Down to the Sea in Ships (16 page)

‘NO,' boils the Captain, ‘I will do this.'

Chris and I watch the duel in silence. The pilot's blade-faced attack cannot match the Captain's thundering-bear defence. At the end of a stretched pause we all feel the pilot blink.

‘What course and speed would you like, Mr Pilot?' the Captain inquires, in an effortfully neutral tone.

‘Three fifty!' snaps the pilot. ‘And not more than fifteen knots.'

Chris makes him some coffee.

Lantau Island is green, wet and gorsey: the wind comes straight off it and you can smell the vegetation. A stagger of promontories falls back, revealing the flashing lights and runways of Hong Kong's new airport. The air is loud with jets, the sea sliced with ships, but there is no sign of where all this transport is going, no hint of whatever is drawing so much here. The sea slides from moss-green to silt-brown to a yellow in which vague islands appear like preparatory sketches in the haze.

Now the mainland's arms spread ahead of us and the water muddies to a swatch of sludges. This is the Zhujiang estuary, the delta of the Pearl River. To port are Macau and Xiangzhou, to starboard Shenzen and Bao'an. Ahead somewhere is the city of Guangzhou. Though we are in a waterway so wide you need binoculars to see its borders we are confined to a narrow channel pulsing with other vessels. Junks with buckets and grabs attest that dredging in the Pearl estuary never stops. The great width of these surrounding waters and the harnessed profusion of boats and ships – something between a conveyor belt and an invasion fleet – gives the feeling of entering a world of the superlative. Perhaps it struck every wide-eyed Western mariner thus since the first European sailors reached here, via Malacca, from Portugal. We pass the spot where it happened, Neilingding Dao, an island like a two-humped tortoise nosing into the deep-water channel. Jorge Alvares raised the flag of Portugal there in 1513. By 1821 it was the transhipment point for nine hundred annual tonnes of opium from Bangalore. When the Chinese cracked down on the trade the British launched the First Opium War, and began what the Chinese still refer to as their Century of Humiliation. Steaming up Zhujiang estuary, you feel humiliation has since changed sides.

Taking the cities on the horizon together – nothing separates them but lines on maps – we are steaming into the middle of a megacity of forty million people, a conurbation second only to Greater Tokyo. The Pearl River delta has been turned into one of the earth's most economically productive landscapes. Consequently, we are churning our way up the world's most polluted waterway. Tankers, coasters, bulk carriers and container ships are pouring up with us or beating down past us, three abreast every few minutes. The city nearest us, Bao'an, is a line of white tower blocks. Identical in height and design, they look as though they were unwrapped and arranged along the shore just this morning. A brand new bulk carrier surges by, empty: whatever she had, cereal, coal or red bauxite, Guangzhou has swallowed it. Lumbering up with us are barges so loaded they have no freeboard, and junks and dredgers and small boats carrying three or four containers, as well as parades of giants our size, though all this renders our leviathan strangely small. We make lame jokes as though we are nervous. It is a common saying, and one of Chris's favourites, that we are just bus drivers. For the first time it feels as though our enterprise is rather smaller than that, more like pizza delivery. We pass two small tankers,
New Glory
and
Morning Breeze
, both daubed with two of the sea's most common signposts: ‘Safety First – No Smoking'.

‘
Morning Breeze
!' Sorin exclaims, ‘You mean Smell-like-Shit poison chemicals . . .'

Wistful Chinese music weeps from the radio. Bao'an is now clearly visible under the heavy, fume-grey sky. The city's towers are dense as a quiver of arrows. Who lives there? Is the city waiting for a populace? We pass a red-flagged junk at anchor, riding the wake waves. Through binoculars I can see its master is smiling and his wife is heavily pregnant. I decide their baby will be a girl, and she will become the first female mayor of Bao'an.

Our destination is a scaffold of cranes on the west bank: Nansha, recently reopened after typhoon closure. We are nearly there when, three days to the hour after we left Vung Tau, our heron leaves us. He is last seen holding a steady course for an area marked ‘Shellfish Farm' on the chart. I applaud the bird, and soon recognise the extent of his perspicacity. It is not just that the shellfish farm looks like the first heron-friendly spot we have seen, it is Nansha. Nansha to us is a hardened mudflat, tarmac glistening under rain slick, and stacks of containers, all marked COSCO, and tugs churning up water the colour of dirty elastoplast. Through a tiny portion of exhausted sky an orange sunset gleams like a cracked scab. Bats scatter over the containers, and men rig the gangway, and the stevedores board and cranes beep and boxes boom all through another night of loading and unloading and there are no shore passes. The small birds that failed to leave us earlier are befuddled by soaring containers and blazing lights.

