he was also keeping an eye on the ship and giving directions down his radio to the second officer regarding the evacuation drill. At one point he told the second officer he was busy with ‘passenger familiarisation’, but turned to us saying that he couldn’t really tell them he was drinking coffee. His daughter in Australia is a vegan, and he has tried being a vegetarian himself aboard a ship, but he seems to think it is very difficult. For some reason he seems to thinks that vegans need to eat six meals a day. Eating three alone seems to take up most of our time on the ship!

On the horizon an oil freighter was moving in front of us from right to left. They were trying to contact the MSC Flaminia with some instructions to keep a certain distance away. The captain did not seem to be too keen to converse to them, saying you don’t talk to every car you meet on the street and that the same principle should be applied to shipping. Before we knew it, it was lunchtime already.

There was noodle soup, followed by a potato with cabbage and onion, all rounded off with an orange. Grapefruit juice has been replaced with ‘all natural orange juice’, which appears to be from Cyprus. NSB must have an interesting buying policy. It tastes too good to be a just from concentrate juice, but since we never did master Cyrillic and never even thought about Cypriatic, we can’t be sure. I told the steward we could just eat bread and salad in the evening, I don’t think they need to go to all this effort for us.

More ping pong followed lunch. I got bored of bouncing the ball on the bat once I got to 322. Back in our room we had to try on our immersion suits, because the captain thinks they are probably too big. They did seem big and I felt rather clumsy in it, but we have no clue whether they are really too big or not. I think they seem o.k., the small Filipino’s have to wear these ones too, so I don’t see why we should be privileged with getting smaller ones. After the excitement of the immersion suits we managed to entertain ourselves for at least five minutes with counting our ginger cookies (Jenny says they’re biscuits but they’re Canadian so clearly they are cookies) and discussing how many we can eat each day. We have about seven days left and 34 cookies (they’re pretty small).

At some point we finally left for a wander around the deck. We are never really sure where to walk, because they seem to be working somewhere all the time. Taking a walk around 3.00 p.m., or 10.00a.m. is the best bet though, because that’s when they down tools and go in for tea break. They seem to be smoothing rust holes on the deck and proceeding to paint over them with red paint, followed by grey. This is being done at both ends of the ship. This arduous task didn’t seem to be necessary on the Yantian, because the rust hadn’t yet set in. The waves didn’t seem very high, but it still looks like we won’t be seeing any whales or dolphins with all these crests. In the distance we saw a seabird and yesterday a few gannets, but it just doesn’t seem like there’s a whole lot out there. So then we went back to our room, Jenny reading and me writing. I have come to the conclusion that after my practice on Hornby Island I could do as good or better a job of the tiling in our cabin’s bathroom. I also can’t help wondering why the MSC Flaminia is a ‘she’ in English and a ‘he’ in German.

For supper we ate our salad and I had some quite delicious dill cream cheese from Houston on my German sourdough bread. The rest of the diners were having some spaghetti with a shrimp sauce, the spaghetti didn’t look like the extremely slippery kind we’d had on the Yantian. The captain was requesting more dill from cookie, before discussing something to do with the swimming pool with the Russian chief mate. It seems the poor man has to sit at the table with all the Poles while they talk Polish most meals. In addition to them there are I think three Germans and a Swede. As we ate we could hear the wind starting to batter the containers and feel the ship sway a bit more. Apparently the worst of the storms is moving at a faster speed than us towards Europe. That’s reassuring. But then there are another two…

Day (23/01/2012)

Again I felt like I didn’t sleep much, but despite waking up numerous times, going to bed at 8.00p.m. would surely have ensured I slept enough. As we lay in bed it really felt like the ship was rolling quite a lot and every now and then we’d hit a big wave and roll slightly more. In the morning though the sea was flat and we were scarcely rolling at all, perhaps we'd just imagined all that movement in the night. For breakfast we had our eggs with cucumber, with the little addition of tomato. There was grapefruit juice too; the juice has just started appearing at our breakfast table, Heinz Peter is grateful that we’re here. Apparently we’ve hit the Gulf Stream and the water temperature last night was a crazy 24’C. The Swiss couple are getting the swimming pool filled. Sailing in the Gulf Stream also pushes us along a bit.

