Day 17

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Day 17 - Thursday, April 17 2008

We cleared Shanghai at around 0400 and now have two days at sea before hitting Hong Kong tomorrow evening, this time docking in the more amenable Kowloon area rather than the container city of Chiwan that we visited on the outbound run.

We’re slipping very easily back into the rhythm of shipboard life - eat, sleep, occasional forays on deck and to the bridge, and pointing the binoculars at anything that catches our interest. Bird life has been a bit sparse, but yesterday we were visited by a not readily identifiable specimen that took up position on the stack of containers nearest our for’ard porthole.

About the size of a pigeon, but fatter and shorter, it had a long straight beak and nondescript brownish plumage. Linda reckoned it was a curlew; I put it down as a snipe. From memory, I think curlews have curved beaks but maybe that’s because ‘curved’ and ‘curlew’ go together. Maybe the twitchers among you can give a definitive ruling. At least it gave us something to argue about, in the absence of navigational decisions and the current hiding place of the Famous Grouse bottle. (No, the mystery bird definitely wasn’t a wee low flier, I have no problems recognising them - whether one-litre or 750ml species.) Our feathered friend hung around for an hour or so, and then obviously got anxious about being stared at and flew off - pausing only to leave a calling card on the porthole.

That reminds me of an earlier dispute on bird identification. When we got back from Beijing, we fell on the evening repast with great enthusiasm. The menu said ‘Pintade Roti’ which with my superior French skills I was able to translate as grilled pigeon with crisp Indian bread. The plates duly arrived and Linda dismissively announced “This isn’t pigeon, it’s chicken!” Admittedly, it tasted a bit like chicken, but that’s ‘poulet’ in French or ‘capon’ if it’s a young male bird that’s not male any longer. Very moreish it was, though, irrespective of the dispute over its nature.

Heading back to the cabin, who should we bump into but M. Fady, our chef cuisinier. “You enjoy pigeon?” he asked, in the solicitous manner of chefs everywhere. “Of course! Absolutely delicious, you really surpassed yourself,” I assured him, while smiling smugly at Linda who obviously can’t tell the difference between a chicken and a feather duster.

M. Fady looked a wee bit blank and walked away. I don’t think his English is a match for his culinary skills, and he probably hasn’t yet got an ear for a Scottish accent. Linda then claimed he hadn’t asked “You enjoy pigeon?”, and insisted: “What he actually said, you daft bugger, was ‘You enjoy Beijing?’ ” Or did she say deaf bugger? Hard to tell with the noise of the cranes and containers being banged down on deck. But it just goes to show the lengths she’ll stretch to a score a point, even down to linguistic contortions. I suppose that’s how the expression ‘pidgin English’ arose.

Only joking. Although the true origins are also a bit of a linguistic contortion. ‘Pidgin’ is a roughly phonetic Chinese rendering of ‘business’, so being able to speak pidgin English was simply enough to do a bit of horse-trading, or opium trading more likely. The derivation is apparent in the related expression ‘not my pigeon’ - ‘not my business’.

These days, business is still a Chinese preoccupation, especially in Shanghai. Let’s go back to that 40 km bridge for a minute, or 25 - which was the time taken to cross it. The Shanghai container terminal has been built (or is still being built, I should say) on an offshore island. It’s so new that our berth was not even marked on the chart (18 months old) which shows a dotted area designated ‘under construction’. The bridge is not one span, obviously, but uses a series of islands and outcrops as stepping stones to the mainland, with three lanes in each direction. Couldn’t see much other than the guard rails on the way out - visibility was so poor - but on the way back we could take in the sheer scale of the thing. It snaked ahead in a necklace of lights leading us further and further out to sea. A thing of beauty as well as an engineering marvel. The suspension sections look like upturned harps set back to back, the steels cables emerging at stepped intervals from the vertical columns. If you can’t picture it, open a Guinness and have a look at the label. Then have another one and you’ll have two harps to work with. And if my analogy is still not evident, just enjoy the Guinness.

It’s now quite clear that driving in China is a very orderly affair. The standard speed limit is 100 km/h and it’s carefully observed. And that’s in the ‘fast’ lane. The inside lanes are restricted to 80 km/h. When our white-gloved chauffeur took a call on his mobile, he would change lanes and slow down to about 60 km/h. Definitely not a graduate of the Dubai college of advanced motoring mayhem!

The mist lifted enough on the outward trip to get a decent look at the countryside - very lush, with almost every scrap of land apparently under cultivation. Yellow fields of oilseed rape butted on to huge spreads of poly-tunnels, forests and orchards stretched in all directions, and even the houses had front and back gardens growing vegetables rather than the standard lawns and flower-beds of western suburbia. A well-manicured box hedge occupies the central reservation of the freeway, stepped down with adjoining levels of different shrubbery, ending in a trimming of ornamental ground-cover at the roadside. This goes on for about 100 km, and must take an inordinate amount of looking after, although there was no sign of the army of gardeners that must be in daily attendance just to keep everything so geometrically precise. Horticulture isn’t something that I’d normally get worked up about, but this botanic gardens of the roadside was just amazing in its scale, execution, and maintenance.

I’ve already told you about the delights of Shanghai city, but the journey there and back was well worth the trip in its own right. Normally, I’m constantly doing mental calculations of time and distance elapsed and impatiently adjusting ETA. Getting to and from Shanghai was an exception, that seemed to pass in no time at all.

The same can’t be said about the gap between breakfast and lunch, but wittering away about Guinness bridges and roadside gardens appears to have done the trick. The wardoom beckons - and another bottle or two of Les Cayolles? Who said we’d get bored at sea with nothing to do all day?
Noon position 28◦09.18 N - 122◦21.14 E
Day’s run to noon - 189 miles
7,302 miles out from Khor Fakkan
Heading 213◦
Local time GMT+8
Average speed - 7.9 knots

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