New Zealand to Singapore

February 24, 2008

We dock in downtown Auckland, New Zealand, The city has the look and feel of Vancouver, except a mirror-image Vancouver because people drive on the other side of the road. Finally, it feels like we’re back in civilization. There are real drug stores here, people carrying briefcases come and go from the intermodal train station where I encamp to use the free internet, courtesy of Subway. This could have been what I’ve been missing since Fort Lauderdale. 

On the other hand . . . the other day, trapped on the old rust bucket for two sea days, Siân sees a cockroach scuttling across the floor of the mess. The following day, she finds a live maggot in among her lettuce leaves and vows to eat nothing but Snickers for the rest of her contract. Nobody is going to bet more pissed off because of these incursions of the insect world than Siân. I didn’t see the maggot, but I was there for the second cockroach incident. When Siân brought up the matter to Wendy, the crew welfare lady, in the presence of no less than the Staff Captain and the crew housekeeper, she was met with the level of indifference she thought possible only in the Queens Room on the third set. They promised to investigate. Yeah. Sure.

We are at the crossroads once again. I keep thinking of what it’s going to come to when the Rust Bucket closes in on Dubai. “Toilet paper? What do you people need toilet paper for?”

Encouraged and emboldened by Auckland, we pull in to Sydney, famous for the transports of convicts. They could have learned something from this ship, and maybe it goes the other way too. We arrived Sunday morning and find our usual position in Circular Quay occupied by the Queen Vic. So we were moved to another slip on the other side of the Opera House in Wooloomooloo. The crew was informed to be back on the ship at 5:30 so we can move to Circular Quay at 6:00. I guess it’s better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick, or a full drill in the sun. But there has been some, shall we say, resistance to the idea of going back to the ship on an overnight, although how many will refuse to come back is anyone’s guess. Many of these gripe sessions in the mess never materialize.

I spent a nice afternoon walking through the city’s Hyde Park, down to Circular Quay to have a look at the pokey QV, and generally through town until I got back on the shuttle and headed back to the ship in plenty of time to make me legal, with a sandwich from Subway in my bag. The band is doing our regular gig tonight, even though passengers might be few and far between. Three sets, to the show band’s zero. At least somebody works here. 

Maybe we can have a little quality time tomorrow. We also lose Archie, the Changes band, my roommate Junior and a host of others. Just normal turnover at a major port. 

Maybe we can sneak out tonight after work.

February 25, 2008

This morning, though, we had another incident with a cockroach and Siân in the Concessionaire’s Mess. Feeling something crawling on her feet as she was eating her toast and tea, she was shocked looking down to note a crawling cockroach. She flicked it off, but it wouldn’t be denied, and tried to climb back onto her foot, at which time one of the mess workers collected a napkin and dispatched him. 

John, the crew housekeeper, was having his toast and tea in the mess at the same time, but he shrugged it off. 

This is Siân’s third run-in with the insect kingdom in the mess. She’s beginning to feel singled out.

Afterward, after the official shrug, Richard, our bass player, and Siân and I went over to the Opera House to have a look. I got some pretty nice pictures, and then we went looking for Starbucks, which I had gone to yesterday. I knew where it was, but there were hills and Siân was certain that every tree in town had poisonous spiders ready to pounce on her head, and so wouldn’t walk under them. That being the case, our trip into town took a good deal longer than anticipated, but with the application of a dosage of caffeine all was forgotten and forgiven.

I’ve now exercised my Starbucks card in Texas, England, Greece, and Australia. Thanks, Leroy.

February 28, 2008

Today is a sea day between Hobart, Tasmania and Melbourne, although we seem to be doing 12 knots. By far the highlight of the day for me was when a recording playing in the Queens Room before we started to play started to skip on a tango. Just then Trevor walked in, one of the guys who’s been here since the dawn of civilization. When I pointed the skip out to Trevor, he walked back to the board and told Peggy Nixon, the dance instructor and partner of the unfortunately named Rick Nixon in dance as well as life. As the recording skipped merrily away on its version of Whatever Lola Wants, Lola Gets, Peggy responded to Trevor that this was in fact how the tango was played. This from a dance instructor, who one would suppose ought to know a little more about rhythm, even of their count is 5-6-7-8 to our 1-2-3-4. It was almost boneheaded enough a remark to be downright cute.