The steward was reprimanded by the captain for not having put the clock change sign on the door before breakfast. He hadn’t realised it was clock change day, so the captain led him to the calendar and circled all the dates the clock is changing with a thick red pen. Any confusion is to be blamed on the calendar, because it’s German. We’ve got just another five clock changes to go after today’s (and then we’ll have to regain one of the hours when we go back to England).

Seeing as it was calm and sunny we headed up to the bridge, discovered we were off the coast of Washington and stood outside. We then went to the ship’s front; sat around a bit and reconfirmed that it just isn’t as good for whale watching as the Hanjin Yantian. The view is obstructed by walls, but at least because it’s covered it’s not so windy. We also can’t see the bow, so there’s no potential for seeing dolphins riding on the bow wave. At the back of the boat there were hoses everywhere and we didn’t want to get in the way, so we headed to the officer’s recreation room to examine the DVD collection- lots of copies of films and documentaries in German, concerning themselves mostly with the largest ships of the world.

Lunch was a potato, some brussel sprouts, a crown shaped cucumber piece atop a slice of tomato and almost the same vegetables as yesterday- celery and leek with sesame seeds. Beatrice, was really hot after eating her soup, she has a point-it is very hot inside this ship, must be Filipino temperatures. Apple pie provided a very nice dessert.

Before dinner we played ping pong, went outside again and lazed. There is a dart board in the gym room, I imagine it must be really hard to hit the bull’s eye in a heavy seaway not to mention dangerous. I dread to think where the dart would end up if Valerie (my fellow volunteer in Churchill) were here. The evening’s meal was three blobs of mashed potato and bits of cauliflower, French beans, peas, carrots and a yellow vegetable, we added some tasty red cabbage salad. I thought it was high time in life to try some brown sauce, I wasn’t expecting it to be so much like Branston pickle. Small chunks of watermelon were a very nice dessert.

We wanted to go and play ping pong but we thought someone was getting changed for the swimming pool, so instead we retired to our room to watch NDF’s ‘Mare TV’, the main documentary we found in our rummaging through the officer’s recreation room. I revisited St. Petersburg and California, but it was a bit too sea-rich. You would think that being at sea all the time they’d want to watch something about the land. People in California are crazy, there is a restaurant that serves food for dogs and strange people who push their dogs around in pushchairs, whatever happened to taking the dog for a walk?! It’s about 8.00p.m. and time for bed. This is allowed because of all the time changes to come, in Antwerp it would currently be 1.00a.m.

Day 2 (22/01/2012)

I didn’t sleep much, not because I couldn’t have, but because I urgently needed to see what was happening outside our window. The containers were slowly being moved aboard. The crane seemed highly inefficient, since almost every container would be dropped down onto the others, but wouldn’t click in place properly, so was then lifted back up before finally being put into the correct position. Sometimes this process would have to be repeated multiple times. As the night drew on the cranes moved closer to the living quarters and the containers began to fill the gaping hole right in front of us. There was quite a lot of clanking and shouting. Fortunately they aren’t piled high enough as to obstruct our view completely.

Having set the alarm for 5.30 a.m., we awoke in anticipation of our departure. There was still a crane hovering around, but by six the cranes were all in upright position, the lights at the dockside out and the engines rolling. Tugboats slowly turned the boat and we were then pushed relatively quickly under the bridge we’d driven over on the bus last night and on past the lights of Charleston. It was hard to work out where anything was with the darkness and fast encroaching fog.

