Llama for Lunch (11 page)

The day that followed was a busy one for me. It included a nap before and after lunch and a two-hour chat with the captain. Wojciech was such a charmer and he loved to talk. I had a standing joke with him about the letter of complaint that I was writing concerning the ship. This came about after he saw the list of rules for passengers that I had been given by the ship’s agents. They intrigued him no end as he’d never seen or heard of them before. He was especially amused by the stern warning that passengers must wear only slippers in their cabins.

I finally mastered the washing machine. I’d had a big argument with it when it wouldn’t give me back my clothes after finishing the wash. Eventually one of the sailors came by and told me its secret. The machine needed to be left alone for a little quality time with my clothes before it felt inclined to release them. Maybe it had formed an emotional attachment to them.

And I learned to ride the exercise bike. Hurrah! a bike that was safely anchored to the floor and couldn’t throw me. I had mentioned to Wojciech that I needed exercise and, voila, he ordered a crew member to bring forth the bike and harness it in the TV room. It felt weird to be riding a bike while looking out of a porthole at a pitching, rolling sea. Even though I was pedalling madly, the up and down motion of the waves made me feel that I was riding a horse. The bike behaved admirably for several days but then it took to groaning and making complaining noises. I don’t know why – I was doing all the ruddy work.

I did my daily Spanish lessons and argued a lot with Carlos, the person on the tapes. Lord, he was thick – and I was heartily sick of him. Then I acquired a deck chair. At lunch I told Wojciech that there was class distinction on his ship. The deck above me had a plastic chair and I didn’t. A chair was produced but I failed to use it that day because I was too busy mastering the video machine (I hope this doesn’t get around). After an hour of swearing and pressing all the buttons I could find I watched
Shakespeare in Love
. Absolute drivel but nice clothes.

Wojciech told me some terrific stories about the drugs that had been planted on ships in South American ports. Once on this ship, before he was captain, the crew had noticed that a container picked up in Columbia wasn’t correctly sealed. The drug authorities were notified and they found a large quantity of heroin. The captain was taken ashore and arrested, despite the fact that it was he who had actually notified the police. Another time someone was seen swimming in the water near the ship. The police were called and a bag of drugs was found to have been attached to the hull with a magnet. Again the captain was arrested and this time the engineer was also arrested for good measure – the authorities said that underneath the ship was his department. They were held for two weeks. You’d hope that they learned to stay clear of the constabulary from then on.

Wojciech said something that expressed a feeling I’d often had, but never put into words. I had told him that I liked to hang over the bow or the prow to watch the water foam away from under me. He said, ‘When you do that and you look down and stare for a while, does the water call to you? Does it call to you to join it?’ I knew exactly what he meant. The water has always called to me. Not that I want to drown – it is just a consciousness that you want to be one with it. When I said, ‘Yes. It calls to me.’ Wojciech replied, ‘Ah, you are a romantic.’ Funny, I never thought I was.

Out on deck that night, in the delicious warm, velvety dark, there was no moon and the sides of the ship were not lit. I watched great sheets of lighting flashing close on one side accompanied by clashes of thunder – this was the hurricane season.

Five days out from Miami we reached Manzana in Panama at two in the morning. Work began immediately and by morning we had finished loading. The pilot came aboard and we chugged off into a channel marked by buoys, passed through a breakwater made from big chunks of rock that encircled almost all the bay, and sat riding at anchor five kilometres off the coast waiting our turn to go through the Panama Canal. The pilot left clutching his obligatory bottle of whisky, while from the flag drawer we selected and ran up the red and white flag of the canal. Wojciech told me that when entering Libya’s waters that country’s flag must be higher, as well as bigger, than any other flag on the ship. Fortunately this is easy. If you don’t have a suitable exhibit, all you have to do is paint an old bed sheet green. That is the Libyan flag, plain green.

