Apen Kijken

We're back from our tropical adventure in Indonesia — with about 700 underwater photos and 400 more freckles in tow. 

I have to confess that I even enjoyed the parts of the trip that were supposed to be painful, like the 12-hour flight from Amsterdam to Singapore.  Buckled in front of a 6x6-inch personal entertainment screen, I was ecstatic (and I really do mean ecstatic) to find more than 50 English-language movies and TV shows upon which to binge.  

It's not like we're living in Bhutan.  But we haven't yet tackled the project of getting a membership at our local Videoland, and we don't yet have a digital TV antenna, so our couch-based entertainment options have been a little limited.  (Insert deep sigh of longing for Netflix here...) 

As a side note, even though it explicitly mocks people who use their travel experiences as fodder for blog entries, I can't help but recommend a terrific Japanese movie set in Hawai'i that we saw on the plane: Honokaa Boy.  It's definitely one of the best movies I've seen in the last year.  

Relative to our other far-flung vacations, the rest of the itinerary for this one was pretty straightforward:  a 3-hour flight from Singapore to Manado, which is on the island of Sulawesi (during which I was completely unconscious due to the aforementioned TV bingeing in place of sleeping), then a car ride to the port of Bitung, then a 10-minute boat trip across Lembeh Strait to the dive resort. 

When I say "dive resort", what I mean is a cluster of 6 very basic cabins, 3,000 geckos, a pair of bare-bones dive boats, a communicative rooster, and — with three long dives and three square meals each day and a semi-motley crew of divers from all over the world — a schedule and atmosphere remarkably similar to summer camp. 

We also had a spidery friend lurking in our bathroom.  Who happened to be 4 inches across! 

Of the 8 other guests, roughly half were Dutch, so I was able to get a tiny bit of language practice, as well.  John was not especially overjoyed when I suggested that we situate ourselves at a Dutch-speaking dinner table (aka "Nederlandse Tafel"), and things went from bad to worse when he was called upon to explain his physics research.  

In the interest of defending John's honor, I have two disclaimers: one is that considering how little time he's spent studying and practicing it, John's Dutch is quite good.  The other is that I would (still) be hard-pressed to explain his research project to anyone in English.  

But a rough translation of his answer that night goes something like this:  "So, there are these little particles from outer space that are very little, and they have high energy, and the little particles are coming, and coming down and...uhhhhh..."  

At which point John's face telegraphed a desperate plea for help and the Dutch shouted in unison, "Say it in English!" 

Needless to say, that was the end of Nederlandse Tafel for John and Autumn! 

But our time spent underwater, where we communicated only with creature-identifying hand signals, was delightful.  I think it was my favorite diving trip ever. 

As I mentioned in my last post, the diving in Lembeh Strait is "muck diving", which means there aren't huge gardens of colorful coral in a crystal-clear sea.  Instead, much of the diving resembles a dark moonscape, with thick, murky black sand beneath thick, murky water.  

At some of the sites, there's a fair amount of trash in the water, which, while not ideal from an ecological standpoint, keeps things interesting.  Everything looks 33 percent bigger underwater, so seeing a man's leather shoe crusted with colorful algae makes it seem like you've found the footwear of a larger-than-life King Neptune.  

Now, some people like to dive because they like to hang around in lush, tropical underwater paradise.  I like to dive because it's a big treasure hunt for critters, and finding bizarre camouflaged life forms hiding in the rubble is one of the best ways I can think of to spend an hour.  Gorging myself on delicious Indonesian food is another, so you can see why this was an easy choice for us! 

A small subset of our photos doesn't do justice to the diversity of underwater life in Lembeh, but here are a few for your viewing pleasure:

Muck diving is cephalopod heaven, which is good for people like us who are in heaven anytime they find cephalopods.  On one dive alone, we saw a squid, two octopi and two cuttlefish!    

 

There are also a number of dive sites crawling with nudibranchs, which are sea slugs (usually just a couple of inches long) that come in all varieties of shapes and colors.  

 
 

Lembeh is also famous for its frogfish, which are sponge-shaped bottom dwellers that "walk" on their pectoral fins instead of swimming.  They attract prey by dangling a fleshy lobe like bait in front of their gaping maws.  Luckily, we kept our wits about us and didn't fall for the trick.  This one was so cute and grumpy looking, and he was only about 2 inches long! 

