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Did you know you can still travel across the ocean as a passenger on a boat?

PhillyB

By PhillyB,
in Huddle Lounge

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PhillyB Grand Master

PhillyB

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3k for 21 days includes the insurance for being on a cargo ship (passengers have been injured on deck before, as it's a work environment, and the coverage is at a premium.) the total covers all meals as well.

a few years ago you could've nabbed something like that for a grand or less... demand has driven up the cost. There are only a few cabins available on this things, and people are starting to hear about it and sign up. It's a bit eccentric but a lot of people long to be able to travel by ocean again, and the days of passenger-carrying steamers are long gone. i am one of those people (and i have been ever since i read moby dick when i was eight.)

also these companies are based in Europe, which makes it way more expensive for those using the American dollar.

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PhillyB Grand Master

PhillyB

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What it's about... well here's the blog post I put up the other day to announce it

On February 16, 2012 I will embark from the docks in Long Beach, California. I will be a passenger on the German freighter Natalie-Schülte, a container ship bound for Sydney, Australia. I will be at sea for twenty-one days. During this time I intend to write a book.

Earlier this year in Fiji I wrote the following entry in my journal:

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"One often hears of writers that rise and swell with their subject, though it may seem but an ordinary one. How, then, with me, writing of this Leviathan? Unconsciously my chirography expands into placard capitals. Give me a condor's quill! Give me Vesuvius' crater for an inkstand! Friends, hold my arms! For in the mere act of penning my thoughts of this leviathan, they weary me, and make me faint with their outreaching comprehensiveness of sweep, as if to include the whole circle of the sciences, and all the generations of whales, and men, and mastodons, past, present, and to come, with all the revolving panoramas of empire on earth, and throughout the whole universe, not excluding its suburbs. Such, and so magnifying, is the virtue of a large and liberal theme! We expand to its bulk. To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme. No great and enduring volume can ever be written on the flea, though many there be who have tried it..."

-Ishmael, in Moby Dick,

by Herman Melville, 1850

Call me Ishmael, for his sentiment is my own! I do not seek to write of whales, as he - my Leviathan which I cannot pen is my travels, and the vast breadth which the reasons, philosophies, influences, thoughts, fears, wonders, imaginations, whims, terrors, discoveries, revelations, epiphanies, views, awe, persons, histories, languages, and sheer happenstance covers, and is inextricably intertwined with the written expression of the above.

Condor's quill, indeed! Give me several and maybe I'll find a way to begin to begin. Melville's protagonist's musing mirrors mine. I have tried, countless times, to cerebralize the content of that ambiguous, and yet somehow starkly articulate, book which rests barely under the surface of my soul, begging to be penned, meant to be penned, but as yet ineffable.

Organization is as fleeting as Moby Dick; I am Ahab, the ivory stump my motivation, the memory of the thing my drive; and yet that vast white whale eludes me, every time, every chase, through the Caribbean and the Pacific, the China Seas and the Indian Ocean; across these waters I give chase; thar she blows and thar she goes, sounding, gone, harpoons as razors, but virgin steel.

I shall hunt on.

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Unless you've read Moby Dick you probably won't quite grasp all the references there, but you get the idea - much the same as Captain Ahab fruitlessly pursued the great white whale, I have been mulling over how I want to write my book for several years now, always understanding the the core of its substance, but never the whole of it; always hurling my lances, if you will, but never quite hitting target. The journal entry was a reflection of my deep desire to sit down and write about my journey, but my inability to grasp it to the point of actually being able to.

My subject is clear - I want to recapture the magic of my first journey abroad. I want to tell the story of my leaving my world behind and setting off for Australia with a backpack and a bicycle and a thirst for adventure, of my ensuing traipse across the continent, my trek deep into the heart of Southeast Asia. I want to tell the story of my adventure, and I want to use the story as a literary vehicle to explore the greater context in which it stands: questions of existential importance, of our place in this world and what we hold as important and what we fear and what we love.

And that's exactly what this voyage is about. I have found that I cannot simply turn on creativity like a faucet, and I find it nearly impossible to write while I'm distracted with work and other such nuisances; all of my best work has come during journeys, and I expect this to be no different. Much of the book's content is already written; twenty-one days at sea - three weeks of uninhibited creative process - should allow me to finish it.

Needed: prayers, advice, encouragement, input, and volunteers to read copies when I've got the draft done.

Thanks to everyone in advance! and a special thanks to my wife, who continues to be incredibly supportive and unselfish when it comes to my heart for things that occasionally take me on ridiculous adventures.

If that was tl;dr the sum of it is that I'm writing about the initial journey I took several years ago. I sold my poo quit my job and bought a one-way ticket to Australia, wandered around for months with a bicycle and a backpack, ended up in Southeast Asia, got stranded, etc. The book is a recounting of that tale, but will use the story of the journey itself as a literary vehicle to explore greater existential themes.

SoCal to Sydney was the first leg of that original journey... and that's exactly the path I'll be plying in February... so there's something poetic about that that appeals to my sense of things.

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PhillyB Grand Master

PhillyB

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Nah, Philly.

He went to Peru, SE Asia, and now a cross Pacific voyage all without his wife.

He has either a very good, or very bad relationship with the Mrs.

my wife is the poo. our marriage is based around the idea that we are about more than just getting as much out of each other as possible. we love each other but we both have huge things that we feel called to and we support each other in our pursuit of those things. we love each other and make each other better human beings, and we don't want to hinder each other if we can help it.

my wife will be in cambodia for a few weeks around the same time, doing volunteer work with the orphanage that i was working at in Southeast Asia earlier this year.

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