The Hugo

The next time you pop down the shops, it’s a good bet that some of the items that end up your bag have once been on a boat.

Whilst humans can whizz through the air, care of Boeing and Airbus, most of the things we buy from aboard stay firmly on the ground. Or at least, the water.

Ninety percent of the world’s trade is carried by sea, loaded up on massive container ships and floated across oceans and seas.

The CMA-CGM Hugo is one of these such ships.

Yet calling him a ‘ship’ is to belittle him. He‘s (for surely with a name like that one must break with the convention of making all ships female and address him as such) much more than a ship.

A behemoth, a big beast, a key part of the machine.

Built in a Korean shipyard the Hugo entered service five years ago, one of the largest of his kind.
Standing 62m tall and measuring over 1,000 foot long, he weighs in at a hefty 90,000 tonnes.

With a draft of 48 feet when fully loaded, and 140 feet wide (just enough to squeeze through the Panama Canal) he is a true titan of the oceans.

This appearance is not deceptive, for he packs a mighty punch as well.

Down in the engine room the impressive Hyundai engine is a huge metal monster, all pistons and pipes, exhausts and flashing lights. It‘s capable of producing 93,000 horsepower - enough to turn the propeller at up to 94 rpm and push the boat along at speeds of up to 26 knots/hour.

Pretty impressive for such a heavy craft.

This is thirsty work of course, at Hong Kong we took in a mere 5,500 metric tons of heavy diesel, enough to power the big fella across the Pacific to LA and back. That’s a fair few barrels of the black stuff, yet still far more fuel efficient than an aeroplane.

All this power of course is with one purpose in mind - to carry our precious cargo across an ocean.

And the cargo itself is no less impressive. From the bridge it lies stretched out, nine rows to the bow, another five rows astern. Big heavy 40 foot containers, rust and rocking in the swell, nine across and five deep.

Below, in the holds, lie another nine layers of containers, of equal proportions.

This all adds up to a maximum capacity of some 8,200 containers (though, thanks to recent global economic jitters we’re only stacked up to about three quarters capacity).

It’s hardly surprising then that a huge heavy lifting operation swings into action each time one of those vessels hoves into view over the horizon.

The containers resemble massive, rusting lego bricks, green, red, yellow, blue. They’re stamped with their companies names: Maersk, Hapag-Lloyd, Hanjin, MSC. Unfamiliar names carrying familiar brands.

We don’t know exactly what’s inside, but we can hazard a guess. Consumer items from the factories of China to the living rooms of America. TVs and ipods, cheap clothes and food.

I’m told this tub is so big it can carry enough cargo to completely fill a shopping centre of one million-square-feet, stacking the shelves some eight feet high. That’s a lot of Christmas presents.
The Hugo is a modern marvel, a testament to the engineering brilliance of mankind and his capacity for logic and organisation.

And, statistics aside, he’s a living, breathing symbol of the interconnected, interdependent, inexorable nature of global trade today.

You don’t need a credit crunch to realise how reliant countries are on each other for the goods that make them tick. Just take a look around Hugo: his various parts and machinery, his crew and destinations.

Consider his multinational character: Korean-built, French-owned, German-run, serving the peoples of China, America and probably way beyond. This makes him the maritime equivalent of a Hollywood movie, key components coming from different countries.

And scan his cargo inventory, with products made, originating from, or heading to, a whole host of other nations.
He may fly a German flag but surely he belongs to the world.

Running the Hugo requires a compliment of 8 officers (German and Polish) and 16 crew (all Filopino), surprisingly few for so large a vessel.

These men are extremely busy for, alongside manning the bridge and guiding it across the ocean, the vessel demands constant attention and endless maintenance.

Oiling and welding, washing and cleaning, Safety checks, firedrills, equipment checks, it goes on and on.

There’s a crew to be fed, and cargo to be checked, records to be kept and mountains of paperwork to attend to.

It’s a 24-hour job, with the crew rotating in shifts, long nights on the bridge, watching the screens, or in the heat of the engine room, monitoring banks of bewildering dials.

All’s ship-shape and tightly-run, working to local time, following the 24 hour clock and keeping rigorously to schedule.

Safety is paramount, fire the greatest fear. Safety checks are made day and night,; warning signs de riguer; checklists are exhaustive, neatly painted yellow and black stripes mark out every possible trip hazard.

The Hugo runs the ‘Pearl River Express’ route, between the southern coast of China and the West coast of the USA. Trade between these two countries is increasing faster and faster and boats such as this are its workhorses, powering this growth.

Before boarding we realised the significance of the shipping business, however it wasn’t until we were on board that we came to realise just how big a piggy bank it was upon which we had hitched a ride.

This is a multi-billion pound industry - the sums of money involved are mind boggling. In California, our destination, the value of international trade to California tops $350 billion every year. If the Hugo went down he would take tens, if not hundreds of millions of dollars with him.

Hugo is one of many container ships; CMA CGM (his French owners) alone own or have on order 17 of this class of vessel.

This may sound rather extravagant but then they do boast quite a considerable turnover - last year, for example, their revenue stood at some $11.8 billion.