February 29, 2008

We are now in the “real” Australia, I feel. Sydney is a beautiful city, but it’s all polished and modern with the definite feel of an Asian city. Melbourne is another thing altogether. It was carved out of the wilderness during a gold rush, and still has many Victorian buildings to support the claim. I woke up way too early--always trouble sleeping before an important port--and took a tram downtown from the port.

Australia in the last decade has been aggressively supporting immigration from virtually the entire globe, so there are more diverse and younger folks here than Sydney or Hobart. The weather’s funny. It’s the middle of the summer, but the wind swirls and wehn it comes from the south the temperature drops precipitously. It shifts to that side of the compass every 30 seconds or so, so even when the sun does its best to warm things up there comes the Antarctic blast to cool things down again.

I found a couple of Santy Runyon’s wonderful rubber saxophone gimmicks in a music store, a days-old New Yorker in a magazine store, and laid hands on the Macbook whatever-it’s-called, which is incredibly light at the local Apple only computer store. Mostly I wandered like a rube around the town. We’re here til midnight, although things fire up in the Queens Room at 7:45 as usual. (Once again, for the second time in a week, the show band has the night off.)

I am filing a paper with the crew office which will if approved allow me to exit the QE2 in Los Angeles at the end of this month. 

The chef who cooks for the crew was replaced in Sydney. Turns out Siân’s discover of a maggot in her salad did a lot of good. She ran into the crew welfare lady, the crew chief steward and the big chief, the staff captain, and wagged a finger at them, accusing them of letting the quality of food in the mess spiral out of control. It’s true, but that maggot, along with the various cockroach incidents motivated her to do something. And now it’s done. 

The new guy gives a shit, and the food has improved noticeably. 

March 1, 2008

A quiet sea day between Melbourne and Adelaide. The form is making its rounds, collecting signatures. I saw a movie called “Dan in Real Life,” deeply flawed but the whole movie featured a large, multigenerational and multiracial family, which got me very homesick. Damned manipulative movies!

March 2, 2008

Pulled into Adelaide, South Australia this morning. Off the ship at 11, into town by noon on the shuttle, toured the street festival, adjunct to the Fringe Festival on the city’s mall downtown with Campbell, the English piano player who used to live in Laguna and Sonoma. Campbell is an excellent choice for a traveling companion in this instance because there the Fringe Festival has taken over the town, along with an adjunct street fair and buskers are everywhere. He’s seen it all, all the street fairs up and down the west coast of the USA, even though he’s English. We saw street jugglers who performed the same finale, who depend on the passing of the hat without being corrupted by accepting gigs on cruise ships, for example. 

In light of the recent upgrade in the mess, we elect to go back to the ship at 1:00 and catch lunch rather than eat lunch in town.

The town is in the grip of a multiyear drought.

March 3, 2008

We played jazz in the Lion at lunch. My contribution beyond playing was to suggest “Gregory Is Here,” a great unknown Horace Silver tune. First time I ever heard Michael Brecker was that record, back in 1977. My level of involvement seems to have lessened since I put in notice. I am also barking out opinions in every direction. When Pete asks if it wouldn’t be cool to play the first 2 A sections of Cherokee with just flugelhorn and bass, I instantly said “No!”

I am truly a short-timer now, unafraid of my opinions, no matter how extreme. 

March 4, 2008

Why we are visiting the port of Albany is anyone’s guess. Even the pandering Englishman who delivers the port lectures spiced with anti-American asides has never been there. Still, there’s a lot to like about Albany, even though it does seem like the shops raised prices when QE2 was on the horizon.

We were warned by the lady selling all-day passes on the shuttle bus that walking to town is a dangerous enterprise, fraught with peril. I challenge her to sell her bus tickets without using fear as the motivation, and she does back off a bit. The walk proves to be not dangerous at all, but we have to walk through a tent to get to the overpass over the rail lines where a new condo development is being pitched. 

