Greetings from Western Australia

I'm writing you today from Breaks, an Internet cafe in Freemantle, Western Australia.  My Internet went down a few days ago in Melbourne and I've been offline for the past few days.  It's exhausting traveling this far to speak, but the people are wonderful and the scenery is striking.  This is the Indian Ocean, rolling ashore at Freemantle.  It's open sea from here to South Africa

It's much easier to visit the ports here than in America.  Here's a BigLift's heavy lift ship heavy lift ship Happy Delta tied up at the container terminal.  She is brand new, as of January 2011, and can lift 800 tons between the two deck cranes.  Standard container ships, in comparison, are limited at cargos of about 40 tons per container.

As the container crews work fisherman gaze out to sea and wait for the big one to bite.

There was a Wallenius car carrier ties to the dock behind the fishermen.

In this image you see APL RIYADH, an 850-foot container ship operated by American President Lines.  She's also a new ship, built in 2010 with the capacity to carry some 4,300 shipping containers.  She's powered by a single MAN diesel engine developing 50,000 horsepower.  That's equivalent to a dozen heavy freight locomotives, but she carries vastly more cargo than those same locomotives could pull.  That's why ocean transport is so efficient, and so inexpensive for the tons and miles moved.

In this image you can see two slightly smaller Malaysian container ships offloading cargo.  Even a small port like this can move a great deal of traffic with container handling and ship-to-rail and ship-to-truck facilities.

In this final shot synthetic dock lines dry in the sun

I will be speaking at the University of Western Australia in Perth this evening.  Tomorrow, I am off to Brisbane and the Writer's Festival there.  I'm looking forward to meeting more of my Australian friends in person.

Woof!