But he also uncovered that dismantling oil tankers and ocean liners has a genteel side. His story starts with a man sitting in a palace dining room at a burnished teak table cracking a boiled egg with a silver teaspoon.

Breakfast
It is so quiet the man can feel the leather of his seat creak each time he moves. There are noises, faint careful clatters, coming from the hidden kitchen. The newspaper spread in front of him whispers as he turns each page. The cabinets set against the walls, glass-doored and filled with antique silverware, murmur their own messages into the silence.

He is there to do business. He is buying steel. Each time he comes to Bhavnagar he stays at the Nilambag Palace, a former Maharaja’s residence now open to anyone who can afford the rooms. Sometimes, when business is done, he sits in the stone courtyard and fades himself into one of the oil paintings, allows himself the luxury of dissipation into silence, but only at night and only when business is done.

He is waiting to meet the captain of a cargo vessel who will today drive his ship onto the beach at Alang and place it in the hands of men with oxy-acetylene torches. He is here to take the captain’s ship – a wife of sorts to the captain who travelled with him through storms and sunsets – and reduce it to pieces of steel small enough to fit onto the trailers of his filthy trucks.

The captain is German, a tall, thin man, gaunt-cheeked and healthy-looking. The palace grounds outside his window are a sanctuary from the thronging Indian streets beyond them. As a man who crosses oceans for a living, new places now fail to exert the same pressure of unfamiliarity on him. But this morning, the gardens inside the palace walls impose an order on his mind. The spaces between the trees and the flat ground around them leave room for his own quiet reminiscences.

He arrives in the dining room, combed hair still damp. Orders coffee and toast, a single boiled egg as well, and then asks the other man, a paunchy Indian, how he is. His breakfast arrives and he taps at the warm egg with his spoon, a delicate gesture, refined silver knocking against the hardened shell, then he decapitates it. The Indian man responds briefly to his remarks about the stories in the newspaper, wishing not to impose himself, yet.

Finished eating, the captain pushes his plate to one side, straightens in his chair and looks at the Indian man. The Indian man looks back at him. Both are dressed casually: open-necked business shirts, neat dark slacks, brown leather shoes. A conversation in broken English starts its journey to the surface of their day.

***

The bus was late. The buses are always late. The buses that are on time usually break down. It’s a law of nature for India’s buses. This bus was late and like all the other buses in India there is dried vomit angled out of each window. The driver blasts the horn longer than necessary. It echoes into the concrete bus station and I again look at the man standing over there, the one who’s been looking at me. He nods to me, confirming it’s our bus and I assume he doesn’t notice the dried vomit down the side.

There’s only a minor crush of people as we climb on board. The trip is not a long one. It’s mostly workers and commuters, single people rather than shambolic family units moving between towns for whatever reason. The trip should take a couple of hours and so I don’t expect it to break down. When everyone is seated there is still enough room left to breathe, for light to get in. It’s early, around 7.30am, and the day is just winding itself up. I’m going out to Alang, a shipbreaking yard on the western coast of Gujarat, an eastern state of India.

During the journey, the natural curiosity of the man from the bus station gets the better of him. Unused to seeing wide-eyed travellers on this route, he musters the courage to ask me where I am going.

‘Alang,’ I tell him. ‘You know it?’

‘Oh yes. My job is at this Alang.’

‘Really.’ I think for a moment. ‘Can I ask you a question?’

‘Of course.’

‘Why all the way out there?’

‘The tides at Alang are very special,’ he starts. ‘The beach is a sandy shallow shelf and while the tide is in the ships can drive right into the shoreline.’ I’m nodding. ‘Yes. This makes it possible for these ships to be scrapped without building expensive piers. There are no piers or drydocks. Ships are simply run onto the shore and it doesn’t cost the yard owners very much money.’

And how do the mud crabs and molluscs feel about it? I wonder to myself.

