Until 2020, it was possible to book a voyage on a cargo ship. Today, it\u2019s virtually impossible, despite being a greener, languid alternative to air travel.<\/p>\n
Summer read \u2013 originally published March 26 2025.<\/p>\n
Before the time of te Tiriti, there were few passenger ships. Crossing the Pacific in 1830? Usually, only a merchant could take you \u2013 and if you didn\u2019t want to be swindled, swabbing decks, or marooned as a stowaway, you needed to hire a middleman like Hamish Jamieson.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Jamieson lives in Hawke\u2019s Bay. Until 2020, his travel agency Freighter Travel NZ served a small but dedicated group of holdouts from a bygone era of sea travel. For three decades he helped people gain passage on cargo ships \u2013 offering slower, greener, languid alternatives to long haul flights.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Cost-wise, cargo travel sat between air travel and cruise ships. Jamieson could typically secure clients a cabin and three meals for $280 per person, per day. The fee did not include anything in the way of entertainment; passengers were left to their own devices on voyages that could last months. This, Jamieson believes, was the main appeal of cargo travel. \u201cThere was no cabaret. There were no deck chairs. There was no steward in a white coat and a simpering smile looking for a tip,\u201d he says. \u201cYou can switch off from society. And that\u2019s a very, very big attraction for a lot of people.\u201d<\/p>\n
Such a big attraction that Jamieson believes it was destined to explode. \u201c[Cargo travel] was the fastest growing market in the world,\u201d he exclaims. \u201cPeople want to be ecologically more friendly. They want to reduce their carbon footprint. They want to de-stress. And this is the perfect opportunity.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
Freighter Travel NZ\u2019s market was too small to survive the pandemic. While he insists demand was growing, driven by climate-conscious travellers and rising airfares, Jamieson\u2019s agency closed four years ago. Today, it\u2019s virtually impossible to board a cargo ship as a passenger.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Jamieson ran his business after a lifetime with freighters, first as a purser for shipping firm P&O, then as an intermediary between travellers and his merchant contacts. Before the pandemic, freighters took an average of 4,000 passengers per-year; 29 of them booked through Jamieson in 2019.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m very sad, very sad that they don\u2019t do [cargo travel] any more,\u201d says one of Jamieson\u2019s last customers, Rania Kalogirou. The Kiwi-Greek travel writer embarked on a 45-day voyage from Singapore to Istanbul in 2019. Her journey, she says, was eye-opening.\u00a0 \u201cI got to peek behind the curtain,\u201d says Kalogirou, recalling the industrial chaos of the seasport where she boarded her freighter. This dusty hive of cranes and checkpoints felt a world away from the tourism industry. \u201cThese are parts of the world that you don\u2019t often get to see.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
Life at sea was similarly unmanicured. Kalogirou peeled potatoes in her ship\u2019s galley and went ashore in Suez with cartons of cigarettes for bartering. \u201cYou can never really get that inside experience [elsewhere],\u201d she says. \u201cYou\u2019re part of the crew. You\u2019re part of the ship. You feel very much like you live there.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
Kalogirou\u2019s presence on board was a welcome distraction but her convenience mattered little to the merchant she sailed with. Her ship departed five days early. Then, their route changed due to conflict in Lebanon. Kalogirou also spent the entire journey without internet connection \u2013 something she considered a blessing.\u00a0<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Beyond the sensation of living apart from the world, Jamieson believes there\u2019s something soul-nourishing about life at sea. \u201cJust standing by the bow, watching the world go by\u2026that, for me, is everything,\u201d\u00a0 he says. \u201cThat\u2019s what keeps taking me back on freighters. And I\u2019m absolutely gutted that at the moment we can\u2019t do that.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
The pandemic sank the bottom lines of most shipping companies. Fickle, hastily arranged quarantine laws often left merchants waiting offshore while cargo, crew and profits wasted away.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Companies like Maersk and CMA C&M, tightening their belts, decided passengers were more trouble than their worth. Any non-essential crew member increased the risk of infection, quarantine and delay. Jamieson\u2019s network of shipping company contacts refused to take any more travellers, and a millennia-old tradition ended overnight.<\/p>\n
