More cargo

Decks #1, 2, & 3 had the highest head room of the 11 decks and held all kinds of equipment that needed more space, including 8' tall containers and heavy machinery. Here on deck 3 right inside the ramp opening were two very familiar machines, a Caterpillar bulldozer going to Israel, and a John Deere crop sprayer going to Izmir Turkey. Interestingly enough, our experiences as Americans ashore in those two countries were exactly opposite. The Turkish people we met, including the security people at the port, were very friendly and helpful, whereas the Israeli officials we met were almost rude and very demanding. I just hope that bulldozer wasn't going to be used to destroy more homes and build more walls. As well as this bulldozer, on deck #3 near the ramp on the way from Antwerp to the Mediterranean Sea there were several huge New Holland tracked backhoes, a huge steel cylinder on two trailers, and several hundred 8' by 40' containers, filled with who knows what. 

Yes, the green paint of John Deere is getting seen all around the world. This is the sprayer that got off the ship in Izmir Turkey. We got off the ship there as well for a few hours after the Captain told us that we wouldn't be leaving for the next port of Limasoll Cyprus until late that night or early the next morning. So we got our shore passes (the ship's 3rd Deck Officer kept our passports locked in his safe almost the whole voyage), threaded our way through the forest of shipping containers between us and the front gate of the port, and headed off for town. On the way into the harbor we had seen through our binoculars a waterfront street that looked like it had some outdoor cafes along it, and indeed there was at least a half mile of nice but pricey waterfront resturaunts and sidewalk cafes, complete with chess sets and table top tap beer dispensers. The patrons were very young and stylishly dressed, with very few head scarves on the women. And this, we wondered, is a Muslim country? It is, but a fairly low-key form of Islam rules there, at least in its cities.

This is another import to Israel, a bomb-proof amoured personnel carrier, much like the ones we saw in South Africa in the 1970's. Behind it was a large front end loader, and in front of it was another piece of heavy machinery. The port of Ashdod Israel had two "duty-free" shops where the crewmen could shop if they had time to go ashore at all, but in most of the ports the crew worked all night long supervising the loading and unloading. And as far as we could see, most of what was sold in those duty-free shops was alcohol, cigarettes, and high priced perfume. But the biggest seller were the international telephone cards where you could get several hours of calling time anywhere in the world for about $16. The problem is that you had to use all those minutes in the country where you bought the card, so we saw long lines in front of the telephones that were outside the duty-free shops of crew members waiting for those on the phones to use up their minutes calling their families around the world. The Italian crew members all seemed to have cell-phones that would work anywhere in Europe as long as you were within sight of land and a cell phone tower. As soon a land was sighted when we crossed the Med crewmen would be seen up on the highest decks trying to see if they had any "bars" on their phones, and if they did then they were busy making calls home. Modern technology has made phoning easy, but you still can't use the internet from the ship, at least on the Grimaldi Line.

 

This big cylindrical object was one of two that were loaded at our last stop, Setubal Portugal. We saw it being loaded because we had to wait at the ramp for the Gramaldi Line's port agent to take us to the Portugese Immigration office so that we could enter the country and get ourselves to the Madrid airport for our flight home. As we said in our earlier post, Portugal was the other "most friendly" country we visited, from the officials we met at the Immigration office to the train and bus station attendants, and even just plain folks who were traveling and met us in the waiting rooms. 

Cargo on board the Grande Ellade

This is the "car-carrier" portion of the enormous Antwerp Belgium cargo port. And this is only 1/3rd of the parking area for vehicles waiting to be loaded on the shops. You can see in the distance another "ro/ro" (roll-on/roll-off) ship from a German shipping line. And in the front of the cars is a line of backhoes, and behind it is a line of trucks and buses. But mostly the area was filled with cars, mostly new. There was a large section of used cars going to West Africa, and the interesting thing about them was that every available space in them was filled with used matteresses and other consumer goods. Kind of a four-wheel container!  

As you can tell from this photo, sailing on the Grande Ellade was like going to sea in a parking garage! This photo was taken after we left Antwerp where we completely filled up with cars, all 4720 of them on 8 decks. Most of them were going for some reason to Cyprus, and about half the ones on this top deck were used Mercedes from England. Cyprus is a favorite destination of UK residents who are fed up with the high cost of living in Britain and the cold, wet weather most of the year. But on the lower more protected decks there were thousands of new cars, Fords, Jaguars, Opels, Fiats, Hundais, Kias, and Volvos.

