alien corn

And so suddenly, it’s all over. As we plunged into a week of action, time telescoped in both directions – crawling while waiting for something (anything!) to happen, but also hurtling forward to the abrupt end of my time on the Esperanza. Where the hell have the last six weeks gone?

A few brief snatches from the memory banks: dashing across Dumai harbour in the inflatables to scrawl slogans on the side of palm oil tankers; the agonising waiting, first for our ship to come in, and then for the big finale to kick off; eyeing up the blackboard in the mess for news, some news, any news!; the pervading smell of rancid palm oil which coated me for hours after hauling the mooring lines into place and being plastered in rancid palm oil mud; standing on the bridge deck watching our ship battle two tugs to return to the dock, while a huge tanker was moved into place, a real race against time and all I could do was watch.

There was also a growing realisation that, on the ship, we’re pretty much isolated from what people on the ground really feel. But a couple of incidents – one of the land team based in Dumai being threatened; a man on the dockside standing on one of the mooring lines to prevent the ship from moving, and being extremely angry in the doing of it – brought it home. I’m an outsider and, while I get caught up in the excitement of being all daring on a Greenpeace ship, I’m just here for the duration of the campaign. I have a grasp on the situation as seen through the lens of reports and press releases, but no on-the-ground experience.

And so to Singapore. As someone said to me, it’s like a theme park, or one of those alien civilisations the Star Trek crew beam down to with immaculately manicured lawns and no litter. We’ve been stationed in Little India which is great from an eating and drinking point of view, and it actually smells like India. But along with the incense and spice, now I know what to look for the sweet waft of refining palm oil still comes through.

Leaving the ship was, for a few hours, like having a limb cut off. Along with the realisation that I was no longer encased in a floating steel bubble and had the freedom to do whatever the hell I liked (in accordance with Singapore’s many legal codes, of course), I’d also lost the social circle I’ve had for the past six weeks. It was made worse by working in a chilly, air-conditioned hotel lobby on my lonesome all day Monday (not to mention the cack-up with my immigration papers, or lack of them, causing endless fun when I tried to get into Singapore), but one last bout of shore leave had some of us reuniting in a dingy backpacker pub.

(Technically, I was the only one doing the reuniting, but it’s my perspective that counts here.)

The problem with working on a website all day is that, when I finally manage to finish, the last thing I want to do is go and work on my own one. So no updates for two weeks.

We crossed a time zone the other night. As we sailed westwards, sunset slipped progressively later. In Jayapura, it was almost bang on 6pm; by Wednesday, it had slid to 7pm. Then we crossed into GMT+8 and everything’s back as it was. And we’ve been passing islands and seas with the most bewitching names – Flores, Butu, Ceram, Halmahera – which evoke the spice trade.

But going back further, I was glad to arrive in Manokwari. The daily routine of chopper flights in the morning and afternoon was getting, well, routine. The stop in Manokwari meant an end to the flights for the time being and some public events, with the chance to meet and talk to people from outside the ship. It’s amazing how quickly a confined space becomes your entire world, and how rapidly it becomes all you know. Plus several people disembarked: some were going home, others were heading to Jakarta for a long planning meeting and we’ll catch up with them next week.

I met a Dutch couple who had grown up in Papua (or Dutch New Guinea as it was then) who were appalled at how things had changed and how the environment was being trashed. They were Greenpeace supporters who had made a beeline for the ship. I also had my photograph taken more times than I can count by the various volunteers who manned the open boat session and it was a relief when they finally left the ship.

Sunday is a day of rest, and a few of us were ferried over to a small island in Manokwari Bay for some time on the beach. The crystal water concealed fields of coral rubble so I can only imagine what the sealife must have been like in years gone by. I did spot some really freaky creatures though: a long, textured tube with black and white checkered markings; a coiled-up starfish that wasn’t a starfish as it must have had fifty arms; a tiny black sea slug with electric blue markings. Usnea and Silas, two of the deckhands, later showed us some pictures of a fish they’d seen and Kelly (our resident spear-fisherman) confirmed it was a dangerous one. Probably a lion fish. How we laughed.

With campaign work effectively suspended for the transit to Jakarta, I thought I wouldn’t have enough web work to keep me occupied, so I volunteered to help out on deck. To be honest, it was a relief to be doing something physical despite the sweltering heat and I did a fair bit of painting bulkheads. But somehow my real work seems to multiply – I think the tasks I set myself breed like rabbits when I’m not looking – and I had to cry off the deck work. My excuses sounded a bit feeble, and I think a lot of people wonder what I do all day. Sometimes, I wonder the same thing as my task list doesn’t seem to get any shorter.

I am, however, learning heaps, such as:

• how not to shoot a video in two languages;
• how not to dub a video into English to try and repair the initial mistake;
• how not to record interviews in another language, thinking I can just edit them willy nilly;
• how not to include idioms and cultural references which are completely pointless outside of the English language;
• how not to handle toxic ship paint with my bare hands;

and so much more.

Some really cool things from last night: me and Locky the bosun won the ship quiz (a bottle of Jacob’s Creek was our booty); the bioluminescent dinoflagellates exploding in the ship’s wake, like a fiery nebula; the lights of Borneo to starboard, Bali to port, sunk beneath the horizon but reflecting on the low cloud.

And the whales from a few days ago. No one is sure, but they could have been fin whales. Second largest creature on the planet. We spotted a commotion in the water, schools of fish flapping about near the surface. Occasionally, spouts of water would rocket up and huge jaws broke the surface to scoop up the fish. Unreal.

Read Black Swan Green, which contains David Mitchell’s customary hallmarks, but sadly narrow in scope compared to his previous novels. Embarking on Divided Kingdom which I found in the ship’s library. Rupert Thomson’s fantastic scenarios often seem ludicrous but hide tightly-woven and sinster analogies, so I’m expecting good things.