So what’s shipbreaking? It’s like this. Ships age. They become unsafe, or worse, uneconomical. The get retired to beaches in developing countries (Bangladesh, Pakistan, China) to be demolished. It’s very dangerous work, as you’re about to see; that partly explains why third world countries do it. Simply, if the work was to be done in countries that have labor laws it would be too expensive. In fact, in the United States, the place of origin for many of the ships at Alang, environmental and safety laws prevent shipbreaking but do not prohibit their export to other countries.

And, third world countries are hungry for cheap steel. The ships here are 80-90 per cent high quality steel. Each year, 2.5 million tonnes are salvaged from ships at Alang. That figure represents about 10 per cent of India’s annual production. Developing countries can’t afford to baulk at relatively cheap means of sourcing those quantities of steel.

Also, driving into Alang the roadside is canyoned by the ovens, beds, lifeboats, crockery, linen, shaving cabinets, windows, doors, towel rails, shelves, fridges, tables, curtains, chairs, mirrors, lights, ropes, flags, signs, chains and anchors that were on those ships, all these pieces now for sale, all of them useful to someone.

***

To find out whether curious tourists are welcome at Alang is difficult. Everyone you ask has a different story. There appears to be no official story. So as a curious tourist I made my own rule: I’m allowed in. When I stepped through the gate, stopped to order a chai and get my bearings, I was surprised when a policeman grabbed my arm, put me in a car and ordered it to take me back to Prapad, the nearest town. I thought that, of all people, a policeman should understand the importance of following rules. So, I followed my rule right back to the front gate.

Avoiding the policeman by creeping along in the shadow of the many trucks, I was spotted by a young passenger in one of them. He offered his hand and hauled me into the cabin. He was little. The driver was also little and neither of them spoke English. They looked too little to be in charge of a truck, and too young. They stared at me for so long I had to remind the driver to keep an eye on the road. We drove straight past the policeman.

The truck stopped at Sosiya, a shanty village at the northern end of the beach. The boys made it clear I wasn’t allowed into the yards. They pointed up the road as if to say ‘enjoy your day’ and ‘see you later.’ Looking around I could see the workers’ houses were made from cobbled together scraps of timber – old cupboard doors, floor linings. There was no evidence of running water or electricity. But there were oil tankers, cargo vessels and passenger ships standing on the beach in front of me. To impart a sense of the scale, imagine a series of medium to large sky-scrapers lying on their sides on an expanse of flat earth, in a desert-scape say, and you standing there looking up at them. Some of these vessels are so big that while in service the crew members used bicycles to move around on them.

But the enormity of these dead machines is only one aspect of this place. There’s a dark side to this industry and I suspect this explains why visitors are less than welcome. It’s about the environment these men (not a woman in sight) work in. Thinking about it now, the quiet horror of Alang is its central attraction. In his awesome painting The Triumph of Death, 16th century Flemish painter Pieter Brueghel accurately captured, 400 years before if happened, the working life at Alang.

Half-destroyed propellers and partially disemboweled engines lay on the dirty beach. Next to them teams of grease blackened men struggle with rusting shards of steel. Cranes hoist larger slabs of steel over their heads. The men wear blue safety helmets, if they are lucky enough to have one, while others wear caps. Some have no shoes. None wear gloves, and none wear ear- or eye-protection.

There are enormous winches mounted on concrete platforms. Wound around the giant spools are steel cables thicker than a man’s arm. The cables then stretch out onto the mudflats and into the ships. Some men stand along the cables directing them to the ships, others stand on the ships securing the cables. Then a man fires up the winches and enormous chunks of steel are dragged, inched, closer to the shore. Sometimes those cables snap. I choose not to think about what that does to a human body.

Greenpeace say shipbreakers in these yards are constantly exposed to free asbestos fibres, vapors and dusts which contain heavy metals and arsenic. The danger of fire, explosions and falling debris is high. Ravi Agarwal, chief of the leading Delhi-based environment groups Srushti and Jayaraman, says the employers are ‘mafia-like’ and ‘actively prevent the enforcement of any law or safety norm.’ On average, he says, two workers die at the yards from the explosions, fires and falling steel sections every week; not what you’d call an average workplace by western standards.

