Facing the slowest ferry ever on this planet, Mindanao just doesn’t look to come any closer, from hour to hour. There are times on the Liloan – Lipata ferry I lose track on time. Numerous moments come up where I got scared missing my flight back to the Netherlands, being trapped on this ferry for months. My vision sometimes get so blurred that for minutes I can’t even notice the ferry is actively moving. At the end of the ride I even manage to walk on specific parts on the ferry with my eyes closed, without ever hitting my head to anything.
So what can you do when you get bored on a ferry? Well, there are a couple of options. First you can go sleeping. In fact, that’s what approximately half of the passengers are doing. Another option is to watch a blood splashing “Hostel 6 look-a-like” movie on the public canteen TV, preferably to do together with your kids, varying in age between 3 and 14. This is what another 25% is doing right now.
Playing charts is a possibility. Eating anything is reasonably popular. Walking around the ship for hours is done solely by lonely souls like me and one or two others. During one of these walks I decided to give myself a new assignment: Identifying the most silly direction given by the owner of this ship, which is Seamarine Transport, Inc.
There is choice enough: I find detailed technical drawings from the complete ship in the canteen. I wonder what they expect me to do with this. Fresh water signs above big cans of water where a layer of oil is clearly covering its surface. In fact, on this ship everything is covered in oil. The stairs, the seats, the floors…everything is drowned in oil. In fact, it’s a miracle that this ship shows so many signs of severe oxidation with so much protective substances. Then, a lot of signs are in Korean, Japanese or Chinese only. I can’t read them, I even can’t tell the exact language they are written in, and I am sure no-one on this ship can do it better than me. I can only hope whatever these signs represent, it is not important. But then … why not remove them? And why were they important for the previous passengers who cruised this ship? Many questions pop-up in my mind which will not be answered today.
Garbage disposal at sea – sign
The most nonsense direction however is this sign about food waste. The first thing what probably draws your attention is this Gothic font used. I personally believe that the only purpose of this font is making readable text not readable anymore. Now I am sure this font has nothing to do with house styles from Seamarine Transport, Inc or so: The designer of this document is probably the most IT literate (or the only IT literate) member of this ferry company, and most probably when exploring the first time the type of fonts used in Windows, he discovered this one. Not thinking about the purpose of his document, he most likely decided on personal reasons to use this font. The result is that it took me minutes more than usual to identify all words. I bet my monthly salary on it that in all its travels of this ferry, I am the first passenger ever taking a detailed look to this specific sign about garbage disposal at sea. And I am sure the used font does not invite passengers to read the content of the poster, simply because it takes too much effort to decrypt it first. Talking about information waste huh.
Of-course there is much more to say about this. Suppose you have Food Waste Comminutes (whatever that may be huh) and you think…where can I drop this? Well, the average passenger will probably look around, than see this big blue ocean, and thinks……how about giving it back to mother sea?
Hoho, stop! That’s not the idea. According to Seamarine Transport, Inc, first you have to estimate the distance to the nearest shore. This must be more than three miles. Now you need to know this is a country which calculates in the metric system, not in miles. If you can find more than 10 persons in the whole country who knows the conversion factor between miles and kilometers, you deserve a statue. Furthermore, for a vast majority of the people in the Philippines, any direction which goes further then the next barangay is considered as far. People here don’t think in miles, or kilometers. Distances are expressed in terms like “there”, “far” or “very far”. You as a traveler have to translate that in metric numbers, a task which is often hard to complete successfully. So asking a Filipino to estimate the distance to the closes seashore is like asking an Eskimo where you can buy coconut milk.
Now take a closer look to the header. It says something about “Inside special areas, and “Outside special areas” when talking about garbage disposal at sea. So whats the first thing what comes up in your and my mind when reading this? Exactly, what the f.ck are special area’s? I closely examined this ferry twice, from the cargo level until the steering cabin on top, but no explanation is given about “special areas”. So it’s up to your and my imagination whatever a special area can be. I wonder if even the crew knows.
How about if you have packing material? Well, according to Seamarine Transport Inc, you need to be at least 25 miles from the nearest seashore to be allowed to give it back to the fish. 25 miles???? We are just entering a low depression area, I can’t even see Leyte anymore, which was seconds ago about 400 meters away. And now I have to estimate 25 miles?? Even with clear vision I think land view stops after a mile or 10.
Strangely, they do not specify packing material at all. Thinking about it, there are a wide collection of articles which all can be considered as packing material. Carton boxes, plastic straps, foam, metal wire … So how do I know which packing material can be thrown overboard? Or maybe it doesn’t matter for Seamarine Transport, Inc. As long as you are 25 miles from the nearest seashore, you can dump anything overboard which can be explained as some kind of packing material. Weird huh. Apparently , the fish there don’t care, or care less than fish swimming close the seashore, about chemical garbage? Didn’t know that …
I can go further, but I leave it up to your imagination. The idea is good to ask attention for ocean pollution, but the way Seamarine Transport, Inc. tries to deal with it is totally rubbish. What Seamarine Transport, Inc. should say: DO NOT THROW ANY GARBAGE IN SEA. IF YOU DO SO, YOU RISK FOLLOWING YOUR OWN GARBAGE DURING THE TIME IT TAKES TO REACH THE DESTINATION PORT. That should give Seamarine Transport, Inc. more then enough time to take “appropriate actions” if someone decides to use the ocean as garbage cemetery.
Oh yes, before I forget, Seamarine Transport, Inc. should write this message in Arial, Verdana or Courier. Do not expect that every customer has taken a higher degree course on decryption techniques.
I am about to claim my own part of the ferry when finally the Lipata terminal appears in sight. It is like wakening up from the most horrible nightmare which you experienced when you were a kid. A simple glimpse on my cellphone learns me however that this ferry takes 4 hours and 12 minutes to reach Lipata. Not weeks, not months and my destiny is not doomed to stay on this ship forever. When off-boarding I push and wrestle myself with my bike to the front to be the first one to leave this turtle among all Philippine ferries. Only when reaching Surigao, I remember my thoughts about the food waste sign. I hope I will never see it back again …
08th of January 2013
Philippine Diaries 