Jeff Blogs: Hong Kong to the Mediterranean

There have been a few ports-of-call that would accurately be called “off the beaten path”. Un-spun, that means that they aren't tourist destinations. There are reasons why they aren't tourist destinations, and we got to see that - all of which is to say that in the larger scheme of things, they are just regular places. They were: Kota Kinabalu, a Malaysian city next to the country of Brunei, on the island of Borneo; Penang, another Malaysian city on the mainland; Cochin and Chennai, two cities in India (pop. 5 - 8 million). These cities were not remarkable for anything other than as being places where millions upon millions of people spend their days getting by.

One thing that became apparent is that no one likely knows the population of anything in eastern & southern Asia. Think of the drama that takes place in the US during census every 10 years. Or, think of the motivations behind dreaming up the number, “12.5 million illegals” in the US. No matter what methods or motivations, after hearing from our local guides, no one has a clue. Bigger cities all seem to have 5 - 8 million. Smaller cities seem to have a million and a half. Cities like Bombay and Calcutta have 12 - 18 million, which the guides proudly claim as being less than Mexico City's supposed 25 million.

One statistic that we were told is the most number of employees for a single employer on the planet: 25 million people get regular paychecks from the state-owned Indian railroad. India's population is (estimated to be) 1.1 billion, so it would seem to be a believable number.

Staying with the population thing, but going a bit out-of-sequence: In Puntarenas, Costa Rica our guide said that their Catholic Bishop came under fire from the Vatican because birth control methods were being distributed in high schools, and Costa Rica's birth rate was decreasing. Costa Rica is 90% Catholic. The Costa Rican government replied directly to the Pope, saying that when the Vatican began to provide for babies born into poverty, birth control would cease immediately.

While going from country to country, it generally seemed that the rise in the level of prosperity was inversely proportional to rate of population growth. In Southern and Southeast Asia, from what little we saw, there appeared to be growing population among the poor, uneducated Hindus and Muslims.

Buddhism (which is secular, not spiritual) is the main thing going on in China. Buddhism has no comment on propagation. From the local press, there is more competition between China and India than what we hear about in the West. Presently it is being indicated that the Chinese are winning at everything, including demonstrated control of their birthrate. They may not know how many people they have, but a reduction in population and an increase in prosperity are not in dispute. The brutality of their control was commented on by our Chinese born dining mates. There are now so few women in the Chinese countryside that it is common for 3 - 4 men to share a woman. In less than 2 generations, family structure in China is being replaced by something yet to be defined.

Two final notes on population; (a) it was reported on BBC World that some Non-Government Organizations, aka NGOs are beginning to regard religions that promote population growth in the impoverished parts of third world countries as being “extremists”, and (b) we were in Dubai on the day that the Vatican announced that Muslims now outnumber Catholics.

We were excited to see Liz and Tim in Hong Kong. Liz put together a great, day and evening tour. One thing that we began to see in Hong Kong, and that continued throughout Southern Asia, all the way to Northwestern Africa, is haze. Humidity combines with pollution from exhaust, and different kinds of dust, i.e. dirt, cement and desert sand, form a haze that rarely goes away. The port of Hong Kong was the busiest that we've seen so far. Ships, cranes, trucks, and people, moving fast, 7x24. The official word is that Hong Kong is the same as it was under British control. However, according to our on-board lecturer, that is not true. It has and likely will continue to become more and more Chinese. The best part for me was finding a pub while riding up a half-mile long, on/off outdoor escalator.

