An Ocean Voyage.

[devi]

I'm in a cosy living-room in Dublin with inannajones, thesis-typing, and a cat, sleeping. And an open fire. And it is good. Would that it could stay that way. But it's back to the UK and the Real World (ie work-hunting) soon. Bah. I have no idea about anything and am waiting for the Heavens to Send Me a Sign or something.

Writing is going okay-ish; I'm about 6000 words behind, but I'll make it up (I will, I will). I am now thinking of Angels' Prey as Fish In The Sky until I think of something better, because it makes me laugh and think of Eddie Izzard trying to sing the US national anthem.

Last night we went to see Neil Gaiman being interviewed for RTE Radio. Now I'm not the swooning fangirl I was ten years ago when I started reading Sandman (= started reading comics) but I enjoyed it hugely all the same. He has great anecdotes, well told, and does a hilarious impression of Alan Moore, and there was something distinctly eldritch about him intoning a description of Destiny under a full moon. And his advice for aspiring writers has sent me into a frenzy of enthusiasm.

But back to the trip. Kyoto pictures will be next, but first I have to tell you about The Bit on the Boat between China and Japan...

*

4th-6th October

My brother and I are the only ones on the deck of the Su Zhou Hao, the ferry that runs between Shanghai and Osaka. We have the ship almost to ourselves. For hours now Japan has been creeping up on us and reaching out its islands to embrace us. The ship is sailing past the top of Kyushu, the southernmost island. We’ve been up here watching the scenery roll by, muffled up against the warm but damp and insistent wind. We can see mountains, with drifting threads of fog in their valleys, and the occasional house with its own little sea pier and a plume of smoke rising. Now the boat enters a narrow, wooded strait. Far away we can see a string of blinking red lights in the dusk. It grows gradually into a huge, graceful suspension bridge, hundreds of feet high, connecting two islands. We sail beneath it as traffic twinkles past above. “Well, hello, Japan,” Ivan says.


The voyage takes two days. You board on a Tuesday morning at a ramshackle port in Shanghai, where you pay a departure tax of 22 yen, or about 250 yuan, and they process you through draughty security halls which feature a “Passage for Helping the Old and the Weak” and the worst. duty-free. ever, with a meagre scattering of dusty, sticky-looking liqueur bottles. We hadn’t been able to get tickets in advance and we’d been worried, but maybe because of the national holiday, there were only a handful of other people waiting with us.

There are large dormitories (sleeping 36) and shared cabins for six or four, but Ivan and I, after all the struggles of Shanghai, had decided to splash out on a two-person ensuite cabin. It wasn’t that much more money, and when else would we have the chance to go on a two-day sea voyage? I thought it would still be pretty spartan, but when I saw the cabin I had to pick up my jaw. It was bigger than some flats I’ve lived in and had a proper sit-down bath (though now I think about it, trying to have a shower in the heavy seas ahead would have been the stuff of comedy. The sort of comedy that involves lots of injury). It had not only two good big beds but a sofa, a DVD player and widescreen TV, and a huge window. We’d had several days of non-stop admin and communication hassles, and knowing that we’d made it on to the boat and we could relax here in this cosy place for two days was bliss. We spent the first half-hour or so just bouncing around the cabin and going “This is so cool!” Outside, the banks of the Huangpu River – with their cross-hatched docking cranes, barges full of concrete and sand, and villages of houseboats lashed together with ropes – were sliding by.



It takes at least two hours to sail down the Huangpu to the sea. It’s a busy river; watching the other watergoing traffic is fascinating. China is all happening as fast as it possibly can, in a headlong dash to build and modernise, and here you can see that. You can feel the frenetic busyness wafting from every boat loaded with raw materials. But it’s nice, on the serenely gliding ferry after a couple of weeks in China, to know you don’t have to be frenetically busy yourself.