I stopped at one yard and sat with a smiling gatekeeper in the shade of his booth. He had a small radio and was listening to the cricket in Bombay - Australia versus India, the commentary in Hindi. When the crowd cheered loudly and the commentators got excited, the gatekeeper grinned and I knew that was bad news for me, an Aussie. But I was more interested in the ship over his shoulder, an oil tanker with Russian markings on its bow. The workers had reached its stern. What was once the engine had become a localised apocalypse of cables and pipes, a still-life study in mayhem. Occasionally, tiny sparks of flame burst from here and there alerting my eyes to the miniscule men working at severing valuable pieces of steel.

Sitting there, I tried imagining what it must be like being a shipbreaker. A tired ocean liner appears on the horizon. The captain fires its engine for the last time, aims the bow shoreward and powers the ship – massive and hostile – as far onto the beach as the high tide will allow. The sun disappears behind it. Then, as the tide subsides, the full extent of my work is revealed.

Over the next few months, a small army of acetylene torch wielding workers, others like me, will strip 30,000 tonnes of steel and fixtures from it. People I know will die. The fear that it might be me is strong regardless of how careful I am. Empty oil tankers have a hostile attitude to men like me, men wielding flames. But that’s my job, tearing apart these empty machines once used to carry crude oil to countries I don’t even know the name of. And to think I travelled hundreds of kilometers on the promise of this work.

***

Breakfast

‘How much for a casing of that mould?’ asks the Indian man at Nilambag Palace, holding onto the last corner of his toast. A waiter floats through the room to collect empty plates. The German holds his hand over his plate, keeps his eyes on the Indian man.

‘Sixty thousand Deutschmarks new, but an old one around twenty five thousand.’

‘And for the whole casing assembly?’

‘Around three hundred and sixty thousand,’ the German answers. The Indian nods. There is a brief silence. Some sparrows can be heard chirping in the courtyard. The Indian man threads his finger through the handle of the tea pot in front of him. He lifts it and pours a careful stream into his cup. He places the teapot onto its coaster silently, stirs in a teaspoon of sugar, then unlike anywhere else in everyday India, he pours a dash of fresh milk into it. He lifts the cup to his mouth, wisps of steam disappearing into his neatly clipped moustache, takes a gentle sip from it and swishes it around inside his cheeks, then swallows.

‘You’re going onto the ship today?’ he asks the German, placing the cup back onto its saucer.

‘Yes. This afternoon, for the last time. I was its first captain you know. I took it from the dry dock on its first day of service. That was 29 years ago. This afternoon I will climb aboard for the last time and then drive it onto the shore. The last time its bottom touched dry land was when I took charge of her, and in all this time my job has been to keep her well clear of land. But today I must beach her to be dismantled by your workers.’ He forces a resigned smile across his lips. The Indian lets the man live the words fully.

‘Could you do me a favor?’ the Indian man eventually asks. The German man looks at him. ‘Could you ask the chef for a parcel of his tea before you come ashore? Your company always equips its ships with the finest tea.’

‘Of course.’

The Indian man then touched his lips with his napkin and stood. He moved out of the dining room and into the reception, sank into one of the plush velvet couches. He took a newspaper from the rack. The German man turned to look at me. I finished my breakfast and paid my bill. I walked out of the palace, through the quiet, thinly grassed gardens, and back onto the street, where I belonged.

I looked around and saw a more familiar life. I saw people selling mounds of dirty green oranges, lines of old motorbikes spewing blue smoke into the street, makeshift chai stalls with groups of men doing nothing, children with filthy faces. And I wondered how many of them had ever seen inside the Nilambag palace. I wondered how many of them have family working at Alang.