As I waited in
line in the duty free shop holding my bottle of Irish Whiskey,
the ferry hit a particularly large wave and we pitched up
to a 90 degree angle (it felt like it anyway), sending bottles
literally flying off the shelves into a cacophony of breaking
glass. In a couple of instants, the room filled up with the
odours of every kind of liquor imaginable, and the staff scurried
to close the store and begin cleaning up. Why the shelves
were not secured in some way to prevent this has never been
clear to me. I was on an overnight ferry from Cherbourg, France
to Rosslare, Ireland, and at that moment, I instantly felt
quite lucky that I hadn’t waited an extra few minutes
to hit the duty free.
Travelling is
such a wonderful experience – we discover so many things
about the world, and ourselves, from literally putting ourselves
physically into new environments that facilitate direct contact
with different peoples, languages, cultures, geographies,
architectures, cuisines, environments etc. The world is a
beautiful place. And of all the ways to travel, surface is
the most amazing way to do it. Trains, boats, buses and cars
all give us a chance to see how things are actually interconnected
over time and space. We would all agree that however practical
teleportation (air travel) is to get from point A to B, it
rarely lends itself to an edifying travel experience.
That crossing
was quite an adventure for me. It was long, leaving in the
evening and arriving the next morning, charting a course around
the Island of Great Britain, through the Irish Sea to Ireland.
Some time after we left France, while it was still light,
the seas began to toss and turn. As it got dark, it was getting
very, very rough. People began to get seasick and were running
into the bathrooms to throw up. I even recall some people
not making it to the toilets, and there was vomit on the floor,
usually near the bathrooms LOL; I remember one guy letting
it out just as he was approaching the bathroom door. I suppose
I have a strong stomach, I felt OK, and I passed my time drinking
pints of Guinness, talking to a heavy-set, middle-aged Irishman
I met in the bar, who seemed familiar with the area. It was
instructive to me that even he seemed quite uneasy at the
state of the sea. I recall him saying things like “Let’s
hope we can make it back to Ireland in these waters.”
In the end, of
course, we made it. The next interesting thing to happen was
at Irish customs; I was going through it with some other travellers.
As a young Canadian, I had made friends with a couple of others,
a few of whom were young Americans. We went through, and the
Irish Immigration people took one of them aside for extra
questioning. After about 20 minutes, he emerged, and looked
pale, and was shaking. When he rejoined us, he explained what
had happened: “From the stamp in my passport, the guy
saw I had been in Holland, and started asking me about Amsterdam
and the hash bars. At one point, he said: ’Look, we
know you have some drugs on you, we will go easy on you if
you just give it up now.’ and I kept telling them, ‘no
I don’t.’” The poor kid. I have often wondered
what prompted Immigration to interrogate him: were they convinced
that he was smuggling something? Did they do it just to torture
a poor American kid, for a laugh?
Another great
boat journey was in the Caribbean, and it also had some interesting
immigration issues. It was from San Juan, Puerto Rico to Santo
Domingo, Dominican Republic, and back. Leaving San Juan there
was a long corridor out to board the boat, which had exit
control, which is common in many parts of the world, though
not common in North America where the country you are leaving
wants to check you. I approached, and the US Homeland Security
agent took my passport and looked at it quizzically. At the
ferry terminal in San Juan, the agent probably spends his
days stamping the same two passports over and over: US and
Dominican. All of a sudden, here was a guy with a different
one. It may well have been the first time he had interacted
with a Canadian, since the ferry is mostly used by Dominicans
living in Puerto Rico as a low cost means of transport home
and back. He flipped through the pages of my passport, and
then, as he got to the end, asked me, sounding surprised:
“Sir, ‘where’ did you ‘enter’
the United States?” Then it hit me! Most people with
foreign passports fly into an American airport, and thus have
a US Homeland Security stamp. I had driven from my home in
Montreal to the US border, crossed, then continued on to Florida,
through a blazing heatwave, with no AC in my Dodge.
Then, after leaving
my car at a friend’s workplace in Miami, I’d flown
to San Juan, Puerto Rico, which is, of course, a domestic
flight, as Puerto Rico is an ‘associated state’
of the United States. Because I had entered by land from Canada
and I am a Canadian, there was no passport stamp. This is
totally normal procedure, but it was causing trouble for this
border agent who wanted to discern where I had entered his
country. At that moment, I honestly could not remember the
name of the US border station. (It is near Lacolle, Québec).
