Day 19

21 September, 2003

A long night of smashing containers, but I sleep reasonably. After breakfast in an empty mess, I go out on deck to look at the port. All the same rushed activity, only half of the other ships have been swapped out during the night. There on the flying bridge was the captain doing his inspection, he smiled and said hello. I asked for the etd and he said 13:00 but... with a look of exasperation towards the local workers.

By 08:10 I was at the bus stop, still no buses, I start walking when after a few minutes, an officials tiny car (with a big PSA, Port of Singapore Authority on it’s side) waves me down, stopping the traffic of trucks, and offers a ride. He said, wincing as I bashed my knee against the dashboard of the tiny vehicle while climbing in, that he saw me walking with a limp, so he thought he would help. Oh! Hadn’t thought of it, but I guess I do... sometimes. My back is still iffy. Anyway he took me to the best gate (the Keppel gate) where I could get a taxi, and on return where I would find a bus. The passport check guy at the gate wants to help, telling me where to get a taxi, and “not to let them cheat you, we have 70,000 taxis in Singapore, if a driver does not use meter, get out find another one. If you don’t like the way he look, get out find another one. Always use meter. No tipping”.

Taxis are everywhere. I tried to convince my driver to keep driving around, that I just wanted to look at the city. It was an almost quiet Sunday morning, not much traffic. He said everything would be open ten to ten today. He took me through Chinatown (he was Chinese), then through the Singapore river district and past Raffles, but he was uncomfortable without a destination so I finally suggested Orchard Road. It is a well known upmarket street. It is hard to work up a taxi fare in this city, compared to London, by 08:50 he was dropping me in front of the Hilton, with a fare of six Singapore dollars (at 0.60 US per). I felt magnanimous in spite of the no tipping policy and gave him a ten. He had tried hard in his pidgin English.

This is a lovely, famously clean city. It could be in Hawaii or Florida. All the same business names. Broad Avenues covered with large trees and an air of lush green gardens. Although there are Starbucks everywhere, even more ubiquitous was the International Bean and Tea Leaf chain. I looked at a local paperstand and didn’t see any of my usual, so I popped into the Hilton thinking I might find a concession stand with at least a USA Today. Maybe labor is so cheap, that the Hilton has a suited smiling person stationed every ten feet around their lobby. All obsequiously saying hello, bowing and smiling. I had managed to avoid the first group of these fellows. Looking around for a shop with no immediate satisfaction I decide to ask the next fellow. He, grinning idiotically in response to my question, asks which room I am in. When I say I am not in a room, he points me out to the street and dismissivly says “I dunno, mebbe the seveleven or sumptin’”. My, I didn’t think I was looking that scruffy!

As it was 09:00, an hour before shops open, and feeling somewhat under caffeinated, I popped into one of the Bean and Tea establishments (next to the California Pizza Kitchen). I ordered a Iced Frozen Mocha just as one would find on Montana Ave. and sat down outside and watched the world. At this hour it seemed mostly tourists up early and venturing out of their hotels for the first time. I use my phone card to make some calls to the west coast, and started walking.

In a block I see an internet room where I go in and start working my way through some two hundred and fifty messages. Some people I know with PC’s must be smitten with viri, as I have a lot of stupid messages with little 100k packages attached. It takes me ten minutes to weed them out. I spend about an hour checking banks, brokerages etc. Then I start walking again. I go into a Border’s, I might as well be in Santa Monica except it is about eighty-five degrees and humid out. I buy a Herald-Trib, a Harper’s and Atlantic Monthly, see that the DVDs are highly priced and head out. It is 10:40 and I start worrying, “what if the work went faster”.

I hop in a cab whose driver seems reluctant to put on the meter as we drive along. He also keeps pretending not to understand me although he is listening to a cooking show on the radio, in English! I am firm, he puts the meter on and I get back to my gate. There, I have to wait until 11:30 for a bus. The sky opens up in a tropical drenching. Finally we pile into a beaten up old jalopy bus with old dirty cans of various automotive fluids sitting around the front door in case of need. There is also a friendly lucky dragon hanging from then mirror and a real live bird in a cage. We slowly totter off, and twenty minutes later, much in relief to still find it there, I am at the ship.

At 11:55, my Border’s bag in hand, dripping with rain, I stumble into the mess, where everyone is (a rare occurrence)! The captain and chief are glaring at me and everyone else is looking away, like in school, “oh-oh, you are going to get it”. It seemed that the chief had gone to close out the ship with customs/immigrations when my passport could not be found and then I could not be found as I had not reported to anyone that I was going ashore! Yeaaah buuuttt, I hadn’t been instructed as to the formalities, there had been nobody in the ships office when I left, and I had just assumed to return by the traditional one hour before departure. I was not going to feel guilty, if they had been too busy to give me proper instructions. But I asserted that now I knew so it wouldn’t happen again, I delivered my passport and vaccination certificates to the chief and sat down to lunch. That was Singapore!

We departed at 13:45, ten minutes after the last container were put on board (maybe five to ten percent fewer then we had before) and the last gantry slowly raised up. Again the almost imperceptible sideways acceleration and then the move forward. Only this time, when the engine started up, the smoke stack coughed and rained down a shower of huge oily black cinders, on all the fresh new containers, for a few seconds, as if it was getting used to the new fuel. Into the busy straits and then eastbound and down. After a few hours we were going NNE along a route with most of the rest of the shipping world in either direction, through the South China Sea.

It is interesting how the ability to perceive motion, mass, specific gravity and such, is learned. A child will be afraid of a big paper elephant because it is big. An adult, able to intuit the papers lack of weight feels no fear. If someone threatened to drop a basketball on your foot, you would react very differently then if they threatened to drop a basketball sized piece of lead on it. When your house shakes in an earthquake, although it shakes much less then you might notice if your car shook the same amount, it is scary as one can feel the potential of that much movement by that much mass (as well as the strangeness of the occurrence).. The skill it takes in docking these ships is an awareness of the energies involved with mass in motion, and how to control them.

At around 22:00, I went to the completely dark wheelhouse to ask about something I had peered at out of my porthole, even with binoculars I couldn’t make head or tails of. Ernesto explained that, besides the myriad fishingboats making his life hard on this moonless night (we were at full speed never the less) that we were still in a high piracy zone going through all these Malay islands. What I had seen was a tanker whose skippers idea of anti-piracy behavior was the opposite of ours. He lit his ship up like a christmas tree, and attached fire hoses to the railings spraying showers of water all over, a watery curtain to dissuade would be boarders. It was quite impressive looking. But it was a laden tanker at about half our speed and and much lower free board. We raced along blacked out. The Gulf of Thailand to my port, Malaysia on the starboard.

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