At 6:00 AM I woke with a stuffy nose and sinus headache.  Outside I could hear loud metallic bangs.  We had docked at Salaverry, the port for Trujillo.  I went to the balcony and saw a cloud of gray dust rising from a large sieve where a giant set of jaws attached to a crane had just dropped a load of yellow grain that was now being funneled into the back of a tractor trailer truck.  Both my questions were answered.  The banging and the stuffy nose.  I am allergic to grain dust and there were clouds of it right outside my cabin.

Across the pier a bulk carrier homeported in Majuro (although it may never have called at the Marshall Islands) was unloading a cargo of corn.  I went back into the cabin, took a Sudafed, used some Afrin spray, donned a face mask and went back out to look.

I think Holland America should offer tours of port operations, or at the least a program with slides explaining different cargo ports.  So far on this trip we have docked at a coal port, a grain port, container ports and right as I am writing cars unload in Calleo, the port for Lima.

The bulk carrier has two holds open, one worked by a crane based shoreside the other by one of the ship’s cranes.  The cranes’ jaws dip into the hold, grab a scoop of corn, swing out, spilling corn all along the way, and dump it into the funnel/sieve which sifts it into the long trailers of a tractor trailer truck.  After each scoop the truck moves forward a few meters to wait for another scoop.  Two or three scoops and the truck is full.  It drives down our finger pier, to the main pier, down the main pier to the grain elevators on the mainland.  The back of the truck tips up and dumps the grain onto conveyers.  A giant tube sucks the corn to the top of a grain elevator.  It seems like a long and labor-intensive project to move the corn only several hundred meters.  I love watching this stuff, but it creates a lot of dust. The back deck by the pool was covered in a slight gray film. 

On the freighter’s deck guys with shovels collect the spilled corn and dump it back into the hold.  On the dock guys shovel the corn into piles.

We got off the ship we took the shuttle bus, following the grain trucks, in kind of a truck, bus synchronized ballet,…

…to Salaverry’s Plaza de Armas, an attractive little square where we picked up a taxi to Trujillo.

Returning from Slaverry to the ship the bus dropped us off at a little market on the pier.  All the vendors wore the same orange vests and hard hats as longshoremen.

We sailed out past the bulk carrier, still unloading, with a sunset forward and a rainbow aft.