Until 2020, it was possible to book a voyage on a cargo ship. Today, it’s virtually impossible, despite being a greener, languid alternative to air travel.

Before the time of te Tiriti, there were few passenger ships. Crossing the Pacific in 1830? Usually, only a merchant could take you – and if you didn’t want to be swindled, swabbing decks, or marooned as a stowaway, you needed to hire a middleman like Hamish Jamieson. 

Jamieson lives in Hawke’s 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 – offering slower, greener, languid alternatives to long haul flights. 

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. “There was no cabaret. There were no deck chairs. There was no steward in a white coat and a simpering smile looking for a tip,” he says. “You can switch off from society. And that’s a very, very big attraction for a lot of people.”

Such a big attraction that Jamieson believes it was destined to explode. “[Cargo travel] was the fastest growing market in the world,” he exclaims. “People want to be ecologically more friendly. They want to reduce their carbon footprint. They want to de-stress. And this is the perfect opportunity.” 

Freighter Travel NZ’s market was too small to survive the pandemic. While he insists demand was growing, driven by climate-conscious travellers and rising airfares, Jamieson’s agency closed four years ago. Today, it’s virtually impossible to board a cargo ship as a passenger. 

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.

“I’m very sad, very sad that they don’t do [cargo travel] any more,” says one of Jamieson’s last customers, Rania Kaligorou. The Kiwi-Greek travel writer embarked on a 45-day voyage from Singapore to Istanbul in 2019. Her journey, she says, was eye-opening.  “I got to peek behind the curtain,” says Kaligorou, 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. “These are parts of the world that you don’t often get to see.”  

Life at sea was similarly unmanicured. Kaligorou peeled potatoes in her ship’s galley and went ashore in Suez with cartons of cigarettes for bartering. “You can never really get that inside experience [elsewhere],” she says. “You’re part of the crew. You’re part of the ship. You feel very much like you live there.” 

Kaligorou’s 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. Kaligorou also spent the entire journey without internet connection – something she considered a blessing. 

Beyond the sensation of living apart from the world, Jamieson believes there’s something soul-nourishing about life at sea. “Just standing by the bow, watching the world go by…that, for me, is everything,”  he says. “That’s what keeps taking me back on freighters. And I’m absolutely gutted that at the moment we can’t do that.” 

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. 

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’s network of shipping company contacts refused to take any more travellers, and a millennia-old tradition ended overnight.

When pandemic restrictions eased, nothing changed. Jameson says it’s because he, and agents like him, have no leverage. For merchants, the money made by taking passengers was negligible. “I can’t promise them more than maybe 1-1.5 million euros a year of income,” explains Jameson, “these shipping companies make that in a week.” 

CMA CGM and Maersk declined to comment for this story. 

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’s 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’s chief of staff was from Terranova’s 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. 

Terranova says climate change drove him to insist on cargo travel. “If I had taken the same itinerary but by plane, my carbon footprint would have been catastrophic,” he says. 

Terranova isn’t 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. 

Though he is far from your average tourist, Terranova’s 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’t easily decarbonise. 

This all means air travel will account for 25% of our carbon budget by 2050 – a staggering percentage given how few people fly and how the majority of these trips are for leisure. 

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. 

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 – showing that demand exists for slower, greener modes of travel. 

Terranova revels in his good fortune. “Every night, I sat on the deck, watching shooting stars, the infinite ocean, and I realised how lucky I was to be there,” he recalls. “For more than two months, I lived an experience outside of time. I discovered life at sea, a world most people never get to experience.

“I dream that shipping companies will reopen cargo travel for passengers… even though they’re not luxury cruises. It’s a raw, authentic, unforgettable adventure.“ 

Jamieson is happy to leave the future of container travel to advocates like Terranova. Now 75, he’s 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’s. “The dreams are free,” he sighs, reclining on a La-Z-Boy with a scotch. “I’m staying hopeful but with a tinge of, you know, that sense that you’re wrong.”

Most people would look at our house and decide painting it was a job for professionals. My mum and dad decided it was a job for their kids.

I grew up in a house that was always being renovated. That’s not hyperbole, it was literally always being renovated. Just one big DIY project that lasted 30 years. Bought in the 70s as a three bedroom, single storey house, by the time I was born in the mid 90s – the ninth of 10 children – the house was two storeys, eight bedrooms, three bathrooms, one garage and a deck that couldn’t be walked on in case you fell through it to your death. 

The flooring was a mix of old carpet, bare floorboards (not to be walked on barefoot because of nails), and a big slab of concrete for the entire newly built downstairs that was – huge luxury – heated. Various walls would be without drywall or insulation for years at a time, resulting in the framing being used as makeshift shelving. I heard stories of my mum spending all day on the jackhammer while pregnant with me (or maybe it was my older brother), wanting to have the basement dug out before I was born. Another brother used to insist that he would’ve been taller if he hadn’t spent his adolescent summers wheeling barrows full of dirt and concrete for hours at a time. 

