Thought Picnic: Being merry on the ferry

Decisions

I finally decided I will travel to Amsterdam late yesterday afternoon rather than postpone once again the appointment I should have had with my medical consultant last month.

In December, one is met with all sorts of choices and the variables are cost, weather and ease of travel. Now, I have at various times used all the forms of travel available between London and Amsterdam by air, by coach, by train and by sea.

The queen’s itinerary

The last time I did the sea crossing was in the summer of 99 when I embarked on a tour of Europe with what was sold as the Imperial Tour and it was London - Budapest - London to be completed within 2 months stopping anywhere along the way for as long as I wanted within that time frame.

I did Amsterdam, Hannover, Berlin, Dresden, Prague, Bratislava, Budapest, Vienna, Salzburg, Innsbruck, Zurich and Brussels, by which time I was no more ready to endure travelling by sea that I took the EuroStar back to London.

I should do it again and get my pictures onto Flickr with blogs of my experiences and insights about all those cities. I think everyone should try an eye-opening voyage of discovery more than once and just take in the beauty of nature, the people, their culture and something new.

Like deja vu

So, back at the Liverpool Street Station ticket office like I did well over a decade ago, I met this helpful lady who told me the choices I had to make between day travel and night travel along with asking if I needed a cabin.

The journey appears to be longer this time, I remember then it was a catamaran that covered the journey from Harwich to Hoek van Holland in 3:45 hours, this time it would be 7 hours and maybe I should have gotten a cabin, but I later got a cabin on the ferry from much less and as a single occupier.

Setting out

I had to catch the 6:38 from Liverpool Street Station which meant I was up from 4:45AM, when I got to Harwich International, the station platform was hardly 500 yards from the ferry itself.

I was waved through, the security checks were hardly fussy, a cursory look into my rucksack - I notice this is the lightest I have ever travelled - none of the crude and music-less stripper acts that we perform at airports, the passport checks without menacing apparatchiks and the baggage check-in done almost too easily for words.

I was beginning to like this as I boarded the ferry, looked around and found a seat. I had bought an inflatable neck pillow; the seats are rarely built to support the neck if you doze off.

Connect to the skies

It was nice to know that one could use wireless internet connectivity on a satellite uplink throughout the journey, it would be slow and multimedia content will be blocked but there was enough bandwidth to surf, use Twitter and send emails.

One should as a matter of course avoid use the exorbitantly priced Mobile Maritime roaming network except in an emergency.

Having not slept that well overnight, I decided on getting a portside cabin. The word posh is apparently an acronym used for passages to India where the well-heeled travelled Portside Out and Starboard Home, if you travelled 'soph' which is by no means an abbreviation of sophisticated you were on the hottest side of the ship because that side faced the sun on the way out and the way back.

In the winter though, on the North Sea, you probably want to get as much light and sun as you can get.

The rest betters the rest

I repaired to my cabin which had a good sized bed, en-suite toilet and shower, a television with a mix of Dutch and English channels, sockets to charge my devices and wireless internet if I needed it.

I must say, apart from the passage of time and it is long, the basic comforts of travelling by ferry beat all the offerings you can have by air which is the shortest in time but most stressful to endure, by train which is longer and quite expensive, by coach which is probably longest in time, cheapest in cost but I will say from experience the most uncomfortable.

Easy for me and easy for her

Taking a shower, I noticed that the showerhead was a Hans Grohe raindance fixture and being cognisant of the tragedy that befell a 46-year old due to overexertion doing the Gangnam Style dance, I wisely moved as carefully and with as minimal exertion as possible, I just let the shower rain on me.

Let us put all disputing aside, I might just take to travelling by ferry on what seems to the calmest of seas I have been on in a very long time. This, my friends is fun and I just made friends with a toddler who is so excited to be travelling to meet her grandparents for Christmas, we all know that air travel is at best tortuous for our really young ones.

We have arrived.

Boats, Threats & Videotape

A voice out of somewhere

“I am coming to you”, Could this be a father saying to his daughter who is distressed at school as a voice of assurance or is it a voice carried in the un-calm winds of the Persian Gulf in the Strait of Hormuz, threatening the existence of a coalition vessel convoy?

No one can say, just as the United States military command in the Gulf cannot now confirm that the video of seemingly or allegedly Iranian speedboats in aggressive posturing to their fleet is the source of that cool but eerily sinister voice.

We have seen boats, threats and videotape – you can make what you want out of both.

Far away war a day

The United States, very far away from home causing enough trouble in the Middle East was in international waters close to the territorial extent of Iran – this was no doubt a recipe for close encounters with their enemy.

The US then released a video of seemingly reckless speedboat riders playing chicken with a belligerent world power – they were at the point of being blown to smithereens when a voice was recorded with this chilling threat.

Iran then released their own video and the storyline takes a completely different course – a calm and collected officer asking about the coalition vessel, definitely not the voice we heard of the US video threat.

The curse of propaganda

If anything, it shows why we need multiple perspectives of any story, because each side had a propaganda element to portray and we are at risk of being persuading of what might be entirely false.

Had Iran not released a video view of their perspective of the incident the US reported, we would have satisfied ourselves with the usual staple of Iran being a lawless, ill-disciplined, faction-ridden theocracy that needs to be blown up to instigate regime change.

The Iranian version of events, though edited for consumption just as the US version was, gives us another pause for thought that Iran might not as horrible as we get told they are – it also shows that we would try to get away with anything, if other parties are not smart enough to take a record of their engagements with the West.

The UFO threat

I find this whole thing utterly reprehensible, I would hate to think that people are manufacturing videos to reflect a situation that does not represent the truth – between the US notion of provocative and Iran notion of routine, there must be something that is closer to the truth.

As the US backtracks about the coincidence of the voice with the appearance of these speedboats which one could almost say are probably Unidentified Floating Objects (UFO) – mirages of the sea – recorded from the fatigued lenses of a battle-weary cameraman and edited by excitable agents for more blood and gore of war.

As this story unravels, I do not think the entire truth would be revealed – however, for the sake of truth, fairness and justice, it is incumbent of all these aspiring Hollywood film-makers to release the entirety of their recordings of the event.

The news wires and channels should also keep out the analysts – at least, give us viewers the opportunity to decide for ourselves who is closer to the truth of the event.

A new premise for war

Beyond this is the opportunity for the US to contend that they have been provoked into attacking Iran having lost the impetus from the recent report that states that Iran has suspended any nuclear weapons development programme for years.

With an admiral suggesting that Iran risks a Gulf conflict, one fears that some activity very similar to the Iraq Dossier on the presence of Weapons of Mass Destruction on which the war in Iraq was based but found to be groundless is being orchestrated to justify an unjustifiable attack on Iran – someone is fanning the embers of discord and one wonders who.

More so, having failed to execute the war in Iraq with finesse, or handle the issues in Afghanistan with a conclusion in sight; it is contemptible that a new set of planners are probably trying to see if another war in Iran can be a lessons-learnt success to redeem the supremacy and credibility of the United States.

Perish the thought, but let it pass your mind for a second!

Both pieces of footage