No problem Chris.
I talked to our shipping agent in Durban before about this and he told me that all the containers are loaded / offloaded from a place in the port called 'stacks'. This is basically a huge pile of all the containers that go on the one ship I think. To pack or unpack the container it has to be transported to a warehouse.
I have two price quotes now and the prices are about the same sadly. More than twice what we paid in Durban for the same services..
It seems that union regulations don't allow non-union workers to touch the cargo in the port area, which includes all warehouses. A lump sum of around 40.000 yen is charged per container for unloading, which is incredibly steep since in this case the unloading would take a single person about half an hour. I'm going to try and negotiate this down to actual cost. We'll see what happens!
Thanks again,
Onno
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