November 12 – Dockside in Kwangyang, South Korea

We slipped out of Busan last night. When I woke at 0600 and peered through my window, I was excited by the profusion of ship and navigation lights and black clumps of land strewn to port and starboard. A real change after dawn’s early blankness on the open ocean the last two weeks. We were approaching the port of Kwangyang through a small coastal archipelago.

I put on my running gear and head down to the gym on C deck. On the “Kettler Satura E” elliptical machine, sweat dripping onto the console, I stride with my legs and push the “ski poles” back and forth. Out the window I see the very first edges of daylight on the Korean coast.  The effort turns into a 6k time trial, of course. I’ve made note of the result and can beat it. But only by upping the cadence and making myself look even more ridiculous.

Breakfast is another rare thing – literally. Beef tartare is a uniquely German concoction consisting of a plate of raw ground beef (think of it as cow sushi), with an egg yolk plopped on top, chopped onions, and capers. If you’re revolted, then you’re not German, for it is truly awesome with toast and tea. In between mouthfuls the officers start rhapsodizing about the jams and preserves they make at home and how they only buy locally-grown produce. Considering that the Hanjin Copenhagen, right now, is probably unloading potatoes from Portland, the irony is not lost on me.

It’s warm and sunny, so I go outside to read “For Whom the Bell Tolls” to its inevitably tragic conclusion. I pull out a molded plastic chair, set it so I can rest my feet on the railing, and look out at the harbour. It’s an odd setting in which to delve into a world of Spanish Civil War partisans, bullfights, and torrid passion. There’s the ship’s oily-metally whiff, the loud, hollow whoosh from the engine room, and the whirr and bang of the Gantry cranes as they pick up the containers. Our load has been lightened and Hanjin Copenhagen looks like a poorly-eaten corncob. Great gaps open up as I peer all the way down to the bottom of the hold, eight stories deep. Writing today, after finishing a Hemingway, is humbling.

We head into the East China Sea tonight.