Freighter travel understand · Freighter travel tourist information
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Freighter travel tourist information
Freighter travel tourist information
A well-kept secret in these days of airport anxiety and worry about aircraft emissions is that it is still possible to book a regularly scheduled sea passage to most parts of the world. While the world-famous Queen Mary 2 offers sometimes two departures in a month between Southampton and New York, many cargo-passenger services offer sailings every week of the year.
A tour of ports tells us what’s going on. From Southampton, for example, there are four weekly sailings, two each to the Far East and the Mediterranean, from Long Beach, there is a sailing nearly every week to the Far East, from Le Havre a weekly sailing to Martinique and Guadeloupe and so on. In all, there are now about seven or eight regularly-scheduled weekly services accepting passengers. In addition, there are frequent sailings to Australia and New Zealand, South America, the Far East and West and South Africa. Freighter travel is also possible in some smaller and/or third world countries. Freighter travel is virtually the only way to travel across the Caspian Sea and is a very common way to travel across the Black Sea. Be warned however, that in these regions, it is possible that ships will have to wait for days to be given access to the final port, facilities are bad, you likely have to bring your own food, and service is sporadic/unreliable(you will have to check every morning for departing ships).
Essentially, you are paying a cargo vessel to transport you along with whatever they are ferrying across the sea, usually containers these days, although some multi-purpose ships still survive and you can sail from the USA and Europe to China and Japan in a heavy-lift ship or from the Great Lakes to Europe in a grain carrier. Imagine having your own 100,000-tonner for just five passengers instead of the 5,000 that a similar-sized cruise ship might carry - many of the new container ships that serve the Far East from Europe and from California are now in this category.
Passengers on freighters are mainly retired and early retired people who can afford the time (it takes about a day of sea travel to cover an hour of air travel). There are also many returning students, relocating executives and their families, airline pilots (yes) and these days, people who are simply tired of air travel. The vessels usually take no more than 12 passengers along, due to the fact that ships are required to hire a doctor if more than 12 passengers are present.
The shortest passages are of course Transatlantic and these vary between eight and twelve days each way, while a voyage can be made around the world in between 80 and 120 days. A trip from Marseille to Cape Town could take up to 25 days.
The freighters sometimes call in ports on the way, to load or unload cargo, which can take from 12 to 36 hours. You will need to have all visas for these stops in your passport to be allowed to travel. It does mean though that you are able to spend some time on land.
You will probably need someone to introduce you into the freighter world, because it is a bit of a fuss for a company to take a passenger when they also take a multi million dollar cargo. However the crews seem to enjoy the company of passengers since the work is very monotonous.
There are some agents arranging trips, who charge around USD 75-100 (EUR 100-120) a day. With an introduction it might be as cheap as USD 50 (EUR 85), but don't count on it as many freighter trips, especially tramp trips that were cheaper, have been withdrawn since 2001.
Bear in mind though that you can take as much luggage as you can stow in your cabin so for people moving to a new place this might save a lot on shipping your things out there by air.
A cheaper alternative is becoming part of the crew. This is only available to credentialed mariners. It can take quite some time to gain sufficient experience, and the regulations are becoming onerous.
The Most Frequently Asked Travel Questions about Freighter travel
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Freighter travel Travel Guide from Wikitravel. Many thanks to all Wikitravel contributors. Text is available under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0, images are available under various licenses, see each image for details.
