beamish
Wednesday, 27 June 2012
yet more pics
some more pics
thats why i only took two photos all day
install 12
Install 12 Mon 18 june
Well yesterday we moved down to just north of york to bob and daphne....have known them since the 70s also and they farm near the town of tollerton...although they have downsized in recent years and lease out a fair bit of their property these days....bob has a small flock of texel stud ewes to keep him out of trouble and he drives part time for a fairly big bus company....they have also stayed with us in nz a few years ago
Today we went over to the coast to whitby for daphne's birthday..(where capitano cook came from)....on the way we stopped in pickering as we were going to take the scenic steam train over the moors to whitby....however train fully occupied with carrying what has become a new-age british institution...ie the olympic torch...or to be more specific...some of the 8500 olympic torches which they have made....what they do is cart them around by bus mostly and when they come to a village they get a member of the uk olympic team or some noted sportsman to run with one for about 300 meters and then he or she uses their torch to light the next one who repeats the process and they then get to keep the torch....so there are a lot of torches floating about and a huge enterage to cart them around and no-one can understand why they dont just use one torch....anyway relay was over when we arrived and they were all lining up for the photo shoot.....i asked one of them what he was going to do with his torch...."use it to light the barbecue" says he....i asked him what his sport was...rowing says he....i said "keep an eye out for kiwis coming past"...he thought we were looking good in the singles and doubles but thought he might be in for a chance as he is in the 8s
Whitby is a good little town to wander around though there are always a lot of "loopies"(tourists for the uninitiated) under your feet....and a lot of the town excluding the concrete entrance to the harbour, would have been standing when jimmy sailed out in the 1760s.......
The trip over to whitby crosses the north yorkshire moors which are pretty spectacular and where in one place is the town of gotland where they filmed "heartbeat"
Tue 19th june
Well had a boys version of what women call "shopping therapy"....bob and i hauled the back wheels of his ford 4000 and replaced them with rowcrop ones ....then we put the spray unit on the back and i sprayed a paddock of barley for him with a fungaside....at home all of our spraying is on grass paddocks using gps tracking....here it is mostly crop spraying and crops are sowed with tramlines at whatever spacing you want (ie the sowing unit leaves a wheel sized strip for later on) and all you have to do when spraying is to drive up and down the tramlines which is easy- peasy...and made a nice change from being a tourist for so long !!
Wed 20th
Today bob and daphne took us up north to county durham where we went to the beamish outdoor museum.....about 1970 an estate gifted a preservation society a 300 acre farm....what they proceeded to do then was to transplant old buildings from all over britain to the site where they rebuilt them as seperate villages....a 1920s one ,...an edwardian one..a coalmining one complete with pit and of course the farm and i would defy anyone to pick out that these sites have not always been there , such is the detail that they put into rebuilding them....a lot of people work there as each shop business ,etc is staffed by people in period dress and they actually sale a selection of what they would have originally....including the pub of course !! and the villages are all linked together by a vintage tram and bus network...entry ticket is not expensive and is valid for a year
On the way home we called into the centre of durham to have a weatherspoons tea and a look at the cathederal which has the largest gothic arch in europe...it was closed but had a good look around outside....is made of sandstone and is badly eroded ...man what a huge bill will be required to restore the outside of that.....dont think i would like to be inside there in a decent earthquake !!
Thur 21st
More "shopping therapy" today...cut down some "crack" willows that were blocking the house drains....same variety of bloody weeds that we have in nz and they are also chocking a lot of rivers up here as well......job made more interesting by raining all day as well
Fri 22nd
Still bloody raining....man are they having a crap summer up here....just as well we didnt come for the sun.....got a bit of a break after brecky and we manage to load 3 big fadges of wool onto back of bobs double cab which we fortunately covered and we all set off for bradford....man it hosed down all the way and these big motor ways up here have so much spray coming off vehicles , it is like driving through a carwash.......got to bradford and dropped off wool at woolstore....hopefully not too much water has forced its way in.....went to center of city to see what a 24million pound fountain looks like.....by looks of it it a good place to take your dog for a bath and not very spectacular....i think a working bee of cockies or a school comittee workday could have knocked it up for 24 thou....is of course very contoversial in bradford as most people talked about prefering more housing to a white elephant like that but it is bang in the middle of town ouside a very impressive city hall.and they say it looks better at night!!....but there was high wind , rain and very cold....and from what ive heard of bradford before or since....ideal conditions to get a feel for the city......thank the stars for a good warm pub lunch across the square...weatherspoons....my favorite pup chain
After lunch bob and daphne took me to one of my favorite institutions and my first one for the whole trip.......a museum...in this case the museum of photography and cinemotography.....very interesting and free as well...appears to be heavily sponsored by the bbc and other big corps....they have recording studios from across time all set up and you can wander around them and fiddle with the equipment like cameras etc and special effects...film yourself wandering among the dinosaurs etc etcwatch countless stuff from the past ...also contained a full sized imax cinema ....so could have spent a week there but reluctantly we had to move on
B & D dropped us to the nearby village of steeton where we were taken over by becky and michael who a lot of you may have met at home late last year and earlier this year......they were woofers at home for us on two occassions (willing workers on organic farms) and in january the three of us tramped the northwest circuit of stewart island in 7 days instead of the suggested 9 and it was a gut buster and if it hadnt been for those two driving me on each day , then i would probably still be down there.....they say they would be happier over in west otago tailing lambs but alas they had to come back up here to regroup...michael is a structural engineer who works from home and consults on projects all over central britain....over here they have a lot of privately funded public works and becky works for one such group who are building state houses...she is qualified as an estimater and or quantity surveyor and her job is to make sure they are using the right materials and not cutting any corners.....but there are a lot of people living over in that part of west yorkshire and commuting is tedious so she works about 4 twelve hour days a week and has three off...they are both keen trampers and push bikers....michael is lining them up to do "the three peaks" which are 3 hills spread over 25 miles and you have about 12 hours to do it in
They sacrifised their weekend to take us up into the yorkshire dales which lead north from the town of skipton and are part of another national park...very scenic but a lot of flood water around due to continual rain
And on the sunday we went to a world war 1 and 11 reinactment day nearby ......here boys (and gals) who happen to own tanks ,field artillary and machine guns dress up in period uniforms and attack each other across a very boggy field....on this particular day the germans won and kate who only had on open towed shoes had mud up to her knees much to someones mirth....and bugger me but on the way home in the middle of the town of keighly we came upon crowds of people lining the streets....stopped to inspect...olympic bloody flame again , but this time it hadnt arrived yet so we waited while a convoy of support buses and sponsors vehicles came thru the route not to mention heaps of police escorts on motor bikes....an finally the torch bearer ran past.....a good keen englishman who was grinning from ear to ear and waving his free hand like he was trying to detach it.....the humorous thing that struck me was that his country of birth was obviously......................................china !!
Mon 25
Very good of michael it was to cart us back across to bob and daphnes this morning ,a bit of timewith them and we were picked up by derick and yvonne....i worked mostly with dick in the 70s and for part of it lived in his parents pub(the station hotel) at tollerton (now a chinese restaurant )....they live in a village on the outskirts of york called wiggington and dick has a hedge cutting business and believe me there are a lot of hedges in this part of the world so he is real busy
We are ty-howing at dick and vons this week and next mon we fly back up to sweden ( having made phone contact with the people i worked with up there when we called there on boat , it struck me afterwards that it was a pity that we couldnt catch up in person as i havent seen them for 37 years and who knows when we will be up here next.....so while we were at bobs , he went on line with ryanair and managed to get us a good deal...so next mon morn that is where we will be for most of that week so more later
Well yesterday we moved down to just north of york to bob and daphne....have known them since the 70s also and they farm near the town of tollerton...although they have downsized in recent years and lease out a fair bit of their property these days....bob has a small flock of texel stud ewes to keep him out of trouble and he drives part time for a fairly big bus company....they have also stayed with us in nz a few years ago
Today we went over to the coast to whitby for daphne's birthday..(where capitano cook came from)....on the way we stopped in pickering as we were going to take the scenic steam train over the moors to whitby....however train fully occupied with carrying what has become a new-age british institution...ie the olympic torch...or to be more specific...some of the 8500 olympic torches which they have made....what they do is cart them around by bus mostly and when they come to a village they get a member of the uk olympic team or some noted sportsman to run with one for about 300 meters and then he or she uses their torch to light the next one who repeats the process and they then get to keep the torch....so there are a lot of torches floating about and a huge enterage to cart them around and no-one can understand why they dont just use one torch....anyway relay was over when we arrived and they were all lining up for the photo shoot.....i asked one of them what he was going to do with his torch...."use it to light the barbecue" says he....i asked him what his sport was...rowing says he....i said "keep an eye out for kiwis coming past"...he thought we were looking good in the singles and doubles but thought he might be in for a chance as he is in the 8s
Whitby is a good little town to wander around though there are always a lot of "loopies"(tourists for the uninitiated) under your feet....and a lot of the town excluding the concrete entrance to the harbour, would have been standing when jimmy sailed out in the 1760s.......
The trip over to whitby crosses the north yorkshire moors which are pretty spectacular and where in one place is the town of gotland where they filmed "heartbeat"
Tue 19th june
Well had a boys version of what women call "shopping therapy"....bob and i hauled the back wheels of his ford 4000 and replaced them with rowcrop ones ....then we put the spray unit on the back and i sprayed a paddock of barley for him with a fungaside....at home all of our spraying is on grass paddocks using gps tracking....here it is mostly crop spraying and crops are sowed with tramlines at whatever spacing you want (ie the sowing unit leaves a wheel sized strip for later on) and all you have to do when spraying is to drive up and down the tramlines which is easy- peasy...and made a nice change from being a tourist for so long !!
Wed 20th
Today bob and daphne took us up north to county durham where we went to the beamish outdoor museum.....about 1970 an estate gifted a preservation society a 300 acre farm....what they proceeded to do then was to transplant old buildings from all over britain to the site where they rebuilt them as seperate villages....a 1920s one ,...an edwardian one..a coalmining one complete with pit and of course the farm and i would defy anyone to pick out that these sites have not always been there , such is the detail that they put into rebuilding them....a lot of people work there as each shop business ,etc is staffed by people in period dress and they actually sale a selection of what they would have originally....including the pub of course !! and the villages are all linked together by a vintage tram and bus network...entry ticket is not expensive and is valid for a year
On the way home we called into the centre of durham to have a weatherspoons tea and a look at the cathederal which has the largest gothic arch in europe...it was closed but had a good look around outside....is made of sandstone and is badly eroded ...man what a huge bill will be required to restore the outside of that.....dont think i would like to be inside there in a decent earthquake !!
Thur 21st
More "shopping therapy" today...cut down some "crack" willows that were blocking the house drains....same variety of bloody weeds that we have in nz and they are also chocking a lot of rivers up here as well......job made more interesting by raining all day as well
Fri 22nd
Still bloody raining....man are they having a crap summer up here....just as well we didnt come for the sun.....got a bit of a break after brecky and we manage to load 3 big fadges of wool onto back of bobs double cab which we fortunately covered and we all set off for bradford....man it hosed down all the way and these big motor ways up here have so much spray coming off vehicles , it is like driving through a carwash.......got to bradford and dropped off wool at woolstore....hopefully not too much water has forced its way in.....went to center of city to see what a 24million pound fountain looks like.....by looks of it it a good place to take your dog for a bath and not very spectacular....i think a working bee of cockies or a school comittee workday could have knocked it up for 24 thou....is of course very contoversial in bradford as most people talked about prefering more housing to a white elephant like that but it is bang in the middle of town ouside a very impressive city hall.and they say it looks better at night!!....but there was high wind , rain and very cold....and from what ive heard of bradford before or since....ideal conditions to get a feel for the city......thank the stars for a good warm pub lunch across the square...weatherspoons....my favorite pup chain
After lunch bob and daphne took me to one of my favorite institutions and my first one for the whole trip.......a museum...in this case the museum of photography and cinemotography.....very interesting and free as well...appears to be heavily sponsored by the bbc and other big corps....they have recording studios from across time all set up and you can wander around them and fiddle with the equipment like cameras etc and special effects...film yourself wandering among the dinosaurs etc etcwatch countless stuff from the past ...also contained a full sized imax cinema ....so could have spent a week there but reluctantly we had to move on
B & D dropped us to the nearby village of steeton where we were taken over by becky and michael who a lot of you may have met at home late last year and earlier this year......they were woofers at home for us on two occassions (willing workers on organic farms) and in january the three of us tramped the northwest circuit of stewart island in 7 days instead of the suggested 9 and it was a gut buster and if it hadnt been for those two driving me on each day , then i would probably still be down there.....they say they would be happier over in west otago tailing lambs but alas they had to come back up here to regroup...michael is a structural engineer who works from home and consults on projects all over central britain....over here they have a lot of privately funded public works and becky works for one such group who are building state houses...she is qualified as an estimater and or quantity surveyor and her job is to make sure they are using the right materials and not cutting any corners.....but there are a lot of people living over in that part of west yorkshire and commuting is tedious so she works about 4 twelve hour days a week and has three off...they are both keen trampers and push bikers....michael is lining them up to do "the three peaks" which are 3 hills spread over 25 miles and you have about 12 hours to do it in
They sacrifised their weekend to take us up into the yorkshire dales which lead north from the town of skipton and are part of another national park...very scenic but a lot of flood water around due to continual rain
And on the sunday we went to a world war 1 and 11 reinactment day nearby ......here boys (and gals) who happen to own tanks ,field artillary and machine guns dress up in period uniforms and attack each other across a very boggy field....on this particular day the germans won and kate who only had on open towed shoes had mud up to her knees much to someones mirth....and bugger me but on the way home in the middle of the town of keighly we came upon crowds of people lining the streets....stopped to inspect...olympic bloody flame again , but this time it hadnt arrived yet so we waited while a convoy of support buses and sponsors vehicles came thru the route not to mention heaps of police escorts on motor bikes....an finally the torch bearer ran past.....a good keen englishman who was grinning from ear to ear and waving his free hand like he was trying to detach it.....the humorous thing that struck me was that his country of birth was obviously......................................china !!
