Taking a slow boat from China

    

The Huangpu River and skyline of Shanghai.

Aboard a cargo ferry in the East China Sea, Stephen Phelan finds himself sleeping with a floating league of nations.

My father was a sailor, although none of his ships had actual sails. He operated radar and radio equipment aboard ocean-going tankers, each one the size of a small town, delivering crude oil through the Panama Canal, into the Persian Gulf, around the Cape of Good Hope. He would come home for a few months after six or more away and tell stories that gave me a fantastical impression of his workplace. On his off days, he would admit there was precious little romance left in the life of a mariner.

"A modern fleet of ships," wrote Joseph Conrad, one of several authors I later came to love for their first-hand accounts of earlier mercantile voyages, "does not so much make use of the sea as exploit a highway." This strikes me as particularly true in Shanghai harbour this morning, where traffic on the Huangpu River is so heavy that it takes us hours to reach open water

Before we began the two-day crossing to Osaka, Japan, I climbed on the deck of Su Zhou Hao, a ferry that also functions as a cargo vessel, to watch the containers being loaded. And I stay up here during our passage through the biggest and busiest port in the world. The view is spectacularly ugly. Behind us is the old city, half-destroyed by Japanese bombers in World War II, and the new, being restacked with futurist skyscrapers.

Ahead is an industrial underworld of vast dry docks, flying sparks and smokestacks, with tugboats and barges swarming around us, driving our captain to honk his horn like a short-fused motorist. The sky is low and heavy with petrochemical rain clouds.

Off to starboard, on a huge and half-built freighter suspended in mid-air between two titanic cranes, I spy a lone engineer standing under a pink umbrella. I wave to him and he waves back, which fills me with a sudden glee and fellow feeling. And a good day to you, my communist friend! Beyond all this, at last, is the East China Sea.

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