Word: port
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...Kennebunk Beach feels just like Ye Olde New England house, except with better bathrooms. Bicycles, beach chairs and canoes are available for use, as is a wraparound porch, where you can feel free to nap or read. Rates start at $209 per night, including breakfast, afternoon tea and evening port and sherry. If you stay three nights, you'll get the fourth night free through June 30. 211 Beach Avenue, Kennebunk, Maine...
...much overtime. The World Trade Organization predicts the volume of global trade will shrink by 9% in 2009, the worst fall since the Great Depression. As a result, a fleet of empty ships lie idly at anchor just outside the territorial waters of Singapore, the world's busiest port. "The pile up of ships in the Straits is a reflection of the collapse in trade until the early part of this year," says P.K. Basu, Asia economist for the Daiwa Institute of Research. Mirroring that drop is the Baltic Dry Index, which tracks the average cost of shipping a container...
...Though maritime trade has been picking up recently due to a resumption in Chinese commodity imports, pushing up the Baltic Dry Index from its lows, the Maritime and Port Authority of Singapore estimates there are about 150 ships in the vicinity of the island-state, although the number of vessels could be significantly higher than the official figures. That's in addition to 400 to 500 ships that are using Singapore's port at any given time. Most of the vessels outside Singapore are idle and have been stripped to skeleton crews of three or four in contrast...
...early nineteenth century. Before the arrival of the steamship, when three-masted clippers sailed between India and China with cargoes of tea, silver and opium, Singapore was a midway point and a place to drop anchor during the stormy monsoons. Under British colonial rule Singapore developed into a free port where import and export duties were scrapped and passing ships could cheaply purchase all their rigging, provisions, and bunker oil. As the industry grew, the figure of the ship chandler passed into Singapore's literary lore, appearing most memorably in Paul Theroux's 1973 novel Saint Jack, the title character...
...office is a gymnasium-sized warehouse where he stores the various goods he sells to mariners. Forklifts busily move boxes of soda pop, aspirin, coffee, cooking oil, flour and instant noodles onto waiting trucks, which will take the goods to a security controlled pier. Heightened security around Singapore's port since the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks may have made a chandler's daily routine more regimented and less fun. "In the old days everybody used to knock on the side of the ship and have a beer," Inch recalls. "That's long over." And, as with nearly every industry...