Mon 25
Very good of michael it was to cart us back across to bob and daphnes this morning ,a bit of timewith them and we were picked up by derick and yvonne....i worked mostly with dick in the 70s and for part of it lived in his parents pub(the station hotel) at tollerton (now a chinese restaurant )....they live in a village on the outskirts of york called wiggington and dick has a hedge cutting business and believe me there are a lot of hedges in this part of the world so he is real busy
We are ty-howing at dick and vons this week and next mon we fly back up to sweden ( having made phone contact with the people i worked with up there when we called there on boat , it struck me afterwards that it was a pity that we couldnt catch up in person as i havent seen them for 37 years and who knows when we will be up here next.....so while we were at bobs , he went on line with ryanair and managed to get us a good deal...so next mon morn that is where we will be for most of that week so more later
Sunday, 17 June 2012
install 11 Yorkshire
Instal 11
Sun 17 june
Well just when you thought i had dried up...bad luck ..here is an update
As per the last instal...we got back to peter and julia's 10 days ago (thur 7th )...spent the weekend there on a few chores...some horse transporting and whacked down some errant tree branches in garden.....however on the sat we went to the "east of england show "...it is near east grinstead and is an annual 3 day "agricultural "show......well there was a lot of car parks so guessed it was going to be big...first thing we noticed when we finally footslogged it from distant car park to entrance was that they wanted nz $36 per per adult or $80 for a family ...and that was per day!!...holy moses it was huge and it was packed...welcome to britain in a financial recession....the trade displays were endless and while the area would be greater than the field-days at home...the emphasis was more domestic than agricultural...ag equipment stands were quite small as was livestock...although a lot of horses of course.....it all came to a finish about 6.00pm and we decided to wander around while the trade stands packed up so as to let the traffic get away...we were talking to a guy who sells medical beds...high tech sort of gurneys that you lie on and they massage you....i said how was the show given that times are hard in the uk and not everyone would have a vibrating bed high on their priority list....he said the thur was so windy 10 marques blew away so things were quite that day and same on friday cause it rained all day...but today he said "i couldnt get a cup of tea in as too busy writing out sales dockets for beds "nz$6000 each.....an over all he had a sucessful show....so not much recession in the south east of england anyway
Mon 11th june
Caught train up to st pancreas station...it is an old station that has been renovated and the eurostar leaves from there to Paris....we got lost looking for megabus terminal(they are like naked bus at home...fares are cheap and on spot market)..after a bit of running about we discovered we were on a megabus train up into the midlands and from there we got an old tired double decker to york but cant complain as total fare london to york was nz$36 for both of us !!(getting the relatively short distance from peter and julia's cost nz $44 on conventional district train)
From york we got local bus to malton which is in the vale of pickering ie east yorkshire...scarborough to the east and north yorkshire moors to north....picked up by les and elaine who are cobbers of ours...i used to work with les around york in the 70s mission and him and elaine stayed with us in nz back 2004......they have been spoiling us all this week and we have seen a fair bit of the territory which we didnt see when we last stayed with them in 2007.we have roamed a lot of small villages on the edge of the moors which all fall into the "north yorkshire moors national park"..one of such is called hutton le hole and there went to the rydale folk museum which is a large outdoor museum which gives you a good idea of the history of the area going back to the iron age ...
Les and elaine live in a detached house which was once the coachhouse for the coaching inn which is attached at the other end of the row....it dates from 1776 and is called the "coachman inn".....the village we are on the outskirts of is called snainton and a tidy little spot it is too ....just outside of village live a young couple which are cobbers of les and elaines....they have 20 odd acres and he is a stock agent and has a transhipping terminal for sheep there....they also have a free-range egg operation which his wife runs ....it is a purpose built shed holding 7500 hens...they are free to go out in the paddocks but two-thirds of them dont bother....feeding is automatic and right through the length of the shed is a conveyor and on top of this are the nest boxes......so with a bit of training , they lay in there and the eggs all turn up in the packing room off the end of the conveyor...so the only manual work then is grading them into trays ...600doz per day....hens last 13 months before change over to next batch....payment from wholesaler is every tue so cashflow good and it is a slick operation....apparently this is a growth industry as battery hens have been banned since the start of this year and there is a shortage of eggs as a result .
Sun 17th june
fathers day if you live here....today les and elaine are taling us to another couple of cobbers we have down by york so more from yorkshire later
Sun 17 june
Well just when you thought i had dried up...bad luck ..here is an update
As per the last instal...we got back to peter and julia's 10 days ago (thur 7th )...spent the weekend there on a few chores...some horse transporting and whacked down some errant tree branches in garden.....however on the sat we went to the "east of england show "...it is near east grinstead and is an annual 3 day "agricultural "show......well there was a lot of car parks so guessed it was going to be big...first thing we noticed when we finally footslogged it from distant car park to entrance was that they wanted nz $36 per per adult or $80 for a family ...and that was per day!!...holy moses it was huge and it was packed...welcome to britain in a financial recession....the trade displays were endless and while the area would be greater than the field-days at home...the emphasis was more domestic than agricultural...ag equipment stands were quite small as was livestock...although a lot of horses of course.....it all came to a finish about 6.00pm and we decided to wander around while the trade stands packed up so as to let the traffic get away...we were talking to a guy who sells medical beds...high tech sort of gurneys that you lie on and they massage you....i said how was the show given that times are hard in the uk and not everyone would have a vibrating bed high on their priority list....he said the thur was so windy 10 marques blew away so things were quite that day and same on friday cause it rained all day...but today he said "i couldnt get a cup of tea in as too busy writing out sales dockets for beds "nz$6000 each.....an over all he had a sucessful show....so not much recession in the south east of england anyway
Mon 11th june
Caught train up to st pancreas station...it is an old station that has been renovated and the eurostar leaves from there to Paris....we got lost looking for megabus terminal(they are like naked bus at home...fares are cheap and on spot market)..after a bit of running about we discovered we were on a megabus train up into the midlands and from there we got an old tired double decker to york but cant complain as total fare london to york was nz$36 for both of us !!(getting the relatively short distance from peter and julia's cost nz $44 on conventional district train)
From york we got local bus to malton which is in the vale of pickering ie east yorkshire...scarborough to the east and north yorkshire moors to north....picked up by les and elaine who are cobbers of ours...i used to work with les around york in the 70s mission and him and elaine stayed with us in nz back 2004......they have been spoiling us all this week and we have seen a fair bit of the territory which we didnt see when we last stayed with them in 2007.we have roamed a lot of small villages on the edge of the moors which all fall into the "north yorkshire moors national park"..one of such is called hutton le hole and there went to the rydale folk museum which is a large outdoor museum which gives you a good idea of the history of the area going back to the iron age ...
Les and elaine live in a detached house which was once the coachhouse for the coaching inn which is attached at the other end of the row....it dates from 1776 and is called the "coachman inn".....the village we are on the outskirts of is called snainton and a tidy little spot it is too ....just outside of village live a young couple which are cobbers of les and elaines....they have 20 odd acres and he is a stock agent and has a transhipping terminal for sheep there....they also have a free-range egg operation which his wife runs ....it is a purpose built shed holding 7500 hens...they are free to go out in the paddocks but two-thirds of them dont bother....feeding is automatic and right through the length of the shed is a conveyor and on top of this are the nest boxes......so with a bit of training , they lay in there and the eggs all turn up in the packing room off the end of the conveyor...so the only manual work then is grading them into trays ...600doz per day....hens last 13 months before change over to next batch....payment from wholesaler is every tue so cashflow good and it is a slick operation....apparently this is a growth industry as battery hens have been banned since the start of this year and there is a shortage of eggs as a result .
Sun 17th june
fathers day if you live here....today les and elaine are taling us to another couple of cobbers we have down by york so more from yorkshire later
Sunday, 10 June 2012
summary of trip at sea
...well i wouldnt have missed this i can tell you but it would not be every-ones cup of tea thats for sure(the main thing that really gutted me looking back was the ship being two weeks late at the start which means we have missed the big golden jubilee celebrations in london on the last weekend ie june 2nd ).....if you were going to do it to see heaps of things on land....forget it....take a bus trip....but if you want to see a working ship in action , this is the way to go....when we dropped jr and 2mp off in cypress and easy rider off in salerno , we were the only passengers left on board for the rest of the trip and we thought that we might be adopted into the crew environment a bit closer but this was not the case.....the italian officers remained friendly but distant at same time if you get the idea....in fact you could say that italians are quite big on mood swings , even chabal with whom we have had most to do with is like that....one day you can pass him and hardly get the time of day and the next he will come and find you to point out something of interest (one day i was up on the top deck looking over the side minding my own business when he shot up alongside me in a ford focus and said to jump in he was going down into the bowels of the ship and thought i might like a ride ! )....mostly the body language of the other italians is that passengers are a pain in the arse...and they insist on addressing you in english and calling me sir and kate maam(as in ham)....i have an italian phrase book with me and had gone to pains to learn all the basics like hello , goodmorning/afternoon/evening...count to 10 etc and i tried answering them in that way for a week or two but in the end i decided to fight fire with fire and threw that away and answered the italians english with a bit of kiwi (howsitgoin.....gidday...seeyalater etc )and generally stayed a bit aloof myself and this seemed to work a lot better except that i allways use the italian on the cook as he is most impressed and i dont mind greasing around him....i alternate between "complimenti al cuoco" (compliments to the chef) and " era squisito" (that was delicious)....the officer we got on best with was jessie the philippino second mate who has good english and of course joselle our messman ....i overwrote the italian phrase book with philippino andwe had some real laughs as whatever you said in philly jo-jo would sing-song it back to you at least once with much laughter so wasnt wasted and i rather hoped it was annoying the crap out of some of the goory italians as well...as i got the impression that they feel superior to the phillies and probably cant understand that we dont (as afterall , we are "pacific" people !!!)
..so here some tips if you want to go grimaldi cruising.....firstly find out from namesake if booking thru him (or me if you are booking direct ) as to what vessel you are going to be on(this is one of the best) and more importantly...who is the master....im not putting real names in this blog but woody is regarded as being one of the best and walrus is very friendly but the atmosphere was very much more restrained after they changed....jr came up to england on the grande britagna and he said that the captain on it was an 18 carat arshole so you want to avoid the likes of him or would spoil your trip
......if bookings are light and you have any like minded friends who might like to go too you would be best to make up a party as you need to have enough passengers to get a bit of "passenger power"....but bare in mind that it is a long trip so make sure you dont take friends with you who will turn into enemies before you get back.....
dont forget to take binnoculars and a world atlas.. and do some homework on the countries you are passing....get a phone modem for your laptop that will take sim cards as i kick myself for not doing that as you are often in cellphone range of compatible networks when at sea and also when you are alongside but cant get off.....while on the subject of phones....take your telecom one and it will automatically go onto global roaming but try not to use it except in emergencies as it is not cheap....a few days before we left nz i got a new phone as i knew the old cmda network was closing while we were away...i specifically asked the pea-brained woman from whom i bought it (no prizes for guessing what south otago shop ) "do i have to worry about it down loading stuff from the internet ?....." oh no says she just dont log on and you will be ok".......well fortunately not long after i arrived in the uk i got a text from telecom telling me "welcome to telecom global roaming" etc etc and a number to ring for prices so thought i should do that to see what the rates actually are.....got straight thru to telecom (india of course )...a well spoken gal gave me all the prices and also emailed them to us as well.....then she said 'are you aware that your internet device on your phone is not disabled ?"....i repeated what i was told in good old balclutha and she said....not so , it will do updates if you dont disable the function said she and would i like her to do it for me ....yes says i and i thought i wont say anything nasty about punjabies ever again !!
...well i wouldnt have missed this i can tell you but it would not be every-ones cup of tea thats for sure(the main thing that really gutted me looking back was the ship being two weeks late at the start which means we have missed the big golden jubilee celebrations in london on the last weekend ie june 2nd ).....if you were going to do it to see heaps of things on land....forget it....take a bus trip....but if you want to see a working ship in action , this is the way to go....when we dropped jr and 2mp off in cypress and easy rider off in salerno , we were the only passengers left on board for the rest of the trip and we thought that we might be adopted into the crew environment a bit closer but this was not the case.....the italian officers remained friendly but distant at same time if you get the idea....in fact you could say that italians are quite big on mood swings , even chabal with whom we have had most to do with is like that....one day you can pass him and hardly get the time of day and the next he will come and find you to point out something of interest (one day i was up on the top deck looking over the side minding my own business when he shot up alongside me in a ford focus and said to jump in he was going down into the bowels of the ship and thought i might like a ride ! )....mostly the body language of the other italians is that passengers are a pain in the arse...and they insist on addressing you in english and calling me sir and kate maam(as in ham)....i have an italian phrase book with me and had gone to pains to learn all the basics like hello , goodmorning/afternoon/evening...count to 10 etc and i tried answering them in that way for a week or two but in the end i decided to fight fire with fire and threw that away and answered the italians english with a bit of kiwi (howsitgoin.....gidday...seeyalater etc )and generally stayed a bit aloof myself and this seemed to work a lot better except that i allways use the italian on the cook as he is most impressed and i dont mind greasing around him....i alternate between "complimenti al cuoco" (compliments to the chef) and " era squisito" (that was delicious)....the officer we got on best with was jessie the philippino second mate who has good english and of course joselle our messman ....i overwrote the italian phrase book with philippino andwe had some real laughs as whatever you said in philly jo-jo would sing-song it back to you at least once with much laughter so wasnt wasted and i rather hoped it was annoying the crap out of some of the goory italians as well...as i got the impression that they feel superior to the phillies and probably cant understand that we dont (as afterall , we are "pacific" people !!!)
..so here some tips if you want to go grimaldi cruising.....firstly find out from namesake if booking thru him (or me if you are booking direct ) as to what vessel you are going to be on(this is one of the best) and more importantly...who is the master....im not putting real names in this blog but woody is regarded as being one of the best and walrus is very friendly but the atmosphere was very much more restrained after they changed....jr came up to england on the grande britagna and he said that the captain on it was an 18 carat arshole so you want to avoid the likes of him or would spoil your trip
......if bookings are light and you have any like minded friends who might like to go too you would be best to make up a party as you need to have enough passengers to get a bit of "passenger power"....but bare in mind that it is a long trip so make sure you dont take friends with you who will turn into enemies before you get back.....
dont forget to take binnoculars and a world atlas.. and do some homework on the countries you are passing....get a phone modem for your laptop that will take sim cards as i kick myself for not doing that as you are often in cellphone range of compatible networks when at sea and also when you are alongside but cant get off.....while on the subject of phones....take your telecom one and it will automatically go onto global roaming but try not to use it except in emergencies as it is not cheap....a few days before we left nz i got a new phone as i knew the old cmda network was closing while we were away...i specifically asked the pea-brained woman from whom i bought it (no prizes for guessing what south otago shop ) "do i have to worry about it down loading stuff from the internet ?....." oh no says she just dont log on and you will be ok".......well fortunately not long after i arrived in the uk i got a text from telecom telling me "welcome to telecom global roaming" etc etc and a number to ring for prices so thought i should do that to see what the rates actually are.....got straight thru to telecom (india of course )...a well spoken gal gave me all the prices and also emailed them to us as well.....then she said 'are you aware that your internet device on your phone is not disabled ?"....i repeated what i was told in good old balclutha and she said....not so , it will do updates if you dont disable the function said she and would i like her to do it for me ....yes says i and i thought i wont say anything nasty about punjabies ever again !!
instal 10
fri june 2nd
well the town centre of esbjerg is handy alright and while we flew into town in 07 and were picked up by siff and gitta for our denmark experience ,we didnt actually go into the town centre on that occassion....but we did today it was almost deserted and down-right bloody cold and i no jersey....there was a few youngies on the street though at 10.00am and they looked in a fairly good mood and i guessed why......it wasnt long before we were accosted by one and i could tell by the stamp on the back of his hand and the fact that he was fairly fumey that he had been out clubbing all night and heading home.....he looked a bit like he might have had an affiliation to a right-wing organisation but he was very well spoken and polite....could i phone a taxi for him as he had run out of money on his cel....which i did but had to use kiwi cel (see my notes on phones in trip summary) and it would probably have been cheaper to have piggy backed him !!
...one thing you notice about towns in denmark is that they are very tidy and orderly....here we were sat morning and no rubbish around streets from last night....went to public toilets...they are as clean and tidy as most homes would have...no dickheads writing graffiti up the walls there....and later phoned siff and birgette by putting my card in a public phone and it actually worked....nobody had even pinched the book !!....however not much action as shops dont open till after 10 on a sat and because we were feeling the cold we had to repair to mcdonalds where their wifi was a good speed and i set up more blogs which of course i had pre written but as i explained some of them got scrambled when they copied over which annoyed the crap out of me as apart from annoying you all with them i do intend to keep them for my own reference.....so all in all didnt get to see much else in town as had to be back at 12.00 and to make matters worse i got a stab of guilt at having spent an hr sheltering in macca's so i bought us burgers for lunch instead of going and getting something danish for lunch and the burgers were not flash....where the hell has the colonel gone to in continental europe !!......but it was good to catch up with the danish gals by phone but a pity we couldnt fine tune our arrival times or we might have been able to catch up in person....but as if to justify making us go back to the ship at 12.00 sharp, we actually sailed early.....denmark is a real good country and i think they are in pretty good financial position too....they have real good looking stock as well!!