One over the bridge we climb a hill into town, and there is a Dixieland band playing on a bandstand in the center of the street. These young guys are from Perth, the most remote city in the world as they say, but they are pretty good, especially the trumpet player and the cornet player . (They go with the two trumpet model of early Louis.) I am walking with Siân, who pokes the shops for a parental boomerang. We get snagged by a couple of passengers who hear her almost every night in the Chart Room and have a long coffee (no Starbucks here) in an outdoor cafe. Siân goes off after the coffee to play her 12:30 set, and I climb further up the hill to see if I can find some wi-fi. I run across a dog who is clearly part cardigan corgi on a lead and take a picture. Further up, a dingo cross seems disinterested in all of humanity, although intelligent enough to cruise the streets without harm. 

I find a cafe where I am required to buy a $4 pastry to use the wi-fi for an hour, and make the most of it. 

Walking down the hill to the rail bridge, I realize that this city, for all its faults, is a lot like Laguna in the early sixties. There must be artists here.

March 5, 2008

Fremantle is the port city of Perth. We come in an hour late so a container vessel can sneak in ahead of us. I’ve been warned that the weather will be hot here, and it is. Not quite Texas in the summer, but enough to notice it. I head out, cross another rail footbridge, and find myself in front of a coffee house carved out of a spare warehouse space in a bicycle shop. I have a coffee and a muffin, $6 special ($AUS=.95 cents US).

I wandered about with no particular plan, but got turned around by the town plan, which is not a grid. I made my wau from bus shelter to bus shelter, watching as the You Are Here dot moved across the landscape. Finally I came to the High Street, which in every English colonial city means downtown. 

March 10, 2008

After four excruciating sea days passing through Indonesian waters, including passage alongside Krakatoa (I took a couple pictures of the volcano from my porthole) we landed in a container terminal in Singapore. This is no way to treat a retiring lady, I think. There is a perfectly good cruise terminal a couple miles away, with shopping attached along with all the local goods and services, including that unique Singapore invention, the hawker food court. 

But wait a minute, a couple days before our arrival in Singapore a suspicious notice appears on the bulletin board of the resurgent crew mess: “INPORTANT (sic) NOTICE.” All crew taking shore leave are advised that they MUST be up the gangway by 4:00. NO EXCEPTIONS,  NO EXCUSES. 

Hmmm. Well, this is assuming that the buses are running in a regular way, and it hardly explains what the deal is. Any part of this INPORTANT NOTICE that can go wrong will go wrong, will go wrong, I’m thinking. Anyone who misspells IMPORTANT is likely to screw some or all part of this scheme up.

Anyway, back to landing in Singapore. The thing I was most looking forward to was the food stalls that Calvin Trillin described in the New Yorker. Truth be told, anything Calvin Trillin describes is of interest to me. Here’s the way the article starts:

THREE CHOPSTICKS

Does street food make the best cuisine?

When I think back on the conversations that took place after I told people that I was going to Singapore to eat, I'm reminded of the scene in "Little Red Riding Hood" when the title character first encounters the big bad wolf. I play the wolf:

"Singapore!" Little Red Riding Hood says, in an improbable New York accent. "But Singapore is supposed to be the least exotic place in Asia. There's nothing to see there, unless you're a connoisseur of skyscrapers or container ports or obsessive street-cleaning."

"All the better for guilt-free eating, my dear. Your meals can't be spoiled by remorse over not having conducted a thorough inspection of the second-most-important cathedral."

"And isn't Singapore the place where you can get fined for chewing gum?"

"But, my dear, you can't chew gum while you're eating anyway."

From those conversations, I have concluded that the governmental ban on chewing gum, promulgated in 1992, remains the fact most strongly associated by Americans with Singapore. If Singapore tested a nuclear device tomorrow, the stories in American newspapers would mention the gum ban by the second paragraph. (Three years ago, the government relented a bit, in order to satisfy the requirements of a free-trade agreement: you can now buy nicotine gum by prescription.) There is a collateral awareness of the penalties that Singapore imposes for such malefactions as dropping a candy wrapper on the sidewalk. According to what's listed on a widely sold souvenir T-shirt emblazoned "Singapore - A Fine City," the acts that can bring you a serious fine include not only gum-chewing and littering and smoking and spitting but also carrying a durian on a public conveyance. A durian is an astonishingly odoriferous melon, much prized in Southeast Asia. Having smelled a durian, I must say that the prohibition against carrying one on a public conveyance (for which there is actually no specific fine) strikes me as a very solid piece of legislation. In American terms, it's the equivalent of a law against carrying a cattle feedlot on a public conveyance.