John took all of the photos (using an older model digital Olympus and an underwater housing), which is great for me because my only responsibilities were keeping track of John and looking for creatures in the muck.  

After seven straight days of diving (and eating, and sleeping, and changing in and out of dive gear, and showering in between dives, and avoiding ear infections, and identifying nudibranchs, and reviewing photos, and writing detailed dive logs...), we were pretty wiped out.  Wiped out in a good way, but still wiped out!

Our next stop was Tangkoko National Park, home of tarsiers and black-crested macaques.  It also turned out to be home of more chickens, pigs and other livestock than my mother could shake a flu vaccination syringe at.  

We were especially entertained by the drove of pigs that we found rooting around in the sand at the beach near our village.  

As some of our Dutch (quasi-) compatriots explained, there's an expression for when tourists visit a place and take photos of the surroundings and/or people without actually interacting with them or having a meaningful experience: apen kijken.  As in, apen = monkeys and kijken = looking at.  

(As a side note, I can't help but think that there is something fundamentally politically incorrect in this saying, but we're learning that there's absolutely no preoccupation with political correctness among the Dutch.  When in Rome, I suppose, shudder with discomfort and do as the Romans do...)

But apen kijken was the order of the day in Tangkoko, where first we set out in the evening to observe tarsiers and then woke up early the next morning to go find the macaques.  

The park uses a network of local guides to bring visitors in and observe wildlife, and so we marched in at 5:30 in the morning (after an unfortunate incident of me — ever the morning person! — putting my pants on inside out) with a friendly if hung-over guide from the village where we were staying.  

We later met up with another couple and their guide, and learned that the standard practice was for the guides to dispatch someone to keep track of the monkeys and make sure that the guides can actually locate the animals.  

As we got deeper into the jungle, the guides started a call-and-response with the macaque babysitter.  It sounded to us like the sitter was off to our left, but the guides insisted on heading to the right.  The sitter called out, the guides responded, but we kept getting further and further away...until finally the guides gave up and called the sitter's cell phone.  

Macaque Hotline, how can I help you?! 

Having plunged into the undergrowth in pursuit of the sitter's calls, we proceeded to bushwhack our way toward the macaques.  Never have I felt like a lesser ape than while crashing like an elephant through the jungle in clumsy pursuit of a monkey with a brain half the size of mine!  

Eventually we did find a group of 15 to 20 macaques, which were really fun to watch as they ate and climbed trees and squabbled and groomed each other and tried to urinate on us.  We were also amused to learn that the guides had named the alpha male  "Rambo."  

A day and a half in the blistering heat and the (even more) basic accommodation near Tangkoko was enough for us, so we then headed to the city of Manado (population: 500,000) for the last three days of our vacation.  

Parental advisory!  If you are our parents, you probably don't want to know that for us to get to Manado, our taxi driver had to drive us through a forest fire in which the edges of our one-lane road were in flames.  

I have to confess that a key factor in our decision to head to Manado was the possibility of an air-conditioned hotel room, which we felt guilty about but not guilty enough to not purchase.  As it turns out, our hotel room was a lovely, cool oasis from the heat, though we learned that even a medium-to-high-end accommodation is not immune to rats scratching ardently in the ceiling! 

Manado is an interesting place: as the main transit hub for dive centers in Lembeh and nearby Bunaken, it gets a lot of visitors, but to say that our Lonely Planet guidebook had few kind words for it would be a grave understatement.  Our impression was that few tourists stay for more than one night, and even fewer venture out into the shops.  

But we had a great time exploring the malls and grocery stores, picking up hard-to-find Indonesian ingredients to smuggle back to the Netherlands, and dodging the ubiquitous aqua-blue, van-sized taxis called mikrolets and the off-brand SUVs that everyone who is not in a mikrolet seemed to be driving.   

For the record, Indonesian traffic laws appeared to be fairly...fluid.  

Most of the time, we were the only people dumb enough to be walking around in the scorching heat of the afternoon, and we were certainly the only white (or in my case, reddish pink) people we encountered while out and about.  

We also had fun exchanging greetings in English with kids we met on the street.  "HELLO MISTER!  HOW DO YOU DO?!" was a frequent salutation to both me and John.  Manado doesn't get a lot of American tourists, and everyone we talked with was heartily pro-American.  Thanks, President Obama!  

