The Container Ship stamp is based on an undated photograph of the R.J. Pfeiffer, a modern container ship launched in 1992 and operated by Matson Navigation Company. Container ships, pioneered in the 1950s, are key to today’s global economy, carrying manufactured goods worldwide across the oceans and exemplifying the modern merchant marine.
After a cursory search, it appears that the stamp’s illustration was based on a photo from the International Organization of Masters, Mates & Pilots website, bridgedeck.org.
R.J. Pfeiffer rounding Diamond Head, “a volcanic tuff cone on the Hawaiian island of O’ahu.”
My walk to work takes me through a lively cross-section of San Francisco: down Fillmore and Church, then across the Mission on 18th Street all the way to Folsom. The beauty below caught my eye a few days ago, and reminded me how I used to walk to work with my camera on the off-chance I’d stumble upon something interesting (even after walking the same route, day after day). So this morning I decided to resuscitate the old habit.
Texas pride can be a little over the top sometimes, so when I saw a steak in the shape of Texas on the side of an H-E-B semi-trailer the other day, I had to get a photo of it. I was driving at the time, so I asked Stephanie to snap these out the window for me (with her original iPhone). It was only after passing the truck that we realized the entire ad was a barbecue-rific recreation of the Texas Flag, complete with “lone star” tongs. Absolutely brilliant!
Booking passage on a container ship should have entailed 28 days without internet. But on a whim I looked into satellite phones and discovered that I could rent a “satellite modem” to access the internet anywhere in the world (except the poles). While using it to blog aboard the Cap Cleveland, someone I didn’t know stumbled upon my dispatches and posted a series of links to MetaFilter. As it happens, the MetaFilter post got picked up and “syndicated” by a regional portal of the New York Times. An online communications specialist in Auckland, New Zealand, who monitors such things, stumbled upon the link and followed it to my blog. When she discovered I was going to be landing in Auckland in a few weeks, she left a comment offering to host us for dinner. I reached out to her before we landed and made plans to meet up. (Sound familiar?) When we finally got together, we met her housemate, who told us about her travels earlier in the year: a months long “overland” trip across Africa using a UK-based company called Oasis.
It’s astounding in retrospect how these trivial, circuitous events can combine to alter the course of our lives.
“An overland trip across Africa.” Our curiosity was piqued. At that point we’d only been in New Zealand a week. We didn’t have a clue what we planned to do there, let alone after. When we started looking at Oasis’ website a few weeks later, we were seduced. We’d just begun the spontaneous, go-where-the-spirit-takes-us part of our trip, and we were already finding ourselves challenged by the constant decision-making. The promise of a voyage where everything is figured out for us, and miraculously at a price within our budget, was tantalizing. We wanted to visit Africa as part of this adventure, if possible, and the concept of budget overland travel (which we’d never heard of) sounded like a great way to cover ground in a region that was less backpacker-friendly than, say, Southeast Asia.
On the other hand, we were wary of having commitments in the future weighing on our present decision-making. We wanted our itinerary to be open to the people we meet and the things we learn along the way (even at the cost of having to make all our decisions on the spot). So we put off the overland idea until such time as we found ourselves closer to Africa, assuming that both we and our budget lasted that long.
That time turned out to be February, as we were rounding Southeast Asia and thinking about our onward travel plans. Looking again at the available overland trips, we scaled back our ambitions from a 3 month expedition across Africa (several months of independent travel made us wary of being in close contact with others) to a 3 week jaunt from Kenya to Rwanda and back called Gorillas & Gameparks—which we augmented with the incomparable Maasai Mara safari.
Map of the Gorillas & Gameparks route
Part II
What is this overland travel of which you speak? First, a photo.
It wasn’t until we saw the third or fourth person riding a scooter with an umbrella (on our first afternoon in Luang Prabang, Laos) that we realized it was “a thing”. It wasn’t raining—the umbrellas were simply shade from the sun. Often if two people were riding, the person in back would hold the umbrella for the person in front. We were completely charmed.
A few days later I went out in the afternoon, with the sun beating down, to take a few shots. I realized then it wasn’t just scooters with umbrellas—people on bicycles rode with umbrellas too.
It’s 32°C: do you wear a sweatshirt hood or carry an umbrella?Bicycles with matching umbrellas, too cuteHolding an umbrella and purse while scooting
