Semiramis

I stay at the Semiramis Hotel by the Egyptian industrial designer Karim Rashid whose projects include interiors, fashion, furniture, lighting, art and music to installation. It's a freak of a place without room numbers (replaced with symbols), flashing lights and wacky colours - my room hot pink and lime which a bit overwhelming. The pool similar tiled vibe and a model-shoot taking place when I arrive. A lot of nicely toned bikinis stroll about as Duane and I relive college memories and drink white wine. It's not 3PM.

From there we have dinner with another fellow from Poland House - Constantine, who is a self-made shipping entrepreneur who has built a fleet of 30 dry-cargo and tankers, which he trades or leases. He once owned two of the world's four largest super tankers able to transport four million barrels of oil or over $400 million of cargo at today's prices. The ships 400 meters in length and 20 stories high at the control deck; the hull 25 meters down - scuba divers, he points out, can't go so deep which is a problem should something need to be examined or repaired. The tankers efficient to - the average cost of oil transport about two or three cents per gallon or second only to pipelines. A voyage may take over 90 days and burn 15,000 tons of fuel. In the US, only Louisiana has a refinery to accept offshore payloads - it is located two miles in the Gulf of Mexico and Constantine tells me it is just a big hose floating in the middle of no where. Cool.

We have dinner locally and drink wine from Constantine's vineyard in Argentina which today makes about 25,000 bottles while he plans to make it a bigger business. In 2006, his grapes won a prestigious award which goes perfectly with the olive trees and outdoors where we now sit.