There was always a job to do, like using pliers to pull out thousands of vinyl staples in the kitchen, or chiselling concrete off a pile of free bricks to build a garden wall. Then once every 10-15 years, a full summer holidays would be dedicated to painting the entire exterior of the house. 

If any normal person looked at the size of our house and was told it needed to be painted, they would say that it was a job best left to professionals. My mum and dad looked at the size of our house and decided it was a job for their kids.

First the scaffolding went up – terrifying metal frames that stretched up five metres high in order to reach the guttering. Once the scaffolding was up on one wall, it would soon be filled with Chapmans of every age. Up to 10 people spread across the wall, performing the same task on their patch of boards. 

If there was ever a strategy discussed, it was never discussed with me, but natural patterns always emerged. The fittest and fastest were on the top level because painting above your head (under the roof) gets very sore very quick. The slower, younger lot handled the middle section which was usually the largest, and the little kids (including myself) were on the ground covering only about five weatherboards but also acting as runners any time someone dropped their brush from five metres up or needed a paint refill from the garage. Those who really couldn’t paint well were in charge of preparing morning tea and lunch for everyone.

Most of us would be on one end with the big brushes, painting any weatherboards within reach. On the other end, my eldest brother and mum were on windows as the cleanest edge cutters. Every day, during the 2001 paint, then the 2010 paint and any internal painting in between, my dad complained that the window painters were too slow. He could do it twice as fast, he reckoned.

In 2008 we window cutters finally let him prove it. He was right. He finished the downstairs bathroom trim in half the time and for seven years I had to look at wobbly purple lines around the window every time I took a shower.

The big painting summer of my childhood felt like a lifetime to me but in reality it was three weeks, surely a record for a house of that size. With so many of us, the whole side of the two-storey house could get two full coats in a single day (which it did because the scaffolding had a daily hire fee).

There was a promotion running on paint that summer – for every 10 litre bucket of paint purchased, you got a free lawn chair. By the end of the three weeks, lawn chairs were being given away as Christmas presents. It took more than 100 litres of paint to finish two coats but no labour costs. My parents never even bothered to get a quote from a professional. 

Fourteen years later, fresh from graduating university and a dozen declined applications for casual retail work, I really needed a job. When my frugal aunty complained about the quotes she’d just gotten to have her house painted, I said I could do it for half the price. Did I know how much paint cost or how long it would take to paint a house alone? Of course not, but the thought of getting a lump sum of money and one big task to complete with it was instantly appealing. 

I estimated how much paint I would need, what equipment I’d need to buy and how long it would take. I grossly underestimated every category. I bought a pair of painter’s overalls for genuine reasons instead of as a student party costume. Thanks to our family’s history with painting, I had a bunch of equipment and tips and tricks up my sleeve. I made my little plans each night for the next day, and took my little trips to the paint shop for replacement brushes and top ups, and had my little lunch breaks and Friday treats. It was the most accomplished I’d ever felt, but it came with some lessons.

Because I was blasé, I painted one east-facing wall in the middle of the day, leading to a massive bubble on the side of the house that I blamed on the paint. When I repainted it in the sun again with a different paint, it happened once more. By the time I digested that you shouldn’t have wet paint in the middle of the day in summer, I’d sanded and painted that one board four times. 

At one point I decided to hire my little sister as a contractor. Despite being three years apart in age, she is Gen Z and I’m not. She insisted on taking her full lunch break and refused to work overtime, eventually decided she couldn’t be bothered with the sun and quit. Such boundaries have served her very well in her career. 

As a business venture it was a disaster. Even with my mum kindly working for zero dollars an hour for half the project, I ended up making something close to $10 an hour. And yet it was the most enjoyable job I’ve ever had. Without a deadline and working alone a lot of the time, painting was peaceful and satisfying. Each wall or window I finished was immediately noticeable and at the end of the day, I cleaned up my tools, drove home and felt proudly exhausted. On my last day on the job, I stood in the driveway and couldn’t believe that I had just painted a whole house. Besides the bubble saga, my aunty was a happy customer. 

That was my last paying job before I went travelling, returned home and became a journalist. It was also the last time I painted a house. Since then I’ve lived in four rentals and every one of them could’ve done with fresh paint. But my heart’s not in it enough to paint someone else’s house for free. Instead, whenever my partner and I briefly entertain the idea of buying a house together, the first thing I look at is the paint. I always hope it hasn’t been done recently. That way I’ll have an excuse to hire myself again for my favourite job.