‘My kid could manoeuvre a ship better than that' is Sorin's verdict on the pilot who oversees our departure.

‘What's he done?'

‘He doesn't use the wind, he doesn't control the tugs . . .'

This is related with an air of absolute disgust. It is not as simple as a man being no good at his job. It is as though the pilot's incompetence is a moral failing, and the indictment of a port, of a whole district, almost of a culture. Perhaps our bitterness is a function of our evident insignificance. Perhaps this morning's pilot could not be bothered with us because he had heard about our clash with his colleague. Or perhaps the touchiness comes from our changed role. For these four days we are not in the business of intercontinental shipping, which is the
Gerd
's cause and calling. Instead we are shuffling containers between Nansha, Yantian and Hong Kong. We are coasting, which is a different kind of work altogether.

‘Goodbye, Nansha!'

‘Good riddance,' says Sorin. ‘Yantian is better – Yantian is nice.'

We steam into an angled bay below a steep green mountain. A spit of land supporting the container port forms two Yantians: we moor opposite the Yantian of pleasure, denoted by a scatter of coloured lights. On the other side of the headland is Yantian the town. A Chinese agent grants a lift to the port gates, most of a mile from our berth. He does not smile, perhaps because his car has no springs in seats or suspension, or perhaps he takes against me, or perhaps he is shy. How lost to supposition and imaginings is a dumb-tongued foreigner. Beyond the gates is a long road linking the two Yantians. It is Sunday morning, early, but every passing bus is full to the doors. Where is everyone going? There are Lycra packs of serious cyclists. The buildings are charmless utilitarian blocks but the town has a pleasant feeling: the embracing damp of the bambooed hill above it fills the atmosphere. Twenty students are queuing at the cashpoint. No shopkeeper is having a day off. Shops have a uniform signage, red and yellow on brown. They sell all the goods with which China floods the world, cheap suitcases, blow-up toys, temporary umbrellas, every daily contortion of plastic. I had assumed that being clever enough to wash the rest of the planet in this stuff would imply the Chinese were clever enough to avoid it, but by the volume of shops offering dross they are, like a failing drug dealer, getting high on their own supply. Stalls sell yams and oranges. The town smells of plastic and imitation leather, cigarettes, mouldering cement and rotting fruit. Most of the people on the streets are young. Occasionally someone says ‘Hallo!' and laughs – one radically coiffeured young hairdresser in particular.

Down at the waterfront an old Soviet aircraft carrier is rusting. The
Minsk
is a major attraction; scores of families stream on and off. In front of it an extremely beautiful young bride is being photographed with her handsome man. He wears a full dress naval uniform, complete with more medals than he could possibly have earned. There is an unreality about them, as though they are models, rather than a happy couple. Wedding photos are serious business in China. If you can afford it the thing to do is rent a series of costumes and be photographed in several scenarios, a creation of memories reminiscent of Philip K. Dick. Perhaps the happy couple are pretending to be a happy couple for a website or brochure for prospective happy couples. The undertaking has a certain satire about it, visible in the smiles of the bride-to-be and groom, if they are. The day-off atmosphere at the front contrasts with the solemnity of the administrative district, where red-starred party offices are closed.

The end of town is marked by the beginning of Chung Ying Street, once a dry riverbed lined on one bank with Hong Kongese shops, Chinese on the other. In 1979 the Chinese government allowed a cautious degree of free enterprise in Yantian, designating it a Special Economic Zone. Chung Ying Street became a place of encounter between Western capitalism and Chinese communism, and something of an attraction. There is now a museum commemorating this and you can walk down the memory of Chung Ying Street – but only if you have a special pass. I do not have a special pass, so walk three miles to the other end of town, arriving just in time for holiday luncheon.

