American dreams

“Woo-oooo, there’s trouble in America…”
- Razorlight

I’m very excited - we‘re heading for America! (Hence the all-too-predictable title).

The United States of America provokes in me a reaction like no other country on earth. It’s a mixture of amazement, excitement and envy with distain, disgust and just downright pity.

I last visited this incredible country in 2001, returning to Blighty a jumble of mixed feelings.
I was wowed by its cities (the buzz of New York; the buildings of Chicago; the harbour of San Francisco), enthralled by its natural beauty (the Great Plains of South Dakota, the Rocky Mountains of Colorado, the forests of the Pacific North West).

But while I was impressed at what the States had to offer I was also appalled at what people had to give. It seemed as if the whole country had been sacrificed to the pursuit of making money, that anything and everything was knocked down, the soul sucked out of it and given over to the corporations.

The result was an unthinking standardisation of everything, a mundane uniformity so that life was reduced to the lowest common denominator. Whether Washington or Milwaukee, Denver or Seattle it was likely you’d have a similar experience - the same shops, the same burger, the same same.

How could it be that this huge nation, with so much potential, such ability, so many aspirations - the ‘land of the free’ - had willingly surrendered its soul, all in the pursuit of a quick buck?

Did this help to explain all that made me recoil in America? The dominance of huge ugly shopping malls and junk food outlets, the fat lardy people, the crap public transport and the dominance of the car, the apathy and the helplessness of common folk versus the naked greed of the suits and the cynical venality of the Republican administration.

Perhaps, but it seemed to me a place which was had gone simply too far. It was tragic to witness the gross and obvious extremities screaming out across the land.

Flags festooned every front lawn yet many people I spoke to had little idea about the world outside their own state, let alone country; the rich pratted about in flashy gas guzzlers and barricaded themselves in palatial fortresses whilst the poor pushed all their worldly goods through the streets in shopping trolleys.

I’ll never forget the ghettoes, where you seemed to be left to rot with little help from the state.
America is a paradox. One of the richest countries on earth, where anyone can supposedly ‘make it‘, yet you can also lose it. Like nowhere else in the developed world.

Seven years on, after another seven years of Bush and Cheney, I fear what I might find.
But I also hold out hope. This is America, after all, the country towards whom the rest of the world still often turns.

Will Barrack make it better? I hope so, though I’m not naïve enough to expect it (I recall similar feelings of jubilation and relief back in 1997, with the ascendancy of a certain T. Blair).

But the past can be a deadweight: I’ll leave my memories at the border and enter with a clear mind. The good, the bad and the downright bizarre: bring them all on.

I expect to find them all, cheek-by-jowl in the first of our destinations, Los Angeles.

We’re staying with a chap with a crazy name who lives in Hollywood, describes himself as a comedian and communicates like Bill and Ted - “I’m, like, totally cool with you guys crashing”.
Can’t wait.

Los Angeles is our first starting point - home to Hollywood, Ram It and the worst of American excesses.

As LA marks the start of our trip, I’ve been inspired to follow in the best traditions of this city and set myself some good ol’ ‘attainment goals’ for my time in the USA.

My list so far reads:
Meet someone called Chuck or Randy (particularly if their name also includes the suffix ‘Jr’ )
Eat a Corndog
Visit a High School and look inside the students’ lockers
Go to a live recording of a chat show
Watch an Ice Hockey match
Visit a space centre
Get admired for my accent and asked if I'm from 'Scotsland' / Denmark etc
Persuade someone I am Prince William’s cousin
Collect bizarre questions about my home country, e.g: ’Do you still drive a horse and carriage?’
Hear some Mississippi blues, preferably on a rickety old porch, in the rain
Hear something referred to as ‘aloadabaloney’
Eat pizza in ‘Noo York Cidy’
Buy a ten gallon hat
Meet a stressed-out, coffee-guzzling cop like the fat one off ‘NYPD Blues’
Go to Mardi Gras in New Orleans

High-brow stuff indeed.

And I’m, like, totally looking forward to it.

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The Only Woman on the Ship

When we arrived at the CMA CGM Hugo the Second Mate cried ‘Right gentlemen, here we are.’ Had he not noticed I have breasts?

Before boarding our floating hotel of 6,000 containers I had a suspicion that I would be the only woman onboard, and I was correct. Indeed at fire drill twenty surprised faces looked out from under florescent orange helmets to see me clambering through the door clutching an ‘adult oversize’ immersion suit to fit a person three times my size. But then given that the signs for the fire drill read ‘Gentlemen, today there will be a fire drill at 15:30...’ perhaps I really wasn’t expected. I was therefore a little apprehensive and to start with kept a low profile.

However, my voyage has not been the chauvinist experience I had chauvinistically expected. Sure there was a collection of dodgy DVDs (like the temptingly titled Erotic Werewolf in London), some strange comments ('You don’t eat seconds so that you stay sexy') and a number of wink wink nudge nudge jibes and jokes (especially after we announced our engagement), but this bunch of Germans, Filipinos and a Pole were real gentlemen.

So it would seem that I need to revise my prejudicial view of randy sailors based on tales of old from films, rumour and the Reeperbahn, for I have been able to sunbathe and have had a very pleasant journey. All apart from one traumatic experience - having visited the bridge to check our position and course I happened upon the Captain, or Master, sprawled out naked in the sunshine on a white towel with nothing but a flannel to cover his modesty. At that moment, I really wished I was a man.
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Wednesday 3rd December, 2008

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.

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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.

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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.
Just water. Lots and lots of it. We‘re crossing the biggest body of water in the world, one that covers a third of the entire globe.

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

Stirring up memories: seasickness and Stugeron on the ferry to Cherbourg; childhood stories of shipwrecked mariners; songs about drowning,; films about storms; news of sinking vessels; TV celebrity ‘survival’ shows featuring Carol Thatcher….

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 sunloungers 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.

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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.




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Symphonies of Lights

Hong Kong Island was ablaze with the 8pm music and light show. The grey concrete and glass skyscrapers of day suddenly took on individual personalities as they jovially flashed and jiggled their multitude of rainbow lights and sent lasers into the night sky in synchrony with the retro electronic beat of the music. All very Orbital and quite spectacular. (see video below)

Watching the show for a second time from the deck of our cargo ship the distant skyscraper disco paled in comparison to the dockyard rave around us. CMA CGM Hugo was being loaded up. Six thousand forty foot containers were being stacked like duplo blocks in the holds. Cranes the size of skyscrapers wheeled along the port side flashing and beeping as they went, picking up crates from the back of lorries, tugging them into the air and bringing them crashing down with a metal on metal thud on top of the layer below. The ship shook with each deposit.

There were six cranes dancing on our ship, hundreds more in the port moving and stacking boxes, and ships all around us being laden in a similar way. All glistening with flashing warning lights. Set to the accompaniment of a repetitive beats (engines thumping) and bleeps (reversing lorries, moving cranes) soundtrack with overlying noises (crash and click of containers) that would make Aphex Twin jealous.

It is a gargantuan operation and must have a powerful, logistical mind behind it all. Someone must know what is in the surrounding sea of containers (the officers on the ship do not), where they have come from and where they are going. Containers from the stacks stored on shore are lifted onto lorries that bring them around to the ship edge where a small man in a control box dangling from the top of a crane picks up, drags and drops the containers on board. The men operating these pods must be regular winners on the fairground snatch and grab games. Between them, they load thirty containers onto the ship every hour. It’s a long track.

This is the international world of shipping. This is how Made In China products arrive in our shops. And tonight I feel like a VIP guest at an exclusive underground party. Hong Kong International Port is where the Symphony of Lights is really at.

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