Most of the car decks were just high enough for a person to walk through. This was deck #5 and you actually had to duck to walk under those steel beams. Some of the lower decks can be raised or lowered to fit the requirements of the roll-on/roll-off cargo that was taken aboard. What surprised us was the small size of the nylon straps that held each car in place. Every so often in the deck was a place to hook a strap on, and the strap then went to the wheels of the car. But the strap was only about 1 inch wide and very thin. Nevertheless, even in the gales in the North Atantic, we never saw any movement of the cars across the decks.

 

The driving force of the Grande Ellade!

When we got to Ashdod Israel we not only had to go through an interview with immigration officials, we then had to wait until they took our information back to their office to check us out, and then return with our shore passes. While we were waiting, we took a tour of the engine room, something you cannot do while the ship is under way. This first photo shows the control room on deck #3 in between the ramps that lead to the other decks. The Engineering officers are a light hearted bunch, always friendly and once the engine is not running, delighted to show us around.

Before we were allowed to go into the engine room itself we had to put on ear protectors, for even when the main engine is not running there are dozens of other engines running and the noise was deafening. Linda is standing next to the crankshaft level of this three story, 7 cylinder diesel main engine. We were told that the engine produces 16,000 kw of power, and noticed that the engine is started at least an hour before the ship gets underway, and isn't shut down until she is tied up at the next port. If we need to stop while waiting for a pilot to come out to the ship, the variable propeller is feathered but the shaft keeps turning.

On the next level is the where the cylinder heads and valves are. This engine burns diesel fuel, but not straight from the tank. The fuel is filtered and centrifuged and finally clean enough to run through the engine. On the wall of the Officers Mess where we ate were a series of alarm lights, but the engineering crew told us that the only one that mattered was the "main engine shut down" alarm. However I did notice that when any of the engine room alarms went off during a meal, most of the engineering officers there got up and ran to the elevator that took them down the 7 decks to the engine room.

I was unable to rotate this photo so you will have to turn your head sideways, but this is a spare piston and cylinder head that they carry with them, just in case. One of the engineers told me that they can replace a piston at sea if they absolutely have to, but they certainly would rather do that tied up to a dock somewhere.

And the final result of all that power going down that shaft is a propeller that turns at about 110 rpm's when the control is set at Full Ahead. And you can see in this photo looking behind the ship the kind of wake it produces at 19 kts, about 22 miles per hour. I noticed something I remember seeing when I crossed the Pacific Ocean during my Navy days, the wake of a ship is visible long after the ship has moved on, and sometimes they looked like a maritime version of the jet trails we often see in the sky on a clear day. Standing at the stern of the ship and looking back at the wake behind the ship somehow puts me in a reflective mood, and I noticed that I often started thinking about the "big picture", looking back on life, thinking about what would have happened if I had made different choices at various times, and wondering what's going to happen next.

Lynn

Eating and sleeping onboard

Probably the most important room on the ship to us other than our cabin was the "messroom", which is ship talk for dining room. And high class dining it was! Breakfast was simple, mostly rolls, pizza, and coffee, with occasional yogurt and fruit. But lunches and dinner were four-course all the way. In this picture Boc Noly, the Filipino "messboy" (waiter) is serving us the first course of soup or pasta. At the table on the left are a German couple from a village near Hanover, Eberhart and Gertrude Braun, who joined the ship in Antwerp Belgium. And across from Linda are Joan and Ken Hughes from England who joined us in Southampton and who were emigrating to Cyprus with all their belongs including a car that was safely stowed on deck #5.


The second course was always a seafood course, although occasionally the pasta course had seafood mixed in with the spagetti or soup. This particular dish was boiled octopus, and Linda is having some difficulty trying to figure out if she is brave enough to try some octopus along with the potatoes that Boc is putting on her plate. In fact, she passed on the octopus, but I had one and it was really good, tentacles, head, and whatever else and octopus is made of. Over the five weeks we had clams, squid, cod, sole, sardines, mackrel, and a number of other fishes that no one on board knew the names of.



