A Tour of Hamburg's Burchardkai

ONE of Hamburg's most renowned and distinctive features is its port. On most days you can see immense container ships cautiously navigating the Elbe, often with the help of a tugboat that seems diminutive in comparison, and when they dock the giant gantry cranes swing into action. Even the largest ships can be fully divested of their cargo, as infinite as the occupants of a clown car, in a matter of hours. The port itself rarely sleeps. It's a 24-hour operation with only a handful of holidays per year.

Recently the teaching company I work for began providing English training to select groups of the longshoremen who work along the port. Although going into the lessons I had no idea what form and direction the actual classes might take, the participants have so far shown a surprisingly good command of English as well as an eagerness to make the courses worth their while. Maybe that's why, having sensed that I'd only culled from books the technical English that I was passing on to them, they invited me to what turned out to be a very hands-on tour of the famous Burchardkai on the southern shore of the Elbe.

It was a cold, foggy evening punctuated by rain showers, and my self-appointed guides emphasized that winter work under similar conditions could be brutal, since they had to make mechanical repairs without gloves to retain a modicum of dexterity when dealing with small parts on the gusty, frozen catwalks, and that the work was much better in the summer, even though the temperature in the cranes' electrical rooms can reach 50°C/120°F on the hottest days. We sped across the HHLA complex in an orange van that wore a spinning warning light: first to see a ship being offloaded, then among the stored containers where the long-legged van carriers slipped in and out like dystopian devices out of Blade Runner, then on to a row of unoccupied gantry cranes.

The cramped, slow-moving elevator took us up to a height of around 50 meters (164 feet), and we disembarked into the cabin, which offered a clear view — straight down — of the spreader (the extendable grip that lowers and hoists the containers) dangling above the river. After the pros made a few test runs to clear the water from the cabin's path along the crane's arm, I was put in the captain's chair and invited to drive the thing myself. Which I did. With great care and deliberation. In a way, the most unsettling thing was the realization that these countless tons of metal and cable could be controlled with virtually the same equipment I once used to play Kung-Fu Master on my Commodore 128.

I wasn't too worried about accelerating so quickly that we went rocketing off the arm and into the Elbe (there are multiple buffers to prevent such a thing, and besides, I made extra sure that they were really, really sure it couldn't happen), but I did wince at the recurring thought that I might raise or lower the spreader too quickly, resulting in whatever insane amount of damage that might cause. For the longshoremen, working at that height and with that massive bulk of equipment was as natural as breathing; they were completely at home in a world where everything is of grossly exaggerated proportions: weight, size, temperature, height.

The last leg of the tour took us to the workshop, where we warmed up and saw some of these Brobdingnagian objects divorced from their equally gigantic surroundings. The spreaders, for example, appeared slightly less imposing on their repair pallets. That still didn't completely alleviate the feeling that I was a dwarf lost on the set of an epic sci-fi movie.

Although they still might not convey the true (or apparent) scale of things, my Flickr page has some photos in addition to the ones shown in this post.