On My Way to Samarkand: Memoirs of a Travelling Writer (35 page)

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There were three main world events which occurred while we were in Hong Kong. In 1990 the Berlin Wall came down. Just about everyone I know has a little piece of it. In that same year apartheid ended and Nelson Mandela was freed from prison. A wonderful thing for South Africa. Finally, in 1991 the dissolution of the Soviet Union took place, a wonderful thing for number of countries, many of them names I had never heard of mostly ending in ‘stan’. Living in Hong Kong, these momentous changes to our planet did not have the same impact as if we had been at home in England. Yes, we watched the news on television, but I actually needed my lifelong friends to discuss them with.

Not long before we set out for dear old Blighty after our last tour in the last outpost of the empire, Annette and I contracted typhoid and bacterial dysentery. (Well, if you’re going to get ill, why not go the whole hog and get several nasties over with in one go?) The good news was that you can’t catch typhoid twice, apparently, so now we never bother to look at eat-by dates on our meat and fish purchases, and even munch on garbage and remain perfectly healthy.

22. Bali, Thailand, Japan, Philippines, Singapore, Malaysia, Sarawak, Sumatra

Bali is stupendously beautiful, an island that is nothing but one big garden, with flowers and blooms everywhere. Our favourite was Ubud, where we had a hut in the middle of the rice paddies. In the evening the duck herders with their long flexible poles would sing out a call for their ducks to come in out of the paddies, and amazingly they did, waddling towards their particular herder as he warbled his command. We also saw the semi-religious
wayang kulit
show, the shadow-puppets, which resulted in a short story much later on, the title being ‘Wayang Kulit’
.

If you go out walking in Bali, you will be asked by passers-by, ‘Where are you going?’ The answer to this should always be, ‘Over there!’ This is a form of greeting similar to our ‘How do you do?’ You are not expected to reply with a specific destination to the Bali greeting, any more than you would spill out a list of recent illnesses to the British one.

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Here’s a traveller’s tale set in Thailand. We wanted to journey by train from Bangkok to Chang Mai on an overnight sleeper train. Just obtaining the ticket turned the clock back to a time when Rudyard Kipling was in his youth. First we obtained a number at a kiosk. We took that number, just a simple figure like 8 or 9, to an office where a man wrote our names in a great ledger. We then went to another office where we were assigned seats and canvas bunk beds that unrolled from the side of the carriage. Finally, we went to the last office, where we were issued with tickets for the 6 pm train to Chang Mai.

We were excited. This was our first long rail trip in the Far East.

At quarter-to-six that evening we boarded a train which said ‘Bangkok to Chang Mai’ on the side in big letters. The platform from which it was leaving was registered on both our tickets. We stowed our luggage, sat in our seats and were delighted to be served curry from a man who had a portable paraffin stove set up in the linked bit between the next carriage and ours. We had especially opted for no air conditioning, because we like the climate of Thailand and don’t like to freeze.

The train pulled out at precisely 6 pm.

Once out in the countryside we would stop only at the odd station, but on the edge of Bangkok there were a number of suburban halts where people could board. At about 7 pm a Thai family entered our carriage. There was dad, mum and two children. The mild-looking man confronted us, inspected his own tickets, and said politely, ‘Madam and sir, you are in our seats.’

I took out our tickets, looked at the seat numbers, checked the carriage number, and shook my head.

‘I’m sorry, you’ve made a mistake. These are our seats.’

He shrugged and showed me his tickets. I showed him mine. They were identical. Damn railway clerks, I thought. They’ve either sold the seats twice, or made a stupid error. All those ledgers too! You would think the system infallible with so much bureaucracy.

‘I must fetch the ticket inspector,’ said the Thai gentleman. ‘He’ll know what to do.’

‘Good idea,’ I replied, safe in the knowledge that possession was nine tenths of the law. ‘He’ll sort it out.’

In the meantime I offered my seat to the man’s wife and Annette chatted to the two children.

The ticket inspector turned out to be a corpulent official covered in gold lanyards, medals and scrambled egg. He looked like an amiable general in Thailand’s army. However, he was accompanied by a lean narrow-eyed lieutenant who wore a gun at his hip. This one looked like an officer in the Vietcong, the one from the movie
The Deerhunter
who keeps yelling, ‘
Wai! Wai! Wai!’
or some such word into the ear of Robert de Niro. This man’s hand never left his gun butt as he stared at me from beneath the slanted peak of his immaculate cap.

Neither of these rail officials spoke English.

The ticket inspector studied all the tickets on show and then spoke softly to the gentleman with the nice family.

‘He wants to know,’ said the gentleman, turning to me, ‘why you are on the wrong train?’