Fortunately for Linda the fish course was always followed by a meat course, in this case veal cutlets. As you can see in several of these photos, at each meal we had a small bottle of wine, some times red and sometimes white. At lunch on Easter Sunday we shared several bottles of champaign with the Officers table.




















After all that food, it was time for a nap, and the bunks in the cabin were very comfortable. We were supposed to have an inside cabin with just an upper and lower bunk, but because the ship we were supposed to be on was in drydock in Italy when we arrived in England, they gave us a three-bunk cabin and didn't charge us the $1400 difference if fare. I suppose that made up for the extra money we had to spend because the ship was so far behind schedule, but the real economic boost came when the German couple told us that the kinds of lunches or dinners complete with wine and bottled water that we were being served on the ship would cost a least $40-50 in a modest German restaurant, and we only paid $70/day for food, cabin, and more than 8,000 miles of sea travel on our way to visiting 14 ports in 12 countries. Such a deal!

More photos to come in a few days,
L&L

Picture time!

And here she is! The Grande Ellade, all 600ft of her, 11 decks, 82 feet high, built in South Korea in 2004 for the Grimaldi Line of Napoli Italy.

She can carry over 4,000 automobiles on 11 decks, and up to 700 40'x8' shipping containers on the lower three decks. The line of windows across the ship below the yellow line are the bridge windows, and we were invited by the Captain to spend as much time as we wanted on the bridge, as long as we didn't touch anything! The best times on the bridge were when we were entering or leaving port and since almost all the pilots spoke English to our Italian crew, we were able to hear every command to the helmsman.

If the bridge is where the center of authority is on the ship, the "ramp" is where she pays her way. When the ship ties up alongside a pier a huge articulated ramp is lowered from her stern and all her cargo is driven on or off across it. In this photo containers are being unloaded from Deck #3, but sometimes the container platforms held pieces of machinery and in one case thousands of rolls of newsprint on its way to Alexandria Egypt from a paper mill in Sweden. Although we were not allowed to spend any time hanging around the ramp itself because of safety concerns, once we were off the ship we could stand at a safe distance and watch the proceedings to our hearts delight. 

Just to give you a perspective on the size of this ship and its equipment, standing next to the ramp control office on the upper deck with its little window are two of the other passengers waving at us down on the dock. We often walked the length of the upper deck to the stern to see the wake behind us, or just for exercise since five roundtrips between stern and bridge equalled one mile. And depending on what had been loaded up there on Deck #11, sometimes we had to walk in between the 500 cars parked up there, a little like going for a walk in a parking garage. On the dock are parked two very large dump trucks heading from Salerno Italy to Antwerp Belgium, so large that they were the last things to be loaded in the huge space behind the ramp opening, and at every stop they had to be driven off and parked so that other things behind them could be unloaded. If you were ever a kid who loved machinery, you would love taking a trip on one of these ships, for you will see machines you never thought existed. At one point on deck #5 there were parked two "tapping" machines, machines that looked like huge street sweepers but had 8' high and 6' wide cylindrical cast iron "pots" suspended in their middles. If anyone knows what a tapping machine is please let the rest of in on it. 

More photos and narrative as we get time,

Lynn & Linda

Home again, home again, jiggity jig!

One thing about sea travel, when it comes to weather, you take what you get. And "take" it we did! After leaving Savona Italy on a nice calm evening, we headed west along the Italian Riviera enroute to the Straits of Gibralter and the port of Setubal out on the Atlantic coast of western Portugal, and ran right into three days of 30-40kts gale winds and very high seas. So instead of going back through the Straits and the Rock of Gibralter early in the evening of the second day at 17kts (20mph), we went through early in the dark of the next morning at 13kts because of the wind and the heavy seas. And of course that meant that instead of getting to Setubal early on Saturday, we got there at 2:00am on Sunday morning.

It had become evident early in our circuit of the Mediterranean Sea that we were going to have to leave the ship before it returned to Portbury England inorder for me to get back to the US in time to make a speaking commitment I had in Kansas on the coming weekend. And so we planned to leave the ship in Setubal and to change our tickets while we were in Savona to leave from the nearby city of Lisbon instead of London, but the Lisbon Continental office told us that there were no seats available from Lisbon to Newark till May 4th! Ahah! Continental also flies to the US from Rome and Milan, maybe we could get a flight out of Milan which is close to Genoa, which is in sight of Savona right down the coast? But, because of Italian immigration policy no one can leave a ship permanently in Savona!