I'd always thought that I wouldn't go much further than that in supporting Singapore's efforts to treat tidiness as the nearly Athenian ideal of government. Still, had I known that it was happening I would have backed the government's scheme in the seventies to bring food venders, called hawkers, off the streets and into centers that have proper sanitation and refrigeration and running water - a scheme that was inspired by a desire for tidy streets, along with public-health considerations and the needs of traffic control and, presumably, the relentless modernization that seems to have a momentum of its own in Singapore. My support would have been based on enlightened self-interest, one of the cornerstones of democracy. For years, as I've walked past food stands in foreign lands, I've struggled to keep in mind that for an American visitor the operational translation for signs that ostensibly say something like "bhel puri" or "tacos de nopales" is "Delivery System for Unfamiliar Bugs That You Will Bitterly Regret Having Ingested." The temptation to throw caution to the wind has been excruciating, since I may love street food above all other types of food. I have never figured out just why, although I've considered the possibility that, through some rare genetic oddity, my sense of taste is at full strength only when I'm standing up. (The fact that I particularly enjoy whatever I eat while standing in front of the refrigerator could be considered supporting evidence.) For a while, I thought about testing the standup hypothesis at some fancy Manhattan restaurant by springing to my feet halfway through the main course and trying to gauge whether that makes the roasted organic chicken with fricassée of spring vegetables and chanterelle polenta taste as good as those sausage sandwiches you get at Italian street fairs.

Gathering food venders into hawker centers, under the purview of public-health inspectors, meant that a Western visitor not only can have a safe shot at a variety of Singaporean delicacies but can do so in a setting so convenient that his energy is reserved for eating. All over Singapore, there are open-air pavilions where an island of tables and chairs is ringed by eighty or a hundred hawker stands - many of them selling only one item, like just satay or just fish-ball noodles. The government has established hawker centers in the central business district and hawker centers at the beach and hawker centers attached to the high-rise public-housing projects where the vast majority of Singaporeans live. In some of the fancy skyscrapers and department stores, private operators run air-conditioned, upmarket versions of hawker centers called food courts - a term presumably selected by someone who had never tasted what's passed off as food at an American shopping-mall food court. In Singapore, even the establishments called coffee shops are essentially mini hawker centers. They might have started as places that served coffee and the pastries that the British Empire, for reasons of its own, inflicted on unsuspecting colonials throughout the world, but these days the proprietor is likely to operate the drink concession himself and rent out two or three stalls to specialists in, say, fish-head curry or Hainanese chicken rice. It has become possible to eat in Singapore for days at a time without ever entering a conventional restaurant. Since I have never been much taken with the concept of courses - my eating habits are more on the order of a bit of this, a bit of that, and, now that I think of it, a bit of something else - it almost seems as if the Singapore government of forty years ago had arranged its hawker policy with me in mind.

=================================================

Can this guy write or what? This is the writing that made me a subscriber back in the seventies, after I discovered when I was on the road that the long bus rides we were subjected to would be lessened by the magazine’s writing.

So you can see how excited I was to be arriving in Singapore, despite the INPORTANT NOTICE. I took the first crew bus to the cruise center, where we should have docked but were displaced by a ship called, improbably, Leisure World. I found a Starbucks and caffeinated myself. 

I hooked up with Richard Williams, Siân, Simon Galfe, and Brad the drummer. We take over two cabs and head for the town from the electronics mall, eight stories of small shops with all the stuff except, apparently, for the one thing I was looking for, a wi-fi detector. I could have bought one for $20 at Fry’s before I left. But they’ve got everything else and lots more. 