Perhaps it goes without saying that we also ate our way through Manado, starting with a utensil-free dinner at a local restaurant where there was only one dish on the menu.  Thanks to a hefty language barrier, we ended up with four red-flavored Fantas as our beverage of choice.  The whole experience was exceptionally fun and the food (other than the red Fanta, which tastes like cough syrup) was delicious.  

We also ate several great meals at the mall...though it was a very discouraging to find that mall food in Manado was significantly better than any Indonesian food we've found in the Netherlands.  

Speaking of SUVs, we saw about 400 billboards advertising a new type of Suzuki SUV called the Vaganza.  I don't know about you, but to me, that sounds like a glaring combination of two words, one of which is a part of the female anatomy and the other of which is "extravaganza." 

Off to The Colonies!

On the very best kind of logistical note: we are off to Indonesia for two weeks of "muck diving" — i.e., the kind of diving where one scrounges around on a sandy sea floor in search of strange and wonderful creatures like the mimic octopus.   

We will be completely, delightfully off the grid for the next two Mondays and so Peanut Cheese will be on hiatus until September 14 (or thereabouts).  

We've had our eye on Indonesia since we moved.  Actually, we've had our eye on Indonesia since about 1997!  But we had hoped that it would be easier and cheaper to get to Indonesia from the Netherlands than it is from the U.S., in part because Indonesia is a former Dutch colony.  

It was definitely a no-go on the cheaper part, but as a consolation prize, we occasionally encounter Dutch people of a certain age who still refer to Indonesia as "The Colonies."  

Or who express longing regret that Indonesia is not still a colony, since to them, the best possible situation was traveling to a tropical paradise and still being able to speak Dutch.

I find this sentiment both charming and vaguely horrifying.  

For my part, I am hoping not to speak Dutch at any point while on vacation.  

Though it has infected our everyday conversation so that now John and I speak a largely incomprehensible pidgin of English and Dutch at home.  

For example, the Dutch use the phrase "volgens mij", which literally means "following me", or slightly less literally, "according to me."  It's used all the time as a casual interjection along the lines of "I think" or "If you ask me".  

But the literal translation is irresistible, and so I find myself speaking in English and adding "according to me" to whatever it is that I'm saying. According to me, we need to leave at 9 to catch our train to the airport. And so on.  

In other logistical news, I'm thrilled to report that the painting is finally done!  (And that I finished with about 4 milliliters of paint to spare.) 

My final hurdle was painting the mustard-yellow built-in bookshelves, and they are now busily curing.  Our plan is to triumphantly move our books from the floor to the shelves when we return from vacation.  

The end of painting has meant the beginning of hanging art on the walls, which is great because it makes us feel like we have a home again and not like we crash-landed in an abandoned warehouse that just happens to be in the Netherlands.   

The not-so-great part is that each and every hole in the wall requires a thick masonry drill bit, a plastic anchor, and all of the manly drilling power that John and/or I can summon.   And a vacuum cleaner, for clearing away the pile rubble when we're finished.  

There's nothing quite as suboptimal as jackhammering a 1/2-inch hole into a freshly spackled, meticulously sanded and carefully painted wall in order to hang up an 8x10 picture frame. According to me. 

Like A Fish(stick) To Water

Banksy vs. Bristol Museum might be the coolest art exhibit of all time.  And it had lines — I mean queues! — to prove it: 

 
 

 

(Thanks to Eugenie for being such an intrepid queue photographer!) 

Back in Loughborough, Eugenie and I had pillaged her closet and dolled up a little for the exhibit.  I was feeling a little communist in a lovely red cheongsam.  So while we waited in line, we took some photos.  

 
 

I complained last week about how everyone in the Netherlands thinks I'm Russian, but I'm starting to see what they mean. 

Sadly, the full effect may be lost in the wool sweater I'm wearing over the red dress, but a) this is one of the most telling examples of my true fashion sensibility ever captured on film, and b) by this point, we had been standing in line for two hours and it was raining.  

It might sound a little harsh, but we probably would have visited the non-Banksified Bristol Museum only if we were marooned in Bristol for five days with small children, and on each of the five days, it was raining.  

(Bizarrely, the American Museum of Britain is located in nearby Bath.  Next time we need to stock up on Navajo jewelry, we'll know where to go!) 