At 7.45a.m. we emerged for breakfast, the boat still being piloted, with frequently sounding foghorn as background music. At the table we met the other passengers, who immediately wanted to know if we spoke French. They are a retired couple- Beatrice and Heinz Peter, from Aigle, near Geneva, and are now pretty settled into ship life, having been on-board for five weeks, coming across the Atlantic, to all the East coast ports here twice, to New Orleans, Houston and Mexico. Previously they have taken four cargo ship ‘cruises’ around Europe, across the Atlantic and to Hong Kong. The sea has apparently only been pretty choppy for two days on this trip so far, but of course the captain dismissed it as nothing. Other passengers have come and gone, one of them it seems was on her way home to New Zealand from a year in England, and didn’t want to fly.

Breakfast consisted of two fried eggs each and a few slices of cucumber. We also had a slice of bread and a sip of some Russian-looking fruit drink, tasting of mango and peaches, but seeming a bit oily. We passengers won’t be participating in the morning and afternoon coffee breaks, the Swiss couple seem to be coffeed out and we don’t drink normal tea or coffee.

After breakfast I read and wrote, while Jenny did something or other on the computer. At some point the phone rung rather loudly, when I’d finally managed to pick it up we learnt that we were to go down to the A-deck for our safety briefing. I jumped at the chance (hopefully the only one) to see inside the lifeboat, it seems quite spacious. I wasn’t imagining it to have a roof for some reason or seatbelts. Tomorrow there is likely to be a practice at responding to the alarm, when we’ll have to go with our immersion suits and life jackets to the muster station on deck A.

Lunch was trouble free, minestrone soup (Jenny thought he said soap) followed by a vegetable medley and ‘French fries’ (last night I thought he said French rice), rounded off with enough ice cream to cost you well over $5 on the streets of Charleston. The captain and three others seem to sit at one table and converse in Russian or Polish, while the remaining European crew sit at another table and don’t seem to converse at all. It does seem rather segregated, like there is a bit of a Poles only club here. I can just imagine the complaints the second engineer on the Hanjin Yantian would have about the downfall of NSB and it no longer being the German institution it used to be. Once again the Filipinos eat in their crew mess room on the other side of the kitchen.

Post lunch we donned our winter coats and took a walk around outside. Even if the waves were co-operative for whale watching, the MSC Flaminia does not seem to be ideal for the task since the front of the boat is covered and hard to see out of. We weren’t even sure if we were allowed to be there since there were signs saying that you have to wear hardhats. The rest of the time before dinner Jenny once again sat before her computer watching something while I finished reading ‘A narrative by Frederick Douglass’, an account by a former slave in Maryland and all the terrible things he witnessed and was subjected to. I also fitted in a short nap (staying up last night has made me exceedingly sleepy) and some more blog writing. We’re leaving the excitement of visiting the bridge for tomorrow, you can’t do everything in one day, otherwise there’ll be nothing left to do.
Supper was a bread, salad, egg and egg and salad in a decidedly American burger bap affair. Heinz-Peter tells us that the waves are around 3m now, but there’s a cold front coming and the conditions won’t be quite so peachy soon. At the moment the ship is scarcely rolling and the horizon pretty horizontal. We’ve just played our first spot of ping pong, realised that our legs are too short for the exercise bike and now we’ll settle in for an evening’s film watching. Hopefully we can get to bed early, the changing of the clocks starts tomorrow morning when we’ll lose our first hour. Fortunately on this ship we lose the hour after breakfast, so we don’t have to get up any earlier, the day will just be shorter!

Day 1 aboard the MSC Flaminia (21/01/12)

We’re finally aboard the MSC Flaminia, ‘she’s’ sitting in the Waldo Port in Charleston while they load the mostly yellow MSC containers (interspersed with a few greens, blues, oranges, reds and whites) in a very slow American fashion. We were told on our last trip that the Americans are very inefficient at loading in comparison to the Europeans and Chinese. And from what we can see occurring outside the window we’d have to agree.