* a little aside.....the north sea in that area is festooned with oil rigs and you would have trouble free sailing thru there in the dark without charts and radar , thats for sure....also windfarms galore out there....miles out of sight of land , they are in all sorts of configurations but the ones we sailed past were in rows like you would do grape vines ....about 100 in each block i counted.
sun 3rd june
got up sharp to see that we were not far off entering the channel into wallhamn on swedens west coast....is a toss up as to whether this port or corks , is the most scenic to sail into....wallhamn has heaps of rocky islands dotted around throughout the long channel in and some of them are very small but the odd thing is that a lot of people live on them....one was probably only about 3 or 4 ha but looked to have about 100 houses crammed onto it.....no roads how odd..i should have spent my productive years in local body planning as the first thing that occured to me aside from the asthetic side to it was ....what do they do for the two "p"s( power and poos) as there was no overhead lines anywhere and not much scope for septic tanks on solid rock and cant see a green country like sweden pumping it into the harbour.....plus what do they do for a living if there permanently and how do they get on and off....we docked about 9.0 am and we were straight off as no shore pass needed here....had a yarn with one of the wharfies and he said a lot of the people who live on those islands commute to gothenburg and other cities and keep their cars on mainland and use boats/small ferries to get on and off...said he himself lives on one and is 80km each way plus a ferry trip....forgot to ask about the 2 ps......
.wallhamn is miles from anywhere but like portbury in england it is a big car port for distribution purposes....the big car transporters like us unload there and a lot go by road into the hinterland of sweden and also small car carriers come along and load them up again and haul them north to norway and russia....man when you see all the acres of cars at these ports you just got to wonder if theres enough people on the planet with cash to buy them ......and theres a ship from this company alone in these ports every week!!
...port agent took us to gates and rang a taxi for us .....was about 20mins to closest town as there is nothing at wallhamn ....the town of stenunsund....about 25000 people but not much doing on a sunday morning ....(.however i did have in my head , the name and address of the people i worked for in central sweden back in the 70s ( tore and gunvor torstensson )and i gave that to the taxi driver who punched it into his computer and hey-presto there was their phone number......rang them and they are still alive and kicking in same place....now i wished that i had given them some notice as there would have been enough time for them to have driven over for the day.....sod it).......uncharacteristically we were told we could be away all day so we jumped on a bus to gothenberg which is swedens second biggest city and were there in under an hour and we were tourists for the day....did the open top bus tour and then the canalboat/harbour cruise (not that we haven't seen a lot of harbours lately)....and as an extra bonus when we got off boat , we found out why there were so many people on streets ....it was the annual "hero " parade which was big and there were some very strange sights from drag queens to gay dwarfs etc etc plus the two girls standing next to us kept giving each other mouth-to-mouth resusitation so that should make for some interesting video editing......
.we had a young swedish girl woofing for us the week before we left nz and she is actively involved in left-wing politics already and has her sights set on becoming pm one day....one of the policies she is keen on is the open door one ...ie open the borders to any refugee be they muslim,black white or brindle and unfortunately sweden has already been doing that for years....when i worked in sweden in the 70s they were taking vietnamese like there was no tomorrow along with any political refugees like draft dodgers and anybody else who floated past.....the result i noticed when walking through those streets today is that its hard to pick the vikings out anymore ....there are so many eastern europeans and liquorish alsorts.....(.denmark on the other hand seems to have kept there bloodlines a bit more pure)...anyway we had a good day in gothenberg and went back to stenunsund by fast train....arriving there by about 5.30pm so plenty of time to get something for tea but not a lot of places open due to sun night but we did find "harry's" down at the marina....an english themed pub built in an octagonal shape....they did a very tender medium-rare hereford fillet with salad and chips which i had been hanging out for for some time (there was also a macca's open and a pizza joint...but i think i am getting enough of that on board here thanks !!)...only peculiar thing for the day was that kate wanted lavy in gothenburg and sneaked into mcdonalds....found it was coin operated but crafty woman that she is , she waited until someone came out and grabbed door before it closed.....i felt urge at train/bus station(its a big one ) and found same thing...springboarding off kates experiences , did the door thing but found i was in an anti room and girl cashier parked there with till.....wanted 10 kr(they are not in euro)...we were having a credit card day as not worth changing money and no banks open anyway....well bugger me 10kr is about $1.50nz and not something you would use card for...cost you more than that in fees.....so i negotiated that she would accept 1 euro coin....only problem is i didnt take any euro with me ....so had to hunt around to find kate,shake her down for a coin.....just as well i wasnt busting....to rub in the insult....dunny on train was free !!
....so that was sweden...but as usual we were back at ship on time (8.0pm) but due to some cargo hassles it was 1.30 mon morning before we actually sailed....we got up to see all those islands sliding past in the moonlight....very scenic !!!
* here is a little aside on sweden that tore told me on the phone when i rang him.....when i worked in england in1975 i bought an old mk1 cortina off the next door neighbour....it was lying in her garden and she was sick of spending money on it as it was always breaking down so gave it to me for 50 quid.(i think it was about about a 1965 model)...and i took it to sweden where i worked for tore and gunvor torstensson and after that i did 10,000 miles in it up through finland , into the artic circle and down through norway..(never laid a spanner on it )..then i had to go back to england prior to heading for nz.....cortina was out of mot and rego for britain so not worth taking it back.....left it in tore's shed and there it stayed for a year or so till they made sure i wasnt going back.....then they needed the shed so they gave cortina to a local engineer and he was going to make it into an agricultural trailer.....but he must have fired her up and started driving it around and apparently he kept her on the road for about the next 30years and cortina only went to big scrap yard in the sky 2005...the engineer fellow just clocked up his 96thyear too so hope that cortina gives me a bit of longevity as well !!!
tue 5th june
well from wallhamn to the mouth of antwerp harbour is about 12 hours so we picked up the pilot off there about 1.30pm today....bugger me but it is a long way up the skelt (think thats what its called ...its like a big canal)...40 nautical miles in fact and it took about 5and a half hours to get up to the lock gates but a very interesting trip it was.....lot of industry on the banks ....all the big guys in the chemical world have vast plants on the banks...god knows what the air samples come out like..and theres nuclear power stations and you name it...also..off out starboard side as we first went in were a lot of crops and farming and on one of the flood banks was a sight becoming rare even in south otago....a flock of sheep !!...and out there on the horizon reside countless thousands of kiwis for that of course is the fields of flanders....and on my next trip up here i am going to the menin gates at ypres by hook or by crook ..the big german rivers link in via locks and the biggest lock in the world is up here somewhere.....by the time we are thru lock and tied up is 9.00pm......this bit of the port is big by the standards of where we have been but found out where we were was just the grimaldi terminal ( two other grimaldis already tied up)....the rest of the port is vast...no 8 in the world av turn around is 40 ships perday........the port is miles from the town as the old town port was too small and was overrun by commerce and shut down so they moved out here in the 70s and knocked down a few towns to build this port ( you see a few chuches around the skyline...these were from the deceased villages but they were not allowed to knock them down as they are historic places so they now maintain them but they are closed.)....we sneaked ashore and found port security and hit them with the dumb kiwi looking for awifi site....there wasnt any unencrypted ones but in the end they took pity on us and let us into a multistoried admin building where he wandered around various offices till he found a machine that was on line and left us to it till about midnight....bit tricky though trying to log onto email sites from a foreign site as servers were concinced we were hackers....but we got there and that was good of him and he gave us a good tip cause we wanted to go into town the next day.....said dont get a taxi in the 7.0 to 9.0 time as traffic queues and costs a fortune so off to bed we went
wed 6th....up at 5.0 and to port gates to order taxi 5.45.....pouring with bloody rain.....a little aside from yesterday was that nobody from belgium immigration called on board so they left a message with 3rd mate that if passengers coming ashore they should get a taxi to immigration and get their own passports stamped (as obviously they are not in the shangran area)....yea right....by the time we got to the outskirts of the old city , the meter was already over 40euro...so we were illegal immigrants in belgium for a day!!!....the taxi driver was also a good sort and he dropped us off on the opposite bank of the river schelde from where the old city was......the idea is that along with people on pushbikes , you go into a huge lift which takes you down into the bowels of the earth where you come out into a 500m long tunnel which is one of several under the river but the only one you can walk or bike thru and you go into an identical lift at the other end and you walk out into old antwerp....it is by far the most interesting city we struck if you are into old buildings and how they blend the old in with the new.(brussels is the political center of belgium and the european union..antwerp is the commercial center of belgium famous for diamond finishing factories but i dont agree with the concept of diamonds and that even before i saw "blood diamond"...so kate was out of luck !!)..only problem was that it was hosing down without letup..first thing we did when we got there was wait until 7.30 for nearest cafe to open and we had huge bacon and egg omlettes and french bread cause we are missing the b&e breckys....we are a bit pizza..d out.....
we were meant to be back at ship by 12.00 but 3rd took us aside and said "this capitano very conservative...3.00pm will be fine"....so we took a bus tour of the city but fortunately and unfortunately they had the roof on the top deck so couldnt stand up for the photo op and windows fairly steamed up but we got the idea.....eventually we found our way back thru the tunnel and best way to get a taxi (esp since we know not a word of flemish)...is to get someone to call one for us and since there was a restaurant/tavern right next door that is how we did it nd of course they have some very good beer in belgium about 500 different brews i believe so that would be a challenge ....only managed a couple of them im afraid but they made quite a fuss of us and sent us on our way with about half a kg of the snack mix that they supply when you have a beer because we commented that it was very moorish!! and that was wet and windy belgium
thur 7th june day 35
apparently we went thru the dover straits about 4.0am so both passes in the dark....off the mouth of the solent just after our last breakfast on board...it is heavy mist and raining welcome back to drought stricken england...we take on a pilot and plod off up the solent...we on bridge and normally when you have pilot on bridge passengers have to stand over in the bridge wings and generally keep alow profile ....however this pilot who was an ex super tanker skipper was very keen on being our tour guide as well as getting ship up thru the maze....he came over and pointed out the three victorian forts that stand out in the mouth of the solent....they were built out there in the 19th century to counter some potential french threat as longrange artillery was just being developed....dont thinkthey fired a shot in anger and one of them is now a luxury hotel if for some reason you want to spend a fortune for a night on a lump of concrete out in the middle of nowhere.....as we progressed up past the isle of wight he pointed out various buildings of interest and their history and when we came opposite cowes we had a bit of friendly banter over the americas cup and of course i had to remind him which countries managed to get a hand on that cup when the english have never been able to....over on the mainland is the remains of the worlds longest building...it was a hospital (netley)with its own wharf and was used extensively during the ww1 and by the americans in ww11....now only the chapel still stands and it is not tiny either....all the time he is showing us this , he is calling out course changes to the helmsman and keeping his eye out for the masses of yachts sailing about in the mist in front of us....i said was there a regatta on ?...he said "did we sail ourselves?" ...i said "no"...he said "good ...because we call them w.p.f.i's...which he translated to "wind powered fn idiots "...no regatta on ...is always like that and while theoretically power gives way to sail , it doesnt work that way in controlled areas like that so he eventually got a coast guard boat to shoo some of them out of the road and we eventually came alongside the same dock at southampton that we started from 35 days ago.... pouring rain and poor visibility....then pilot turned into travel adviser and showed us on chart where railwaystation was and suggested best way out....(.good old smyth had kindly offered to come and get us but let us know in antwerp that he couldnt) ...we managed to con the grimaldi agent to bring his car onto the ship(the crew insisted that he do that as they were worried that kate would get wet and they stopped the unloading while he did it....good old kate!!) and grab our gear and then he took us to railway stn which was actually quite close to the docks(he also gave us an immigration certificate to say we are allowed back into britain as once again no actual pass required and nobody from immigration.......so there we were standing in shampton railway stn with not much idea of what comes next....went to ticketing and suggested route that pilot had come up with and bugger me but he hit a few buttons and gave us a really good deal right back to tumbridge wells which is only 10mins from peter and julia's....it involved 4 different trains and 4 hrs but that was no problem....picked up by julia and here we are back at stone cross........summary of trip follows just in case i have inspired any of you to follow in our tracks
fri june 2nd
well the town centre of esbjerg is handy alright and while we flew into town in 07 and were picked up by siff and gitta for our denmark experience ,we didnt actually go into the town centre on that occassion....but we did today it was almost deserted and down-right bloody cold and i no jersey....there was a few youngies on the street though at 10.00am and they looked in a fairly good mood and i guessed why......it wasnt long before we were accosted by one and i could tell by the stamp on the back of his hand and the fact that he was fairly fumey that he had been out clubbing all night and heading home.....he looked a bit like he might have had an affiliation to a right-wing organisation but he was very well spoken and polite....could i phone a taxi for him as he had run out of money on his cel....which i did but had to use kiwi cel (see my notes on phones in trip summary) and it would probably have been cheaper to have piggy backed him !!
...one thing you notice about towns in denmark is that they are very tidy and orderly....here we were sat morning and no rubbish around streets from last night....went to public toilets...they are as clean and tidy as most homes would have...no dickheads writing graffiti up the walls there....and later phoned siff and birgette by putting my card in a public phone and it actually worked....nobody had even pinched the book !!....however not much action as shops dont open till after 10 on a sat and because we were feeling the cold we had to repair to mcdonalds where their wifi was a good speed and i set up more blogs which of course i had pre written but as i explained some of them got scrambled when they copied over which annoyed the crap out of me as apart from annoying you all with them i do intend to keep them for my own reference.....so all in all didnt get to see much else in town as had to be back at 12.00 and to make matters worse i got a stab of guilt at having spent an hr sheltering in macca's so i bought us burgers for lunch instead of going and getting something danish for lunch and the burgers were not flash....where the hell has the colonel gone to in continental europe !!......but it was good to catch up with the danish gals by phone but a pity we couldnt fine tune our arrival times or we might have been able to catch up in person....but as if to justify making us go back to the ship at 12.00 sharp, we actually sailed early.....denmark is a real good country and i think they are in pretty good financial position too....they have real good looking stock as well!!
* a little aside.....the north sea in that area is festooned with oil rigs and you would have trouble free sailing thru there in the dark without charts and radar , thats for sure....also windfarms galore out there....miles out of sight of land , they are in all sorts of configurations but the ones we sailed past were in rows like you would do grape vines ....about 100 in each block i counted.
sun 3rd june
got up sharp to see that we were not far off entering the channel into wallhamn on swedens west coast....is a toss up as to whether this port or corks , is the most scenic to sail into....wallhamn has heaps of rocky islands dotted around throughout the long channel in and some of them are very small but the odd thing is that a lot of people live on them....one was probably only about 3 or 4 ha but looked to have about 100 houses crammed onto it.....no roads how odd..i should have spent my productive years in local body planning as the first thing that occured to me aside from the asthetic side to it was ....what do they do for the two "p"s( power and poos) as there was no overhead lines anywhere and not much scope for septic tanks on solid rock and cant see a green country like sweden pumping it into the harbour.....plus what do they do for a living if there permanently and how do they get on and off....we docked about 9.0 am and we were straight off as no shore pass needed here....had a yarn with one of the wharfies and he said a lot of the people who live on those islands commute to gothenburg and other cities and keep their cars on mainland and use boats/small ferries to get on and off...said he himself lives on one and is 80km each way plus a ferry trip....forgot to ask about the 2 ps......