But with the Banksy takeover, it was truly a sight to behold.  The ground floor was a dizzying amalgamation of Banksy street art, paintings, sculpture, and animatronics.  

On the three upper floors, the entire museum had been infiltrated with Banksy art and art objects. 

For example, one might find a fishing trophy situated next to a taxidermic beaver.  Or a mouse hidden among early Japanese textiles.  

In each gallery, one or two of the paintings had been modified in some clever, irreverent way.  Think Baby Jesus wearing an iPod.

Things got even better when we spotted the bank of terrariums with animatronic sausages. Which are captured here for your viewing pleasure by John, charming boyfriend and videographer extraordinaire.  

 

But it probably goes without saying that the pièce de résistance was the swimming fish stick.  

 

Different Strokes

For your viewing pleasure this week: a random assortment of notes, photos and errata.  

First, I'm happy to report that we ate some seriously delicious Slovakian Forest Death Pastry and are still alive to tell about it.  

(As a side note, my new favorite thing is making small versions of desserts in two ramekins at a time.  It's far better than eating the same thing for 9 days in a row and/or throwing away half of a slaved-over dessert.)

As I mentioned last week, we came home from Slovakia in the middle of Nijmegen's Vierdaagse event, or Four Days March.  

Prior to this week, I had tried to remain reasonably receptive while our neighbors and other acquaintances raved and raved about this great annual event.  

But here's the line-up: 47,000 people sign up for four days of walking.  It's a substantial undertaking for the participants, since each day's course is 40 to 60 kilometers, depending on the age of the walker.  The walks are on a series of circular routes that start and end in Nijmegen, and at the end, everyone who finishes gets an official medal.  

(Speaking of age-related tracking, I've finally started to look for a job.  This process went from fun to grim in about 45 minutes, so I started poking around on the Albert Heijn grocery store website, just to see what my options were.  

I was horrified — horrified! — to learn that the hourly wages are on a sliding scale based on how old you are.  For example: a 16-year-old earns €4.65/hour doing the same job as a 20-year-old who earns €7.20 an hour as a 24-year-old (or anyone older) who gets €12.90/hour.  Holy Boy Would That Be Illegal In The U.S., Batman!)

For the other 953,000 people who descend upon Nijmegen for the Four Days event, there appear to be three main activities: sitting in bleachers to watch the walkers walk, attending a multitude of live bands in the streets of Nijmegen, and drinking beer.  

I'm sorry, but I just don't understand this.  Watching people walk?  For four days in a row?  

In contrast, it would take a lot of convincing to get me to attend a marathon, but at least there's some drama in a marathon.  What with people nearly killing themselves to run an inhumanly long way, and someone emerging as a winner at the end. 

To be fair, I understand that some people might feel the same way about things we love to do.  Like taking photos of insects.  Or sitting around and watching golf on T.V.   Or traveling to places that require a long list of vaccinations.  Or going out in the rain to find little snails in our neighborhood.  Or clarifying butter to make ghee. 

But seriously: watching a bunch of people walk?  Every year?!

To add insult to injury, we ventured downtown on Friday to get some much-needed groceries, only to discover that pretty much everything was closed because of the march.  

We realized that in addition to forgetting a great deal of Dutch while in Slovakia and Poland, we had forgotten our finely honed paranoia about closures of grocery stores on even the most minor holidays.  

Luckily for us, the streets were instead teeming with carnival-style vendors, so we were able to stock up on essential items. Like California Peanuts. 

But speaking of insect photos, we've posted a selection of photos from our Slovakia trip on our baryon.net website.  Snails, spiders, moths, caterpillars, beetles, bees, and two bigger critters (i.e. the two of us) abound!   

Tatra Melky

We returned to Nijmegen last night after a long and complicated journey back from Slovakia, which included but was not limited to:

• An early morning trip to the Slovakia-Poland border on a local bus; 
  
• A border crossing on foot; 
  
• A mini-bus from the border to Zakopane, Poland, which ended up being a leisurely milk-run-style loop through the greater Zakopane area.  By the end, we had at least 24 tourists and commuters crammed into a van that looked like it was built for 15!
  
