Planalto Cycles

Hey flat-earthers around the globe – you see THIS?

The morning was nearly normal but around noon, I realized that the end of this trip was near. For me, maybe at least five days more would have been good for finding out what I can and want to do when I am not busy anymore. A bit of that was in the morning, I read in the offline Wikipedia about Malaysia

and Thailand and whatever came to my mind when I was not busy with some new photos or videos.

At noon, I began with some preparations for leaving like finding my pro-forma flight ticket out of Malaysia (when you want to come in you have to prove when and how you get out, a bike doesn’t count as a proof).
The chief officer had told me that around 15:30 at the bridge the preparations for landing would start, so I went there. Everyone was in the white uniform and although the most striking activity was using the looking glass from time to time, higher concentration was perceptible.

A boat with the pilot came and he joined the captain although obviously there was no actual need, but it is part of the ceremony (ok, sometimes maybe it has a safety aspect, too).

After taking some photos from the bridge,

I went to deck F in front of my cabin to see more of the landing as we this time berthed from the starboard side.
The “parking slot” came nearer and nearer and it was only a bit longer than the ship.The huge ship had been moved laterally by three small boats that pushed it, but it was, very slow.

I couldn’t see the process of anchoring etc., so I went to the cabin. But soon after I got a call to the office on deck G.
The captain and two Malayan officers were there. One of them asked them from where I came and how long I was in Dubai and when I would leave Malaysia. I told them that I have a flight ticket for 19^th of November. The captain started to say something like, “But you said you will go by bike…?!” but luckily, he stopped again. I was sorry that I had not told him about that problem but first, I had not thought about that until noon and second, I did not expect that he would be involved.
And then I was informed that I would be brought to the immigration in 15min. I went to take my passport and that flight ticket and, on the way back, I tried to explain the captain in a convoluted way abought that ticket. The agent came and was not amused that he would have to come 2x as he thought I would disembark in the evening and come and go with him. The captain explained in a strict way that allowed no protest that I would go to immigration now, would come back, stay on the ship and leave on my own tomorrow morning.
The agent went off with me. When we were alone he brought his protest and combined it with demanding 70$, I understood 20$ for immigration and 2×25$, because he has to go 2x to bring me back to the ship.
It was a long way from the ship to immigration and with his car, the agent would not have been able to transport my bike anyway. I had to wait at a counter to get my passport back and the agent went off and said I should wait there. After some minutes, I got my passport without any problem and a stamp without showing any flight ticket.
I had to wait long enough for the agent to start worrying, but at least I saw his car in front of the office. Finally, he came back with a second guy who had two bills and wanted 50$ for the immigration and 20$ for the agent. I don’t know if the immigration was really 50 and not 20$ or what was going on now but compared with Dubai it was cheaper anyway and I had what I needed.
He brought me back to the ship and I tried to remember the way and to memorize that I had to drive left. This is no big problem as long as I go straight, but I remember how confused I was last time in Sydney when Markus, Martina and I went by bike and made a turn to the left or right and I was glad that I just was following them to make no mistake.
If I had known everything before, including that it was still not dark when I came back to the ship after 19:00, I could have thought about leaving this evening, because in the city the lights could have been enough, but so I am on the safe side.
I didn’t see the captain anymore, so I said good bye to the chief officer and will find the captain in the morning.
Meanwhile, the cargo-work had started and it proceeded the whole night.

