Types of Sea Ports

There seem to be three types of ports where we have docked.

First are the docks that are especially designed for passenger ships. Hong Kong was a great example of this type, where the end of our gangplank emptied directly into a 3-story shopping mall with 100+ stores in it. Sydney, Australia, was another example, where we were minutes from downtown. There we asked the captain to consider staying overnight on a future cruise so that passengers could attend the Sydney opera house. He said that the Sydney port is booked solid through middle of the year 2012, so that is very difficult. (So much for the economic downturn.)

Second type is the “tender” ports. In these, you cannot get in against the land. Instead, you drop anchor offshore and have small boats ferry the people into shore. The most extreme example here was Rarotonga (Cooks Island), where the water was too deep for the anchor, we had to say offshore, and the current was significant enough that the captain had to keep the ship under propulsion for the full 8 hours or so that we were “docked.”

Third type is an industrial port. In this type, the main job is moving cargo. People are a side objective. These can still be nice, but they tend to have a bit of a factory-floor look to them. They also can be further from the tourist areas, so typically we have longer bus rides in this type of port.

The port in Thailand was the most dramatic example of this third type of port. I’ll post some pictures below. When our bus came back into port, we saw stored contains at least a mile away from the ship. There easily were 5,000 cars and small trucks lined up in lots, and 10,000 contains…each the size of a semi-trucks load.