By mid-day I am looking for something to eat, and I am not disappointed. One of these hawker centers is in the basement of the electronics mall. I have a three dollar bowl of ramen noodles with an egg and a separately cooked piece of chicken. It is truly glorious. It’s so good that I’m thinking, “This is what the crew mess ought to be.” The taste of that wok-fried chicken among the fragrant broth with its noodles and greens is still with me. It was made by a family in a stand a couple stands down from the one marked PIG ORGAN SOUP. True to Trillin, all of the seats in this food court were occupied, even though it was past what I’d think was local lunch time. 

I wandered a bit with Simon and Siân, who were shopping, Simon for sunglasses and shorts, Siân for silk kimonos for her family and fiancé. We snagged a cab and drove back to the cruise center, past the world’s largest ferris wheel and what will be the only Formula 1 course designed specifically for night races. We arrived at the cruise center at around 1:45, cruised through the shops there, and got into the queue for the crew shuttle back to the ship at 2:45. Soon, there was a line of a couple hundred crew members.

Even though there were no crew buses forthcoming, there were plenty of passenger busses, and some of them were returning to the ship with less than a load. It became frustrating as the minutes ticked away on the deadline for the crew to return. Finally, a crew bus pulled in at 3:30. We were among the lucky 48 crew on that bus, and we ascended the gangway with fifteen minutes to spare.

What the INPORTANT NOTICE didn’t tell us was that the the reason they wanted us back before four was because the Singapore authorities wanted to stamp our passports, and as anyone caught in the web of Singapore regulations will tell you, you don’t mess with the Singapore authorities. 

But what then became of the rest of the crew back at the cruise center? Siân waved at Peter Clagget, who was one of the ones left behind. When I came back to my cabin, which I now share with the keyboard player in the Caribbean band, I recognized the mighty rumble of the leader of the band, who was visiting in our cabin while grousing about the situation. It turned out that 160 crew members had their ID cards confiscated for being on a late arriving bus. A crew members without a card can’t go off the ship, have a beer in the crew bar after work, or even buy a bottle of drinking water. The usual punishment for the offense of being late is confiscation for three ports. But 160 is way beyond the usual number of offenders, which usually number one or two. 

We spent the night wondering how the bridge might react to this situation. Those of us who were there knew that the problem was not the crew members in that line but rather the logistics dreamed up in the crew office for the conveyance of the crew from the cruise center to the container terminal.

UPDATE: All of the crew cards were returned the next day. There still may be some actions taken. We’ll see.

March 12, 2008

After a day at sea, and dealing with the usual fiasco of breaking in a new singer as Kenny left in Singapore, we are anchored off Vung Tao, port city of Ho Chi Minh City, formerly Saigon. We are just north of the Mekong delta. This place had a lot to do with who I am. Unfortunately, all of the crew members are still on the ship at noon. We are anchored off the city, a three-mile tender ride. This may be as close as we get to Vietnam. I’m still in my cabin, waiting for announcements. Guess I’ll go have lunch, my bowl of ramen still a close memory.

In no particular order. the three ports I wanted to see when I was deciding whether to take this gig were Easter Island, Vietnam, and Shanghai. Looks like I’ll be batting 0 for 3. Easter Island we were denied shore leave, Shanghai required a $200 visa nobody told me about, and today in Vietnam we were denied shore leave. This is shit. The announcement by the staff captain was only made to deck 6, where most of the foreign crew lives, but I heard it because there’s a stairway to 6 right next to my cabin. The message was pure noblesse oblige. “Thank you for your understanding . . . there will be vendors on deck 2 selling local goods . . .We are setting up busses for Shanghai and Hong Kong.” Yeah, and we found out how good that worked in Singapore. With only a handful of ports remaining—Hong Kong, Shanghai, Osaka, Honolulu, and Los Angeles—and lots of sea days in between, it’s beginning to feel like a prison ship. As Trevor told me the other night, the management of this ship has done everything possible to piss off the crew.

I spent the day here, of course. I went up on Boat Deck and brought my iPod and the speaker, and shared my collection of raunchy Redd Foxx recordings with the guys in the band. In the near distance, Vung Tao spread out. A passenger would walk by every now and then.