Da Nang and Saigon (Ho Chi Min City): We headed south on the South China Sea from Hong Kong to Viet Nam. We landed close to Da Nang, which is near the now non-existent DMZ border between (then) North and South Viet Nam. During the Fall of 1969, my Junior year at KMHS, I attended the war moratorium march and rally in Washington DC. For a 16 year old it was a lot to take in at the time. No regrets. On this trip, touring the museums, we were able to see just how far the war had gotten away from the military and into the control of politicians. We wondered around the country-side with our private guide. No way could a soldier on the ground have ever figured out what was going on, at any level. In one museum there was a detailed display of John Kerry's involvement in the war. Had Kerry been elected, I don't think that the ship would have been able to stop in Viet Nam. There was also a display showing the ultimate back-tracking of the at-the-time Defense Secretary, Robert McNamara. Anyway, it seemed all the more real now because of my age at that time.

Interestingly, while on our approach to Da Nang, the ship went aground. And, while departing Saigon, we tangled a dock line in a propeller. First off, forget the advantage of a charting GPS. This ain't (Olathe,) Kansas. Those channel markers don't appear on an internal GPS chart. It was the most remote port that you could imagine. There was nothing else at this port, nor did it look like anything had been there since the war. Two rusted out containers, with window openings torched through the sides - they made up the temporarily offices. No Jiffy Johnnies, nothing.

Docking: I went up on deck to observe. It was early dawn, combined with fog so thick that visibility was less than 100 yards. (Think: duck hunting.) The channel was not much wider than this massive ship. Another problem is that the radar is about 180' up and 250' back, actually behind the bridge. So the channel markers were in the radar shadow of the bow of the ship. The bottom was silt, which means that the depth-sounders don't have anything to bounce a signal off of, thereby being unable to tell where the “bottom” was. With 90,000 tons of momentum, the slow, forward movement of the ship went to a soft, unnoticeable stop. The fog lifted a bit, showing the bow as being outside of the right/starboard side channel marker. We needed to back-up and go left in order to get back into the channel.

With propeller pods as our propulsion system, there is no reverse gear. To go backwards, one or both of the pods needs to spin 180 degrees, which is obviously made difficult by being impacted in the silt. The bow thrusters were activated. There are three of them. They are powered by single-speed electric motors, with a hydraulic based system for controlling the pitch of the propeller blades. Thrust is further controlled by turning on one, then the next, then the third one - which was done, but they did not free us. The bulb of the ship was impacted in the silt.

We sat very still, for a while. It was definitely a “pregnant pause”. Then suddenly, the entire ship began to grumble, big-time. In what seemed to be a simultaneous action, the starboard pod was put in gear, slow speed and spun around. The slow, clawing motion of the propeller actually carved a circular a space in the silt as the pod was slowly, gently spun around to face the other way. While all that was going on, all three bow thrusters were turned on, pushing silt from left to right, much of it actually being forced though the thruster tubes in the forward hull. We didn't move at all for about 20 seconds. It seemed longer but that was long enough. After a lot of racket, shaking, with huge amounts of slurry being moved from the left side to the to the right side of the ship, we broke free, moved sideways, abaft, and got back into the channel.

Departure: The dock-guys on shore were clueless. In fairness to them, this enormous, alien, floating structure is way beyond their normal realm of daily activity. It only takes 2 - 3 of these guys to cast us off, which is pretty amazing by itself. They get all but the last line un-cleated. Prior to that, the ship needs to begin movement in order to maintain a steady position --- meaning that if the tide is going in or out, the ship needs to compensate for that in order to remain at the dock. So the dock guys, instead of waiting for the ship guys to begin winching the last line up to the deck, just toss the line into the water - while the propeller is in gear, maintaining a steady ship's position.

Most of us water-rats have tangled a dock line in the prop. It happens, and you deal with it. At the scale of this program, things happen differently. These dock lines are 5” in diameter. It takes two guys to man-handle them. The last line is now wrapped around a 20' propeller. Okay, time for Plan B. After stabilizing the ship, you'd think that they'd get out some diving gear, send some guys down, unwrap it, and we're on our way. That's not happening. In fact, get out another bottle of sail-away Champagne. We have divers, but no diving gear, and no plan.