Panic time! And who do you turn to in a panic, who else but your family?So before we left Savona, we bought an international phone card at the Savona seaman's center and called our oldest daughter Lori in Bluffton, throwning ourselves on her mercy, and asked her to see what she could find by calling the US Continental reservation desk. If nothing else we would have to fly from Lisbon to London on Sunday, if there were flights and seats available. By this time I was looking down the barrel of two last-minute one-way tickets to the most expensive airport in Europe (Heathrow), and didn't relish the thought of what this was going to cost. But by the time we finished breakfast the following day there was an e-mail message stuck in our cabin door handle telling us that she was able to change our tickets so that we didn't have to get all the way back to London by Monday morning for our scheduled flight on the 21st after all, instead we were now scheduled to leave from Madrid Spain at 1:00pm the same day.

Good news, even though not having planned on going across Spain for any reason, we didn't have any maps or guide books with us, and didn't realize that Madrid is a good 400 miles from Lisbon, but its a lot closer than London. No problem, we have a day and a half to get across Portugal and Spain, and we read somewhere that the high speed train to Seville from Madrid , approximately the same distance, only takes 3 1/2 hours, and the immigration officials were to arrive at the ship at 7:00am on Sunday morning, a good 30 hours before our flight.

On Sunday morning, not having slept a great deal the night before, we were up early, ready to hit the road (or at least the dock) early. But 7:00am came and went, and then 8:00am, and finally at 9:30 the Grimaldi Port agent in Setubal decided that since Immigration was not going to come to us, we would have to go to them. So he took us in his car first to the port immigration office where our passports were duly stamped and we were duly welcomed into Portugal, and then to the local train station where we caught the next train to the city of Lisbon. Of course we didn't know where in Lisbon to go to get the train to Madrid, so we went to the end of the line which we assumed was the center of the city and where we assumed there would be lots of information since it would be the transportation hub where the train to Madrid would leave from. No such luck! Not only were there not a lot of people around early on a Sunday morning, this wasn't the center of the city at all. But we did manage to find a helpful young lady from the railroad company who promptly told us that there are no trains at all to Madrid from Lisbon because of the different rail sizes in the two countries (apparently not everything was standardized with the coming of the European Community), but that there was an express bus service that would get us to Madrid in "only a few hours", although the bus station was back down the rail line two stops away.

So back on the train and back to the Sete Rios station we went, found the Rede Expresso bus terminal, bought two tickets on the 3:00pm bus to Madrid, and then found out that it is more like 9 hours to Madrid rather than two hours as we were led to believe. No problem, we will still have lots of time and we will get to see a little of the countryside of Portugal and Spain on the way. So we did a little exploring on foot around the bus terminal, and then got some lunch and sat for a while in the waiting for our bus to leave. And then we discovered that either Linda looks like a very safe person to leave one's luggage with, or that older Portugese women trust almost anyone with their belongings. Twice Linda was asked to keep an eye on someone's bags while they found a restroom, and then they came back with food that they shared with both of us and chattered away in Portugese assuming we understood every word they were saying. Mainly because of our experience in the bus terminal, Portugal is the other country we might come back to visit someday (Turkey being the first one), simply because of the friendliness of people on the street.

The countryside of Portugal is indeed very beautiful, full of vineyards and hillside pastures of flocks of sheep grazing and orchards of both cork oak and olive trees. There are castles on the tops of hills surrounded by beautiful villages full of white houses with red tile roofs. And we were told that although most foreigners were heading for the more famous southern coast to vacation and even settle on, the west coast south of the port of Setubal has 42 miles of undiscovered and largely undeveloped coastal beaches. Portugal is definitely on our "must return someday" list.