When pandemic restrictions eased, nothing changed. Jameson says it\u2019s because he, and agents like him, have no leverage. For merchants, the money made by taking passengers was negligible. \u201cI can\u2019t promise them more than maybe 1-1.5 million euros a year of income,\u201d explains Jameson, \u201cthese shipping companies make that in a week.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
CMA CGM and Maersk declined to comment for this story.\u00a0<\/p>\n
I spoke to Jamieson in early November, 2024. Weeks later, Enzo Terranova became one of the first tourists since Covid to travel on a cargo ship. The blogger\u2019s desperate attempts to cross the Pacific without flying made it into a French magazine, inspiring the intervention of CMA CGM executives. As it happened, the multinational CEO\u2019s chief of staff was from Terranova\u2019s hometown of Marseille, and executives decided to bend their rules out of solidarity. After months of failed attempts to board a freighter, CMA CGM personally contacted Terranova to offer him passage from Shanghai to Los Angeles.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Terranova says climate change drove him to insist on cargo travel. \u201cIf I had taken the same itinerary but by plane, my carbon footprint would have been catastrophic,\u201d he says.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Terranova isn\u2019t wrong: planes are the most carbon intensive form of transport. A single economy ticket travelling from Auckland to Los Angeles creates around two tonnes of emissions, whereas a cargo berth over the same distance costs just 160kg.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Though he is far from your average tourist, Terranova\u2019s mindset represents a well-reported cultural shift away from planes and towards greener alternatives. Air travel accounts for 4% of all global emissions. If this seems small, consider a miniscule, wealthy number of travellers can fly. In 2024, airlines sold 4.5 billion tickets while almost 9 billion people took trains in India alone. Moreover, unlike trains and other sectors like energy and industry, jets can\u2019t easily decarbonise.\u00a0<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
This all means air travel will account for 25% of our carbon budget by 2050 \u2013 a staggering percentage given how few people fly and how the majority of these trips are for leisure.\u00a0<\/p>\n
In response, France recently banned thousands of short haul domestic flights. Spain is reportedly doing the same. While these laws are unlikely to curb emissions on their own, they show a growing awareness that, to fight climate change, we need to rethink how we go abroad.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Before Terranova crossed the Pacific, he fought for a route that was neither quick, cheap, nor easy. With media exposure, he overcame the apathy of a billion-dollar shipping firm \u2013 showing that demand exists for slower, greener modes of travel.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Terranova revels in his good fortune. \u201cEvery night, I sat on the deck, watching shooting stars, the infinite ocean, and I realised how lucky I was to be there,\u201d he recalls. \u201cFor more than two months, I lived an experience outside of time. I discovered life at sea, a world most people never get to experience.<\/p>\n
\u201cI dream that shipping companies will reopen cargo travel for passengers\u2026 even though they\u2019re not luxury cruises. It\u2019s a raw, authentic, unforgettable adventure.\u201c\u00a0<\/p>\n
Jamieson is happy to leave the future of container travel to advocates like Terranova. Now 75, he\u2019s emotionally and financially drained from years fighting for the return of his business. As good as he knows cargo travel to be, Jamieson also knows shipping companies respond to profit and not impassioned testimonies like Terranova\u2019s. \u201cThe dreams are free,\u201d he sighs, reclining on a La-Z-Boy with a scotch. \u201cI\u2019m staying hopeful but with a tinge of, you know, that sense that you\u2019re wrong.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Until 2020, it was possible to book a voyage on a cargo ship. Today, it\u2019s virtually impossible, despite…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":202160,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[15656,138,492,42,43,4987,96601,40,38,41,39,123306],"class_list":["post-202159","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-air-travel","tag-business","tag-comments-enabled","tag-headlines","tag-news","tag-pollution","tag-the-best-of","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories","tag-tourism-fiji-summer"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/202159","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=202159"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/202159\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/202160"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=202159"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=202159"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=202159"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}