Nothing special,
except that it was the last normal day (is this special?), because tomorrow, we will reach the port

At 8:30, I made videos with gopro and camera to synchronize the dates. Before that, I hade changed the gopro date setting according to the difference I had seen yesterday.
Interesting for me was, that when I connected to gopro to the PC, the time label was 1:30 and when I transferred it to the PC, the time label was 9:30. (1:30 was the time, I had set on the gopro to balance that annoying difference, so the time set and the time to be seen at the gopro are the same, the miracle for me is, how and why it changes by transferring it to the PC)
Sony photos have the same time label at the camera and the PC, only it is 7:30 instead of 8:30.
And Sony videos taken at 8:30 are also shown with 7:30 at the camera and 9:30 at the PC.
I wonder if I find a way to fix this or only a way to handle it.
Then I wanted to check emails.
But the black keyboard that had been on the desk and I had used for writing the last days, was not here and the white keyboard in the drawer under the desk didn’t work. I had to bother the captain and after checking the problem, he called the chef engineer who came with the second engineer. They looked for another keyboard and installed it, but because of manipulating the PC, some cables had been loosened and the chief engineer restarted the PC and went off. But then there was no internet connection and I wanted to give up, but the captain also restarted the PC and said anyway I can write now, and it will be sent. I only found one email of Marvin with one line and no need to answer, so those 40min were not that useful invested.
On my PC, I found 2 videos from Marvdasht, one shorter, one longer and I compared them, finding that the older one contained something that was lost in the younger one. I guess that was also caused by the usage of those two different apps for editing. But now every video from this trip is done, only in the end of the ship passage, I want to unite the clips of different day to a longer one.
In the evening, I tried to fix or handle the problem with time and date of PC, gopro, camera video and photo. After recording and setting and again recording and setting again, I know that photos on the camera are just related to time/date settings whereas video is sensitive to the region settings. When I use the wrong region (one hour ahead) I get the right time. At least with the current PC settings. Here, I must use the region one hour behind to get the right time. I don’t know what will or would be, when the PC is connected to the internet and gets the time-settings from there, I will try to avoid that. Gopro was easy, if the time label on the PC is wrong 7h, I just have to set the gopro time 7h wrong in the other direction.
Back to my yesterday theories about ((not) greeting) officers

Today, I was the first to be there and each officer greeted when coming, but only very few sitting people greeted back. Regarding eating habits, I can say that some of them compared to mine are in another way strange or even rude:
One of them tries all fruits by hand to choose the one he wants, another one did the same with bread rolls, and a third picks out what he likes most from the mixed salad. I mentioned the veggie-hater yesterday, so only the captain remains, he has good habits and good manners. You best could see that at dinner:
We got a plain but not too dry cake as a dessert and he was the only one to eat it like it was. Five other adults indulged themselves with cream and chocolate syrup in different technics, one even organized a new Nutella from the kitchen giving the cake a thick isolation against potentially dangerous environmental factors, two hid it under a cloud of whipped cream and stabilized the structure with chocolate armour, the last one was convinced by a two component strategy, so he put the cream on a second plate, the syrup came direct on the cake and with a knife he put cream on demand to each bite. I had no special plan, only the goal that the cake should be well soaked in a cream-chocolate combination where one time this and one time that may predominate.
The captain had finished first, his plate was clean, his mouth, too. (You know that I potentially could achieve comparable plate-cleanliness but there was no milk available…)
If I were head of a cargo ship company, I would know how to select my captains. Just let them have a three-course lunch and dinner a few times with hidden camera.
You will find your man! Disciplined, superior, considerate, cooperative – whatever you need!
(Not sure if that would work with women or in a mixed group, but at least cargo ship captain still seems to be a +99,9% masculine job. So far, I know two captains, both = 100%, were men – you see?!?)

On 10^th, I will have a 40-50km bike ride, then visits and train travelling but on 16^th I will be back to business and my diary will be, too.
But today, I still can offer only “sea-food for the eyes”
Let’s look at the containers and how they are fixed together:

The first two layers of them on board are fixed together with poles, the other ones by screw. I only have some suspicions but no real idea, how these screws are fixed and opened, so I (you!?) have to wait for the next cargo ship passage.
And then, sometimes, there were milky clouds in the water and the first officer said this is just water with bubbles, but for me it is strange that it came only sometimes and I didn’t see any relation between different kinds of waves and the appearance of those clouds.