By midnight we were at the bus terminal in Madrid, followed the advice and directions about lodging in Madrid that we got from a very helpful American foreign exchange student we met on the bus, and walked down the stairs to the Metro (subway), and by 1:00am were at the airport assuming that there would be lots of hotel options advertised in the arrival lounge area. But to our surprise, the only hotel information we could get was from a very sleepy individual at the only information desk that was open, and that was simply a phone number for something called the Hostal Viky, without any indication of cost, room availablity, or location. So we sat down, had a late snack of cheese and crackers with the last of the wine from the ship, and then called Hostal Viky. It turned out to be a nice little hotel in a small neighborhood of Madrid called Barajas that was right between the three old terminals and the new one of the expanded airport. Like most of Europe it wasn't cheap, 61 euros ($100) for a small room with twin beds, but it was clean, had lots of hot water, and came with free bus service to and from the airport. After a good 6 hours of sleep, we got up, walked around Barajas trying to find a breakfast that included something besides bread and sweetened hot chocolate, and finally gave up and went to the airport early and promptly treated ourselves to an EggMacMuffin with Sausage at one of the two MacDonald restaurants in the new Terminal 4. I don't know how diabetics survive in southern Europe with breakfasts limited to pastry and sweetened chocolate and coffee, maybe they just give in and buy medication.

And then it was simply a matter of negotiating check-in, security, immigration, and the duty-free shops that lined the departure concourse. And eight hours later, again negotiating immigration, customs, security, and check-in at the Newark airport in New Jersey. And then a five hour wait for the next flight to Columbus.

All in all a hectic last few days, but everything went well and we are now up and about and trying to adjust our internal clocks to the new time zone and its 7 hour difference.

In the next few days we will begin posting some of the 275 photographs we took over the last six weeks of this voyage, as well as a last written posting of things we learned and what we would recommend to others considering freighter travel. Let it suffice to say now that of all the trips we have ever taken, this has been certainly one of them!

Lynn & Linda

Back to Italy!

After crossing the Herodtus Abyssal Plain and the Ionian Abyssal Plain, which Linda insists in calling the "abyssmal plains", and once again going through the straits of Messina between Sicily and the toe of Italy, we arrived in Salerno early on April 14. And this time we had all day ashore so we walked to the city center, then took a city bus to the archeological digs, but couldn't figure out where to get off! So we stayed on the bus and got a great round trip tour way out into the country side, all for about $1.60 each!

When we got back to the waterfront, we had lunch in a pizzeria, and walked back to the ship stopping to buy chocolate and cookies for our snack times. The ship left Salerno in the evening and headed for our last Italian stop, Savona, which is on the Italian Riveria near Genoa. But first we had to pass the French island of Corsica, and the italian island of Elba, where Napolean Bonaparte was imprisoned. To our surprise the center of the Island of Corsica is mostly snow covered mountains, which makes sense since some of them are over 9,000 feet high, but stuck in the middle of the Mediterranian sea it does look a litte odd. And when we approached the coast of northern Italy we saw more snow, this time in the Italian Alps that surround the northern coast.

Savona is a very nice port and a very picturesque city, the downtown is full of narrow twisting streets and very small shops and is right near the port entrance, handy for those walking from the ships. A large cruise ship came in this morning but almost all of its passengers got immediately on buses and headed off for their tours of other places, we suppose.

We are sending this post from a seamen's center a block away from the port entrance. They have an internet cafe and phones for visiting seamen. But we found only one computer available for tourist use in the rest of the town, and that was for 15 minutes at the tourist information enter. We got back to the ship at the appointed time only to be told that we have been delayed and are not sailing till 5:00 pm, so we came back ashore to add this post to our blog. We can send e-mails from the ship when they have time to set it up for us, but we cannot use the internet otherwise. One thing we have found is that unlike Central American where we have done most of our travelling over the past ten years, everyone in Europe seems to have their own computer and they expect tourists to bring theirs along. So there is a lot of wireless web access around the towns, but not very many computers to use.

Our next task is to try to change our tickets so that we can fly from Lisbon Portugal to the states, but when we checked on the Continental website there didn't seem to be any frequent flier seats available on the day we were supposed to leave from England, the 21st. So we will be checking other return dates and might even try to call the Continental office in Lisbon. Complicated, but necessary, since our ship is so far behind schedule due to the gales we experienced in the North Atlantic. Weather is one thing that we cannot change!

More from Portugal,
Lynn & Linda