The ship put out a call locally, and two guys wonder down the dock. The one with the goggles and the chain would be the diver. The other guy has a hose. You could sort of believe that maybe this wasn't their first time. The diver tied the chain around his waist - yes, the chain became the weight belt. There was no Jacques Cousteau quick-release on this weight-belt. No way. Chain is rare in these parts. No sense in taking any chances on loosing the chain.

But wait, there's more! The hose was a hose - not a compressed air line with a regulator at the end. That meant that the other guy had to just sit there and hold the opposite end of the hose above the surface of the water. Keep in mind that with this method, not only does the composition of the air change as it is drawn down, under the surface of water - it gets worse than that: The diver guy can't exhale back into the hose because he would then inhale the air that he had just exhaled. Has to inhale through his mouth, and then exhale through his nose. He must be sure to not let any water get into the hose. If it does, the water getting into the hose would cause him to choke underwater the next time he inhaled.

On top of all that there is a fully impenetrable language barrier. Luckily, what was happening was so pathetic that it didn't rise to the level where translation was required! The diver jumped into the churned-up muck, thick slop, with no visibility. After almost two hours, mission accomplished. The diver must have been half-dead. We went on our way.

As a follow-up, weeks later we had dinner with a ship's company representative. He claimed that the additional 2 hours spent at the dock cost Cunard $40,000. This was because of the speed that we needed to maintain in order to make-up for lost time. It required that much more fuel. Had it not been a social occasion, I would have asked him how the cost/benefit analysis was going for a couple of sets of diving gear ;-)

The shoreline is an interesting feature in South Asia. Almost all of it, meaning thousands of miles, is similar to the 10,000 Islands area, between Cape Romano (Marco Island) and Cape Sable. It is all low-land, silt bottom, shallow grades, hundreds of thousands of square miles of mangrove swamp, freshwater rivers everywhere. The water near shore is not clear, due to the silt and obviously huge amounts of nutrients near the cities. But the porous shoreline seems to deal with it. Not too far offshore, the water is clear. Near the cities there is junk floating everywhere. Litter is mostly from packaging.

North America will never have any serious fish farming. Without even looking for it, we saw 100s of square miles of fish farms in Thailand. The permitting industry in the US wouldn't be able to do much more than chuckle at anyone attempting to do what they do in Southeast Asia. Plus, except for maybe the delta area of Louisiana, we simply don't have the required type of topography/shore line

Continuous trawling of the sea bottom in the Gulf of Mexico is not good thing. This is frustrating because Gulf shrimp are far and away the best for eating. The bright side for me was that fish farming in Southeast Asia wasn't the sewerage-aeration-pond operation that US propaganda has suggested. Most of what I saw involved a low-tech approach. The industry is simply too big to be using huge amounts of chemicals. Fish/mussel/shrimp farming in Southeast Asia has been done for domestic consumption for a thousand years. When the US receives chemical-laced product from Southeast Asia, it's because that's what our buyers have selected to be shipped to us.

We stopped at 3 cities in India. In order, they were Chennai, Cochin, and Mumbai (Bombay). That was also the order of their level of prosperity. It went from unbelievably poor to not-quite-as-poor-as-the-previous-one. It's hot, all of the time. In Chennai, with 5 - 8 million people, the city couldn't come up with enough coach buses for us. That's not a complaint. It's an indicator that tourism is not likely to become a significant source of revenue anytime soon. One thing that you get the feel for more than when you see this stuff on TV is the scale of everything. Miles upon miles, repeating the same struggle. The crowds, the filth, blue tarps & tin roofs, the walled government & corporate compounds. It goes on and on and on. In Mumbai, there were some nicer things. However, the appearance of anything is impossible to keep up. Mold and mildew on the walls all of the buildings more than a year old. It never goes away. Once constructed, they are never re-painted. There is never a time that I didn't see a truck hauling fresh water. For all of the cities we stopped at, sewage treatment was essentially left to the Indian Ocean. We drove through Dharavi, the world's largest and most famous slum, located near the central part of Mumbai. About 700,000 people live desperate lives in a truly tiny area.