Yesterday, on the roof of the bridge, I took photos and videos with the camera and with the gopro. Before that, I adjusted the time to the current one.
Result:
Photos of the camera are marked with 15:00, videos of the same camera and taken at the same time are marked with 18:00 [in the file-property-details German: “Medium erstellt” (“Medium created”) but “Änderungsdatum” (“date of change”) 15:00 and “Erstelldatum” (“date of creation”) the date/time when I transferred it to the PC, in this case, the next day].
and gopro videos are marked with 23:00 (both “Änderungsdatum” and “Erstelldatum” only refer to the date/time when I transferred it to the PC).
This is one of the main reasons why editing my videos is complicated when I combine gopro and normal clips to one video, as I can’t rely on the data to know the sequence of the clips.
So far, I thought it was partly my fault, maybe I didn’t change the settings correctly, but now I did and see the results. On 8^th, we have the next change of time, then it should be Malaysian time (by the way, my watch must be set on BKK time to show the time we have now and the PC has Kuala Lumpur time now)
Today at 12:25, I was the last one to come to lunch and when I greeted, no one answered and at “my” table, all the Romanians just talked on without looking at me. I just wonder if there is any reason related to “wrong” behaviour on my side. I can live with these reactions (if they were reactions and related to me at all) but I don’t want to make someone angry or annoyed. I start thinking about possibilities and find ~3. So, I will come at 12 next lunch, to see if this makes any difference (but maybe it is too late to make it better?!). Second would be the expectation that I should/would participate more and communicate more from my side. Well, it also could be that they don’t want to be bothered too much by passengers, it is hard to guess. If I see a good chance, I would talk about expectations and problems regarding passengers with the chief officer. It the last possibility may sound a bit weird or just funny. It is about my eating habits or some of them ?…
Today at breakfast, I took an empty glass of Nutella and filled it with milk and muesli. I notoriously do that, because I want to clean the glass before it goes to trash. I just placed it on the table and ate some bread. I wanted to take it to my cabin and do this cleaning process in privacy. But when my table-neighbour came, it was obvious that he thought about that glass. Did I acquire a glass of Nutella for me? So, I opened it and ate a bit to make visible what is inside. But if someone who is not acquainted with the best way to clean up a Nutella glass, now still is uncomfortable, I can understand it. And especially this officer! (To be more exact: 2^nd engineer). It is that one who notoriously leaves the vegetables on his plate. And even soup and water, where we serve our selves and can decide how much we take, he leaves half eaten/drunk. And the last Nutella glass, he “emptied” (only with a spoon – that cannot work!) and put it on/in the plate with half eaten soup and then the same with a glass of jam. First, carelessly scratching around with his spoon and then drowning it in the soup, neighboured by a napkin that even cannot swim, just get soaked with his soup.
So, no wonder, that I now had to take a jar of jam finished it (on bread) and also filled it with milk for later adding the muesli.
How should people with so different views on the essence of life become friends?
I only hope that I don’t get a negative report and all the other cargo ship passages will be cancelled.
In the afternoon, I finished the editing!! The “family-videos” (the week in and around Tabriz and the same in Shiraz) are now each put together (there is no strong connection between the clips of different days, no story is told, so it was more or less making a row of them).
I have a list of things that I want to do now.
Maybe I can enjoy that freedom or I find some way (or something) to create a bit pressure…
here some totally new motives for photos on a cargo ship trip

ship, sea & faraway object…

…far away object zoomed near with shivering hands on a swaying ship…

sea and clouds

don’t know why I liked to take pictures from far away objects with maximum zoom with shivering hands on a swaying ship . Here is another one!

Fighting with only two videos, those where I had started with movie maker and the outcome was a mess and then I had tried to rescue it with Magix video and the mess became bigger.
The second one still is not finished, but I also want to drop a few lines here and deal with the photos and videos of the day, because today, I was allowed to go on the roof of the bridge.

