70000 miles, or more technically 70000 nautical miles, is just short of three times the distance around the equator. By land, that is as many miles as most people drive in over 5 years. When Magellan's fleet circumnavigated the earth, the 18 surviving men sailed for nearly three years... to sail only just over half as many miles. More, it's just short of a third of the 233,000 mile distance to the moon. With a number as high as 70000, it becomes abstract- while it is something that seems like a lot, it loses any real meaning. For nearly 8 straight months, living with the constant movement of the seas brings, at least for me, that number much closer for the magnitude of how truly far that is. Across the seas and back again, seeing much of what lies between, the endless expanse of ocean begins to take on its own character divided between the shores of those places which define it. At times as calm as glass, others with a tempestuous wrath, in the storming gale of rain or stagnant, burning sun, the seas are as different as the people who lie beyond its far horizon. It is those places which, at the journey's end, which cast a dreamlike memory over the time away, for it is neither what was expected nor familiar. And that is perhaps why it is so vast in the depth and colour of the experience.
Instead of a rambling, full recounting of so long a voyage, of which the stories and memories are as varied and plentiful as the 600 people with whom I shared it, I will rather try to explain an absence in the sights awaiting on the foreign shores.
At night, all modern cities share a similar mask. One which under the glow of electric lighting and infrastructure, in whatever condition it may be, blends into the shadows of darkness and becomes a common thread of humanity even ten thousand miles away.
Indonesia is one of the most populous and geographically important countries in the world, bordering the busiest waterways, and covering thousands of islands across the Pacific. The capital, Jakarta, was much like the costlands I call home, and yet this was the first in a series of new places and languages and cultures so familiar to the seafaring world.
Singapore too, although taking to the extremes a sense of modern architecture and world class hub of business nestled at the corner of the busiest waterway in the world, bore a reflection of nightstape that tried to blend in with the familiar. Only here, that was not quite the case. The nights were filled with lights and music and merriment and a grandiose sense of other worldly adventure. By day, the illusion was painted over with sunlight and the true scale of the city was revealed.
The magnitude, both large and small, exist in an eternal balance on the high seas. At times the sheer vastness of the ocean seems impossible to welcome our transient life when it was not born beneath the waves. And yet over the course of thousands of years we have sought- not without its dangers- to tame its mysteries, its opportunities.
On the far, Eastern shores the land changes yet again, and the seas beside it. Where in the Pacific the waters were vast and rolling, chopped by the wind and darkened by rainclouds as often as a singular hue from horizon to horizon, the sheltered waters grew calm. Stagnant. Breathed with scorching winds and blazing sun, the span of Oman sees both endless southern summer and the greater northern seasons. Where first we found desolation, it was later a cradle of an elder culture from which the legends of our own are born.
Unlike any other city in the world, Dubai evokes the feeling of hyper modern architecture, concentrated wealth, and broken rules. From the Burj Khalifa, the world's tallest building, to a ski slope in the middle of seemingly endless desert, there is very little you cannot find there. All around, the landscape and the cityscape and the mix of people and stories and opportunities form a culture like nothing I have ever seen before or since.
The return to Oman, now in its northern reaches, was so vastly unlike the southern corner that it might have been not only a different country, but a different continent. Mountains ringed the port, watchtowers and palaces and fortresses intermixed with incredible souks and menageries that, although of the local flavour, were much closer to the modern age than endless sands. In a word, it was Sword country.
In the darkest nights, when the seas were just right, a lightning streak of bioluminescence shattered the pitch black waters. On those hours where the final glow of twilight fades away and no reflected moonlight dispels the illusion, the violent blue white of the wake casts a light so bright that it can be seen for nearly a mile in a wandering V behind us before fading back into the murk. Beneath the curl of the wake, other things could be seen beneath the surface, disturbing the planktons on their own. Shadows of something larger than fish, tentacled and nearly 40 feet long.
On the other side of the narrows, India sits in a state of confusing history and vastness. For a country so populous and old, of a seemingly endless depth to its history and landscape, it was difficult to find representation for the nation in a singular place. In a sense, it felt as though stepping through time and into the apocalypse. That is to say, a place where the world had ended and those who continued to live there did so by making for themselves what they were able and scarcely anything more. At times it felt as though rule and order did not exist, ramshackle vehicles driving anywhere there was room, in the weaving in the wrong direction as the traffic around them or through sidewalks or unpaved sections of what might have been a lawn in better times. Mountains of rubble and garbage spilled between buildings, and the beaches were a combination of a fishing industry, living quarters, and extreme poverty. More than any other, the experience was harrowing.
At long last, the return voyage began, and those other places, the heart of Djibouti, the shores of Kuwait, the UAE and Philippines, the calling of Thailand and Guam, it all began to blend together into that sensation of water running through open hands. Soon, it would be at an end.
Crossing over the International Date Line, we had a full moon to guide the passage east. So many months ago, that same light called us west, only then we were younger and naive to the grander scale of humanity
Home, I have learned over the years, can be many places. And yet when the time comes around, after a return so long anticipated and so long traveled to meet, there are few places which can welcome you back so quickly and so wholly.
Long overdue, I think at last it's time to get back to the workshop.