The road runs to the sea and subsides in vehicles, the fat 4×4s favoured by the rich and tasteless everywhere. In a series of two-hundred-seat restaurants families are eating seafood – more kinds of spiky, squirming shelled and gilled creatures than I knew existed. I point and hope. Charred and spiny corpses are served, along with a pile of some sort of armoured crustacean. The latter avenge their deaths by lacerating my fingers. If only I knew the Mandarin for ‘hammer'.

I am the sole Westerner in Yantian today. A construction worker in a hard hat is delighted by the appearance of this alien. He points and cries ‘Ha-lo!' and shouts with laughter at the reply. Several children have the same reaction. Grumpy rain begins to fall but no spirits seem dampened. When a portable karaoke opportunity appears a hundred diners pause to see if I will make use of it. The proffered song is ‘Country Roads' – which the song implores to take you home to the place you belong – and I am convinced this is satire, and find it very funny, until the karaoke master sings it for me with no evident understanding of the lyrics. Leaving a tip causes some confusion, at first, and then grave bows and smiles. It is a long walk back to the ship and there is no time for anything else. The way leads past bedraggled shack-like housing under the legs of a flyover. It's a poor, workhouse world again: coming ashore from seafaring brings you up to the surface of a country as if through its basement. You begin to see nations as theatre sets. Backstage, in their curtained-off ports, the cranes and crates and stagehands supply the ever-multiplying audience, the limitless performance, the carnival without end or intermission we call the day-to-day.

We have loaded volumes of Chinese cargo for the United States almost beyond imagining. Two thousand tonnes of knives, forks and other steel household goods will be laid and deployed in homestead America, while three thousand tonnes of tables and chairs are set and drawn up for the meal. In the kitchens ninety tonnes of Chinese albacore and cod will have been defrosted, with twenty tonnes of yellowfin tuna caught in the Philippines. On the patio will be twenty tonnes of new furniture, supporting twenty tonnes of dried fruit and nuts offered in two hundred tonnes of ceramics. The cook, using five hundred tonnes of kitchenware, will call the family away from three and a half thousand tonnes of phones, DVD players, televisions and stereos. The children will have to be separated from three thousand tonnes of toys. They will take their place looking smart in five hundred tonnes of Chinese clothes. Four hundred tonnes of lamps will light the meal, where discussion will cover today's purchase of three thousand tonnes of manufactured goods and nine hundred tonnes of new shoes. (Seafarers say these are divided into containers of right feet and left feet, to stop us helping ourselves, but this may be apocryphal, based on the one time someone saw a container break.) After supper someone will undertake a little DIY with a hundred tonnes of hand tools and six tonnes of copper, mined in Zambia, converted to pipes and wires. Walking the dog, which is replete with its fourteen tonnes of pet food, forty-two tonnes of Chinese umbrellas will fend off American rain.

Approaching Hong Kong even Chris and Sorin admit a measure of excitement. Beyond Beaufort Island, suddenly, mountains come toppling down to the pale sea. On every fringe and finger of the hills, poking between peaks and over passes are skyscrapers, towers and blocks. A yellow tangle like scrambled barbed wire is a rollercoaster. We pass Stanley Peninsula and Ocean Park; there are people on the beach in Repulse Bay. Through binoculars we can see a stadium full of pinhead faces at Ocean Park, and camera flashes: the great
Gerd
will make a tiny backdrop to the dolphin dance. As we enter the harbour Hong Kong opens and rises before us, a fanfare of technology being realised as you stare, the steel towers springing from slopes like armoured soldiers sprouting from sown dragon's teeth. Bushels of skyscrapers loom, the giants throwing the smaller ones into disproportion. The water is slashed and clotted with boats, many moored in rafts, chaotically, while those in motion follow three hundred different courses. There is a vertiginous sensation of certain collision with another giant, at least our size, as we head straight for the loop of Stonecutter Bridge, its cables hatched against a sky of mists. Hedges of harbour cranes are packed around the docks, crowded over by towers. There are motorways on stilts, traffic torrents and helicopters and our route turns right into the guts of it all. The Hong Kong harbour pilot says a European study surveyed the waterway but stopped short of the inner areas, the Rambler Channel and Victoria Harbour: ‘They left it blank and wrote a note saying it was a miracle there had been no major accidents in twenty-five years.'