There you can see both ends of the ship and I wanted to make a panorama. My phone was on strike and so I only could do it as a video. When I was down at deck F, the phone made panoramas without any problem…

Well, I should get another chance on the way to or on the way from Singapore.
So, besides that excursion on the top of the ship and checking + writing emails to Marvin and Doron, meanwhile you know my schedule, eating framed the day, between that I edited those videos, 3x I started the “spot” tracker to send some GPS signals, I made some exercise (with the “result”-app, then some cycling and for learning the single leg squat) and another day is over…
ah, and here are some photos of the room, except that part that I used most, the desk where I was sitting with my PC.

no sunsets, no ship equipment, only screenshot of the progress…

Today was another time-shift, but I didn’t get it at first. In the morning, there would have been two signs for it: at 6:30, when I opened the curtains, I saw someone cleaning on deck and wondered why he did it so early (but I didn’t check the clock in the cabin). And when I came down to breakfast at 7:05 (so thought I), no one was there and most of the people apparently had finished eating.
Well, I did my usual business, only 3 days and those “family” videos are left to edit, and at 11h, I went to the gym. Only there I saw the watch showing 12:00 instead of 11:00 and still thought, ok, this watch is wrong. During exercising on the ellipter, I had time to think about the time table of time shifts hanging somewhere. I finished my training a bit earlier, went to the cabin, saw the same, later, time on the watch there and hurried down, arriving at 13:04 (new time). No one there, everyone finished with eating and the kitchen closed. My lunch was on the table, so I didn’t starve, I only missed the dessert, ice-cream and that`s the only reason for me to write about this tragedy ?.
In the evening, I of course came in time and the main dish was Chinese hot pot, including cow’s stomach and other stuff. Only one Romanian ate some parts of it, another one at least tried and I took a lot. My only problem was, that I 2x caught slices of ginger looking exactly like the potatoes. When you are more careful, you can feel that potatoes are softer, at least when they are cooked long enough.
Today, we passed the south end of India and I hope this is not the reason that I saw more dirt in the water than the days before. At least, there also were more fishing boats to see than before, boats that looked like not being built for big oceans.
And the waves for the first time caused some clearly perceptible movements of the ship.
so, that are the news from the day ?

Progress of 6 hours today two-in-one-visualisation

Today, I did nothing but editing, some new pictures from the sea (and the ship…)

and some training (13x my pistol squat pre-exercises, an exhausting “results” training and 30min home trainer) to compensate my greedy eating habits (and with the meals on the other hand over-compensating my training, because the rest of the day is sitting).
Now, 10 Iran-videos still have to be cut and I want to make one longer from the Shiraz-days and one from the Tabriz-days, the same with the ship-days.
It can be done on the remaining days on the ship, if the material is not too complicated.
Today, it rained most of the time and the Captain told me, it will stay like this until Port Klang.

During the meals, I sit opposite him and each of us as an officer at both sides. These five talk most of the time in Romanian language and I try to guess by some keywords of Latin or English origin what it might be. Sometimes, the Captain starts talking with me in English and sometimes one or two of the others join the conversation.
For me, it would be ok, not to talk if I know it is also ok for them.

the captain, the crew, the passenger

I think, at the next day I managed to use the same scale 2x. Progress auf 5 hours

in the morning I feel a bit better than it looks here

After breakfast, I came to the upper deck, to the central ship’s office, to wait for someone to go on tour on upper deck (outside).
The officer gave me a workman’s suit, I

had brought the helmet, gloves and ear protection from the cabin and so I dressed up. He suggested that during waiting time, I could click through the pages of the different systems on screen. I looked at the water system, the tanks, the generators etc.

Fuel with less Sulfur is used in most ports in near the coasts but there is more than 30x more of the normal, dirty fuel.

Then came the chief engineer and was prepared to visit the engine room with me. First, we went down only one floor to his office with all the control panels.

the engine usually is controlled from the bridge. If that doesn’t work, it can be done in the engine control room or in worst case directly at the machine

He explained that they used cheaper oil in open sea and oil with less sulfur near the ports and that the engine runs with only ~50tons fuel/day at this low speed and up to 4 times more at high speed and/or bad weather.
The generators (2 out of 5 are running normally) also need ~10 tons fuel every day.

