I live near the Port of Oakland and constantly see the trucks and trains for major shipping lines: Maersk Sea Air, P&O Nedlloyd, Evergreen, APL, OOCL, Hanjin, etc... passing to and fro on the highways and the railways.I say this because in the last two weeks since returning from the Philippines almost every waking moment has been spent trying to get our first container shipment over to Hawaii. We had no idea where to start and initially tried calling shipping lines directly.
We finally understood that you work with a freight forwarder (a broker) to move your stuff from place to place (unless you own the shipping line or have multi-year contracts).
We finally found PT CAT (PTC Agency & Transport) and Vilma Moises with her very competent, very well-organized team to act as our freight forwarder from Manila to Honolulu http://www.ptcat.com.ph/
(Aside: Guess how we found PT CAT? Vilma's nephew blogged about transporting his vehicle from Oakland to Manila in 2004, and we found them through his picture gallery!)
Shipping containers are amazing. There are mostly 40' and 20' containers transporting the goods that we consumers use (if you've seen a "Made in China" sticker on a product, it was probably in a shipping container at one point).
Props to Malcom McLean, who came up with the idea of shipping containers in a flash of ingenuity. He was sitting on the dock sometime in the 1930s, waiting for his truckload of cotton bales to be processed -- unload, repack, reload on ship, repeat -- when he had the innovative idea to keep everything in the container and move the container instead. He founded Maersk many years later.
Now, shipping containers move practically every dry good in the world (Wikipedia stats: 90% of non-bulk cargo worldwide moves by containers on ships, and as of 2005, some 18 million total containers make over 200 million trips per year.) That's tons of sneakers, shirts, cigarettes, chemicals, coal, oil, and gas, televisions, foodstuffs, and our favorite--furniture!My previous encounters with shipping included trying to be a passenger on a ship from Dakar to Morocco (unsuccessful) and trying to be a passenger on a ship from Panama to Colombia (successful).
In 1999 while backpacking for The Odyssey for two years, I had the opportunity to take a cargo boat through the Darien Gap from Panama City to Bahia Solano, Colombia en route to Cartagena.
The shipping industry moves practically everything you buy in a store besides locally grown or locally-made products. Thanks to all the captains, sailors, seafarers, and all in the shipping and transport industries for moving our cargo from place to place.
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And women: if you are good on the phone, have excellent organizational skills, and can relate to timeliness and customer service, follow the lead of Anderson Cargo here in the US and consider starting up a freight brokerage or ultimately a shipping line. (article) We need you!
Womens' International Shipping and Trading Association Links:
wista.net
wistasingapore.com