.wallhamn is miles from anywhere but like portbury in england it is a big car port for distribution purposes....the big car transporters like us unload there and a lot go by road into the hinterland of sweden and also small car carriers come along and load them up again and haul them north to norway and russia....man when you see all the acres of cars at these ports you just got to wonder if theres enough people on the planet with cash to buy them ......and theres a ship from this company alone in these ports every week!!
...port agent took us to gates and rang a taxi for us .....was about 20mins to closest town as there is nothing at wallhamn ....the town of stenunsund....about 25000 people but not much doing on a sunday morning ....(.however i did have in my head , the name and address of the people i worked for in central sweden back in the 70s ( tore and gunvor torstensson )and i gave that to the taxi driver who punched it into his computer and hey-presto there was their phone number......rang them and they are still alive and kicking in same place....now i wished that i had given them some notice as there would have been enough time for them to have driven over for the day.....sod it).......uncharacteristically we were told we could be away all day so we jumped on a bus to gothenberg which is swedens second biggest city and were there in under an hour and we were tourists for the day....did the open top bus tour and then the canalboat/harbour cruise (not that we haven't seen a lot of harbours lately)....and as an extra bonus when we got off boat , we found out why there were so many people on streets ....it was the annual "hero " parade which was big and there were some very strange sights from drag queens to gay dwarfs etc etc plus the two girls standing next to us kept giving each other mouth-to-mouth resusitation so that should make for some interesting video editing......
.we had a young swedish girl woofing for us the week before we left nz and she is actively involved in left-wing politics already and has her sights set on becoming pm one day....one of the policies she is keen on is the open door one ...ie open the borders to any refugee be they muslim,black white or brindle and unfortunately sweden has already been doing that for years....when i worked in sweden in the 70s they were taking vietnamese like there was no tomorrow along with any political refugees like draft dodgers and anybody else who floated past.....the result i noticed when walking through those streets today is that its hard to pick the vikings out anymore ....there are so many eastern europeans and liquorish alsorts.....(.denmark on the other hand seems to have kept there bloodlines a bit more pure)...anyway we had a good day in gothenberg and went back to stenunsund by fast train....arriving there by about 5.30pm so plenty of time to get something for tea but not a lot of places open due to sun night but we did find "harry's" down at the marina....an english themed pub built in an octagonal shape....they did a very tender medium-rare hereford fillet with salad and chips which i had been hanging out for for some time (there was also a macca's open and a pizza joint...but i think i am getting enough of that on board here thanks !!)...only peculiar thing for the day was that kate wanted lavy in gothenburg and sneaked into mcdonalds....found it was coin operated but crafty woman that she is , she waited until someone came out and grabbed door before it closed.....i felt urge at train/bus station(its a big one ) and found same thing...springboarding off kates experiences , did the door thing but found i was in an anti room and girl cashier parked there with till.....wanted 10 kr(they are not in euro)...we were having a credit card day as not worth changing money and no banks open anyway....well bugger me 10kr is about $1.50nz and not something you would use card for...cost you more than that in fees.....so i negotiated that she would accept 1 euro coin....only problem is i didnt take any euro with me ....so had to hunt around to find kate,shake her down for a coin.....just as well i wasnt busting....to rub in the insult....dunny on train was free !!
....so that was sweden...but as usual we were back at ship on time (8.0pm) but due to some cargo hassles it was 1.30 mon morning before we actually sailed....we got up to see all those islands sliding past in the moonlight....very scenic !!!
* here is a little aside on sweden that tore told me on the phone when i rang him.....when i worked in england in1975 i bought an old mk1 cortina off the next door neighbour....it was lying in her garden and she was sick of spending money on it as it was always breaking down so gave it to me for 50 quid.(i think it was about about a 1965 model)...and i took it to sweden where i worked for tore and gunvor torstensson and after that i did 10,000 miles in it up through finland , into the artic circle and down through norway..(never laid a spanner on it )..then i had to go back to england prior to heading for nz.....cortina was out of mot and rego for britain so not worth taking it back.....left it in tore's shed and there it stayed for a year or so till they made sure i wasnt going back.....then they needed the shed so they gave cortina to a local engineer and he was going to make it into an agricultural trailer.....but he must have fired her up and started driving it around and apparently he kept her on the road for about the next 30years and cortina only went to big scrap yard in the sky 2005...the engineer fellow just clocked up his 96thyear too so hope that cortina gives me a bit of longevity as well !!!
tue 5th june
well from wallhamn to the mouth of antwerp harbour is about 12 hours so we picked up the pilot off there about 1.30pm today....bugger me but it is a long way up the skelt (think thats what its called ...its like a big canal)...40 nautical miles in fact and it took about 5and a half hours to get up to the lock gates but a very interesting trip it was.....lot of industry on the banks ....all the big guys in the chemical world have vast plants on the banks...god knows what the air samples come out like..and theres nuclear power stations and you name it...also..off out starboard side as we first went in were a lot of crops and farming and on one of the flood banks was a sight becoming rare even in south otago....a flock of sheep !!...and out there on the horizon reside countless thousands of kiwis for that of course is the fields of flanders....and on my next trip up here i am going to the menin gates at ypres by hook or by crook ..the big german rivers link in via locks and the biggest lock in the world is up here somewhere.....by the time we are thru lock and tied up is 9.00pm......this bit of the port is big by the standards of where we have been but found out where we were was just the grimaldi terminal ( two other grimaldis already tied up)....the rest of the port is vast...no 8 in the world av turn around is 40 ships perday........the port is miles from the town as the old town port was too small and was overrun by commerce and shut down so they moved out here in the 70s and knocked down a few towns to build this port ( you see a few chuches around the skyline...these were from the deceased villages but they were not allowed to knock them down as they are historic places so they now maintain them but they are closed.)....we sneaked ashore and found port security and hit them with the dumb kiwi looking for awifi site....there wasnt any unencrypted ones but in the end they took pity on us and let us into a multistoried admin building where he wandered around various offices till he found a machine that was on line and left us to it till about midnight....bit tricky though trying to log onto email sites from a foreign site as servers were concinced we were hackers....but we got there and that was good of him and he gave us a good tip cause we wanted to go into town the next day.....said dont get a taxi in the 7.0 to 9.0 time as traffic queues and costs a fortune so off to bed we went
wed 6th....up at 5.0 and to port gates to order taxi 5.45.....pouring with bloody rain.....a little aside from yesterday was that nobody from belgium immigration called on board so they left a message with 3rd mate that if passengers coming ashore they should get a taxi to immigration and get their own passports stamped (as obviously they are not in the shangran area)....yea right....by the time we got to the outskirts of the old city , the meter was already over 40euro...so we were illegal immigrants in belgium for a day!!!....the taxi driver was also a good sort and he dropped us off on the opposite bank of the river schelde from where the old city was......the idea is that along with people on pushbikes , you go into a huge lift which takes you down into the bowels of the earth where you come out into a 500m long tunnel which is one of several under the river but the only one you can walk or bike thru and you go into an identical lift at the other end and you walk out into old antwerp....it is by far the most interesting city we struck if you are into old buildings and how they blend the old in with the new.(brussels is the political center of belgium and the european union..antwerp is the commercial center of belgium famous for diamond finishing factories but i dont agree with the concept of diamonds and that even before i saw "blood diamond"...so kate was out of luck !!)..only problem was that it was hosing down without letup..first thing we did when we got there was wait until 7.30 for nearest cafe to open and we had huge bacon and egg omlettes and french bread cause we are missing the b&e breckys....we are a bit pizza..d out.....
we were meant to be back at ship by 12.00 but 3rd took us aside and said "this capitano very conservative...3.00pm will be fine"....so we took a bus tour of the city but fortunately and unfortunately they had the roof on the top deck so couldnt stand up for the photo op and windows fairly steamed up but we got the idea.....eventually we found our way back thru the tunnel and best way to get a taxi (esp since we know not a word of flemish)...is to get someone to call one for us and since there was a restaurant/tavern right next door that is how we did it nd of course they have some very good beer in belgium about 500 different brews i believe so that would be a challenge ....only managed a couple of them im afraid but they made quite a fuss of us and sent us on our way with about half a kg of the snack mix that they supply when you have a beer because we commented that it was very moorish!! and that was wet and windy belgium
thur 7th june day 35
apparently we went thru the dover straits about 4.0am so both passes in the dark....off the mouth of the solent just after our last breakfast on board...it is heavy mist and raining welcome back to drought stricken england...we take on a pilot and plod off up the solent...we on bridge and normally when you have pilot on bridge passengers have to stand over in the bridge wings and generally keep alow profile ....however this pilot who was an ex super tanker skipper was very keen on being our tour guide as well as getting ship up thru the maze....he came over and pointed out the three victorian forts that stand out in the mouth of the solent....they were built out there in the 19th century to counter some potential french threat as longrange artillery was just being developed....dont thinkthey fired a shot in anger and one of them is now a luxury hotel if for some reason you want to spend a fortune for a night on a lump of concrete out in the middle of nowhere.....as we progressed up past the isle of wight he pointed out various buildings of interest and their history and when we came opposite cowes we had a bit of friendly banter over the americas cup and of course i had to remind him which countries managed to get a hand on that cup when the english have never been able to....over on the mainland is the remains of the worlds longest building...it was a hospital (netley)with its own wharf and was used extensively during the ww1 and by the americans in ww11....now only the chapel still stands and it is not tiny either....all the time he is showing us this , he is calling out course changes to the helmsman and keeping his eye out for the masses of yachts sailing about in the mist in front of us....i said was there a regatta on ?...he said "did we sail ourselves?" ...i said "no"...he said "good ...because we call them w.p.f.i's...which he translated to "wind powered fn idiots "...no regatta on ...is always like that and while theoretically power gives way to sail , it doesnt work that way in controlled areas like that so he eventually got a coast guard boat to shoo some of them out of the road and we eventually came alongside the same dock at southampton that we started from 35 days ago.... pouring rain and poor visibility....then pilot turned into travel adviser and showed us on chart where railwaystation was and suggested best way out....(.good old smyth had kindly offered to come and get us but let us know in antwerp that he couldnt) ...we managed to con the grimaldi agent to bring his car onto the ship(the crew insisted that he do that as they were worried that kate would get wet and they stopped the unloading while he did it....good old kate!!) and grab our gear and then he took us to railway stn which was actually quite close to the docks(he also gave us an immigration certificate to say we are allowed back into britain as once again no actual pass required and nobody from immigration.......so there we were standing in shampton railway stn with not much idea of what comes next....went to ticketing and suggested route that pilot had come up with and bugger me but he hit a few buttons and gave us a really good deal right back to tumbridge wells which is only 10mins from peter and julia's....it involved 4 different trains and 4 hrs but that was no problem....picked up by julia and here we are back at stone cross........summary of trip follows just in case i have inspired any of you to follow in our tracks
Instal 9
tue may 29
well....apparently portbury is the biggest car port in britain because it is well placed to the motorway network.....and i figured there must be a reason for it as it takes forever to get here as i said at the end of last blog...we were off the mouth of the bristol channel about 9.30am yesterday and plodded up it till 12.00 when we took on a pilot and then its on and on....you have to go thru a lock to get into the harbour and it was about 3.30pm before we got that done and tied up....one of the annoying things about being a passenger is there is always a long wait for customs and shipping agent and was about an hr and a half before we got off...but for the first time we had a long stay ie 17 hrs but that was a bit double edged as you will see.....first up we went to the seafarers centre which is in the port complex....it is a great place for the sea boys as they have high-speed broadband, telephone networks, games room, library, guitars,organs etcetc.....plus they have a curtesy-coach to pick up sea-men from avonmouth dock which was nearby.....did the blog and email thingy there and the guys that run it said that bristol was about 7 miles away but there is no bus link , only taxi....which we would have done but by that time was 6.30pm and thought , what is point of going there at that time on a monday night...plus we had gone thru bristol on one of our previous missions .so decided to go for option b. which was to walk to local pub for tea....only one mile.....fortunately the coach turned up and offered to give us ride... just as well ...the only people that would have reckoned it was only a mile would have been irish or maori , as if we had been on foot i would have turned back ages before we had got there on the assumption we were going wrong way..(i reckon 5km.).so that is how we got to "the kings arms"....a good old village pub in what i guess by the accents...was summerset?....this was also indicated by the amount of cider that was on tap....but also they had real ale as well...plus they did very good pub-grub...which for us always revolves around scampi and chips ....plus we had a bit of craik with the locals (thats gaelic for a yarn....not a mis-spelling of a type of cocaine! )....all in all a good night and to cap it off the seafarers centre sent the coach to get us at closing time ..
..today we sailed about 11.30am and are through locks and hauling for it down the channel...seems to be going a lot faster might be something to do with the tide......cork in ireland is next 12 hrs which means another middle of the nighter but might be ok as i dont think we can onload ourselves in some of these ports due to union issues so might be in port for tomorrow morning as well ...as kate will be wanting to set foot on her beloved ireland again.
wed 30 may
woke up to nice spring day in ireland , showered up and were ready to go...but bugger me we couldnt find 3rd mate who usually handles our travel (namesake stresses in the info that comes with your ticket , that you need a lot of patience on a cargo ship and i usually have but sometimes it gets very strained !!)....in the end i ran into the walrus and asked him about chances of a shore pass.....he has fairly good english but takes a bit of time to produce it..."there is no shore pass " says he....and i must have looked fairly astonished and was about to enquire why not in as diplomatic a way as possible....when he continued...."noo need for shore pass this port .....you just go ashore when you are ready but need you back 12.00noon as we sailing soon after that "....well wait till i get that mate thinks i...if the tosser had said that last night we could have offed at 7.00 oc(as you will see we did manage to salvage victory from the jaws of defeat !!)....anyway we hit the wharf at 9.30 and took route to gates that walrus had shown us....there was a philiy on the gates and you wont believe me but for the first time on the trip apart from israel...he asked us for our shore pass!!....bugger me yet again....i said we dont have one and he must have been a local-philly as he said " oohwell we wont bother about one today then"....and we walked into ireland
.....about 500 meters down road and we were in the village of ringaskiddy.....it is a small village on the port side of a very picturesque harbour and the bigger town on the opposite side i will describe in a while.....had a bit of a look at bus timetable and wondered if time to go to cork which is about 40mins away.....saw a small shop nearby which was in a virtual sort of car garage....had a good bit of craik with owner barry and he told us of the woes of ireland and indeed they are not flash with high unemployment and houses worth about half of what they were prior to 2008 , people have mortgages worth more than the houses and indeed barry looked like he was just hanging on by the skin of his teeth too as he had hardly any stock ....but we relieved him of some irish newspapers and 2 winning (we hope ) lucky dips in the wed nite 4 mil lotto draw....he also talked us out of going to cork in the short time we had (we have actually been to cork before anyway compliments of our friend tara from galway ).so..apart from him the only other enterprise in ringaskiddy was the "ferry boat inn"...the other two pubs in town having closed due to the recession....so 10.am i walked in and asked the two women behind the bar one of the most stupid questions you can ask in ireland "is it too early in the day for a guiness?"....they of course immediatly answered in unison .."its never too early in ireland for a guiness"....plus one said" if you were still in australia it would be night time and you could have several"....got her put right on the geography and tried a local brew and of course a good yarn since we were only patrons....transpired they had bought the pub between them and were giving it a good go....and a nice wee irish pub it was too.....one of them was called sarah and when i enquired as to where nearest bank would be she said that she had a bit of shopping to do in nearest bigger town and she would take us with her....she was intrigued as she had never met anyone called "heemish" before......so we installed ourselves in one of the smallest cars i have been in since greece...a ka (just as well 2 meter peter wasnt with us or he would have had to sit on roof )...and off we went to carrigaline...which was twenty mins away....a vibrant town with plenty of shops banks etc...she showed us the spot where we would meet up and off we went ....got some more euros at a good price as i am only carrying aus$ this trip and they were good rate even at bank(over 76cents)and some other stuff we needed so all good....we were way up the other end of town and suddenly we heard someone calling out "heemish" and there was sarah parked up in a line of traffic...transpired the stuff she had gone to pick up wasnt ready....so the trip was really only in aid of us....on the way out of town we saw a funeral forming at one of the churches and a lot of foot traffic heading that way...."ah it will be a big funeral" saya sarah..."she was a very popular woman who has 6 teenage sons"...i said that would account for the younguns heading down the street..."ah well now, her husband has 12 brothers you know and each of them has a dozen or so kids you know now"...says sarah....also we got the run down on how the whole event is run in ireland....as i had asked if they would be having a "wake" as my kiwi idea on what that involves is when you all go to the "oak tree inn" or similar after the event to lighten up a bit....but no...they probably do a bit of that as well but a wake in ireland is the whole deal and goes from the "viewing" of the body the day before , the service and ends at the graveside.....so i am further educated ...
