Boyz and their Toyz – a trip to Nacala port

Token boring economic bit (read this only if you are a nerd and/or are bored)

I realized (and blogged) in my early weeks here how money and trade make the world go round. The pursuit of profit, combined with humanity’s insatiable desire for newer and more expensive stuff, has been the driver of economic growth, discovery and development throughout the ages.

Recently I’ve been realizing that shipping is literally the vehicle that enables trade to make the world go round. Many of the countries in the world were only discovered, then colonized, originally for their strategic positioning along trade routes (South Africa being a great example - Australia being an exception!). Hundreds of years later, despite the evolution of the plane, shipping is even more important. Each day, thousands of ships carry thousands of shipping containers each (each container weighing thousands of kilos) to and from the world’s ports to each other – the backbone of our global consumer society.

Seeing the project I’m leading has much to do with export possibilities and import threats, I thought I would grab a car (and a skillful driver – who unfortunately didn’t speak much English, but hey) and head from Nampula to check out Nacala port, the deepest port in the entire world!

(Note: if you (i) are impressed with that fact and (ii) have actually read this bit anyway, you really are a nerd ... welcome!) =)


Everyone else start reading here: 'My shady non-masculine background' (but I’m secure with that)

From an early age, girls have their dolls, boys have their toys: construction trucks, building equipment, cars, other things that move or do stuff. Whilst the cost and the size of the toys change as we get older, us boys (men!) will always have our toys.

However, I was never really like that. Having been given my first computer (an IBM-Compatible XT with 4 colour CGA monitor … oh yeah) at the age of 4, I was never really the “outdoorsy” type (or, in fact, into anything that involved physical exertion, let alone voluntary building construction. Sandpits never did it for me. At all).

As I got older, and the other guys got into fast cars and power tools, well, I didn't. With regards to cars - I didn’t mind what car I drove (I was struggling enough with the driving coordination part) as long as I could play 1980s love songs on a tape/CD player. And power tools and building things – ugh! I loathed every time we bought something from Ikea and I had to do something involving construction with my hands (a special note to my cousin Gonk who somehow managed to get called in to be the ‘foreman’ for most, if not all, of these projects. I love you man!).


But today, I became a man ... (of sorts)

So me being impressed at such a boorish thing as a shipping port might seem highly unlikely. Yet, as I posed as a dodgy Asian importer/exporter in order to get access to the port (complete with fake ID - the only pass we could get had a photo of a black man on it, but no one checked!), I was in awe as I gazed at the sheer size of the operation.

If you ever get to sneak into a port (difficult nowadays with terrorism and everything!), you’ll get an appreciation of just how small we are (even us, um, super sized people). Mazes of 20-ton shipping containers – thousands of them – lie stacked back to back for hundreds of metres, waiting for ships to arrive and pick them up. Enormous cranes carry them on and off.

And the ships! We watched a massive ship, the ‘British Liberty’, carrying hundreds of thousands of tons of diesel, pull towards the port. The biggest ships span some 60 metres beneath sea level (hence the importance of deep ports) ... and this one was huge - 50,000 tonnes, well over a hundred metres long. Watching it slowly drift in was a bit like watching the start of the original Star Wars* - where the first 90 seconds is taken up with this big ship flying over the camera, to the amazement of all us nerds in the cinema ...

Whoa, dude.

Blessings
john

*depending on when you read this, only 42 days to go! =)