Money aside, perhaps these shipping lines are of even greater significance. The Hugo and others are witnesses to the shifts in the global economy, carriers of change as China expands and others follow in its wake.

He’s websites and restaurants and supermarket shelves. He’s factories, clothes shops and online retailers.

See, much more than a ship.

Read more...

A dragon, awake?

From high up on our ship, the Hugo, I gaze out across Hong Kong’s International Container Terminal.

This pulsating new world is full of strange new sights and sounds, like some massive new planet straight from the mind of George Lucas.

Against a backdrop of tower blocks, between the sea and sweeping expressways this massive port never rests. Huge metal containers are neatly stacked up, one on top of the other, row after row after row, like some monstrous supermarket.

Giant machines preside over these containers, mechanical monsters staking out their territory. War of the Worlds meets Bladerunner.

The huge cranes run on rails, their massive legs either side of the rows of containers. One in front of us slides regally up to a heavy container, plucks it up into the air and plonks it onto a waiting, long, gaunt trailer.

The lorry’s chassis shudders under the impact; in this land of giants large trucks seem tiny, one of hundreds of automobile ants scuttling around the crowded loading bays, in a constant rush to keep their Queen fed.

She waits at the dockside - an enormous gantry crane.

This leviathan, one of many lined up along the waterfront, dwarfs even the picker cranes, her operator, high up in his cabin, a mere speck in the sky.

With a pull of a lever his charge reaches down and relives the lorry of its burden, whisking a 40 foot container high into the air, his cabin shooting out over a waiting container ship, and swiftly lowering the cargo into the bowels of the boat.

Another container loaded - a few thousand to go.

A few hours sailing up the coast, from the Special Administrative Region of Hong Kong to ‘the mainland’ proper and the port of Yantian, the scene is repeated. Great containers taken on board, others unloaded.

Yantian is the port for Shenzhen - one of China‘s maritime gateways to the world. As we waited at the dockside I mused on our recent visit to this city.

Back in the 1980s, in the days of Deng, the enlightened Premier opened up this little settlement, on the borders of the British-held New Territories to outside economic forces.

As one of his Special Economic Zones, Shenzhen was allowed to wander down the path of the ‘capitalist running dogs’, to experience the pleasures and pains of capitalism relatively unhindered - something unthinkable only a few years before.
Shenzhen rocketed in size, from a town of 30,000 in 1970 to the present bulging megalopolis of some 14 million. It’s ballooning was such that, by 1990 the city had even outgrown the local energy supply, requiring the construction of a brand new nuclear power station.

Today other Chinese cities have caught up and share the same appearance as Shenzen. Booming metropolises in this overstuffed duvet of a country.
There’s less to distinguish them from each other (and perhaps from many elsewhere in the world?) as they tend towards the universal blueprint from which many local authorities seem to take their cue.
They’re becoming identikit cities, as if they are constructed from some massive ready-to-assemble pack. Cram your steel and glass skyscrapers into the centre; thread your huge, radiating freeways out to the edges.
We hurried headlong through Shenzhen into Hong Kong, crossing the border into Lo Wu.

A filthy little river, strewn with rubbish and framed by barbed wire and huge hoardings for the latest electronic gadgets denotes the border. You cross it via an enclosed pedestrian walkway, through shopping arcades and following signs reading ‘please leave the country by [the] lift’.


By doing so we followed in the footsteps of millions of immigrant Chinese who once left their homeland in search of a better life in the West.

Back to the present, on board the Hugo, I considered how these migratory patterns are changing, as the balance of economic power in the world shifts East.
China’s ’economic miracle’ is by no means unheard of back home. It’s origins are dissected in the Sundays and Newsnight specials, its knock-on effects muttered about down the pub and the gym.
It’s expanding its economic muscles, growing in confidence and might.
From the 50 million containers it moves annually at present this is projected to grow to a gobsmacking 100 million in 2020.
This region is right at the forefront of this.
I need look no further than the scene in front of me, unfolding before us. Mountains of manufactured goods, all bagged up and ready to be shipped, direct to our doorsteps.

Indeed here in Shenzhen are produced all the world’s ipods and apple computers (surely then without this city our global civilisation would take a terrible tumble).

Yet it seems strange that this is occurring in a country where half the population lives below the poverty line, where people still pull handcarts.

Economic progress in China it seems comes at different speeds for different people.

Still the giant - or perhaps more appropriately, the dragon - is awake, he’s fully alert and throwing all his muscle into it.
The forces of global power are shifting, revolving around pivots such as Yantian.

In the West we seem to delight in prophesizing our doom here, scaring ourselves silly. Of course that doesn’t stop us relocating our factories and services here, or buying their products, in our desperate lust for a bargain.
Nor does it allow for there the argument that perhaps there is room for more than one economic superpower in this new world order.
Must the international order follow the laws of Newtonian physics, where the rise of one will see the consequent decline of the other?

In this other power, the United States of course, there’s considerable concern: talk about power already seeping away; the inevitable end of the American hegemony, the inexorable decline of US might.
Is this the true picture of what’s happening? We’ll soon find out for ourselves as we travel between these two great countries.

Uncle Sam’s up next but in the meantime there’s the small matter of a great Ocean to cross.




Read more...