Swinging around out there in the middle of the bay the sea looked fairly calm, but every now and then there was a terrific whoomp as we hit against the swell of the tide and pulled up sharp on our anchor. Chief mate Martin threw his fishing lines in from the bow but with no luck. He said it would be better later when it got dark and he could put the light on to attract the fish.

Meanwhile I watched four ships come out of the canal and sail away across the bay heading north and I counted five other container ships parked and waiting, as we were, to go through the next morning.

After dinner I went aft to check on the fishing. Yuri, the huge Russian bear of an electrician, had joined the hopeful and was jagging for squid. As the sky slowly darkened the lights came on aboard the ships around the bay and made a pretty sight. Night slowly fell and it grew darker until finally I could see into the water with the lantern that had been hung over the side. Schools of small fish flitted and flashed through the beam of light and every now and then a big fish dashed from the shadows to eat one. But no fish was stupid enough to get caught for us to eat. ‘Most unusual,’ the crew said. Not for me. No one ever catches anything when I am around. Jonah they call me. I gave up and went to bed.

The ship tugged on her chain all night like a dog shaking a rat. I was told that the swell was very strong here – if you fell in you’d be whisked away out to sea and gone forever. The thump of the engines coming on woke me at four but I went back to sleep while we crossed the bay. When the ship was ready to enter the canal at five-thirty, Wojciech called me on the phone. I had a quick shower and was on the bridge just as it was getting light. Ahead of us the lights of the Canal illuminated the sky, on one side the lights of the settlement twinkled, while behind the dawn was breaking rosy pink. It was extraordinarily beautiful, with a surreal quality.

Approaching the first lock we could see the ship ahead of us, a Japanese vessel. Then the gates closed and we watched it rise slowly, slowly, until it looked very high.

The Canal pilot came aboard. He stays on the ship for the entire eight to twelve hours that it takes to go through. The pilot, an elderly American with a great letter-box mouth that made him look like the old-time film star George Formby, said he had been in Panama for thirty-nine years, and that there were now only twenty-five Americans left since Panama had been given back to the locals in 1999. His main interest in me was to find out if I played bridge. I was afraid I had to disappoint him but I offered him a game of poker.

We entered the first lock. The water had been allowed to flow into it until it was level with us, then the gate was opened, we moved in and the gate was shut. The two tugs that had guided us in, one on either side in case our engines stopped and we went in sideways, sheared away and went directly to the next ship behind us. If we had gone in wrong way around there would not have been enough room and we would have been in big trouble.

I could see more ships coming slowly along in a stately line after the ship behind us. There were two locks side by side. The one next to us was empty but the Japanese ship was in the lock in front of us. Once the gate was shut people walked across the top of it on a footpath and in front of us was a cantilever bridge over which buses ferried workers. Water started to pour into the lock, and as the level slowly rose we went up with it.

The sides of the Canal were covered with dense, darkgreen jungle that on one side was cut by a road running along the edge. Hovering frigate birds with forked tails circled us while a troop of pelicans lumbered in our wake. Closer to the administration area a few houses stood, but there was still plenty of thick jungle with an occasional palm frond sticking out of it. The pilot told me that all the animals that could be found in Amazonia, with the exception of anacondas but including jaguars, could also be found in this jungle. He said that Panama was a very fine place to live and that he made two hundred thousand US dollars a year. Pity he wouldn’t play poker.

The water continued to rise. Only one ship at a time can fit into a lock that is one thousand metres long and fifty wide. That’s big enough for the
QE2
– but, while the passage would cost that ship one hundred and thirty-five thousand dollars, the
Atlanta
had to pay only thirty-five to fifty thousand.

The Japanese ship that had been in front of us before was now in the lock alongside us. She was the
Neptune
, a car carrier, painted blue on the bottom and white on the top but up close I could now see that she was very rusty. We came out of the lock and, moving on, came level with the administration centre, which was fronted by five dilapidated train carriages standing on a rail line. There was no other housing so I presumed that only canal workers lived here.