• Another bus from Zakopane to Krakow, this one full of tourists bearing souvenir wooden hatchets and white Polish cowboy hats;
  
• A guilty but entirely satisfying lunch in a McDonald's in the mall adjoining the Krakow train station (in our defense, the only other restaurant option was something along the lines of  "Loco Taco Fiesta" which seemed like even less of a good idea);
  
• A nauseating post-McDonald's sprint through the Krakow train station due to my faulty reading of the Polish train schedule (in my defense, said train schedules make IRS forms look like Hop On Pop);
  
• A train to the airport (barely);
  
• A flight to Düsseldorf, Germany on RyanAir, which makes Southwest Airlines seem like those luxury Korean airlines whose soft-focus ads imply that your own personal flight attendant is available to give you a neck massage immediately after the safety video;
  
• An airport shuttle from Düsseldorf back to Nijmegen; and,
  
• A ride from the train station with our luggage bungee-corded to the backs of our bikes, in which we remembered how to ride bikes while dodging revelers, trash, and traffic from Nijmegen's annual Vierdaagse, or Four Days March extravaganza.  (More on that weirdness later.)
  

Whew!  

All of that itineration notwithstanding, we had a lovely, relaxing time in the High Tatras of Slovakia. 

We stayed in a quiet village called Ždiar, which boasts a few small markets, a pair of churches, about 15 small pensions, at least 20 tractors, and a fleet of feral chickens that come bursting out of the bushes to induce heart attacks in unsuspecting tourists.   

 

On our most ambitious day of hiking, we took a local bus to the town of Tatranska Lomnica, then rode a very sketchily attached cable car to a trailhead in the mountains.  

  

From there, we hiked along a bouldery path to a mountain pass at about 6600 feet.  

 

We hoped to see marmots, but the closest we came was a friendly British guy who advised us that he had seen a marmoset on his way up to the pass. 

 

On our less ambitious days of hiking, we explored the ridges and forests close to the village. We had fun taking lots (and lots) of photos of insects, spiders, slugs and snails.  

  

We also picked a half liter of wild huckleberries, which stained our fingers purple.  We smuggled the berries back to the Netherlands in a Nalgene water bottle!

We're reasonably certain that we're going to end up with huckleberry cobbler for dessert tonight, not Slovakian Forest Death Pastry.  

Last but not least, we found two delicious new snacks: first, a (marginally) carbonated drink called Kofola, which was created as a Communist alternative to Coke and Pepsi and is still very popular in Slovakia and the Czech Republic.  

It tastes a little bit like weak root beer mixed with lemon pledge, but it's nevertheless quite tasty and refreshing. 

As an added bonus, it sports the following catchy slogan:  "Když ji miluješ, není co řešit. / Keď ju miluješ, nie je čo riešiť."  

Translation?  "When you love her / There is nothing to think about."   

Nothing to think about, indeed. 

But the crown jewel of our culinary experiences in the Tatras was our discovery of a snack called Tatra Melky.  It has the flavor of a caramel popcorn ball but the consistency of a Rice Krispie treat.  In a word: yum! 

If we do have poison berry cobbler tonight, at least we'll die happy. 

Warsaw Pact

I learned recently through the enlightening power of the Interweb that the Warsaw Pact is officially called the "Treaty of Friendship, Cooperation and Mutual Assistance".  

For the record, I was lost in the Warsaw train system for nearly an hour and a half yesterday, but encountered very little friendship, cooperation or mutual assistance in the process.  Though I acknowledge that I was mostly asking for one-way assistance, and on top of that, rather boorishly expecting it in English. 

Maybe I was feeling a little overconfident.  

The last time I went to Poland was in 1996, when my friend Scott and I traveled by night train from Vienna to Kraków.  We slept through the Kraków stop (note, gentle readers, the lack of any friendship, cooperation, or mutual assistance from the conductors) and ended up quite inadvertently in Warsaw, face to face with a ticket agent who shook her head ruefully when we asked if she spoke any English.

The only reason that we're not still stuck in Warsaw is that Scott was able to trot out enough German to buy us tickets back to Kraków.  

So this time, when I bought a train ticket from Kraków to Łódź via Warsaw, I felt good, at least, about going to Warsaw intentionally.  And even though the train left at 7 a.m., I was reasonably certain that I wouldn't sleep through Warsaw and end up in Minsk.   