...we whistled back to the "ferry boat inn" and sarah knocked up kate a chicken and veg stir fry as kate is getting veg withdrawl symptoms...and me a full irish breakfast of bacon eggs saus. black and white pudding and chips....yum a nice change from our regulation piza breakfasts....and of course washed down with another guiness....and then alas we were off ...but that woman was a real good stick (and along with the cafe mercanti couple from salerno.)...is "right up there with the fighter pilots ".and we got a good wee snapshot of ireland........well we got back to the ellade and bugger me if they didnt have some problem wtih the locks on the ramp when they folded it up and we wasted nearly 3 hours while they played about with that but finally we were on the move out into the harbour about 5.30pm.....now the town on the opposite side of the harbour that i mentioned above is called cobh (prounounced "cove") and we passed right along it only a couple of hundred meters away from shore and a right scenic spot it is too.....on that very spot 100 years ago in april a very well know liner owned by the "white star line "....anchored here to take on the last of her passengers which i think were irish immigrants heading for better places (now adays liners come here and anchor at the quay because the modern harbour has been dredged but in the titanic's time they had to anchor in the channel and barge the passengers out)...so was worth a bit of pondering as we sailed out of that harbour as most of those buildings..esp the lighthouse etc were probably standing when the titanic sailed past and for a lot of them it was the last bit of land they would ever see!!.....(.back in april they re-enacted the titanics voyage on exactly the same day ).....so as night fell we plodded off out into the irish sea hoping that we will have better luck than the worlds most famous ship..
...heading around bottom of england and up through the channel and next port of call is esberj in denmark in a couple of days eta 4.0am sat 2nd june
friday 1 june
past through the dover straits in the night and now plodding up thru the north sea...a lot of shipping around but an even greater number of oil rigs and gas platforms....man they are everywhere and i noticed on the charts that off holland there are also a lot of offshore wind-farms although we are too far out to have seen them....managed to get a guided tour of engine room today....had dropped a few requests in earlier in trip but nothing eventuated until today....engine surprisingly small in size compared with the old waitangi where the engine extended up through 3 decks.....this one is 7 cylinder 22,000kw which is something in hp i am not sure of...cylinders are only about the size of the old standard dust bin but are obviously a lot more efficient than in days of old....incidentally apart from maintenance , the main engine is never shut down even in port....she has done about 70,000hrs and has a shelf life of over 24yrs (she is a 2001 model) but they gradually replace all the parts over a period of time anyway as everything is compartmentalised.....one variable pitch propellor that can push us along at a max of about 22knots but mostly we potter along at about 17 to save fuel....bunkering is done in antwerp of about 250tonnes and that is sufficient for the round trip....the bow thrusters are the side on props that are used to manouver in port and they are both powered by a massive electrical motor.....there are also 4 large 7 cylinder generator sets for electricity and a large fuel fired boiler which produces enough hot water that we could shower all day long if we wanted to
.....something that i have not previously mentioned is that on one of the bulkheads at the back of the bridge is the makers plaque which in this case is daewoo from korea .....on the other bulkhead is a painting of the makers makers son if that makes sence ie...jc in the arms of his mother and this is surrounded by a dried flower arrangement and some religious verse......there were more pictures in that vein in the engine room....and i have noticed in passing at least one officers cabin with the door open , a large depiction of jc over the head of the bunk as well but this is hardly surprising as italy is home to the old fellow with the funny hat and they obviously take it quite seriously.....there is also a small statue of one of the patron saints on top of the bridge consul , facing forward.....so we are in good hands
....one of the most difficult things i find on board is to not walk around absentmindedly whistling as i am prone to do as you well know......it is not just because of the fact that i may not sometimes be in tune....it is because the sailors say..".whistling onboard ship makes the wind blow"....and i must say there has been a lot of offenders before me as it never stops bloody blowing at sea and the north-sea is no exception , i can tell you.
2nd june in esbjerg....sending this from good old macca's free wifi
tue may 29
well....apparently portbury is the biggest car port in britain because it is well placed to the motorway network.....and i figured there must be a reason for it as it takes forever to get here as i said at the end of last blog...we were off the mouth of the bristol channel about 9.30am yesterday and plodded up it till 12.00 when we took on a pilot and then its on and on....you have to go thru a lock to get into the harbour and it was about 3.30pm before we got that done and tied up....one of the annoying things about being a passenger is there is always a long wait for customs and shipping agent and was about an hr and a half before we got off...but for the first time we had a long stay ie 17 hrs but that was a bit double edged as you will see.....first up we went to the seafarers centre which is in the port complex....it is a great place for the sea boys as they have high-speed broadband, telephone networks, games room, library, guitars,organs etcetc.....plus they have a curtesy-coach to pick up sea-men from avonmouth dock which was nearby.....did the blog and email thingy there and the guys that run it said that bristol was about 7 miles away but there is no bus link , only taxi....which we would have done but by that time was 6.30pm and thought , what is point of going there at that time on a monday night...plus we had gone thru bristol on one of our previous missions .so decided to go for option b. which was to walk to local pub for tea....only one mile.....fortunately the coach turned up and offered to give us ride... just as well ...the only people that would have reckoned it was only a mile would have been irish or maori , as if we had been on foot i would have turned back ages before we had got there on the assumption we were going wrong way..(i reckon 5km.).so that is how we got to "the kings arms"....a good old village pub in what i guess by the accents...was summerset?....this was also indicated by the amount of cider that was on tap....but also they had real ale as well...plus they did very good pub-grub...which for us always revolves around scampi and chips ....plus we had a bit of craik with the locals (thats gaelic for a yarn....not a mis-spelling of a type of cocaine! )....all in all a good night and to cap it off the seafarers centre sent the coach to get us at closing time ..
..today we sailed about 11.30am and are through locks and hauling for it down the channel...seems to be going a lot faster might be something to do with the tide......cork in ireland is next 12 hrs which means another middle of the nighter but might be ok as i dont think we can onload ourselves in some of these ports due to union issues so might be in port for tomorrow morning as well ...as kate will be wanting to set foot on her beloved ireland again.
wed 30 may
woke up to nice spring day in ireland , showered up and were ready to go...but bugger me we couldnt find 3rd mate who usually handles our travel (namesake stresses in the info that comes with your ticket , that you need a lot of patience on a cargo ship and i usually have but sometimes it gets very strained !!)....in the end i ran into the walrus and asked him about chances of a shore pass.....he has fairly good english but takes a bit of time to produce it..."there is no shore pass " says he....and i must have looked fairly astonished and was about to enquire why not in as diplomatic a way as possible....when he continued...."noo need for shore pass this port .....you just go ashore when you are ready but need you back 12.00noon as we sailing soon after that "....well wait till i get that mate thinks i...if the tosser had said that last night we could have offed at 7.00 oc(as you will see we did manage to salvage victory from the jaws of defeat !!)....anyway we hit the wharf at 9.30 and took route to gates that walrus had shown us....there was a philiy on the gates and you wont believe me but for the first time on the trip apart from israel...he asked us for our shore pass!!....bugger me yet again....i said we dont have one and he must have been a local-philly as he said " oohwell we wont bother about one today then"....and we walked into ireland
.....about 500 meters down road and we were in the village of ringaskiddy.....it is a small village on the port side of a very picturesque harbour and the bigger town on the opposite side i will describe in a while.....had a bit of a look at bus timetable and wondered if time to go to cork which is about 40mins away.....saw a small shop nearby which was in a virtual sort of car garage....had a good bit of craik with owner barry and he told us of the woes of ireland and indeed they are not flash with high unemployment and houses worth about half of what they were prior to 2008 , people have mortgages worth more than the houses and indeed barry looked like he was just hanging on by the skin of his teeth too as he had hardly any stock ....but we relieved him of some irish newspapers and 2 winning (we hope ) lucky dips in the wed nite 4 mil lotto draw....he also talked us out of going to cork in the short time we had (we have actually been to cork before anyway compliments of our friend tara from galway ).so..apart from him the only other enterprise in ringaskiddy was the "ferry boat inn"...the other two pubs in town having closed due to the recession....so 10.am i walked in and asked the two women behind the bar one of the most stupid questions you can ask in ireland "is it too early in the day for a guiness?"....they of course immediatly answered in unison .."its never too early in ireland for a guiness"....plus one said" if you were still in australia it would be night time and you could have several"....got her put right on the geography and tried a local brew and of course a good yarn since we were only patrons....transpired they had bought the pub between them and were giving it a good go....and a nice wee irish pub it was too.....one of them was called sarah and when i enquired as to where nearest bank would be she said that she had a bit of shopping to do in nearest bigger town and she would take us with her....she was intrigued as she had never met anyone called "heemish" before......so we installed ourselves in one of the smallest cars i have been in since greece...a ka (just as well 2 meter peter wasnt with us or he would have had to sit on roof )...and off we went to carrigaline...which was twenty mins away....a vibrant town with plenty of shops banks etc...she showed us the spot where we would meet up and off we went ....got some more euros at a good price as i am only carrying aus$ this trip and they were good rate even at bank(over 76cents)and some other stuff we needed so all good....we were way up the other end of town and suddenly we heard someone calling out "heemish" and there was sarah parked up in a line of traffic...transpired the stuff she had gone to pick up wasnt ready....so the trip was really only in aid of us....on the way out of town we saw a funeral forming at one of the churches and a lot of foot traffic heading that way...."ah it will be a big funeral" saya sarah..."she was a very popular woman who has 6 teenage sons"...i said that would account for the younguns heading down the street..."ah well now, her husband has 12 brothers you know and each of them has a dozen or so kids you know now"...says sarah....also we got the run down on how the whole event is run in ireland....as i had asked if they would be having a "wake" as my kiwi idea on what that involves is when you all go to the "oak tree inn" or similar after the event to lighten up a bit....but no...they probably do a bit of that as well but a wake in ireland is the whole deal and goes from the "viewing" of the body the day before , the service and ends at the graveside.....so i am further educated ...
...we whistled back to the "ferry boat inn" and sarah knocked up kate a chicken and veg stir fry as kate is getting veg withdrawl symptoms...and me a full irish breakfast of bacon eggs saus. black and white pudding and chips....yum a nice change from our regulation piza breakfasts....and of course washed down with another guiness....and then alas we were off ...but that woman was a real good stick (and along with the cafe mercanti couple from salerno.)...is "right up there with the fighter pilots ".and we got a good wee snapshot of ireland........well we got back to the ellade and bugger me if they didnt have some problem wtih the locks on the ramp when they folded it up and we wasted nearly 3 hours while they played about with that but finally we were on the move out into the harbour about 5.30pm.....now the town on the opposite side of the harbour that i mentioned above is called cobh (prounounced "cove") and we passed right along it only a couple of hundred meters away from shore and a right scenic spot it is too.....on that very spot 100 years ago in april a very well know liner owned by the "white star line "....anchored here to take on the last of her passengers which i think were irish immigrants heading for better places (now adays liners come here and anchor at the quay because the modern harbour has been dredged but in the titanic's time they had to anchor in the channel and barge the passengers out)...so was worth a bit of pondering as we sailed out of that harbour as most of those buildings..esp the lighthouse etc were probably standing when the titanic sailed past and for a lot of them it was the last bit of land they would ever see!!.....(.back in april they re-enacted the titanics voyage on exactly the same day ).....so as night fell we plodded off out into the irish sea hoping that we will have better luck than the worlds most famous ship..
...heading around bottom of england and up through the channel and next port of call is esberj in denmark in a couple of days eta 4.0am sat 2nd june
friday 1 june
past through the dover straits in the night and now plodding up thru the north sea...a lot of shipping around but an even greater number of oil rigs and gas platforms....man they are everywhere and i noticed on the charts that off holland there are also a lot of offshore wind-farms although we are too far out to have seen them....managed to get a guided tour of engine room today....had dropped a few requests in earlier in trip but nothing eventuated until today....engine surprisingly small in size compared with the old waitangi where the engine extended up through 3 decks.....this one is 7 cylinder 22,000kw which is something in hp i am not sure of...cylinders are only about the size of the old standard dust bin but are obviously a lot more efficient than in days of old....incidentally apart from maintenance , the main engine is never shut down even in port....she has done about 70,000hrs and has a shelf life of over 24yrs (she is a 2001 model) but they gradually replace all the parts over a period of time anyway as everything is compartmentalised.....one variable pitch propellor that can push us along at a max of about 22knots but mostly we potter along at about 17 to save fuel....bunkering is done in antwerp of about 250tonnes and that is sufficient for the round trip....the bow thrusters are the side on props that are used to manouver in port and they are both powered by a massive electrical motor.....there are also 4 large 7 cylinder generator sets for electricity and a large fuel fired boiler which produces enough hot water that we could shower all day long if we wanted to
.....something that i have not previously mentioned is that on one of the bulkheads at the back of the bridge is the makers plaque which in this case is daewoo from korea .....on the other bulkhead is a painting of the makers makers son if that makes sence ie...jc in the arms of his mother and this is surrounded by a dried flower arrangement and some religious verse......there were more pictures in that vein in the engine room....and i have noticed in passing at least one officers cabin with the door open , a large depiction of jc over the head of the bunk as well but this is hardly surprising as italy is home to the old fellow with the funny hat and they obviously take it quite seriously.....there is also a small statue of one of the patron saints on top of the bridge consul , facing forward.....so we are in good hands
....one of the most difficult things i find on board is to not walk around absentmindedly whistling as i am prone to do as you well know......it is not just because of the fact that i may not sometimes be in tune....it is because the sailors say..".whistling onboard ship makes the wind blow"....and i must say there has been a lot of offenders before me as it never stops bloody blowing at sea and the north-sea is no exception , i can tell you.