Today has been a long day and it’s great to be here and one step closer to Europe. It’s nice to be in the familiar territory of a cargo ship, although everything seems a lot smaller and back to front compared to the Hanjin Yantian.
Our room is similarly grand to the one on the Yantian, although I did prefer the orange plastic flower bouquet to these planters overflowing with plastic greenery (and dead real plants). Jenny has already ensconced herself before the television with its DVD, video player and USB connection. We’ve also got some form of CD player. There are two paintings on the wall, one with colourful swirls and the other is Dutch with tulip stamps, coloured blocks and Friesian cows. The steward has stocked our fridge with some water, coca cola, sprite and some small bottles of German wine. We have a clock on the wall. This will be handy since Jenny’s watch has been out of action for a while now, so I’ll be glad to be no longer solely responsible for time keeping. However we might bump into problems there when we have to start changing the time on it.

Somewhat disconcerting is ‘Water Words, Sea Readings for the People of the Sea’ which lies on the desk. Perhaps it is obligatory to have this on display when leaving from America’s bible belt, I only hope our safety will be guaranteed without thanking God for safe passages or singing ‘Eternal Father, Strong to Save’ on page 3.

The bathroom and bedroom are in a separate section to the main room. The bathroom is clean, but more grubby looking than on our trans-Pacific freighter. We guess that’s because they take a lot more passengers across the Atlantic than the Pacific, but it’s also because the Flaminia is seven years older than the other ship. The bedroom is nice and dark, but there is only one covered duvet which is just big enough for a small child. We’re not too sure what to do about this yet.

For most of the morning, and the afternoon for that matter, we were labouring over Jenny’s application for a script supervising traineeship. This gave me ample time to worry about not getting to the freighter in time (which was in reality highly unlikely) and to get the sick feeling so familiar to me throughout my childhood. This same feeling I used to get when going to Holland or Switzerland, when I would be ready and nobody else would be and we would become increasingly likely to miss our boat or plane or whatever. I haven’t had this feeling for quite a while now and perhaps it’s been because we’ve left to catch transport in the morning straight after getting up or I’ve been too busy doing other things like picking apples/blueberries or learning how to crochet that I haven’t had time to start worrying.

At midday I phoned David at the port for the latest news on the Flaminia’s arrival. He informed me or ‘Ma’am’ that ‘she’ would be due to arrive at 5.30p.m., with departure tomorrow morning at 5.00a.m. We could arrive at the port via TWIC certified taxi anytime we wanted. Jenny researched which buses would get us closest to the Wando terminal, the no.40, followed by the 401. This would get us to within 2 miles of the port. I phoned up the taxi company closest to this point and was told it would cost $25! We decided to leave booking the taxi till later…

With the application finally finished and the Flaminia already being guided by the pilot in through the estuary we headed off to the waterfront to try and see the ship’s arrival. Unfortunately we got there too late, seeing the ship already docked in the distance. As a consolation there were yet more dolphins very close to the water’s edge.

After a mad dash between the two buses to Wholefoods market where I got to make my very last purchase of Celestial Seasoning’s very fine peach tea, we drove off through the vast expanse of big box stores. So many American streets are badly lit, which is good environmentally speaking, although sadly the reason for that is that no-one walks these streets and these areas are just the domain of the car. Our bus driver was full of praise (giving Jenny two rounds of applause) for our forward planning, in that we were taking a bus instead of a taxi out of Charleston and because Jenny knew where we had to get off.

Dropped in a non-descript shopping area, with pizza hut, subway, pub, closed supermarket by the name of Food Lion, hobby shop, dog spa and liquor store, with two petrol stations and a drive through hamburger place, we trundled around with all our possessions in search of a phone to call a taxi. The gas station (I really have to make sure I start using proper English words pronto.) had two payphones in varying states of decay. Outside subway two friendly ladies were intrigued by us and our backpacks, wanting to know what adventure we were on. They very kindly offered to drive us to the port, but we had to decline because you have to go in a taxi through the port gates and right up to the ship. We could probably have asked them to borrow their phone though.

Thankfully, another nice lady, working at the other petrol station let me use her phone where I learnt that a ‘Yellow Cab’ would cost us only around $7.00. Returning to the spot I’d requested to be picked up at outside pizza hut I realised I’d given the wrong address, so then had to find another phone to make sure the taxi would be coming to the right place. It began to rain torrentially and huge streaks of lightening made their way across the sky. This certainly was a grand finale to the ‘it always starts raining when we leave’ phenomenon we have been experiencing throughout our travels.

