A Slow Boat to China

I’m set to get on a boat to China in less than 48 hours, and I’m not sure when I’ll be back.

The boat in question is a cargo ship called the APL Temasek (pictured above, vessel tracking here), and I’ll be aboard for about three weeks. Give or take. Evidently these things are fairly variable.

Today, I’m sitting on my porch in San Francisco. The sun has just made an appearance between welcome spring showers, and the jasmine is in full, fragrant bloom. I’m asking myself — just a little bit — what the hell I think I’m doing getting on that boat.

In case there’s anyone reading this antiquated thing called a “travel blog” other than my parents: My tentative plan is to get off the boat in Hong Kong, and then make my way overland by train and bus through Southeast Asia, India, the Himalayas, inland China, Siberia, and Europe in approximately that order (rough route map here). When I hit the Atlantic, I’m gonna try to find a position crewing on a sailboat to get back across it. My spreadsheet says it should take me about eight months, but there’s a lot up in the air.

Depending on your relative tastes for comfort and adventure, that may sound either perfectly thrilling or like a really bizarre thing to do. Personally, I’m sorta halfway between those camps. This isn’t a “sow my wild oats” backpacking trip (I’m nowhere near young enough for that), and it isn’t a midlife crisis “tear my life down in order to find myself” trip (I’m not *quite* old enough for that). My life hasn’t recently fallen apart — in fact, I’m happier than I’ve been in a really long time.

So why the trip?

I do have some big questions to answer and bad habits to break.

A few months ago, I quit my job as a professional climate activist. I poured my heart and soul into that job for a lot of years, but eventually I realized that what I was doing — often spending 12 hours a day staring at a computer screen, physically speaking, and running on fumes + the conviction that my work was world-endingly important, psychologically speaking — was killing me. And I realized that I didn’t want to be a martyr for the cause (also that that wasn’t a particularly helpful thing to be).

I’d gotten out of the habit of joy. I’d gotten out of the habit of looking at the world in this moment, without seeing future ecological collapse super-imposed on it. I spent too much time feeling urgent and terrified, and nowhere near enough time feeling spacious, powerful, creative, and lucky. I wasn’t really doing anyone any good, least of all myself.

So this is an exercise at feeling the size and texture of the world a bit better, and about grounding myself in that world more deliberately. It’s about figuring out what to do with my one wild and precious life from here on out, while not looking too hard or too directly at that question.

And why no flying?

When planning a big trip around the world, structure is your friend. Limits are your friend. I had to decide where to go somehow, so “can I get there by boat, train, or bus” seemed as good a self-imposed limit as any.

It also felt extremely guilt-inducing and hypocritical to quit my climate activism job to go fly around in airplanes for months on months. Cargo ships and trains aren’t “green” by any stretch of the imagination, but carbon is certainly a factor here. If you’re rich enough to fly and do so even sometimes, it’s probably your single most carbon-intensive activity.

And yet, travel is broadening, or it can be. With nationalism and racism on the rise in much of the Global North, I’m not comfortable saying people shouldn’t travel, ever. I think we need the sort of unmediated cultural exchange that travel can facilitate, and we need it now more than ever.

We don’t yet have the technology to electrify our air travel infrastructure, and we may never. But boats and trains? We have most of the tech now to start dramatically overhauling those systems. In fifty years, we could still have a world where people travel — if we start now, build it fast, and then do that traveling a lot more slowly.

I’m not here preach or be an absolutist about this no-flying shit. (Not-being-an-absolutist-about-shit is one of my main trip goals!) I’m not here to tell any one person that they shouldn’t take any one trip. People fly for all sorts of reasons, and I’m not gonna tell anyone they shouldn’t visit their ailing parent or attend that crucial meeting. I’ve done both of those things, and I would again. But right now I have the time and space to do it this way — and if you can make the time and space to do it this way, then maybe you should too. I promise to come back with lots of tips.

If you wanna follow my adventures, I will — evidently — be blogging about them, though probably somewhat intermittently. Watch this space, or get approximately the same content in your inbox by signing up here. Mostly I’ll be posting lots of phone pics on Instagram. Come with.

(Disclaimer: Blog posts and pics will resume on the other side of the Pacific in about three weeks. Weirdly, there’s no wifi on the boat.)