2nd june in esbjerg....sending this from good old macca's free wifi
instal 8
sat 26 may
well we sneaked into setabul , portugal about mid afternoon yesterday.....no haze ...mountainous hills around town look to be covered with something like wild olives and wilding pines....sort of has that sort of canadian look to it if you can invisage canada turning up on the 40th parallel......great sandy white beaches on way into harbour with not many people on them(reminded me of the way round to the nuggets at home )...town is a picture postcard one ....terracotta roofs are order of day
i told you a lie previously ....some of the crew are allowed shore leave depending on what their role is on the ship.....several of the italian deck officers were away into town like dogs shot up the proverbial as they all have eu passpoarts.....(it was a text book day...wall to wall sunshine.... probably better than any we had in the med because very clear and no haze....25deg which i found out later , the locals count as a winters day as apparently summer doesnt start till june)....jessie, several of the philly crew and ourselves are of course on foreign passports and apparently setabul is not in the shangran area so we all need visa,s for the day....we are told to wait down at ramp for immigration to bring them...10mins max.....after an hour the philies drifted off back upstairs and i nearly wore the paint off the ramp pacing up and down it....i should have bloody known it as looking over the town as we came in you could tell that traffic and people in no hurry to go anywhere and if youve ever been to spain you will know the significance of the word maunjana......eventually the prick turned up about 5.15 and said to me (who was fighting loosing battle to be civil)..."very sorry for delay...i have been very busy immigration"......what a crock of manure....turns out they are like the israelis in that they sit awhile search engine is going through everyones history , if any
....anyway is only short walk into town....very senic as kilroy would say....lot of buildings have mosaic tiles on facades and cobbled pavements....an absolute rabbit warren of extremely narrow streets all opening onto their own little squares....lot of big churches in the plain mexican style(as seen through clint eastwoods spagetti westerns )....zillions of little cafes and tiny shops selling womans ware and watches....man there is no excuse for people not knowing the time in setabul....by now is after 6 .0 pm and its friday night but most shops still open....i suspect that they have siesta during day and stay open later at night (iguess they probably shut from about 12.0 till 4.0ish....anyway we did what namesake said in travel notes supplied with tickets (by the way "namesake" runs "nz freighter travel" from napier....he is blessed with having the same h first name as me )....we did some serious people watching ( unfortunately the open top sightseeing buses dont operate in "winter").....and ive got to say that "grading on the hoof" is most difficult in setubal....the portugese there seem to come in all shapes and sizes and it is hard to describe what a typical one looks like....they certainly wernt as dark and moorish like the spanish or italians as i thought they would be ..so hard to describe...liquorish allsorts maybe
....if you ever do one of these missions take a world atlas (one i have at home would have been ideal as it has brief history of country as well as maps andof course googleearth is no good without web and naval charts only tell you what towns are on the coast.).....anyway i didnt read up anything on portugal but remember from the old school days that they were at one stage a colonial power in europe and asia and did a lot of the shooting of cheeky darkies , sending the gunboat up the river etc etc....in fact i think they were fairly brutal pricks at the best of times .......anyway the legacy of being a colonial power you will find ( britain is a prime example ) is that a lot of the natives of the countries that you have conquered tend to come and live in your own counry over a long period of time afterwards and portugal is no exception and there are a lot of faces on the streets of setubal that are as black as your hat....probably from african countries like senegal etc....virtually the first one we struck when we got off the ship was a woman coming towards us with a large bag of something perched expertly on the top of her head....look mum...no hands.....something you western ladies should try....great for the posture !! and ergonomically very efficient( if it was a crate of beer up top...you would still have both hands free for the groceries !! )
.....well was annoyed that couldnt find anywhere to get a city/outskirts tour and did even contemplate a taxi but thought that would be a prime way to set oneself up with having to extend mortgage on house and besides the thing we found most lacking in setubal ....was a basic understanding of the queens english...so flagged that idea....decided to have our first meal off the ship and i was fantisizing about the "colonel" but alas he was nowhere to be seen....mcdonalds were there (in white oddly enough and no arches) but drew the line at going there.......
...when we first got on the main drag after leaving ship we came across a gaggle of restaurants one of which was called "the capitano cook"....which i thought was a real dag as jimbob cook certainly didnt discover portugal , but i guessed it was the portugeese style of recognising a fellow sea-farer....i made a mental note to go back there later for our meal....but when we got there , capitano cook was deserted of patrons and remembering what carol said all those weeks ago when we were sunday lunching in kent....."beware of empty eating establishments"....we went next door to one that was populated....actually we were recruited by the doorman who was a slightly more olive skinned version of robbie reid (if you don't happen to know robbie , he is a guide on the keppler)......we were hanging out for something different to the cusine onboard (like steak,eggs and chips or similar) but it looked like this was a specialty seafood restaurant and the waitress who apart from very dark hair , was as white skinned as your average pakeha....but no english and she was determined that we were going to have fish so she brought out a large tray of whole fish all around that one to two kilo size, uncooked for us to select from.....we gave in and put tthe steak on things to do in britain....i selected one that looked a bit like a trumpeter......next was the drinks...bedlieve it or not i happen to have an uncanny knowledge of world beer languages and i was ok on cerveca and thought a house red vinno for kate.....she came out with a glass of white which kate said was slightly bubbly and therefore tolerable and gave that the nod but bugger me if "helpful- hariet" didnt scuttle off and come back with a glass of what i guessed was dry white....kate took a sip and if you know kate you will have experienced one of her famous involuntary shudders which is more felt than seen.....no good and hariet still very keen to rush off for something else but we do by now convince her that option one is ok.....bugger me she scuttles off and gets a jug of the stuff..also as seemed to be common where ever we have been sofar drinks also include snacks and this was no exception....large plate of olives and some sort of beans, 2 dips a round of cheese and half a loaf of bread....by now the fish has arrived and bugger me yet again but it is not one fish between us....it is one each...they are cooked opened up like a book , each one about half the size of the otago daily times....accompanying fish is a large salad and two bowls of new spuds.....now hariet was determined i needed a wine and to save a major event , i had a flashback to the 73 beerfest trip as previously mentioned....when martin ,merv and i got to the french riviera , we didnt get around to turning right and we ended up in a camping ground outside barcelona....where we discovered a very good breakfast wine called sangria....and spain is next door to portugal so i threw this word into the conversation and hariet new exactly what i was talking about and produced 2 jugs during the meal.....it is a slightly grenashy type red poured over a sliced up orange in a jug(something you can try at home if you have got a red thats a bit dodgy....slice an orange into a jug....put the wine through your sodaflow machine to give it a bit of a buzz and hay presto !!!).......by now it was coming up to ship boarding time and we were getting a bit anxious as to whether we had enough cash to pay for all of this as we had by now eaten ourselves to a standstill didnt have a clue what the bill was going to be and couldnt see any mention of visa and hoped it wasnt like greece where cash- was -king exclusively......not to worry...the whole lot 52euro...small change in europe for a meal like that........robbie reid now very inquisitive as to where we come from...i pointed over the road at the service station which puzzled him for a moment....then i got his eyesight organised to go higher where the top deck of the ellade was visible across town....." ah grimaldi" says he.....and we sailed out on a great balmy breeze 10.30pm.....definitely put setabul on list for next time though).....
sun 27 may
all day yesterday plodding through north atlantic...sea fresh and cool......today into bay of biscay...sea nasty grey colour white tops and old girl is now having a good roll as anti heeling obviously cant compensate for this swell which along with the wind is now side on or "on the beam" as the pros. call it....is also persisting down with rain and visibility less than 2 cables which is standard passing distance for ships of this size (about half a km i think is 2 cables ).......sea reminds me of a bit of light reading you could take on after tea...."the cruel sea" by nicholas monserat
...there was hardly any radio stations this morning and bugger all ships ....did see a big tanker through the gloom going other way while we were having lunch....and even she was putting up a fair bit of white water in the air (tankers usually ride better as lower in water and they also pay better cause of danger money but crew says they arnt flash to work on as very fumey all the time )
...speaking of radio....if it wasnt for george horton (a little quizz for you)and many other singers right through to the present day like lady ga.......then half these european radio stations couldnt survive....some stations esp spain play nonstop english lyrics songs with only bit of local language between them and a lot of it is old stuff.....i noticed though that there is a distinct lack of elvis songs .....perhaps the europeans have the mistaken view that he is dead!!
...a couple of days ago when i was on the bridge , chabal was up there trimming the ship(there is a very complicated control panel on the bridge for organising the balast and that is part of his job.....you have got to have her as trim as possible so she scoots through the water with the minimum of friction to keep fuel costs down......bit like having your tyre pressure right in your car
...anyway there is a small tv on bridge hooked up to the satelite reciever and its pulling in a italian radio station via web cam.....its playing an american song from days gone by and chabal calls out "do i know this group"(its a bit like when our kids came home from school once with a tape of a new artist called cat stevens , that they had just discovered...yea right)......i said to chabal ...too right i do in fact have one of their albums on my mp3 and have been playing it a lot on the treadmill in the gym lately....i did point out that the big chick who was the lead singer choked to death on a sandwich about 35 years ago!!!....but it illustrates what i have been saying about radio up here ..."classic hits rule "...after we did the music talk i asked chabal what all the hoo-haa was on their tv in mess that day....church services and black and white images of cars riddled with bullet holes...dead bods....and who is corleonie......ah says chabal...is aniversary 10 years ago when very high up govt prosecuter take on the mafiosa and they (the mafia) kill him...i actually remember that ....i think his name was something like falconia and the mob put a radio controlled bomb in a large culvert under a motor way they new he was going to use....it blew a hole about the size of this ship....killed him , his family....all the escorts and quite a lot of casual passerbys as well and 2 months later they executed another leading figure and apparently the italian public were so enraged the govt had a major crackdown......chabal says most mafia bosses are inside....i ask does that mean that the mafia is a spent force.....he says the italian equivalent of "does the wild bear no longer shit in the woods " or as tui's would say....yea right..........the mafia strong holds were right in the southern tip of mainland italy and across the straits of massina in sicily....this company has its head office in naples but the ships are registered in palermo right in the heart of scicily...hmmm...not theorising any more on that issue ...bunk not big enough for me and horses head....but..having watched the sapranos you would have to wonder if "wheels" have had to be greased in the past........those of you who were watching "secret war" on prime about the time i left would have seen the one on the american mafia when america entered the world war 11.......the yanks couldnt get the ports geared up to do anything at speed and mysterious things were happening....a large ocean liner was being converted to a troop carrier (was it the "france" ?) and it caught on fire and burnt to the waterline etc etc.....the problem being that the wharves were controlled by the mafia and some over zealous g-men had managed to get their main boss , lucky luchiana ....banged up for a 70year jail term.....in the end they cut a secret deal with lucky ....the ports suddenly burst into activity and he got reduced to 10 years and wiled away his retirement years back in sicily......the end of that
mon 28 may
came on deck to find we are plodding up the coast of cornwall and devon....looks to be jolly fine day and just like it would be on our own coast on such a morning....clear and no haze.....got a news fix from the bbc..another station going on in some foreign lingo...suddenly realised it was the "boys from the valleys" boyo..
.we have 1000 cars to drop off here (including the alphas and fiats) so hope to get into portsbury(the port which services bristol) for a wander , a full english lunch and an internet cafe to unload more of this torture on you...rh.......
sat 26 may
well we sneaked into setabul , portugal about mid afternoon yesterday.....no haze ...mountainous hills around town look to be covered with something like wild olives and wilding pines....sort of has that sort of canadian look to it if you can invisage canada turning up on the 40th parallel......great sandy white beaches on way into harbour with not many people on them(reminded me of the way round to the nuggets at home )...town is a picture postcard one ....terracotta roofs are order of day
i told you a lie previously ....some of the crew are allowed shore leave depending on what their role is on the ship.....several of the italian deck officers were away into town like dogs shot up the proverbial as they all have eu passpoarts.....(it was a text book day...wall to wall sunshine.... probably better than any we had in the med because very clear and no haze....25deg which i found out later , the locals count as a winters day as apparently summer doesnt start till june)....jessie, several of the philly crew and ourselves are of course on foreign passports and apparently setabul is not in the shangran area so we all need visa,s for the day....we are told to wait down at ramp for immigration to bring them...10mins max.....after an hour the philies drifted off back upstairs and i nearly wore the paint off the ramp pacing up and down it....i should have bloody known it as looking over the town as we came in you could tell that traffic and people in no hurry to go anywhere and if youve ever been to spain you will know the significance of the word maunjana......eventually the prick turned up about 5.15 and said to me (who was fighting loosing battle to be civil)..."very sorry for delay...i have been very busy immigration"......what a crock of manure....turns out they are like the israelis in that they sit awhile search engine is going through everyones history , if any
....anyway is only short walk into town....very senic as kilroy would say....lot of buildings have mosaic tiles on facades and cobbled pavements....an absolute rabbit warren of extremely narrow streets all opening onto their own little squares....lot of big churches in the plain mexican style(as seen through clint eastwoods spagetti westerns )....zillions of little cafes and tiny shops selling womans ware and watches....man there is no excuse for people not knowing the time in setabul....by now is after 6 .0 pm and its friday night but most shops still open....i suspect that they have siesta during day and stay open later at night (iguess they probably shut from about 12.0 till 4.0ish....anyway we did what namesake said in travel notes supplied with tickets (by the way "namesake" runs "nz freighter travel" from napier....he is blessed with having the same h first name as me )....we did some serious people watching ( unfortunately the open top sightseeing buses dont operate in "winter").....and ive got to say that "grading on the hoof" is most difficult in setubal....the portugese there seem to come in all shapes and sizes and it is hard to describe what a typical one looks like....they certainly wernt as dark and moorish like the spanish or italians as i thought they would be ..so hard to describe...liquorish allsorts maybe
....if you ever do one of these missions take a world atlas (one i have at home would have been ideal as it has brief history of country as well as maps andof course googleearth is no good without web and naval charts only tell you what towns are on the coast.).....anyway i didnt read up anything on portugal but remember from the old school days that they were at one stage a colonial power in europe and asia and did a lot of the shooting of cheeky darkies , sending the gunboat up the river etc etc....in fact i think they were fairly brutal pricks at the best of times .......anyway the legacy of being a colonial power you will find ( britain is a prime example ) is that a lot of the natives of the countries that you have conquered tend to come and live in your own counry over a long period of time afterwards and portugal is no exception and there are a lot of faces on the streets of setubal that are as black as your hat....probably from african countries like senegal etc....virtually the first one we struck when we got off the ship was a woman coming towards us with a large bag of something perched expertly on the top of her head....look mum...no hands.....something you western ladies should try....great for the posture !! and ergonomically very efficient( if it was a crate of beer up top...you would still have both hands free for the groceries !! )
.....well was annoyed that couldnt find anywhere to get a city/outskirts tour and did even contemplate a taxi but thought that would be a prime way to set oneself up with having to extend mortgage on house and besides the thing we found most lacking in setubal ....was a basic understanding of the queens english...so flagged that idea....decided to have our first meal off the ship and i was fantisizing about the "colonel" but alas he was nowhere to be seen....mcdonalds were there (in white oddly enough and no arches) but drew the line at going there.......