Drenched like a drowned rat I ran to the hobby shop where the man let me call the taxi company again, he also offered that we could sit on the chairs at the back of the store to dry off and produced a roll of kitchen paper for me to dry my face. Waiting outside we encountered many generous people offering rides and interested in our journey. It is probably not often that two heavily laden European tourists can be found at the shops of 601 (or thereabouts, never really worked it out) Long Point Road.

The yellow cab driver was chatty and he drove us swiftly to the port entrance where we had to show ID and he then had to fill in some forms. He told us about the qualification he had to take to become TWIC certified, so that he can drive within the port. Obviously the big trucks with the containers on the back of them have the right of way. As every row of containers finished he would stop, look very carefully both ways and cautiously continue. The MSC Flaminia was straight ahead of us. We were dropped off across a large expanse of tarmac buzzing with lorries from the ship. Not being too sure what to do, we looked into the offices right next to us which turned out to be dark and smelly toilets. Upstairs was another ‘office’ which we knocked on, only to realise we’d just woken some sleeping seamen, who didn’t even have any advice for us.

We ran for it, climbed the slippery gangway (those things really scare me, one slip and I don’t like to think what would happen), signed in, got shown to the ship’s office, introduced to the steward, taken to our room by the steward, introduced to the cook, discussed our vegetarian eating requirements (not sure if they understand) and were shown which seats at the table we’ll be sitting at. Unlike the Hanjin Yantian there is no big table where the captain and crew sit, but instead three round tables, each one seating four people. We’ll be sitting at the table with the other two passengers who we are yet to meet. We did go into the corridor to introduce ourselves to them, but they didn’t seem to hear us and shut their door. Perhaps they are old fogies after all, but their flip-flops in the corridor would suggest otherwise.

Unfortunately we forgot to ask whether we can go up to the bridge and see the action as we leave dock tomorrow morning. It will be dark, but nonetheless it would be interesting to see the bright (or not all that bright) lights of Charleston floating by.

Florida, charleston

......

Wildlife of the everglades

Trips into the everglades

Crystal River and Miami

The greyhound arrived among the palm trees and never ending highways of Miami early in the morning. In order to purchase a day ticket for the bus we had to navigate our way to the airport (can’t get away from them), getting advice from a bus driver we took his bus to somewhere where we could cross the road, so that we could take a bus back the way we came and on to the airport. Once we had the tickets we piled ourselves, our backpacks and our ever increasing number of additional bags onto the express bus to Miami Beach. In sweltering heat we trudged from one bench to another hauling our packs off at every opportunity.

There were cargo ships, cruiseships, skyscrapers, more palm trees, skimmers, gulls, numerous parading peoples, a troupe of brightly coloured youth practicing dance moves, baking bodies on the beach, baking lizards on the rocks, children playing in the park and two weary travellers, not used to such warm climes. Reassuringly the Atlantic was looking relatively calm and quite different to the Atlantic we know, with very blue water and white fragmented shell beach.

Progress was slow and after lots of sitting down and not all that much walking we decided we'd head to the wholefoods market. But it wasn't where we thought it was, so then we had to wait about an hour until the bus that would actually take us to it came. We did spot some cattle egrets though, hopping through the hedge in the middle of the road and skirting their ways around the parked cars like pros. By the time we'd toured around the shop with our backpacks in the trolley and got a few things to eat it was already 4.00p.m. With the skies threating to rain properly on us for the first time since leaving Canada we found ourselves waiting at another bus stop. The rain didn't really materialise though, just a few spots of it, but enough for me to stretch my arms out and embrace it. A man waiting told us that it would be getting 'cold' over the next few days and he'd just been out to buy a sweater, because he didn't have one. What a foreign concept.

Florida 1

An account of our work at the Everglades hostel..

Greyhound

more to come..