We were nonplussed. Stunned.

‘What wrong train?’ I argued. ‘This is the 6 pm from Bangkok to Chang Mai, isn’t it?’

‘No,’ came the calm reply, ‘this is the 3 pm from Bangkok to Chang Mai, running late as usual.’

‘What? You mean...’

‘All trains run late here, sir. The 6 pm will still be standing in the station. The ticket inspector says you will have to get off at the next station and wait for your right train.’

Annette and I stared out of the window at the blackness rushing by. The jungle stations we swept through had no lights whatsoever. They were deep pits of darkness in a world of slightly lesser darkness. I had visions of standing on one of those rickety wooden platforms trying to flag down an express. It was scary. Too scary to contemplate. I’m sure the people who lived near those stations were perfectly respectable citizens, but the night-time jungle does things with the imagination. There was no way we were going to get off our train, now that we were rattling towards Chang Mai.

Through our gentleman translator we managed to persuade the inspector to let us stay on the train. At first he wanted to sell us first class tickets to the air conditioned compartments. When that didn’t work – Annette digging in her heels – he found us similar seats to the ones we already had. It occurred to me he could have done that in the first place, but since all was well that ended well, I really didn’t care.

There is a post script to this short tale.

To avoid any repetition of this near horror story, we chose to return to Bangkok by a reliable bus. Annette and I boarded the coach to find our booked seats occupied by two young men in orange robes. Conscript monks. It seems that Thai men are expected to spend one year in the army and then one year as a Buddhist monk. During that latter year they are apparently entitled to all sorts of privileges, such as nicking booked seats with impunity. They are untouchable in that sense. These two refused even to make eye contact with us.

They wouldn’t budge. They knew their rights.

A fierce woman conductor intervened. She told Annette and me to ‘get off the bus’. We informed her we had tickets for the seats these two oranges were occupying. We were not going to leave. Other passengers began to get restless. The driver started looking panicky. Finally he came to us with his hands clasped as if in prayer and said, ‘Sir, Madam, I beseech you. I implore with you to understand my problem and leave the bus.’ We sighed, gave up and got off the vehicle. It’s a tough man who can withstand a Thai beseeching, I can tell you. Tougher than me, anyway. We collected our luggage from underneath the bus and waited for another coach. Hopefully Chang Mai had run out of monks and we could get back to Bangkok on the next one. And where do Thai bus drivers learn English words like ‘beseech’? I guarantee half the population of the English-speaking world doesn’t use that word. He had probably read Chaucer and
Piers Ploughman
, while all I know of the Thai language is ‘Good day’.

~

Thailand? Well, what else can one say about Thailand that hasn’t been said? We went to Hau Hin, where the film
The Killing Fields
was made, and visited the fabulous
Railway Hotel
which has a double staircase sweeping like two elephant tusks to the landing above. We also went on a trek from Chang Mai, into the Burma triangle with a couple half our age, Tony and Tracy Henstock. We still write to them. They have two children now, Summer and Clark. That trek, with a young guide named Pang, was gruelling though. It covered four or five days along rivers and up high hills in desperate heat. On the second night we stayed at a village of the Karen people. We were given a hut overlooking a wild river on the edge of the rainforest. Once you are away from civilisation and into the interior of a country like Thailand there is a raw atmosphere to the landscape. During the day the noise the cicadas make in the bushes could be mistaken for sawmills. Incredibly loud. At night the cicadas go to sleep and the crickets take over from them, making almost as much noise. Add to that the sound of the birds, the monkeys, the occasional Asian elephant, and you have a constant animal choir entertaining you.

After Pang had rustled up one of his amazingly quick and delicious meals, out of nothing but locally-gathered leaves and bits of chicken, we bedded down on our rush mats on the bare boards and prepared to go to sleep. I was woken again about eleven in the evening when a group of young men arrived and sat down beside us on the hut floor. They carried AK47 rifles and had just been into Burma to attack the Burmese army. We chatted with them for some while, they telling us of their problems with the Burmese generals who were oppressing the people and especially the Karen tribes. The exhaustion from the day’s walk and boat ride overtook me and I fell asleep.

In the morning we went down to the river and washed in the shallows, the white water swooshing round us. Then we had breakfast and were shown two female elephants. Annette and I had to ride one of them, Tracy and Tony the other. Managing these two giants were two small boys of about ten and twelve. The twelve-year-old seemed to know what he was doing and he was our guy. The journey lasted all morning and at lunch time we said goodbye to the lady pachyderms. The rest of the day we were force marched up a steep hillside, until we saw a village in the distance, the smoke curling up out of the bush.