...when we first got on the main drag after leaving ship we came across a gaggle of restaurants one of which was called "the capitano cook"....which i thought was a real dag as jimbob cook certainly didnt discover portugal , but i guessed it was the portugeese style of recognising a fellow sea-farer....i made a mental note to go back there later for our meal....but when we got there , capitano cook was deserted of patrons and remembering what carol said all those weeks ago when we were sunday lunching in kent....."beware of empty eating establishments"....we went next door to one that was populated....actually we were recruited by the doorman who was a slightly more olive skinned version of robbie reid (if you don't happen to know robbie , he is a guide on the keppler)......we were hanging out for something different to the cusine onboard (like steak,eggs and chips or similar) but it looked like this was a specialty seafood restaurant and the waitress who apart from very dark hair , was as white skinned as your average pakeha....but no english and she was determined that we were going to have fish so she brought out a large tray of whole fish all around that one to two kilo size, uncooked for us to select from.....we gave in and put tthe steak on things to do in britain....i selected one that looked a bit like a trumpeter......next was the drinks...bedlieve it or not i happen to have an uncanny knowledge of world beer languages and i was ok on cerveca and thought a house red vinno for kate.....she came out with a glass of white which kate said was slightly bubbly and therefore tolerable and gave that the nod but bugger me if "helpful- hariet" didnt scuttle off and come back with a glass of what i guessed was dry white....kate took a sip and if you know kate you will have experienced one of her famous involuntary shudders which is more felt than seen.....no good and hariet still very keen to rush off for something else but we do by now convince her that option one is ok.....bugger me she scuttles off and gets a jug of the stuff..also as seemed to be common where ever we have been sofar drinks also include snacks and this was no exception....large plate of olives and some sort of beans, 2 dips a round of cheese and half a loaf of bread....by now the fish has arrived and bugger me yet again but it is not one fish between us....it is one each...they are cooked opened up like a book , each one about half the size of the otago daily times....accompanying fish is a large salad and two bowls of new spuds.....now hariet was determined i needed a wine and to save a major event , i had a flashback to the 73 beerfest trip as previously mentioned....when martin ,merv and i got to the french riviera , we didnt get around to turning right and we ended up in a camping ground outside barcelona....where we discovered a very good breakfast wine called sangria....and spain is next door to portugal so i threw this word into the conversation and hariet new exactly what i was talking about and produced 2 jugs during the meal.....it is a slightly grenashy type red poured over a sliced up orange in a jug(something you can try at home if you have got a red thats a bit dodgy....slice an orange into a jug....put the wine through your sodaflow machine to give it a bit of a buzz and hay presto !!!).......by now it was coming up to ship boarding time and we were getting a bit anxious as to whether we had enough cash to pay for all of this as we had by now eaten ourselves to a standstill didnt have a clue what the bill was going to be and couldnt see any mention of visa and hoped it wasnt like greece where cash- was -king exclusively......not to worry...the whole lot 52euro...small change in europe for a meal like that........robbie reid now very inquisitive as to where we come from...i pointed over the road at the service station which puzzled him for a moment....then i got his eyesight organised to go higher where the top deck of the ellade was visible across town....." ah grimaldi" says he.....and we sailed out on a great balmy breeze 10.30pm.....definitely put setabul on list for next time though).....
sun 27 may
all day yesterday plodding through north atlantic...sea fresh and cool......today into bay of biscay...sea nasty grey colour white tops and old girl is now having a good roll as anti heeling obviously cant compensate for this swell which along with the wind is now side on or "on the beam" as the pros. call it....is also persisting down with rain and visibility less than 2 cables which is standard passing distance for ships of this size (about half a km i think is 2 cables ).......sea reminds me of a bit of light reading you could take on after tea...."the cruel sea" by nicholas monserat
...there was hardly any radio stations this morning and bugger all ships ....did see a big tanker through the gloom going other way while we were having lunch....and even she was putting up a fair bit of white water in the air (tankers usually ride better as lower in water and they also pay better cause of danger money but crew says they arnt flash to work on as very fumey all the time )
...speaking of radio....if it wasnt for george horton (a little quizz for you)and many other singers right through to the present day like lady ga.......then half these european radio stations couldnt survive....some stations esp spain play nonstop english lyrics songs with only bit of local language between them and a lot of it is old stuff.....i noticed though that there is a distinct lack of elvis songs .....perhaps the europeans have the mistaken view that he is dead!!
...a couple of days ago when i was on the bridge , chabal was up there trimming the ship(there is a very complicated control panel on the bridge for organising the balast and that is part of his job.....you have got to have her as trim as possible so she scoots through the water with the minimum of friction to keep fuel costs down......bit like having your tyre pressure right in your car
...anyway there is a small tv on bridge hooked up to the satelite reciever and its pulling in a italian radio station via web cam.....its playing an american song from days gone by and chabal calls out "do i know this group"(its a bit like when our kids came home from school once with a tape of a new artist called cat stevens , that they had just discovered...yea right)......i said to chabal ...too right i do in fact have one of their albums on my mp3 and have been playing it a lot on the treadmill in the gym lately....i did point out that the big chick who was the lead singer choked to death on a sandwich about 35 years ago!!!....but it illustrates what i have been saying about radio up here ..."classic hits rule "...after we did the music talk i asked chabal what all the hoo-haa was on their tv in mess that day....church services and black and white images of cars riddled with bullet holes...dead bods....and who is corleonie......ah says chabal...is aniversary 10 years ago when very high up govt prosecuter take on the mafiosa and they (the mafia) kill him...i actually remember that ....i think his name was something like falconia and the mob put a radio controlled bomb in a large culvert under a motor way they new he was going to use....it blew a hole about the size of this ship....killed him , his family....all the escorts and quite a lot of casual passerbys as well and 2 months later they executed another leading figure and apparently the italian public were so enraged the govt had a major crackdown......chabal says most mafia bosses are inside....i ask does that mean that the mafia is a spent force.....he says the italian equivalent of "does the wild bear no longer shit in the woods " or as tui's would say....yea right..........the mafia strong holds were right in the southern tip of mainland italy and across the straits of massina in sicily....this company has its head office in naples but the ships are registered in palermo right in the heart of scicily...hmmm...not theorising any more on that issue ...bunk not big enough for me and horses head....but..having watched the sapranos you would have to wonder if "wheels" have had to be greased in the past........those of you who were watching "secret war" on prime about the time i left would have seen the one on the american mafia when america entered the world war 11.......the yanks couldnt get the ports geared up to do anything at speed and mysterious things were happening....a large ocean liner was being converted to a troop carrier (was it the "france" ?) and it caught on fire and burnt to the waterline etc etc.....the problem being that the wharves were controlled by the mafia and some over zealous g-men had managed to get their main boss , lucky luchiana ....banged up for a 70year jail term.....in the end they cut a secret deal with lucky ....the ports suddenly burst into activity and he got reduced to 10 years and wiled away his retirement years back in sicily......the end of that
mon 28 may
came on deck to find we are plodding up the coast of cornwall and devon....looks to be jolly fine day and just like it would be on our own coast on such a morning....clear and no haze.....got a news fix from the bbc..another station going on in some foreign lingo...suddenly realised it was the "boys from the valleys" boyo..
.we have 1000 cars to drop off here (including the alphas and fiats) so hope to get into portsbury(the port which services bristol) for a wander , a full english lunch and an internet cafe to unload more of this torture on you...rh.......
'instal 7
sat may 19
well got back to salerno ok ... pretty quiet since the departure of the cyprus pair....our australian friend "easy rider" is a man of few words and spent much of the few days keeping to himself in his cabin...we get to salerno about 7.00pm at night sat 19th....is 9.15pm when get off ship...we farewell easy rider at the dock gates and he rides his kaw. 650 off into the sunset....he has done africa and s america so we are sure he wont get lost....is a good night so kate and i saunter into town...is only about 40 min walk to center....man it is heaving in downtown salerno (as against last time which was a week night )....being sat night and every second building seems to be a restaurant....the italians love to dine out...we are walking down a crowded footpath looking for an internet cafe when this maniac on a motor bike flies out of the run of traffic and onto footpath not a million miles off being on my toe.....the chances of it being easy rider would be a mill. to one .....but it was...he was looking for somewhere to stay night...hadnt seen us in particular just thought that was good place to pull off)..i think "the big guy" must have misread my request for good luck that i stuck in the wailing wall at jerusalem !!
....well couldnt see anything resembling an internet cafe so with a bit of skillful navigation up the warren of backstreets we found ourselves at the same bar as the first night with jr (it was very busy)and i thought we could ask him for directions to an internet cafe.....he gave me a piece of paper with a brand of english gin written on it....i said no i would prefer a dark rum if we were having a drink thanks no gin.......he say "that password wifi"....well bugger me if i thought of asking him that first time around i could have done it then as i also had netbook with us then.....and it was free but we did have quite a few swings on the gate in the hour and a half we were doing the emails and copying all that drivel i had written on the voyage , to the blog......interestingly they dont have nip pourers in that part of the world they just pour it by eye....about half a glass at a time!!..jusr as well we werent driving!!..so he was a real good scout that guy and his barmaid...he wished us a long and happy life when we left....maybe he thought we havnt yet made a start at that!!!..it seems to be a very safe town to wander about in as is well lit , heaps of people and didnt see a lot of what you could term "bogans"......the irony came the next day when i was telling jessie about hunting for internet sites....he laughed and said why didnt i use the free wifi available in salerneo port.....bugger me again....never thought to check that...would have saved lugging net book etc around all night(namesake you should put that into your next updated notes...free wifi salerno at docks...esbjerg in towncenter portbury seamans center)
.....not sure where the salerno landings were in ww11 as museums shut but can just about guarantee it wasnt in the town as it is perched on mountainsides/cliff faces.....man it is a mountainous country and i can see why we have had the italians do most of our tunnel work in nz as modern motorways in italy are viaduct....tunnel....viaduct/tunnel etc etc ...some of the mountains must be like swiss cheeses....
quite a few of the crew signed off in salerno including good old woody......new captain seems a very affable guy in i guess late 50s which would make him at least 20 years older than most of his officers......he has a very big moustache and i guess i would nickname him "jimmy edwards" but i doubt there are many of you out there alive who will remember that english comedian so i've gone for a fairly obscure beatles song for inspiration...." i am the walrus"....he is the permanent master for this ship ie it is the only one he serves on as its' circuit suits him as he and his wife live in israel.
...(as an aside on woody which i forgot to add in last blog......the day before we got to israel ....it was all hands to the pumps sort of style to shift all the cars destined for israel and cyprus, down a few decks to be ready for unload as there were now spare decks closer to unload ramp....all the spare officers and crew were driving and woody was doing the pickup...they take this job fairly seriously and a lot of them wear flash driving gloves to prove it...they would all grab a car and scream off into the bowels of the ship and park up while woody who had picked a rh drive toyota would be hard up the last car....then they would all pile in on top of woody and he would ferry them back for the next run..it was a bit like those competitions they used to have years ago to see how many men they could get into a mini..jr and i would have loved a crack at that.....i said why didnt woody use the big european car......jr said it would probably breakdown if faced with such an onerous task.....you would be surprised how many cars they can shift like that.....and of course each deck is filled in the opposite order to which they come out....it is not like a city carpark....ie no lanes are left to select cars willy nilly)
...in salerno we topped up with fiat punta's and a lot of very nice looking alfa romeo guiliettes.....twin pipes and a front that looks very much like some of the old series jags.....6 on the floor.....they are rh drives so will be going to britain for sure
...another little aside while i remember and this bares out what janette(met her at the papatowai gutbuster in feb ,she is an editor with the "southland express" (its a community newspaper and if you all stick advts. in it she might shout for me ) told me prior to trip....she has lived in israel and she warned me to watch what i said at the border and here is an example.
...one of the officers that signed off at salerno , had only signed on at salerno on the way through and i heard on the grapevine that on his last run on this circuit which was about 3 years ago , he had stuck it up the israelies verbally and they still had his name on a blacklist and evidently the company now has to put him on a different ship that doesnt go to ashdod..never mind whether he was going to go off the ship or not.....so keep that in mind ...the israelies have long memories!!
sun may 20
woke up to find ship sailed in early hours ocast and goory all the way up upper west coast of italy today....visibility poor which means that we couldnt even see the island that the costa concordia hit littleown the ship itself which was a bugger...(..the costa company/italian govt want to get it into an italian port if they can so that they can use italian labour to cut it up )....also i was scratching to see another bit of that coast i wouldnt have minded a look at....a place called anzio which of course you will all know was another landing site in ww11
mon may 21
went on deck 6.0am to see we are in holding pattern just outside of savona harbour and about to take on pilot..it is raining cats, dogs.sheep and cattle...welcome to the italian riviera... .alongside and tied up just after breakfast.....berthed beside us are two cruise ships ...costa magica and costa romantica.....walrus says we can go into town for a wander till lunchtime as center is very close to port....we need some serious wet weather gear and jack sparrow comes to the rescue with a couple of company jackets and we head through surface flooding on docks into town....man it is still persisting down.....on good days italian hawkers sell roses....on wet days its umbrellas and the usual story is that once you get one of whatever they are flogging then the rest see it and leave you alone....so i used all my bartering skills to get kate a brolly for 3 euro and bugger me if the rain didnt magically stop so never even got to use it but i am sure we will in the near future....got a quick look around town....some nice old buildings painted up with murals....square in center of town has their war memorial which the nz division probably contributed to (although i think from memory that they were mostly shooting jerry in italy and only locals would have been what the yanks call "collateral damage")(another "forgot to tell you " is that the other night after we left cyprus i sat out on deck 9.30pm and watched the lights of crete slide past starboard side....get a copy of anthony beevors book "crete" and read about one of nz's greatest cock-ups of ww11)
anyway got what we needed in savona....nice place ..(.didnt remember it but back in 1973 martin, merv and i were camped up in the hills above genoa recuperating from the munich beer festival trip....we would have driven through savona along the riviera to france....and martin will recall running the red light in ventameglia the town on the border where we got chased on foot by what looked like the entire italian police force at the time and got a good fine !!)
anyway we chugged off along the riviera after lunch and could see a bit of sun hitting the beaches and managed to spy monaco in the haze with the binnoculars on the bridge although we were about 16 mile off shore by then..... we are now heading to villencia in spain....this was not on our original itinery but we must have a bit of time up our sleeves as we didnt' go to egypt....and there are some fords to be picked up in villencia but dont know how many or if we will get ashore because as per usual we will be arriving in middle of night and dont know how long for plus town is some way from port.....
tue 22nd may
....while i was up on bridge yesterday arvo spying monte carlo , mario , the other second mate drew my attention to a huge water spout dead ahead on the horizon and some very dark clouds surrounding it.....must have meant something as we had just finished our usual movie after tea when the sea decided to get up...the wind was hitting 5o knots and the old girl started to pitch and she heaved all night...neither of us felt crook at all but she rolled us around in our bunks all night like a washing machine....it actually rocks you to sleep straight away but then things start banging and wandering around so not the best nights sleep ever had..by breakfast time things had pretty much come right...this arvo we will be plodding through the balearic sea to villencia which is the sea between the spanish mainland and the islands of majorca etc...arrived about 11.00pm
wed 23 may
....well up bright and early crew have been hard at it loading but we can't go ashore until shipping agent comes on board as he dictates dept times....and in typical spanish fashion his idea of 7.00am turns out closer to lunch time and by that time it is too late as port so big , you need a cut lunch and a waterbag to get to the dock gates let alone the town... so to date that is only port we havnt got ashore in..sod it...absolutely cracker day so had to get deckies out and have serious book day...saw the worlds biggest container ship tugged out right past us at one stage....also tied up in front of us on same wharf was a gramaldi ship of similar design , the "repubblica del brasile"....and behind us the "grande detroit"...so all in all , there was almost a kilometer of wharf taken up by the three ships from the same company!!....sailed 3.0pm...didnt even have a movie night as stayed out on deck after dinner until about midnight....sunsets in the med on a good day are beaten only by those in northern western australia or at least from what we have seen anyway
....more on gramaldi.....there are 28 ships in the book we have that they own and there may be more....(they do ...the ones in the book are deep-sea ships, they also have a lot of interisland ferries etc etc )...they do the med, west africa and south america and take passengers on all these trips.....some of the extended whanau had presumed that my silence for the first 2 weeks of trip was because of ship sinking or pirates....but no such luck for you all.....there are a great many memos on noticeboard though which refer to procedures to combat pirates as they are now at it in west africa as well as the gulf of aden....copycat crime i think they call it...dont know what procedures are but the little buggers would have their work cut out getting on board these vessels though as so high....there are many service hatches at deck 3 level but they are all shut at sea and cant be opened from outside anyway.....they would have to have rope throwers to get a line up over handrail and if they did get aboard and into cargo areas , the crew could seal it off and give them a good dose of co2....would clean out the 4 legged rats at the same time so not a complete waste of the co2
thur 24 may
cracker day..last one in med..only 5 knots wind ....spanish coast a bit hazy 20 odd mile off starboard side....running towards gibralta....sea is full of ships of all shapes and sizes......memories of med by sea will be the bitching wind that always is blowing sometimes from all directions at once ! (just as well so many nooks and crannies around ship that you can always get a temperature that suits....off duty italians often lying about getting the filmstar tan ....can't be any holes in the ozone here....philies have built in tan so they can use off duty time on constructive things like movies...they must be low as we are giving them a copy of all our s as well as the 300hrs of tv shows which morry put on hard drive 10 series of "top gear" seems like it will be fairly popular given what we cart round all year) and always it is hazy......even wind and rain doesnt get rid of the bloody haze....something we dont have to worry so much about in good old temperate nz
...came up to gibralta 6.0pm....its not as dominating as you would think.....for those of you familiar with good old clinton....picture two popotunoa hills one joined to the other and that is about it.....the mountains back behind it in spain are much higher (some still have snow on them ) and across the straights in morroco are some much more serious hills as well.....kate wonders what they do for a living on gib.....i said "chase monkeys and annoy the crap out of spain"....which the latter they do....spain wants it back but the locals have the odd referendum and unanimously want to stay british....they like their wee red postboxes and their english bobbys !!