Two days out of Mumbai, we pulled into Dubai. The Burj al Arab hotel was as outrageous as I had expected, as was snow skiing at the Mall of the Emirates. I was looking forward to seeing if the reality lived up to the hype. It surpassed it, big-time. The amount of construction going on there is beyond imagination. They began building their tallest building in the world 2 years ago. They're at 168 stories, and haven't decided yet if that is going to be tall enough. It's incredible. They will keep going up depending upon what the Chinese settle in at for their world's tallest building. The cement factories, power plants and desalination plants are all gargantuan. Everywhere, the engineering and execution is absolutely first rate. This is the loosest budget operation you could ever see anywhere. They want it. They want it now. They want it right. And they want it beautiful. There are miles of clusters of tall residential buildings.

Competition is fierce when it comes to world class ostentation. In the Air Egypt in-flight magazine I read that there have been two indoor ski-hills recently completed that are bigger than Ski Dubai.

At the end of our day, the universal response was, “Why would anyone live here?” It is hot and hazy. You drive west a few miles, and its sand dunes. There are beautiful marinas, with hundreds of big boats. But there is nowhere to go in a boat. The water is too warm to be refreshing. At that temperature, I don't think that you could run a boat at wide-open-throttle for very long due to overheating.

The Sheik must have seen that movie about the ball park in the Iowa corn field. There are tens of thousands of occupied, finished residential units; with tens of thousands more, sold-out, and soon to be finished; and hundreds of thousands more on the drawing boards. It will be interesting to see what kind of community will be created by the people who move in. Lastly, at present, it is an entirely false economy. Everything upfront is made and sold way under cost. However, the Sheik stands a chance at pulling it off. Presently, the secondary market is so strong that those prices would have supported the original unit construction cost. Goodbye Dubai.

Salalah, Oman was another “off the beaten path” stop. 120,000 Arab Muslims live there. The Sheik's palaces, compounds and horse farms were over-the-top. He rarely visits. The royal facilities create a lot of jobs. It is a prosperous place, especially when considering that the only visible industry is a bit of agriculture. The UAE and the other Arab countries have Bedouins that live off the land for extended periods of time.

We passed the coast of Somalia in northwestern African while turning north to enter the Red Sea. There was a tail-wind that blew stink. From there until entering the Mediterranean Sea we faced the most amount of possible peril from terrorists. The Captain commented that there was to be some visible security on the decks. I guess this is supposed to put a particular demographic of our passengers at ease - meaning, how could a couple of guys wondering around the ship actually have an effect our security? I don't know, but I believe that we squawked a unique identifier to the NATO war ships nearby. They keep this seaway open for oil tankers. We have seen a half-dozen war ships and a military helicopter since leaving Dubai. The Red Sea is around 50 miles wide, which is big enough that we didn't see very much of the shore on either side. The war ships stay almost out of sight. You see them occasionally through the haze, but you have to look for them.

I chuckled at the following realization: Regarding maritime security in the UAE, their Sheik/Sultan/King whatever's, private yachts are 2 to 3 times larger than any of their coast guard/naval vessels. The incredibly perfect yachts run +300', while the tiny military marked vessels run about 100' - 200'. The yachts are too big to park at the marinas, so they are kept at the commercial ports, which is where we dock.

Except for the Red Sea, the seas have been totally unremarkable for weeks and weeks, since the Tasman Sea. AHARRGH!!! I could have done the entire Indian Ocean run in the Whaler! Anyway, it looks like we'll see no swells until the Atlantic, from Gibraltar to Southampton.