Waiting to go through the next lock we encountered the contraptions they call mules, which took the place of horses some years ago. Some swap! These mechanical monsters run on a track alongside the ship and are attached to it by ropes with which they haul the vessel up, up, into the next lock. Then we were going down again. The water falls nine metres.

I descended to the lower deck to see what it was like at that level and stared at the walls of the lock as we crept through.

They were either made of old-looking metal or carved out of rock and bolstered every now and then by a great beam of wood. Some of these beams were badly splintered as though something big had hit them – no doubt it had.

Ahead I could see a tug pushing the Japanese ship into a lock and as we approached the last lock we managed to pass this ship. Passing is not allowed outside the locks but can be done in them. The
Neptune
had broken something so we came out of the locks ahead of her. A little further on we passed a ship that was lying half submerged on its side on the canal bank. A sad sight, it looked as though it had gone aground and tipped over.

By this time I was desperate for breakfast. As soon as I had supervised the
Atlanta
safely through the locks and out onto the Gaton Lake, I went below.

We followed a channel marked by buoys through the immense body of water that is the Gaton Lake. In the middle of the lake were a great many tiny islands, remnants of land that had been flooded. Again, they were covered in thick green jungle and they had no shore line – the jungle flowed all the way down to the water. The lake was very calm. The water was the oily green colour of an aventurine gem stone and it was disturbed only by faint ripples from the soft wave made by our slow advance. From between two islands of vegetation behind us a ship loomed up in our wake, looking enormous compared to the tiny islands. Behind that I could see another two ships and in front there was one more.

One-and-a-half hours later we were still on the flat dark water of the lake. There was no sign of habitation until we came close to the lake’s shore on one side. There I saw a tiny cove that had small boats tied in it, and above them a couple of red-roofed houses. A motorised skiff painted the same green colour as the trees came out from there going very fast but creating little movement on the water. Passing a long flat barge that was pushed along by a tug and loaded with what looked like building material, we continued to progress between the marker buoys, green one side, red the other. Later we passed another barge that appeared to be permanently anchored to a buoy and had a small plot of maize growing in the middle of it. I sat on deck in my plastic chair. After making such a fuss to acquire it, I thought I’d better use it.

Suddenly, from behind the uninhabited-looking green jungle, the high-rise buildings of Panama City appeared against a misty grey sky. Floating between the jungle and that eerie sky, the city looked quite unreal, like a mirage. Approaching it, we passed under a wide-spanning bridge, not unlike the Sydney Harbour Bridge, over which much traffic flowed. Then we were in the bay that fronts Panama City and sailing alongside a lengthy causeway on which a road and a row of palm trees led to a small, low, unpopulated island. Another causeway followed that also led to another little island and still two more causeways came after that. The last island was quite high and looked like one of those pointy karsts from south China that seem to have just jumped up out of the sea. This one had a building right on its peak and vegetation around the base.

We anchored out in the bay surrounded by a lot of other ships. Rain poured down on us – I was told that it rained every day here.

During the night we moved to the Panama City wharf. The sea was like a millpond when I ventured out on deck at seven. Not a whisper of wind moved its surface and the air was pleasantly cool. However it soon became steamy and later a fine drizzle fell. I was listening to the
Barber of Saville
, which Wojciech had lent me. A CD no less, the first for me – whoever said that travel broadens your education told no lie! Out on deck, containers went off and came on, as did a huge tank.

Then it was Saturday and I had been aboard the
Atlanta
for a week. We were now out on the empty, grey Pacific ocean. All night there had been a gentle swell and this day was overcast and humid. We saw whales and dolphins close to the ship. I walked around the decks just before dinner and watched two ships pass. One was a white refrigerated ship that carried no containers and the other a long, black vessel away on the horizon. On one side of our ship seven beautiful big frigate birds flew in perfect formation, gliding motionless so close to the sea that at first they looked as though they had been painted on the water. They had white bodies and graceful, black-tipped wings, which every now and then they would flap effortlessly, then continue gliding as they caught the wind drafts off the ship’s side. After a while they flapped a bit more, sped up, and disappeared.