China falls away into the distance, but until afternoon the water around the boat is still brown, as you sail down the plume of sediment the massive Huangpu pumps out into the sea. Then you’re out in proper sea, wide-open water, and the heavy weather begins. I thought I’d been on rough seas, but compared to here the Irish Sea is a slightly wrinkly postage stamp, and the wind is rushing in right off the Pacific, and great big scooping troughs and hills start to form in the water. That first evening, walking around the ship as it plunged forwards and rolled sideways was far too much of a challenge, even with the temptation of sake and beer. All I was good for was lying on my bed watching DVDs (My Neighbour Totoro, Frank Zappa claymation madness, old Hitchcock movies – I love you, o pirate DVDs of China). That alone – having the DVD player – is a reason to get the luxury cabin. Sometimes, when the screen was leaping about too much to focus on, I’d watch the lights outside the window. Even way out here in open water, we were on a sort of seagoing motorway, and other ships travelled – faint like mirages or ghosts – alongside us all through the night.
I went to sleep to escape the queasiness, then some time around 2am I woke up because everything had become still. We’d moved into the wind shadow of Japan, though it would be a long time before it was visible, and from there on the voyage was a quiet, graceful glide on calm water.



Food on the boat is unremarkable but okay. Breakfast is free, but weird. By the end of the stay in Japan I was used to being given stuff for breakfast that would fit in better at dinner, but on the boat I was puzzled by the savoury chopped vegetable stuff and the pickles. There isn’t much of a lunch/dinner menu, but it’s good and wholesome and not too expensive by Japanese standards, though it stung a bit after China. It’s made up of good, filling Japanese staples – ramen, udon, curry in strong meaty sauce, katsu-don (mmm, katsu-don). Mealtimes are pretty strict – breakfast’s from 7.30 to 9, lunch is from 1 to 2.30 and dinner from 6pm, and if you show up any other time you’ll find the restaurant locked. If you find yourself in this desperate situation, there’s a vending machine with three kinds of instant noodles. And another one with the aforementioned sake and beer.



Whenever I’ve been on ferries before there’ve been screens all over the place blasting Sky News or the sort of movies I’d rather pull my nails out than watch. On the Su Zhou Hao they show a couple of movies a day in the TV room, but mostly you have to entertain yourself, and that’s the way I like it. There’s a common reading room at the front of the ship (which we immediately started thinking of as “Ten-Forward”), which serves coffee if you’re lucky enough to be there during one of the brief windows of coffee-serving. It’s got a good view, but all the books and magazines are in Chinese or Japanese, so I left a bookcrossing book there. It’s by an Irish writer too – The Biography of Desire by Mary Dorcey. I hope some other English-speaker is glad to find it amid the sea of hanzi and kanji. There’s a half-hearted fruit machine room too, but by far the most entertaining thing on the boat is the constantly updating navigation display showing the sea charts of wherever you are. It’s particularly cool when you’re weaving your way among the little islands.

I spent a lot of the second day sitting in the lobby learning hiragana and what felt like hundreds of kanji, driven by grim determination not to be as helpless in Japan as I’d been in China. After several hours peering at the small print of my book and trying to see if some character had four horizontal strokes or three, my eyes were actually bloodshot and hurting. That was when Ivan came along and said “Look! It’s Japan!”

And so it was. A sharp zigzag line on the horizon, the steep mountains of the islands. I sat in Ten-Forward and watched it grow. Finally, when my brain would hold not a single kanji more, we went up on the windy deck, passed underneath the first bridge and watched in fascination as our final destination, our last country of the journey, rose up around us.

In the evening I redyed my hair and Ivan shaved his all off, despite my weeping for his mohawk. Then (hoping they wouldn’t notice the faint blue stain I’d left on the bathtub, whoops) we went back up on deck.



It was dark by then and we were in the Inland Sea, the island-filled waters in the middle of Japan, between Honshu and Shikoku. The many bridges looked like garlands of fairy lights. Near and far there were populated islands, ribboned with roads. Once I saw a train, like a necklace of tiny jewels, weaving along the coast of an island before disappearing into the dark woods. Then there were the dark islands where nobody lived, creeping stealthily between us and the lit ones so you could only tell their shape by the lights that were blotted out in the distance. Other ships floated nearby, streaking the water with the reflections of their bright windows. Lighthouses blinked out of phase with each other. Every passage between islands had a big flashing sign with an arrow or a message to listen to VHF channel 16 for shipping news. It was in English and Japanese and even though it didn’t exactly take much figuring out, I actually squealed when I recognised the kanji for “listen”. The warm wind was still blowing, so much air pouring past us. When I’d stopped with the squealing (I admit, the whole time in Japan I was a language-geeking bore) we just stood there and watched it all moving for a long time, in silence. We saw cities – clumps of skyscrapers, just flecks on the horizon. The next morning, Thursday at 9pm, we'd be docking in Osaka. In one way I wanted to float there forever, in another I couldn’t wait to get ashore.