Brisbane to Los Angeles - Grounded: A Down to Earth Journey Around the World - page 95

Chapter Nine
Brisbane to Los Angeles
A T the Port of Brisbane, waiting to board our freighter, we pass the time drinking beer in the seafarers' cen-
ter. It's a little wooden shack dwarfed by the surrounding gantry cranes and container stacks. Most ports have
an outpost like this that caters to the crews of the merchant vessels passing through the harbor. They're a
sort of home base, where deckhands on shore leave can gossip, check e-mail, and make long-distance phone
calls. There's a foosball table in the corner. Stacks of evangelical pamphlets. Groggy seafarers napping on
the musty couches. No one questions our presence here, perhaps because by now we look like a couple of
old salts.
At last our ship, the MV Matisse , radios over to the seafarers' center to tell them we've been cleared to
board. The port's shuttle bus scurries us across a big container yard and alongside a massive hull. We climb
a steel ladder hundreds of feet up to the ship's deck and follow a cadet to our cabin.
Soon enough, we're back down below in the mess room, eating an overboiled dinner from another Filipino
cook. The good news: Because this is a French-owned ship, our meal is served with a bottomless carafe of
red wine. The bad news: Because it's a rusting old cargo freighter, this wine verges into the realm of sub-
palatability. No matter—we manage to down two quick glasses before we're summoned to the crew lounge
for the mandatory safety lecture.
It turns out the Matisse is staffed almost entirely by Romanians. This makes for a stark—and ultimately
pleasing—contrast with the starchy, by-the-book professionalism of the German officers on the freighter we
took across the Atlantic. For instance, Lucian, the first officer here, seems to view his safety lecture less as
vital information than as an opportunity for an open mike comedy routine.
I wish I could convey Lucian's accent on the page. Imagine a man speaking with a half-pound of cabbage
lodged in the middle depths of his throat. “First thing,” Lucian begins. “Drugs not allowed on board. But eez
okay as long as we're not seeing you with them.” Through his inch-thick corrective lenses I see him wink a
highly magnified eye.
“Second thing: Don't be falling in ocean. I don't think you are surviving this.” Here Lucian chuckles in a
manner that suggests he would be curious—in a detached, analytic sort of way—to see what might transpire
if we did in fact fall into the ocean. “You can shout for help, yes,” he muses, “but ship is moving at fifteen
meters per second. So by time you shout you are already behind us. Maybe if you fall off bow we can get
you—but then maybe you are sucked into propeller, and you are turned a little bit sushi.”
We're led on a quick tour of the ship. It's significantly larger than our previous freighter was—nearly one
hundred feet longer—and able to carry far more containers. It's also dirtier. While the German crew main-
tained a shipshape sheen, the crew aboard the Matisse seems not to mind a few stray cigarette butts, muddy
decks, and paint-peeled railings. Also, where the Germans established strict rules regarding which times we
could visit the bridge, Lucian intimates that we, as the only two passengers, can basically pop in and hang
out on the Matisse 's bridge whenever we want.
OUR first full day on the water, we'd expected to hit the open ocean and make serious progress toward
Auckland. Not happening. For unclear reasons (though we suspect it has to do with keeping us on board the
ship longer, and thus charging us more money), nobody informed us in advance that the Matisse first makes