You Have Not a Leg to Stand On (10 page)

The Middle East - Part One

Mombasa to Jericho

The first section of the trip was from Mombasa to Kuwait, stopping at Muscat and Bahrain and would take about ten days, depending on Company orders on the way. We've been back to all the same places again recently; you wouldn't know they were on the same planet, the changes are so dramatic. Muscat wasn't a city, by any stretch of the imagination. Looking at the photographs we'd taken then; the harbour was a natural harbour protected by a horseshoe shape of high natural rock cliffs. The small trading port, consisted of a few rows of white Arab-style little houses which almost immediately gave way to desert, with a sand track that ran for about a mile to a date-palmed oasis. What's there now reminds me of the first Star Wars movie, when Liam Neeson goes back to his planet, a few hundred thousand light years away from Earth, turns to his young student, Ewan McGregor, and proudly says, ‘The whole planet is a city.' Bahrain is the same. Back then, all those years ago, the taxi-driver automatically took us straight from the ship, to an especially designated beach for Europeans and the Sheik. As soon as we sat down on the sand, an Arab in a full-length white gown came running up with a tray of tea, milk and sugar, and fruitcake.

A couple of days after leaving Mombasa the standard of our evening food suddenly took a marked turn for the better. We were invited to the captain's cabin for dinner. Not only did we have quite a sumptuous meal, it was downed with a couple of bottles of delicious rose wine, probably the only alcohol on-board. It quickly became apparent, however, why this delectable change had come about. The Captain's eye was wandering, and his eye was wandering in the direction of our tall blonde chaperone. She played the game very well. I think she'd had quite a lot of practice. Her timing was perfect. The meals got better and better, the rose wine flowed with ever greater quantities before we contentedly disembarked at Kuwait, without him having his wicked way.

Potentially, a big problem awaited us in Kuwait. Well two really. On docking, I asked the first officer when our car would be lifted off. He paused, he said, ‘We sometimes have a little problem here, but I think we'll sort it out.' That didn't sound too ominous. He said, ‘go into the city and I think we'll have it off by this evening.' Even then, the city was beautifully laid out. Tall, elegant, gleaming, glass and marble buildings, way ahead of their time, to us country hicks anyway. One of the most noticeable features was the number of extravagantly planted-up roundabouts. The rich density of colour and exotic variety of plants took your breath away. At their pinnacle, they nearly all had the tallest, multi-nozzle water fountains I'd ever seen. Where there weren't fountains there'd usually be a little group of gowned and head-scarfed Arabs, sitting cross-legged on the bright green grass, sipping tea. The tea was dispensed from a colourful teapot sitting on a carved wooden tray. It turned out that tea drinking on the roundabouts had become a ritual and a small industry in its own right. The teapots and the glasses and the trays were all very carefully chosen. The values of a tea set could reach staggering sums. Then there was the type of tea, Indian, Malaysian, Chinese, East African, all the very best, but the most popular tea by far, was tea from a distillery in Scotland, whose name escapes me.

We had our own little ceremony, with real tea, in a cafe that spilled out on to the sweltering pavement. The canopy had dry ice flowing over it and falling to the ground, forming a curtain of coldness, so we remained cool while sitting outside on the pavement. Was that cool, or was that cool.