It was warm down at the engine, and loud.

So, we didn’t stay long, and I went back to the office. A young Kadett came to the upper deck tour with me.

When we were at the bow,

I wanted to take a picture of the anchor’s chain and him and he said that the last passenger wanted the same.

We looked down to the storage space of the chain

and then the complete way from bow to rear

to watch the “Hecksee” (Heck-See, German for wake, on board of the ferry, (day 097) Harry pronounced it like Hexe = witch).

the rope ladder looks like a leftover from 19, century on this modern ship

if the ship is cleaned with chemicals, the plug has to be put in the hole to prevent them from going into the water.

In general, they try to be more environmentally friendly, but our economical system in all its aspects is far from that. These ships, too

Today, I only could finish two videos, partly due to this excursions and some time at the gym but mainly because I had several very long clips from the gopro. They happen when I forgot to turn of or when I pressed the button to turn of but instead turned on. Some of these videos contain material that I now want to keep and still I try to keep the whole video at least shorter than 10min, better only 3-5min, because I guess they would be too boring.
During dinner, the captain explained to me that coming to the port can be a long procedure and he himself suggested to stay overnight because after all procedures, riding 50km at night would be unpleasant also for Faye and Lulu who would have to wait until very late at night.
In the evening, I read and answered Marvin’s response to my email from yesterday. With the strange keyboard (some letters and signs are hidden to me) and the special program for sending, this took also longer than normal.
But I try to find to a more relaxed attitude, because in the end it is not clear how many people wait for watching all those clips…

because of different scales (200km vs 500km) I tried to visualize the progress with those lines. Would have been great to draw them parallel 😉

After breakfast, I went up to the bridge again. The officer showed me a ship in the same direction on his screen and with the looking glass outside (no good photo available)

The route is controlled by autopilot, influences like wind or bigger waves would be compensated.
The Captain took me to the administration office on G-deck (between F, where my cabin is and the Navigation deck or bridge) where he had installed an email address for me, so that I could write to Marvin and Doron.

I would have liked to write to Lulu, too, but I haven’t written down her email, so I asked Marvin to post something for them on Facebook and they were writing back soon ?
at 11:00, it is my workout time, either “results” or gym, so today again results. I felt a bit better, but the program was different, too, and the cabin is not high enough for real star jacks. Still, they are one of the most exhausting exercises for me, besides flat our burpees and when I have to do 40, I need some breaks in-between. So, today it was: 150 Starjacks, 150, Touchdown lunges, 80 inchworms in 5 rounds.
At lunch, I as always sat on the table with Captain and some officers, all of them Romanians. They apparently were again talking about politics.
At my right side, the officer seems to be especially picky regarding vegetables, but today, only the Captain and I ate the broccoli, all other refused it. I am ok with the food, there is always mixed salad at the table and most of the times, a fruit is the dessert. Only today, it was ice-cream, maybe meant as vanilla, not sure. Anyway, I put a lot of cream and chocolate syrup on it and will go cycling before dinner to compensate at least those calories.
Regarding video cutting, I started with the end of October and went back, because there were less selfie videos to put in and the Gopro clips can be done a bit faster with Magix than with the moviemaker (if that would work properly). I am finished with October except Shiraz, where I want to put all days together, later. Now I must edit ~20 September days, before I get back to those clips that are totally confused by loading, losing, fail-copying and so on.
Maybe I can finish 3-4 videos per day, then I would be up-to-date at the end of the ship trip. It depends on the videos…
Today, at dinner, we were again talking a bit, mainly about car traffic and dogs in Romania. Tomorrow, I will go to upper deck (the lowest deck, but maybe the name is, because it is open all over the ship) and maybe meet an engineer to make another tour, this time with photos.