This was the Akka village where we would spend the rest of that day and the night. On the way we passed a woman selling bottles of water from a lean-to. Pang told us she had been banished from the village for giving birth to twins. Both babies had been killed because one of them was ‘evil’ and no one knew which one that might be.

The village itself appeared to be chaotic. Every adult was smoking a drug, either pot or opium. Women and men had long curved pipes permanently in their mouths, puffing away. Many were walking around witha glazed look in their eyes. What was even more worrying was the fact that the men were all carrying long hunting rifles, slung casually over their shoulders or hooked under an arm. I didn’t think the mix was a good idea, drugs and guns, and had a job to get to sleep that night even though it was a fairly comfortable bed made of springy bamboo rods.

We were relieved to get out of that particular village and on to the next one, which belonged to the Lahu tribe. Though not as colourfully dressed as the Akka, whose women wore headdresses decorated with silver coins, the Lahu did not appear to smoke anything dubious and merely took us to their grain store and proudly showed us the results of their harvest. They let us each have a go on the grinder, which was like a see-saw that went slightly sideways, as well as up and down.

After four days of trekking through the hills of northern Thailand we came down to civilisation again. We scrubbed ourselves in a beautiful waterfall and found a tea stall that sold real tea. A Land Rover then arrived to take us back to Chang Mai. I thoroughly enjoyed the trek, which I have on video. The most telling scene is of Annette struggling valiantly up a burnt-brush hill in the sweltering heat, pausing with the sweat dripping from her brow, then shouting above the sawmill noise of the cicadas, ‘Garry, you go on, love, and just leave me to die . . .’

~

The Philippines was a short visit with Trinny and Lorraine, who came to stay for a while. We passed rubbish dumps in Manila which had children camping on them, living under tents made out of plastic sheeting. They were there to be first at the rubbish when it arrived each morning. It was a sight I did not forget and the result was a children’s novel
The Electric Kid
which won the Lancashire Children’s Book Award, a prize that’s judged by schoolchildren alone. I’m mighty proud to have won it. At more or less the same time the BBC televised one of my children’s books,
Billy Pink’s Private Detective Agency,
which they did with a single actor performing all the parts. It was a not bad production set in the creeks of the Dengies, the Essex marshes.

~

We went to Japan at a time when we would see the plum trees in bloom. Corny, I know, but there you are. We took the bullet train to Kyoto and stayed in one of those inns made of rice paper and bamboo. You can almost see through the walls and you have to be incredibly quiet if you make love, stuffing the corner of a pillow in your mouth. It’s difficult to avoid making love in such a setting, after you’ve been walking under plum and cherry trees in bloom and have visited the hot tub.

We visited Nijo Castle, which had high stone ramparts but the rest of it was also made out of ricepaper and bamboo. We saw the emperor’s bedroom which had a ‘nightingale floor’ that ‘sang’ when you walked on it to give the emperor warning of any midnight assassins. We took bitter tasting green tea at the beautiful Kujomizu and Kodaiji Temples, the latter attached to a high cliff by wooden struts. Another, the Todaiji Temple, houses a fifty-three-foot high bronze statue of Buddha and is the world’s largest wooden structure. At the Imperial Palace there were of course fabulous gardens, ponds and lawns. We were told that stone represents ‘bone’, trees and bushes ‘flesh’and water ‘blood’.

Japan was horrendously expensive. We ate mostly noodle soup at the railway station buffet tent, but also bought
obento
box meals. The box was made of pine and the layout of the pieces of
sushi
worthy of a great artist. Eating it was a spiritual experience. On the last day we were due to meet with Claire, Shaney’s best friend at school. Claire had married a Japanese radio broadcaster (not without fierce opposition from the man’s relations, who were appalled that Akifumi Uchida wanted to marry a Westerner) and she had told us she would bring her new husband along. However, when she arrived there was no Akifumi.

‘He says he has stomach ache,’ Claire said, laughing, ‘but the truth is he’s too shy to meet you.’

Claire’s parents had never been to see her in Japan, so she told us we were to be her surrogate parents.

‘We’ll go home and surprise him.’

So, we all went back to their incredibly small flat and a shocked and surprised Akifumi opened the door to us. He was indeed very shy and fussed around in the kitchen for a while, but once he saw that we were not monsters he came out and we had a great time. Akifumi is a small, quiet and charming man, and he and Claire now have two lovely children. The family have suffered a lot of prejudice from certain quarters, the children being bullied at school, even by teachers. I have no doubt there are many Japanese who are not bigots – we have a good friend in a singer, Yumi Maeda, who we met on that trip in Tokyo who is certainly not chauvinistic – but there are still some who have a medieval mindset and the Uchidas have born the brunt of this narrow thinking.