So I told him: “What’s the name there, you drive
south on Autoroute 15 to the border that goes into New York
State, to Interstate 87, what’s it called . . . “
then it hit me: Champlain, New York. This seemed to assuage
the agent, and I had a flash in my mind of him studying to
become a US Homeland Security Agent watching a training video
on all the points of entry into the US, and learning their
names. He clearly had no idea about Quebec or New York State,
they were just places on a map to him. In any case, he let
me pass.
The voyage was
mostly uneventful: Dominicans were dancing to Bachata (a Dominican
form of music) in a main room where there was a bar. People
seemed to be having a good time. When it got dark, I decided
to go topside. As I put on a sweatshirt, the friend with whom
I was travelling looked at me strangely. After we got outside,
I realized why: even though it was dark and we were on the
open sea, it must have been 30 degrees Celsius. I had only
ever taken ferries in much colder parts of the world, where
when you go out on deck at night you have to dress appropriately.
The return voyage
also had some interesting immigration oddities. Leaving Santo
Domingo, a corpulent Dominican border agent, doing exit control,
looked at my passport. He smiled and looked at me, and asked
in accented English: “Canadian? Where are you from in
Canada?” “Montreal . . .” I replied. It
occurred to me at that this border agent may never have seen
a Canadian before, like the US Homeland Security agent in
San Juan. “OK,” he continued, “please remind
me where exactly is Quebec in Montreal? I haven’t looked
at a map in a while.’”I paused at the question,
since it was utterly illogical: Quebec is not in Montreal,
Montreal is in Quebec. I immediately had a flash suspicion
that he may have been testing me to see if I was who I said
I was. It turns out I was probably right. I answered, carefully:
“Umm, well, I’m not sure I understand the question,
sir, Quebec is not in Montreal, Montreal is in Quebec. Quebec
is the province, sir, like a US state.” At that, his
face broke into a smile, and he said: “Have a great
journey to Puerto Rico, señor.”
After docking
in San Juan, we walked off the boat towards US customs and
immigration. As with many points of entry into the United
States, there were two lines, each with a sign: ‘US
Citizens Only’ and ‘Non-US Citizens.’ As
I approached and saw what was happening, I realized the signs
might as well have read: ‘Puerto Ricans’ and ‘Dominicans.’
As the Puerto Ricans (US citizens) breezed by, practically
waving their US passports, I, as a non-US citizen, got into
the ‘Dominican’ line, and resigned myself to a
long wait, which turned out to be three hours.
What struck me
as almost surreal was that everyone around me was speaking
only Spanish. Everyone was Hispanic: obviously the Dominicans,
but also all of the US Homeland Security agents were all speaking
Spanish, not English, which struck me as interesting when
I looked at their uniforms and the huge Homeland Security
logo on the wall behind the booth. Their uniforms were identical
to those worn at any airport or when I cross the border into
New York State – the wings of the Homeland Security
insignia, and of course the insignia was in English. As well,
they were just as cranky as any US border agents towards the
non-US citizens. It’s almost as if they regarded the
Dominicans even more negatively ‘because’ of the
similarity: they too were Hispanic. At one point, one guard
came out of the booth to literally yell at a few people in
line not far in front of me, chastising entirely in Spanish,
of course, for what seemed to be a relatively minor transgression.
I might be reading too much into it psychologically, but many
have observed the interesting phenomenon in social hierarchies
that when people are similar in ethnic or linguistic background,
but of different legal status, those at the top invariably
want to make their advantage known. Either way, it was very
interesting introduction to the importance of class in Latin
America.
In East Asia,
I took a ferry from Sokcho, South Korea to Zarubino, Russian
Far East (part of a longer journey – Seoul, South Korea
to Bordeaux, France – no airplanes, but that is a story
for another article). That was a mostly uneventful journey,
also an overnighter, and it got colder as we went north. I
spent my time drinking and talking to some of the oddball
people on the boat: one Russian couple who were very friendly,
a Turkish guy who, for reasons entirely unclear to me, lived
in the Russian Far East. I remember when we started talking
about Russia and that it actually stretched all the way to
Europe, he said: “Russia is half of world.”