On the way back to the ship, for Honey to play her dangerous game one more night, because the car was still held hostage on-board, I threw my hands to my face, ‘Oh God, I've left my briefcase at the cafe. Stop, stop, turn round, turn round, Oh No, Oh God. Everything was in the briefcase, all the money, the passports, the carnets, everything. Without that briefcase we couldn't move, we couldn't stay, we couldn't do anything. The horror of losing the briefcase made me want to vomit. The taxi-driver looked at me pathetically, and with a half whimsical smile said, ‘There is no crime in Kuwait, wherever you left it, it will be there.' ‘Please don't try to be nice to me now. Please go back as quickly as you can. You can't realise what this means. Oh no! He turned back at the next roundabout, another little group of Arabs peacefully drinking tea in the middle. It took an eternity to get back to the cafe. Suddenly I saw it, its black leather with brass hinges, there, all on its own, exactly where I left it. All the tables and chairs cleared away, people walking around it, the picture I have of seeing it then, is as clear now, as it was at that moment. The relief, the relief was like a wave of warm water sweeping over me, as I lay on the hot sand of a bright white beach, on the edge of the Indian Ocean. I can feel that wave now, exactly as I felt it then. I didn't deserve that piece of luck, I'd been so stupid. The car was bound not to have been offloaded. I'd used up all my luck for some time to come. No, it wasn't there, we climbed the gangway and there it was, sitting waiting mournfully on the deck. I went to see the first officer. He said, ‘The harbour master wants to see you, he's in a cabin at the bottom of the ship, we've given him most of the whisky we use for these occasions. I hope you have a head for whisky, he doesn't speak any English, and he has noticed you have two girls with you.' What on earth was going to happen? The cabin was in the middle of the ship and below the waterline. I opened the door; a wave of the stench of stale sweat and whisky on the breath nearly knocked me over. We both opened our arms wide, greeting each other like old friends and laughed. We warmly shook hands, more laughter, holding both hands now, smiling and laughing. He motioned me to sit, ‘Whisky, Whisky,' he said. ‘Yes Yes,' I said, ‘Thank you, thank you,' more laughter. The glasses weren't like the little tea glasses on the roundabouts, they were ordinary water tumblers. The whisky gurgled in. He said something, I said something. We touched glasses and laughed again. He rubbed his four fingers with his thumb. I knew what that meant, I laughed again, throwing my head back, he did the same and filled our glasses. How long this went on, I really don't know, but the bottle, thankfully, was beginning to run out. Suddenly, seemingly for no reason, he stood up and said, ‘OK, OK.' I stood up and said, ‘Thank you, thank you,' and we both roared with laughter. We touched glasses and threw our heads back. We shook hands very warmly, laughing all the time, and I moved towards the door. We waved each other goodbye and I closed the door. I had to get to the cabin very quickly, I was about to be sick. I just made it in time before the whole contents of my stomach gushed out. I plainly had no head for whisky. That evening Honey was getting a bit worried about another goodbye dinner with the Captain. As luck would have it, the Officers asked us for a goodbye dinner with them. We gratefully accepted. It was a beautiful evening although the wine didn't flow in the quantities it had on the bridge. It was going to be a long time before we tasted wine again. The first officer said, ‘I don't know what you did, but we've been told to unload your car first thing tomorrow morning. So if you're there just after sun-up, you can begin your long, long journey.' The next morning, after many genuine thanks and shaking of hands, we drove out of the port as quickly as was seemly.

***

In Kuwait, petrol was free, so we took advantage of the unexpected bonus and filled any container we could lay our hands on, to the brim. Finally we started that long, long drive to its eventual conclusion in London. We turned to each other and laughed, with sheer exuberance.

Our first night, after an entirely uneventful dull, flat desert drive, was Basra. We had no idea where the campsite was. We stopped a couple of young men, there were only men walking about, not a woman to be seen, who happened to speak English, if they knew where the campsite was. He gave us complicated directions, then said, ‘There's no need to go to a campsite, why don't you come to my home and meet my family then you can sleep on our roof.' We'd discussed this exact situation while on-board ship and agreed we must never accept such an offer out of the blue, it was obviously far too dangerous. So what did we all say? ‘Oh, that's very kind of you, thank you very much,' and he said, ‘Follow me, I'm in that car.' We followed, looking at each other in exasperation, half laughing at our stupidity. As it happened, it was his home, it was his family, we were given a lovely simple Arab supper and we chatted away, very easily, about all sorts of things. There was no alcohol so the evening passed, very pleasantly, until quite late. Just imagine the possibility of those Iraqis, driving around England, and the first Englishman they stop speaks fluent Arabic and invites them back to their house for a meal and to stay the night? That night was one of the most memorable nights I've ever had. I'd done a lot of camping all through my youth, so I was used to sleeping outside, but I'd never slept outside at home. To be offered the opportunity to do so in a little house in the suburbs of the city of Basra, in southern Iraq, on the first night of a trip, perhaps taking months, boded very well indeed. The House didn't have electricity and the few street lights were very dim. Lying on our backs, fully dressed, well tucked up in our sleeping bags, looking up into the deep, dense, blackness of the night, sprinkled with so many sparkling, pinprick dots of thousands and thousands of brilliant shining stars, worlds? I felt a profound sense of being a part of everything. Not just an unconnected part, but a piece, a small piece, of the whole canopy. We didn't speak. We were lost in our own imaginations. The longer I looked up before my eyelids slowly pulled closed, I lost the sense of my own weight lying on the concrete. We drifted away into the denseness.

The following morning, after a simple Arab breakfast, he led us to the main road to Baghdad. We waved cheery goodbyes, feeling very guilty we should be suspicious of such generous hospitality. We looked at each other, thankful for our luck and reluctantly agreed, we must be more careful in the future. Nevertheless, for the first night of our long drive to Hamburg and then to London, it was a lovely thing to happen.

