Around the world - preparations

Thinking about boarding a freighter? Check your pulse.

I’ve seen two medical evacuations at sea, both on ships with doctors. One was on a tall ship sailing between Central America and Tahiti. A seriously ill crewman had to wait days until we were close enough to an island where an air ambulance could land. The unconscious patient was lowered into a Zodiac and transferred to shore. Paula Westbrook took one of the pictures below. Sorry, but I can’t remember which one.

The patient was flown to Papeete on Tahiti and survived. Had we been further out to sea or had there been no doctor there might have been a less fortunate outcome.

Cargo ships don’t have doctors, so if something goes wrong in the middle of the ocean, you better hope it’s not serious. Officers rely on a venerable publication - The Ship Captain’s Medical Guide – first published in 1868. It covers everything from birth to death. According to the British Maritime and Coastguard Agency,

“The recommended measures for prevention and treatment can be safely carried out by an intelligent layman.”

If you’re particularly anxious to demonstrate your intelligence, go to page 143. It tells you how to tackle appendicitis:

http://www.mcga.gov.uk/c4mca/mcga07-home/workingatsea/mcga-medicalcertandadvice/mcga-dqs_st_shs_ships_capt_medical_guide.htm

What to take other than good health? It’s a freighter, not a posh cruise ship, so no jacket and tie or the female equivalent. And, unlike many cruise ships, there’s either a laundry room for passengers or you share with the officers. Since cleaning is easy, clothing can be kept to essentials.

On a world voyage, ‘essentials’ equal clothes that can handle a variety of conditions. You want garments that will keep you warm and dry in stormy, cold waters, but which you can peel off – layer by layer – to the minimum for tropical seas. Here I am in a Gortex jacket (which also went to Everest, but not, I hasten to add, to the top) a few kilometres from Cape Horn.

Below is a self-portrait a lot closer to the Equator. I had folded the jacket into a pillow and changed my convertible pants into shorts. And if it's a rainy day in the tropics, I can remove the jacket’s cold weather lining and keep dry.

What’s needed is ‘all-seasons’ camping gear. Multi-purpose, comfortable, hard-wearing and easy to clean. Pack less hot weather apparel than you think you’ll need because, at least in tropical ports, it’s usually easy to find cheap clothes. At the end of the voyage, you can give worn – but decent – clothes to members of the deck crew who’ve become friends. They’ll find your castoffs useful for messy work.

It’s relatively simple to pare down clothes and even electronics. Let’s start with laptops. I’ll do some writing for diary, blog and lectures. From my reporting days, I always carry a notepad for quick jottings. However, my portable typewriter, festooned with airline tags and stickers, has long since been replaced by a laptop. The typewriter was a faithful - if eccentric - servant. My computer shows signs of becoming a control freak.

I’ve sent many laptops to the recyclers, but still have my old typewriter sitting safely in a closet. Sometimes I take it out and type a few words just to hear the productive clack of the keys.

Laptops are heavy. To cut luggage weight, I’ve just bought a ‘netbook’, the downsized laptop you see above next to my typewriter. I’ve loaded it with ‘Word’ and my photo editing program, and will use a USB stick as backup. It cost $350 (CDN), so, if lost or damaged, I won’t slit my wrists. Unless I’ve also lost the USB stick …

A freighter, unlike a plane, provides plenty of time to research. After all, what's the point of going to a place, if you don't know what's happened there? I have a Sony eBook reader packed with useful (much of it free) travel writing, in part thanks to Google’s deal with Sony and also the wonderful Project Gutenberg. Here’s a link to Sony’s bookstore and Google books:

http://ebookstore.sony.com/

And here’s Project Gutenberg:

http://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Main_Page

Sony claims its reader can hold the equivalent of 160 real books. That probably doesn’t mean 160 copies of War and Peace, but I now have a small library that can slip into a pocket. To give an idea, I put my reader next to a stack of books.

A quick check of some of the 80 or so titles on my eBook reader brings up:

Voyages Round The World; Also Late Discoveries Between The Years 1792 And 1832 (published in 1834)

The Travellers’ Oracle or Maxims for Locomotion (published 1827)

The Voyage Out by Virginia Woolf and published in 1915

Inevitably there’s some Conrad. There’s a danger of over-dependence on Conrad, but his material is often so relevant.

As recently as the 19th Century, travellers beyond Europe were indeed visiting a ‘New World’, one few Westerners had seen; that shows in the originality of their writing. Before arriving, they’d not been subjected to the wave of books, films, travelogues, daily news, accounts from friends who’d already been and so on.

Take one popular destination: nowadays there’s a surfeit of ‘South Pacificana’. How much has just one book, James Michener’s Tales of the South Pacific, which became a hugely successful Broadway musical and then film, influenced people when they think of that vast swath of ocean and islands? Here we are, a couple of years ago, arriving under sail in French Polynesia. But oh dear! This spectacular bay is but one of a number said to be the inspiration for Michener’s 'Bali Hai'.

As for real – not electronic – books, I often take along my Handy Atlas of the British Empire, published in 1904 and prefaced by Kipling’s A Song of the English:

‘Fair is our Lot – O goodly is our heritage!’

This useful little tome, smaller than most modern paperbacks, has over the years allowed me to compare Empire’s high point with the present in cities from Cape Town to Singapore. Even Toronto. And on my next trip, I will be able follow at least part of our progress on maps titled the ‘Route to India’ and ‘British Islands in the Western Pacific’.

My iPod has given me far more enjoyment – home or abroad – than I would have ever thought possible. For the upcoming voyage, I’ve loaded it with traditional chants, singing and drum dances from Melanesia and Polynesia, plus Victory at Sea and South Pacific. Okay, so South Pacific’s a bit hokey, but some of the passages from Richard Rodgers' Victory – The Song of the High Seas and Beneath the Southern Cross – are wonderful stuff.

If it’s a warm night, I like to listen on deck. The ship rolls gently in the tropics and, with few lights, the stars of the Southern Hemisphere are brilliant. Sometimes you can see meteors, even satellites. I find a deck chair, click on Rodgers’ music and look up at the sky.

Back to reality. I always take two cameras, both 'point-and-shoots'. I simply cannot bothered with the fuss of lenses. One camera is waterproof and serves as a backup. At sea, I can take the chance of being sprayed and on land am not concerned by a sudden downpour.

An inflatable globe lives in my carry-on luggage, has crossed a large part of the planet, given much pleasure and some education. Every morning after brushing my teeth, I pick up the globe and fix my position on the sphere. The rest of the time it bounces around the cabin, forcing me to find the world in odd places. Here it is, resting by a porthole.

On the road (or on the sea), I try - not always successfully - to take the good advice of Nellie Bly who, in 1889, beat the circumnavigation of Verne’s fictitious Phileas Fogg. Bly, a reporter for the New York World, did it in seventy-two days. In an era when people – especially women – took a huge amount of luggage, Bly managed with just a small bag.

'I bought one hand-bag with the determination to confine my baggage to its limit … It will be seen that if one is traveling simply for the sake of traveling and not for the purpose of impressing one's fellow passengers, the problem of baggage becomes a very simple one.'

And in the very same year, Jerome K. Jerome, in his immortal Three Men in a Boat (To Say Nothing of the Dog), wrote:

'George said: “You know we are on the wrong track altogether. We must not think of the things we could do with, but only of the things that we can’t do without.”'