But as it turns out, the Poles are not so keen on signage.  Particularly not interactive signage.  On the trains, on the platforms, or anywhere else, for that matter.  The primary source of information in Polish train stations is a series of scratchy announcements, which is fine if one speaks Polish fluently and has dog hearing.  And is not so fine if you have a tight connection and you're me. 

Long story short(er): I took the wrong train into central Warsaw, where a conductor urged me back onto the platform based on the incompatibility between my ticket and the train's destination.  From there, I wandered into a labyrinthine underground station complex and found even less friendship, etc.  

Only through the power of paying €8 for an hour of Internet access in the Warsaw Marriott lobby did I sort my train schedule back out, let John know not to meet me at the train station at 11:20, luxuriate in the non-train station bathrooms and enjoy, somewhat unexpectedly, music from the American Beauty soundtrack piped into the lobby.  

One Snickers bar for lunch and an hour of waving "bye-bye" to the Polish baby in the seat in front of me later, I made it triumphantly to Łódź. 

(And vowed, in a pact between me and me, never to set foot by train in Warsaw.  Ever, Ever Again.) 

As it turns out, Łódź is a pretty interesting city, in the decrepit-and-weird-but-still-architecturally-lovely sense of interesting.  John has already been here for a week, as one of 800 physicists who have descended upon the city for the 2009 International Cosmic Ray Conference.  

And if "International Cosmic Ray Conference in Łódź" doesn't sound like fun, I don't know what does.  

My plan for the week is to be a hotel bunny until the conference is over on Wednesday, then we'll head into the hills of the High Tatras for a few days of hiking in the mountains.  Though I'm pretty sure that "Łódź hotel bunny" is a phrase that has never been uttered.  Ever, Ever Before. 

Aan Het Goede Schip Pannekoek

This morning, at an hour way too early to be discussing the King of Pop, I found myself on the receiving end of a series of condolences from my classmates on the death of Michael Jackson.  

Then I tried to explain (in broken Dutch) that I while appreciated the sentiment, I'm not feeling particularly devastated about his death, that it doesn't really matter to me one way or another. I'm mean, of course I'm not happy that he's dead, it's just that — oh, never mind.  Condolences accepted.  

Maybe I'm just a cold person / bad dancer, but my most emotional reaction to the news was my immense relief about not being in the U.S. to live through a harrowing 72+ hours of news coverage and tribute film.  

I do feel the need to come out of the closet and disclose that Thriller was my very first cassette tape.  Though it came about only after some friends of our family — who were probably exactly 7 and 9 years old — expressed scorn-laced disbelief that I hadn't even heard of Michael Jackson.  

Twentysomething years later, I think this proves once and for all that you can take the girl out from under a rock, but you can't take the living under a rock out of the girl.  

Those thrilling (ha!) conversations this morning were just the icing on the cake after a weekend of exploring some of the Netherlands' weirder attractions with our friends Josh and Eugenie. 

On Saturday, we ventured into the thriving metropolis of Malden, to the De Muse Accordion and Harmonica Museum, Shop, and Cafe.  Which was even more awesome than it sounds.  

The owner gave us a tour and a detailed tutorial on how accordions work, during which which we all — four musician-types who have day jobs as a mathematician, physicist, physics-leaning engineer and other (me, though technically speaking, I don't have a day job) — listened enthusiastically and asked a million questions.  

At one point, Eugenie asked yet another question about the placement of the holes inside the accordion.  Mr. Accordion narrowed his eyes at her and asked "What is your field, exactly?"  We surmised at that point that most visitors just smile and nod and then ask him to play a polka.  

Prickly-but-charming Dutch accordion makers notwithstanding, the museum is a heady melange of harmonicas, accordions, concertinas, bandoneóns, and their brethren:  

 

 

Plus a requisite diorama, a handful of scary clowns, posters from the heyday of accordion music, and — o sweet oasis in the land of big government! — the Gipper's own personal harmonica.

 
 

On Sunday, we went for broke by taking our maiden voyage on Nijmegen's Pannekoekenboot — a.k.a. a 2 1/2-hour pancake cruise on the River Waal.  

With all-you-can-eat pancakes. And a narrated tour (in Dutch) of the "sights" along the Waal. And beer. And about 427 Dutch children.

I have to say: I don't think I hadn't really lived until I had spooned an mind-boggling assortment of sprinkles onto a pancake under the watchful breasts of a wooden mermaid.  While floating down one of Europe's main commercial shipping channels.