***

It took two days to get to Baghdad. The desert there, is dead flat and featureless. On the way we saw one of many sites that were ‘without doubt' the garden of Eden. At Ephesus we saw the Sespian Arch which was the largest self-supporting brick arch ever built, in the whole world, at the time. At Babylon, we stood on a mound of earth that was, supposedly, once the Tower of Babel. We didn't think there was any point in questioning anything, we decided to accept the information, and maybe question it later, which is probably true of most things one's told in life.

I couldn't help having huge expectations of both the Tigress and the Euphrates. All the Biblical stories of great mountains of water crashing together couldn't have been more wrong. To give them their due it was the dry season, but nevertheless they were a disappointment.

We pitched our tent for the first time, quite far from the main Basra-Baghdad road, in this flat, flinty, featureless, silent desert. We were completely alone, just the three of us. So different from all we'd experienced since leaving Mombasa. I said, rhetorically really, looking out on this featureless silence, ‘I wish we had a bottle of the Captain's rose wine.' ‘As it happens,' said Honey, with a little giggle, ‘he gave me a bottle with which to remember him, on our long journey. So I think the first night on our own in this empty desert, would be an appropriate place to remember our lovely little trip from Mombasa to Kuwait' She couldn't have been more right I remember the Captain clearly, to this day.

Up early, with a cup of coffee and a bread roll, given to us by our last night's host, we set forth for the Baghdad campsite. Even then, the sprawl of a modern city takes away all the romance and excitement of coming to a place you've always heard about but never imagined being there. A trade route, the Silk Road, camels with their long rolling gait, bringing their precious cargos of beautiful carpets or spices or gossamer soft silk, weighing no more than a feather. But now the reality is traffic laden roads, honking horns, thick air filled with fumes.

The campsite itself was very pleasing. Well laid-out and maintained, in a date palm grove. From there we set off every day to explore Baghdad. My future Little wife loves to explore cities, as long as she's in a comfortable vehicle. Traffic jams are eagerly awaited. There was no shortage of traffic jams. The golden-domed mosques were outstandingly beautiful. Inevitably, we found ourselves quickly ushered to Baghdad's famous Souk. We weren't disappointed. Huge cauldrons of bubbling hot, delicious vegetable stews, simple fried eggs wrapped in a sandwich of the local bread, hot, sweet, thick black coffee, all tasting so wonderful. The all-prevailing aromas, when walking into the Souk, instantly springs to mind and brings back the detail of vibrant colours of shining silks, of gleaming brass and enticing jewels.

We had intended to stay only a few days in Baghdad and contacted the two names we'd been given in Kenya, so we prepared for the next leg through the desert to Jordan and Amman. While chatting to fellow-travellers in the campsite we began to get reports of a compulsory quarantine camp on the border between Iraq and Jordan. The British Embassy confirmed this indeed was the case, but it wasn't likely to last long as the impracticality of running a compulsory five-day stoppage of everyone crossing the border every day wasn't viable. A political spat between the two countries had caused one or the other, or both, to accuse the other of importing cholera across the borders. The advice was not to go unless you had no choice. We were quite comfortable in our well-equipped site so a few extra days would be quite pleasant. The date palms were groaning with a bountiful harvest, so the extra days of enforced stay wouldn't necessarily upset our daily, very tight, budget. The days, however, turned into weeks and our consumption of dates-with-everything was proving to be rather tedious, to say the least. Suddenly, one morning, the embassy announced the borders would return to normal as the camps were growing exponentially. We were given authority to drive, unhindered, into Jordan. As you might expect, this piece of advice turned out not to be entirely accurate. We were allowed to drive out of Iraq, but there lay the ambiguity. Between the two border posts was ten miles of no-mans land and our authority didn't, necessarily, allow us into Jordan, even armed with our visas issued in Nairobi. We, very tentatively, drove through the ten miles of desert, only to be confronted by a sprawling mass of line upon line of tents and lorries. There was no question of us staying here. We turned and drove back to Iraq. We were greeted warmly with lots of smiles, long-lost friends. Can we please go back to Baghdad. ‘Of course, of course, can we see your papers.' ‘We can't go into Jordan, so can we go back to Baghdad.' ‘Yes of course you can go back to Baghdad, but can we see your papers to come into Iraq.' We looked at each other with the realisation we were being ‘played', hooked trout on a line. I've never enjoyed fishing since. As we turned to drive back to the Jordanian border, I looked in the mirror to see their heads thrown back with guffaws of laughter. How is it border police are the same the world over?