Word: shipping
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...dreamed of running away to sea. It was a harmless enough fantasy for a kid living in middle-class suburban Houston, who was just as likely to become an astronaut as a sailor. When I grew up, I did go to sea?every now and then, aboard luxury cruise ships plying the Caribbean, the Mediterranean and the Aegean. Seven years ago I went on a South American cruise along the coast of Chile, through the Strait of Magellan and on to Buenos Aires. It was a spectacular voyage in many ways, but I swore it would be my last...
...dream of experiencing the life of the sea endured. So when a friend from my youth told me she was shipping out on a cargo boat and invited me to join her, I leapt at the chance. Davien, a native Manhattanite, was taking a sabbatical from a successful career in the entertainment industry to launch a new chapter of her life, aboard a 197-meter cargo ship. She embarked in Brooklyn and cruised halfway around the world, tracing the route her grandfather, a sea captain, followed 80 years ago. She hooked up with me in Jakarta, Indonesia's capital, where...
...length from bow to stern is two proverbial American football fields, including the end zones. Davien and I were the only noncrew passengers aboard (supernumeraries, in the lingo of the sea), so we had a vast expanse of tranquil time and space at our disposal. On a cargo ship the entertainment is the ship and the sea?and the self. I've never had so much personal time. For anyone who is at all serious about reading or writing, traveling aboard a cargo ship such as the Ingrid Oldendorff is a dreamlike interlude of heavenly peace on earth. I suppose...
...Most cargo ships that accept passengers have room for two to eight people; the Ingrid Oldendorff has a family suite, a living room and two sleeper cabins, each with its own head and shower en suite. Our cabin wasn't superluxurious, but it was as comfortable as most of the cruise-ship accommodations I've seen, attractively furnished and fitted out with a little fridge and a stereo. Davien and I swapped off using the lone desk, which had an inspiring view of containers piled high (and the sea beyond), until I discovered a boardroom by the captain's office...
...ridiculous time of 5:30 p.m. The cook was an ebullient, roly-poly Czech named Victor, who had had a previous career as a lounge singer in the U. S. The cuisine was the only category in which the Ingrid Oldendorff failed to match the standard of the cruise ships I've sailed with: the meals were ample, well cooked and tasty enough but monotonous, with an emphasis on meat and potatoes and garnished alternately by pickles and pineapple. (We did have ice-cream sundaes, on the appropriate day of the week.) Yet Victor's cooking went down well with...