Global Warming isn't Madmade!

(WARNING: I donºt have anyone to enviro-rant with/at out here, so this has been building up for a few days now)
Hurrah! The news I had long been hoping for came in the form of last week's Channel 4 documentary "The Great Global Warming Swindle". I brought it along for entertainment (sad, I know) and watched it somewhere off the coast of the Netherlands. It's OK to fly and drive and do all those things which I had been led to believe were socially irresponsible because of climate change. The elation, I felt, must be similar to the realisation by my parent's generation (x-1?) when the wall came down and people stopped worrying about being oblittered by nukes. So I need not have taken a freight ship to South Africa you say? Marvellous!

Oh wait, it turns out that the documentary wasn't all that credible. In fact wasnºt credible at all. That's unfortunate. There are so many rebuttles in the green online community, that the programme is now being abbreviated to TGGWS. The clearest debunking comes from In the Green, so have a read if you arenºt sick of this topic already. It would appear that last time this guy made a documentary, channel 4 had to broadcast a public apology for the misrepresentations made, in particular the improper editing of interviews. I'm not going to go into great detail, beecause other more intelligent and eloquent people have already done a great job (see link above). Shame on Channel 4 for allowing such flakey science to be portrayed as a documentary. I expected more from the last bastion of quality programming. After all, where would we be without [insert name of any reality TV show here]. I have to admit my mood was dulled :'| (That's a tear).

Quite a few people have asked me whether taking a cargo ship is actually any better for the environment than just flying (OK, 2 people), particularly in light of recent news articles showing that shipping account for more emssions than flights. It's a fair question. I had to admit each time that I had just assumed that it would be, having not done any calculations, but I can now set the record straight. This isn't designed to be an exercise in blowing my own carbon trumpet, I've done more than my fair share of flying in the past and driven around in some pretty ridiculous turbo charged cars, but I can now report that the freight ship is mother earth's chosen way to travel! Well, kind of. My share of the emissions for this journey work out at 0.014 tons of CO2 as against 1.06 tons for the equivalent flight. That's base on the weight of me and my luggage (0.15 tons) as a portion of the ship's total cargo (26,000) tons. ALthuogh it's lucky I'm so slender, the ship belches out over 120 tons of CO2 per day!

I'm leaving Lisbon in a few hours, so the blog will be quiet for a couple of weeks now. I don't expect to see much else apart from sun and sea until we reach Walvis Bay, Namibia, so bye for now.

Finally under way

20th March, Hamburg
I left London 9 days ago, and so far the ship has moved from Antwerp to Hamburg. On our current course it is impossible to hit Cape Town, unless there is a particularly fortunate and rapid shift of tectonic plates. Indeed it seems as thought the ship's progress can be measured on a geological timescale. But today is different. Today I woke at 6am with diesel fumes in my nostrils. Not a particularly pleasant way to start the day, but it meant that the refuelling barge was underneath my window, filling the tanks with the 2000 tons of fuel we will need for the voyage. And now, FINALLY, we are heading towards Cape Town.

Thanks for Nothing Frau Marks

19th March From Hamburg From Lisbon
My GCSE German was a complete waste of time. On my first proper night in Germany the only word on the menu that I understand is "Hamburger". Which turns out to be a fillet of chicken in a mushroom butter gravy. But the chicken lived in Hamburg oringinally, if I understand correctly. If Iºd known at the time how little of this language Iºd retain then I wouldnºt have worked so dilligently in German lessons all those years ago. But thinking about it, I didnºt work that hard. Itºs all starting to make sense now.
I just bought a bottle of ice cold beer from a vending machine in my hostel for ONE EURO. I still canºt quite believe it. Isnºt that about the same about as a Coke from a London vending machine? I wasnºt expecting to find this level of savings whilst in Western Europe. Althuogh itºs not quite Kathyºs 7p for 4 avocados in Malawi.
Having only spent 24 hours in Hamburg I donºt feel qualified to go into much more depth, So Iºll end it here by summarising the whole experience with some hyphenated words: cheap-beer-curt-people-flimsy-maps-misleading-menus.

Leaving Das Belgium

It's true that prolonged periods of inactivity make you stupid. We've been stuck in port now for a few days and tonight I caught myself looking for the English instructions on a sachet of packet soup. My French and German are both pretty rusty but I managed to work it out in the end. The food aboard ship is reasonable, somewhere between primary school dinners and Little Chef with a Polish twist. At the third meal I abandoned all hope of maintaining any vegetarianism, since there aren't any vegatables (mased potato doesn't count). My diet has been catapulted back into meat land (idea for culinary theme park perhaps?) In theory, meal times should be my chance to remember how to communicate with other people, since most of the rest of the time is spent in solitary. However, the chief steward has other ideas. Whenever I try to sit with the only other person that speaks the same language as me, I'm briskly ushered to the captain's table, as passengers command guest status on freight ships. I don't want to step on anyone's toes, (I'm discovering new maritime traditions each day), so I give in and move, but the level of conversation is poor. Few articles are used at the captains table. Most questions fired my way are constructed from an incomprehensible string on English nouns and verbs and unknown Polish. The captain looks surprised and a little hurt when I say I can't understand what he's banging on about.