...tuned into the bbc for a news fix.....bugger me was like being in a time-warp as exactly the same news as when we sailed through here 2 weeks ago....the levison enquirey into rupert murdoch and whether israel will attack iran.....i was tempted to get my cel phone out and ring the bbc to tell them that a bit over a week ago , i asked a leading jew called eyal that very question and he dismissed the possibility out of hand .....george burns (if you remember who he was ) would probably have accepted that as well ...he once said...." the best candidates for president of the united states are too busy shining shoes and driving new york cabs, to take on the job "
....into the north atlantic which is all white caps and a fair swell making the old girl pitch a bit but at this stage is a very gentle rock you to sleep pitch....(hope so as clocks back an hr to gmt so xtra hr in bed)...we dont roll much as we have automatic anti-heeling equipment ie stabililizers .....today was day 21
sat may 19
well got back to salerno ok ... pretty quiet since the departure of the cyprus pair....our australian friend "easy rider" is a man of few words and spent much of the few days keeping to himself in his cabin...we get to salerno about 7.00pm at night sat 19th....is 9.15pm when get off ship...we farewell easy rider at the dock gates and he rides his kaw. 650 off into the sunset....he has done africa and s america so we are sure he wont get lost....is a good night so kate and i saunter into town...is only about 40 min walk to center....man it is heaving in downtown salerno (as against last time which was a week night )....being sat night and every second building seems to be a restaurant....the italians love to dine out...we are walking down a crowded footpath looking for an internet cafe when this maniac on a motor bike flies out of the run of traffic and onto footpath not a million miles off being on my toe.....the chances of it being easy rider would be a mill. to one .....but it was...he was looking for somewhere to stay night...hadnt seen us in particular just thought that was good place to pull off)..i think "the big guy" must have misread my request for good luck that i stuck in the wailing wall at jerusalem !!
....well couldnt see anything resembling an internet cafe so with a bit of skillful navigation up the warren of backstreets we found ourselves at the same bar as the first night with jr (it was very busy)and i thought we could ask him for directions to an internet cafe.....he gave me a piece of paper with a brand of english gin written on it....i said no i would prefer a dark rum if we were having a drink thanks no gin.......he say "that password wifi"....well bugger me if i thought of asking him that first time around i could have done it then as i also had netbook with us then.....and it was free but we did have quite a few swings on the gate in the hour and a half we were doing the emails and copying all that drivel i had written on the voyage , to the blog......interestingly they dont have nip pourers in that part of the world they just pour it by eye....about half a glass at a time!!..jusr as well we werent driving!!..so he was a real good scout that guy and his barmaid...he wished us a long and happy life when we left....maybe he thought we havnt yet made a start at that!!!..it seems to be a very safe town to wander about in as is well lit , heaps of people and didnt see a lot of what you could term "bogans"......the irony came the next day when i was telling jessie about hunting for internet sites....he laughed and said why didnt i use the free wifi available in salerneo port.....bugger me again....never thought to check that...would have saved lugging net book etc around all night(namesake you should put that into your next updated notes...free wifi salerno at docks...esbjerg in towncenter portbury seamans center)
.....not sure where the salerno landings were in ww11 as museums shut but can just about guarantee it wasnt in the town as it is perched on mountainsides/cliff faces.....man it is a mountainous country and i can see why we have had the italians do most of our tunnel work in nz as modern motorways in italy are viaduct....tunnel....viaduct/tunnel etc etc ...some of the mountains must be like swiss cheeses....
quite a few of the crew signed off in salerno including good old woody......new captain seems a very affable guy in i guess late 50s which would make him at least 20 years older than most of his officers......he has a very big moustache and i guess i would nickname him "jimmy edwards" but i doubt there are many of you out there alive who will remember that english comedian so i've gone for a fairly obscure beatles song for inspiration...." i am the walrus"....he is the permanent master for this ship ie it is the only one he serves on as its' circuit suits him as he and his wife live in israel.
...(as an aside on woody which i forgot to add in last blog......the day before we got to israel ....it was all hands to the pumps sort of style to shift all the cars destined for israel and cyprus, down a few decks to be ready for unload as there were now spare decks closer to unload ramp....all the spare officers and crew were driving and woody was doing the pickup...they take this job fairly seriously and a lot of them wear flash driving gloves to prove it...they would all grab a car and scream off into the bowels of the ship and park up while woody who had picked a rh drive toyota would be hard up the last car....then they would all pile in on top of woody and he would ferry them back for the next run..it was a bit like those competitions they used to have years ago to see how many men they could get into a mini..jr and i would have loved a crack at that.....i said why didnt woody use the big european car......jr said it would probably breakdown if faced with such an onerous task.....you would be surprised how many cars they can shift like that.....and of course each deck is filled in the opposite order to which they come out....it is not like a city carpark....ie no lanes are left to select cars willy nilly)
...in salerno we topped up with fiat punta's and a lot of very nice looking alfa romeo guiliettes.....twin pipes and a front that looks very much like some of the old series jags.....6 on the floor.....they are rh drives so will be going to britain for sure
...another little aside while i remember and this bares out what janette(met her at the papatowai gutbuster in feb ,she is an editor with the "southland express" (its a community newspaper and if you all stick advts. in it she might shout for me ) told me prior to trip....she has lived in israel and she warned me to watch what i said at the border and here is an example.
...one of the officers that signed off at salerno , had only signed on at salerno on the way through and i heard on the grapevine that on his last run on this circuit which was about 3 years ago , he had stuck it up the israelies verbally and they still had his name on a blacklist and evidently the company now has to put him on a different ship that doesnt go to ashdod..never mind whether he was going to go off the ship or not.....so keep that in mind ...the israelies have long memories!!
sun may 20
woke up to find ship sailed in early hours ocast and goory all the way up upper west coast of italy today....visibility poor which means that we couldnt even see the island that the costa concordia hit littleown the ship itself which was a bugger...(..the costa company/italian govt want to get it into an italian port if they can so that they can use italian labour to cut it up )....also i was scratching to see another bit of that coast i wouldnt have minded a look at....a place called anzio which of course you will all know was another landing site in ww11
mon may 21
went on deck 6.0am to see we are in holding pattern just outside of savona harbour and about to take on pilot..it is raining cats, dogs.sheep and cattle...welcome to the italian riviera... .alongside and tied up just after breakfast.....berthed beside us are two cruise ships ...costa magica and costa romantica.....walrus says we can go into town for a wander till lunchtime as center is very close to port....we need some serious wet weather gear and jack sparrow comes to the rescue with a couple of company jackets and we head through surface flooding on docks into town....man it is still persisting down.....on good days italian hawkers sell roses....on wet days its umbrellas and the usual story is that once you get one of whatever they are flogging then the rest see it and leave you alone....so i used all my bartering skills to get kate a brolly for 3 euro and bugger me if the rain didnt magically stop so never even got to use it but i am sure we will in the near future....got a quick look around town....some nice old buildings painted up with murals....square in center of town has their war memorial which the nz division probably contributed to (although i think from memory that they were mostly shooting jerry in italy and only locals would have been what the yanks call "collateral damage")(another "forgot to tell you " is that the other night after we left cyprus i sat out on deck 9.30pm and watched the lights of crete slide past starboard side....get a copy of anthony beevors book "crete" and read about one of nz's greatest cock-ups of ww11)
anyway got what we needed in savona....nice place ..(.didnt remember it but back in 1973 martin, merv and i were camped up in the hills above genoa recuperating from the munich beer festival trip....we would have driven through savona along the riviera to france....and martin will recall running the red light in ventameglia the town on the border where we got chased on foot by what looked like the entire italian police force at the time and got a good fine !!)
anyway we chugged off along the riviera after lunch and could see a bit of sun hitting the beaches and managed to spy monaco in the haze with the binnoculars on the bridge although we were about 16 mile off shore by then..... we are now heading to villencia in spain....this was not on our original itinery but we must have a bit of time up our sleeves as we didnt' go to egypt....and there are some fords to be picked up in villencia but dont know how many or if we will get ashore because as per usual we will be arriving in middle of night and dont know how long for plus town is some way from port.....
tue 22nd may
....while i was up on bridge yesterday arvo spying monte carlo , mario , the other second mate drew my attention to a huge water spout dead ahead on the horizon and some very dark clouds surrounding it.....must have meant something as we had just finished our usual movie after tea when the sea decided to get up...the wind was hitting 5o knots and the old girl started to pitch and she heaved all night...neither of us felt crook at all but she rolled us around in our bunks all night like a washing machine....it actually rocks you to sleep straight away but then things start banging and wandering around so not the best nights sleep ever had..by breakfast time things had pretty much come right...this arvo we will be plodding through the balearic sea to villencia which is the sea between the spanish mainland and the islands of majorca etc...arrived about 11.00pm
wed 23 may
....well up bright and early crew have been hard at it loading but we can't go ashore until shipping agent comes on board as he dictates dept times....and in typical spanish fashion his idea of 7.00am turns out closer to lunch time and by that time it is too late as port so big , you need a cut lunch and a waterbag to get to the dock gates let alone the town... so to date that is only port we havnt got ashore in..sod it...absolutely cracker day so had to get deckies out and have serious book day...saw the worlds biggest container ship tugged out right past us at one stage....also tied up in front of us on same wharf was a gramaldi ship of similar design , the "repubblica del brasile"....and behind us the "grande detroit"...so all in all , there was almost a kilometer of wharf taken up by the three ships from the same company!!....sailed 3.0pm...didnt even have a movie night as stayed out on deck after dinner until about midnight....sunsets in the med on a good day are beaten only by those in northern western australia or at least from what we have seen anyway
....more on gramaldi.....there are 28 ships in the book we have that they own and there may be more....(they do ...the ones in the book are deep-sea ships, they also have a lot of interisland ferries etc etc )...they do the med, west africa and south america and take passengers on all these trips.....some of the extended whanau had presumed that my silence for the first 2 weeks of trip was because of ship sinking or pirates....but no such luck for you all.....there are a great many memos on noticeboard though which refer to procedures to combat pirates as they are now at it in west africa as well as the gulf of aden....copycat crime i think they call it...dont know what procedures are but the little buggers would have their work cut out getting on board these vessels though as so high....there are many service hatches at deck 3 level but they are all shut at sea and cant be opened from outside anyway.....they would have to have rope throwers to get a line up over handrail and if they did get aboard and into cargo areas , the crew could seal it off and give them a good dose of co2....would clean out the 4 legged rats at the same time so not a complete waste of the co2
thur 24 may
cracker day..last one in med..only 5 knots wind ....spanish coast a bit hazy 20 odd mile off starboard side....running towards gibralta....sea is full of ships of all shapes and sizes......memories of med by sea will be the bitching wind that always is blowing sometimes from all directions at once ! (just as well so many nooks and crannies around ship that you can always get a temperature that suits....off duty italians often lying about getting the filmstar tan ....can't be any holes in the ozone here....philies have built in tan so they can use off duty time on constructive things like movies...they must be low as we are giving them a copy of all our s as well as the 300hrs of tv shows which morry put on hard drive 10 series of "top gear" seems like it will be fairly popular given what we cart round all year) and always it is hazy......even wind and rain doesnt get rid of the bloody haze....something we dont have to worry so much about in good old temperate nz
...came up to gibralta 6.0pm....its not as dominating as you would think.....for those of you familiar with good old clinton....picture two popotunoa hills one joined to the other and that is about it.....the mountains back behind it in spain are much higher (some still have snow on them ) and across the straights in morroco are some much more serious hills as well.....kate wonders what they do for a living on gib.....i said "chase monkeys and annoy the crap out of spain"....which the latter they do....spain wants it back but the locals have the odd referendum and unanimously want to stay british....they like their wee red postboxes and their english bobbys !!
...tuned into the bbc for a news fix.....bugger me was like being in a time-warp as exactly the same news as when we sailed through here 2 weeks ago....the levison enquirey into rupert murdoch and whether israel will attack iran.....i was tempted to get my cel phone out and ring the bbc to tell them that a bit over a week ago , i asked a leading jew called eyal that very question and he dismissed the possibility out of hand .....george burns (if you remember who he was ) would probably have accepted that as well ...he once said...." the best candidates for president of the united states are too busy shining shoes and driving new york cabs, to take on the job "
....into the north atlantic which is all white caps and a fair swell making the old girl pitch a bit but at this stage is a very gentle rock you to sleep pitch....(hope so as clocks back an hr to gmt so xtra hr in bed)...we dont roll much as we have automatic anti-heeling equipment ie stabililizers .....today was day 21
Saturday, 2 June 2012
explanation
sat 2nd june
sorry to say that instal 7 is scrambled..obviously i do all these blogs while at sea and copy and paste to blog....now have redone insta7 several times and is ok in draft but as soon as hit publish it scrambles it a bit about the music should come in before the mafia....but youll get the rough idea and might be able to sort next port rh.....
Sun 10th...ok think it is all sorted now that we are ashore and a bit of time to sort it out split blog 7 into two so there are to date 10 instals and a summary....sorry about the layout as i do it all on wordpad and when i copy it over the layout is different and paragraph breaks are not where they should be ...from now on i will strain left fihger and start each paragraph with a capital....and sorry also about spelling as i have nothing on this macine for spell checking and obviously my education has slipped over the years....my nephew "dirty berty" has challenged me over my spelling of philippeno....can anybody with a dictionary help out with that one....off to yorkshire next week so probably some smaller blogs from there..rh
sorry to say that instal 7 is scrambled..obviously i do all these blogs while at sea and copy and paste to blog....now have redone insta7 several times and is ok in draft but as soon as hit publish it scrambles it a bit about the music should come in before the mafia....but youll get the rough idea and might be able to sort next port rh.....
Sun 10th...ok think it is all sorted now that we are ashore and a bit of time to sort it out split blog 7 into two so there are to date 10 instals and a summary....sorry about the layout as i do it all on wordpad and when i copy it over the layout is different and paragraph breaks are not where they should be ...from now on i will strain left fihger and start each paragraph with a capital....and sorry also about spelling as i have nothing on this macine for spell checking and obviously my education has slipped over the years....my nephew "dirty berty" has challenged me over my spelling of philippeno....can anybody with a dictionary help out with that one....off to yorkshire next week so probably some smaller blogs from there..rh
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