Another
ferry I took in that part of the world was from Busan, South
Korea to Hiroshima, Japan, another overnight journey. I woke
up early, watched the sun come up. It was a beautiful morning
and the boat glided along the mostly deserted and forested
low mountains of that part of Japan. That struck me as noteworthy,
since Japan is thought to be so heavily populated: here is
an archipelago of islands slightly smaller in size than California
or Norway, with a population of 125 million people. Yet here
was what appeared to be a great coastal forest that took us
several hours to pass before arriving at the port of Hiroshima.
Another life changing
event happened later when I discovered the beautiful city
of Hiroshima in full cherry blossom season. I think I had
expected to see much more evidence of the nuclear explosion.
To be sure, there is some evidence: the building over which
the bomb detonated is still intact, amazingly (the blast seems
to have rained down all around it, destroying everything else)
they have left it pretty much as is: windows broken and blasted
debris fallen onto the grass. 
But
the fenced in edifice is entirely intact; it is quite a beautiful
19th century building, designed by a Czech architect). But
overall, it is a stunningly beautiful city that I never would
have guessed had had such a calamity befall it in the previous
century.
At the museum
dedicated to the terrible event of the dropping of the nuclear
bomb, I held back tears looking at all the horrific things
that occurred. Though I also learned that at one point, not
long after the disaster, a group of scientific experts went
to the city to study the effects. After they concluded their
research, they then declared that nothing would grow in that
area for at least 75 years. As it happened, the ‘following’
spring (1946) flowers sprouted, and the natural environment
repaired itself in very short order. This fact, as well as
actually visiting that city, was life-changing to me: no matter
how bad we think an all out nuclear exchange might be, the
disastrous effects would mostly be to ‘us.’ Nature
would just pick up the pieces and keep on evolving. It was
a lesson in humility, and how as humans, we tend to overestimate
our impact and importance.
Finally, there
were my ferry experiences in my own country of Canada. On
a roadtrip with my father to the former Viking settlement
in L’anse aux Meadows, Newfoundland, we had to take
three ferries: one from Cape Breton, Nova Scotia to Port-aux-Basques,
Nfld, the next was from St Barbe, Nfld, to Blanc Sablon, Quebec
where we continued by land into Labrador. The road from there
‘only’ goes to Labrador. From that point, the
only communications back west to the rest of Quebec are by
boat. At that time (Mid-2000s) the Trans-Labrador Highway
was not completed, so after a long drive from Blanc Sablon
we had to board another ferry from Cartwright, Labrador, through
a very deep fjord to Happy Valley Goose Bay, Labrador. The
first and last ferries were overnighters; the one to Blanc
Sablon was relatively short, only about an hour or two.
On the boat to
Newfoundland from Nova Scotia, topside, I spent some time
talking to some kids who had travelled all across Canada from
Alberta – their parents were there working on the oil
patch (Alberta Tar Sands – petroleum extraction). There
is a very long tradition of Newfoundlanders migrating to other
parts of the country to work, yet they maintain strong ties
to their homeland. I also remember a very festive atmosphere
on the boat – traditional Newfoundland folk music and
people laughing and drinking. It was somewhat similar to the
Dominicans on the boat from Puerto Rico, and for the same
reasons. For one thing, people are often happy to go home,
so that would lead to a festive atmosphere. As well, both
peoples are using boats as a lower cost form of transport
to get home by people who migrate to find work. For an entire
family, it actually may make sense economically to drive all
the way across Canada and then take the ferry than it is to
fly, especially if the destination is in a remote part of
Newfoundland. On the short crossing to Blanc Sablon, we watched
as a porpoise did pirouettes for about half the crossing alongside
the boat. My father said at one point: “He’s having
a great time. He’s showing off to us,” which may
well have been the case, such animals are pretty intelligent
and seem to socialize with us in different ways.
As I stated at
the start, experience has taught me that travelling surface
is the most rewarding means to encounter the world. These
boat voyages shaped me, as have other long road and rail trips,
which could be the subject of a future article. Also, there
are a number of ferries I still dream about. One is across
the Black Sea: there are several ferries from Varna, Bulgaria
to the Ukraine and even to Georgia. There is also one from
Odessa, Ukraine to Istanbul and several fascinating crossings
in the culturally rich Mediterranean. Suffice to say, the
world and all its variety is inexhaustible and there’s
nothing more satisfying than discovering it.
LIKEVILLE PODCAST: JOHN
HAMER INTERVIEWS JASON MCDONALD
By
Jason McDonald:
Montreal:
A Love Story
You Son of a Hippie