On our way north we crossed over from the Arabian Peninsula side of the Red Sea to the African side, going more than a few hundred miles to Safaga, Egypt. We flew on from there and overnighted in Cairo. We went there to see the Pyramids, ride a camel and have a boat ride on the Nile. Cairo has 12 - 15 million people. Flying into Cairo was like flying into Phoenix, AZ. Moonscape for hundreds of miles, then lush. The Nile runs through it. Around the city, the smaller rivers that lead into the Nile are trashed, but the Nile seemed relatively clean.

The Pyramids were worth the toil of this intense shore-side trip. The planning, cutting, placing, and joining of the stones was perfect. Inside one of them there is a 60' long, 8' wide stone that is a flat as a table top, all done by hand. Almost of the work was done in limestone. However, one of them had a granite covering. The hardest metal that they had at the time was copper. Amazing stuff.

The camels on the African side of the Red Sea are much larger than those on the Arabian Peninsula side. African camels are great animals.

The dinner cruise on the Nile showed Cairo to have a reasonably impressive downtown area. The biggest newest buildings were hotels in the 30 - 40 story range.

Traffic in Cairo is insane, similar to what was seen in India, except that the cars in Cairo were much newer. Unlike India, the cars in Cairo had a lot of road-rash, meaning little dents and scrapes on almost every car.

There is a political-policy-gone-bad thing going on in Cairo. Apparently the UN became concerned that Cairo might turn into another Calcutta. In order to not have Indian caliber slums, Egypt was told to construct apartments in Cairo. For 10 miles or more there are thousands of 3 - 10 story red brick buildings, not one of which has been completed. Occupancy looks to be by squatters, and seems to run at about 5%. There are no streets, just dusty, rocky sand in the space between them. Most remarkable are the non-roofs. The columns above the top-most floor extend further up, like another floor will be added soon. Rebar is sticking out of the tops of the columns. But the rebar is rusted, and there is no construction happening anywhere. From a functional standpoint, it's not a problem to not have a roof, because it never, ever rains. It wouldn't be remarkable to see a few or even maybe a hundred, but there are thousands of these buildings throughout Cairo. Lastly, even the ones that made it up to 10 stories tall have no provision for an elevator. Go figure.

The Suez Canal began with lining 30 - 40 ships up prior to entering. War ships go first, but there were none. Technically, ships carrying mail go next, but there are no ships that carry mail anymore, so the protocol moves on to passenger ships. There are three cruise ships. In CB lingo, we are in the rocking chair, which makes us the 2^nd ship in the convoy. Unlike like the Panama Canal, there are few places were ships can pass each other, while going in the opposite direction. It is a one lane highway, with a couple of widenings where ships coming the other way can pull off so that the others can pass.

This ship would definitely be a big prize for terrorists. The Cunard queens stand out in the crowd, as they are the only cruise ships that are not totally white. Every bad country you've ever heard of lately is not very far away. The security provided by Egypt consists of soldiers on the ground all along the way. Militarily, this line could be breached with little effort. However, on an effective level, the good guys, in the form of NATO are here as well, so there is no problem. Thank you American Foreign Policy.

The scuttlebutt on board is that the charge for passing through the Suez Canal is more than the charge for the Panama Canal. $300,000 and $275,000 respectively - again, according to the scuttlebutt. It seemed like a bad deal because this canal was dug around 1860, so the capital costs have long since been recovered. There is some maintenance, and there is the not-intimidating-whatsoever military presence. But most of all is that, unlike the massive locks of the Panama Canal, the Suez Canal has no locks. It's like an 80 mile river between the northern tip of the Red Sea and the southeastern corner of the Mediterranean Sea. So while it might seem like a bad deal, it's Egypt's canal. They charge what the traffic will bear, which is based on tonnage - after the buffets.

I was told that the Suez Canal was essentially a ditch in the desert, similar to parts of the passage going from Ft. Myers to Port St. Lucie. That statement was true enough, but it was still interesting. We were up at 5:00am to view the lining up. We had front row seats in the Commodore Club Lounge throughout the passage. The transit concluded upon entering the Med at 3:30 that same afternoon. It was another great day.

Cheers!