Having accepted that it's meat all the way to Cape Town, one tradition I am looking forward to is the equator BBQ. Apparently everyone strips off the overalls and has a booze up as we ease into the Southern Hemisphere. I'm pleased that the occassion will be marked like this. Wouldn't it be great if your aircraft pilot opened a case of champagne every time their plane crossed the equator? Provided he didn't drink any I guess.

I managed to explain to the Captain today about my plans to cycle to Malawi. He laughed. Which is actually one of the bigger reactions I've had to date. Most of the people I've talked to seem far more interested in the cargo ship part of the trip that the cycle. I suppose the brain can pigeon hole the cycle in its "long bike ride" compartment, next to the memory of doing the London to Brighton charity run last year, but has little frame of reference for spending 3 weeks on a freight ship with no other passengers. Here are some pictures of my cabin.




Not bad eh? I suspect these 2 rooms will seem smaller and smaller as the days pass. I have already watched 1 film (Little Miss Sunshine - 8/10), 1 documentary (The Great Global Warming Swindle - I should have flown after all!) and read 1 book (digital SLR stuff). I am going to need more entertainment than I have brought. I'm hoping my technophile ex-housemates will find a way to beam me some fresh content. (Paul, Nick, sorry about the first blog post, please find a way... orb isn't working. A couple of series of 24 would be nice)

We leave Antwerp tonight, but hopefully I will get a chance to write something from Hamburg. Thanks to everyone for all the emails and blog comments, definitely made it worth paying for another bloody taxi to get into town (Sort it out Orange, why is it still 100 quid per second to use internet on the continent?)

Waiting in Antwerp

For the first leg of the trip to Malawi I'm travelling to cape town by cargo ship from Antwerp. The first challenge i came up against was persuading the coach driver at victoria to take my enormous bike bag. After a lot of begging it was allowed on, and i was off. I arrived at the dock in Antwerp on monday morning, loaded my luggage with a crane and ascended the rickety gangway some 30 feet up to the deck. The ship is about 200 metres long, check out the picture below - my bunk, a (moderately) spacious 2 room 2 bed apartment, is on the fourth deck, beneath the bridge, facing the stern (if that's the word for the ass end of a ship). There's been lots of interest about the accomodation, so pictures will follow when I get a chance to upload some.



The crew is made up of 25 Poles and a South African. I immediately feel at home - it's one part aussie short of a south london cocktail. Varying degrees of english are spoken by the crew (i'm the only passenger), but i feel welcome by those i've met so far. The ship's schedule has been turned upside down this month by a strike in Rotterdam, so it turns out I'm 3 days early for departure. I've stowed my luggage and left the ship to explore Antwerp while the crew busilly finishes loading and rearranging cargo. I've never spent any time in Belgium and despite my preconceptions (chocolate, diamonds, boring), Antwerp turns out to be a nice place. Most of the city centre is pedestrianised, as a result everyone walks around at about half the average londoner's pace. The people and architecture here remind me of Amsterdam, although the boats in Antwerp are measured in kilometres not metres and it's a 30 euro taxi ride to get across the canal (I've had to do this twice already). There is a huge cafe culture here too, some notable omissions from the menu when compared to the Amsterdam coffee shops though. Spring has most definitely sprung this week - it's 16 degrees in belgium today and just about T-shirt weather, but i'm hoping the weather breaks after we sail - i want to see what an atlantic storm is like from the safety of of a 30000 ton ship :-) Provided of course that it's nothing like the film Perfect Storm. The schedule has been revised somewhat, and we are due to leave Antwerp tomorrow lunch time, bound for Hamburg. A day unloading there and then on to Lisbon. Another day in port there, and then Walvis Bay, Namibia, before finally getting to Cape Town around the 5th of April. Kathy has been remarkably good humoured about all the changes to the schedule (we are trying to plan a holiday in Cape Town for when I arrive) and observed that we seem to have moved 200 years into the past, the days when you had to turn up in a port and wait for the ship to put to sea. That pretty much summarises how I feel now, thankfully this time isn't eating into my annual leave.

My health is not yet back up to 100%, so the decision on whether or not to do the cycle from Cape Town to Malawi is still up in the air. Thanks to all the offers of sposorship that I have received so far. I have setup a justgiving page for collecting offers of sponsorship, but I've decided to hold off asking until I know that I am actually capable of completing the task! In the meantime, if you would be interested in sponsoring me, then please take a minute to check out the work of the beneficiaries Practical Action and World Land Trust.

That's all for now folks. If we have time for a shore leave in Lisbon, I'll try and post something then.