On My Way to Samarkand: Memoirs of a Travelling Writer

by Garry Douglas Kilworth

  ‘Oh, shops!’ they both cried, instantly waking, and leapt out of the car to tour the stalls, chattering animatedly among themselves and with the glint-eyed vendors. New Yorkers! I gave up at that point.

  ~

  Not long before we left Hong Kong Charlie Brown, American editor of Locus, the science fiction news magazine, came on a visit. When such visitors came, we often used to take them to the Peninsula Hotel. If hotels were warm blooded creatures and had royalty flowing through their veins, the Peninsula would be a Persian emperor, just as the Raffles of old Singapore would be the King of Babylon. The Peninsula has gold-plated taps in the loos and a musicians’ balcony above the coffee shop floor where violinists play Albinoni and Schubert. The Peninsula is sumptuous, opulent. I tried to take Charlie into the coffee shop but the Sikh doorman pointed to Charlie’s sandals, obviously offensive to other coffee drinkers, and refused us entry. I pointed to a woman in silver sandals, entering right at that moment. The doorman shrugged and shook his head, indicating that a different set of rules applied to the female of the species.

  After Charlie had been to Hong Kong, the science fiction writers Fred Pohl and James White came through. Fred Pohl was one of those authors I had read as a youth. He was famous for his collaborations with another writer, Kornbluth. Pohl of Pohl and Kornbluth! And James White! It was wonderful to meet such men. A local Chinese sf fan group rang me and invited me to a meal they were giving Fred and Jim at a Jumbo Jau Lau, one of those immensely busy, giant, noisy restaurants in Hong Kong where they serve dim sum from handcarts. We went and met the great men. As with other big-name writers I have met – James Blish, Brian Aldiss, Harry Harrison, William Golding, others – Fred and Jim were open, friendly and generous with their time. I very much enjoyed meeting them both. We had to shout at each other, the jau lau being full of Chinese speaking at the tops of their voices, but though they were elderly they were still full of enthusiasm for science fiction.

  William Golding I met at a literary party in Charles Monteith’s office at Faber and Faber in Russell Square. I did not know what to say to the white-haired gentleman and asked Charles for advice.

  ‘Oh, he likes boats – ask him about yachting,’ Charles said, airily.

  Armed with this I went up to the great author, not then yet a Nobel Prize Winner, but still awesome to a fledgling writer.

  ‘I hear you’re a sailor, Mr Golding,’ I said.

  He stared at me for a minute, then looked over my shoulder at a wickedly-beaming Charles Monteith.

  ‘I hate boats,’ William Golding replied, firmly. ‘I almost drowned when the yacht I was on recently got into trouble.’

  Thank you, Charles.

  ~

  In one year, 1990, we had seventeen sets of visitors to our Hong Kong apartment. On average they stayed about two weeks, so you can see we were rarely alone that year. Fortunately the apartment was two-in-one and some visitors we hardly saw. Glen and Wilma Swaik, Australian friends, were out and about on their own and we only joined them for the odd trip. Aussies do tend to be more self-motivated than Brits. It was our habit to show our visitors how to use the MTR (the underground) and the buses, and a map, then leave them to their own devices if they so wished.

  Two final sets of visitors deserve a mention.

  We met Werner and Kathy Hartmann-Campbell on our trip to Bali. Werner is a Swiss architect and Kathy an American life coach. They live in Switzerland but are fond of the Far East. They came to stay with us on their way to a holiday in the Philippines and we took them for a walk in the hills of the New Territories. In one remote valley a man walked by us followed by his dog. The hound passed me, then passed the women without a glance. Werner was following a few yards in the rear when the dog suddenly turned and savagely attacked him. Werner was badly bitten on the leg, which he took phlegmatically, without fuss.

  ‘It’s my height,’ said Werner, who is indeed a very tall lean man. ‘It confuses animals.’

  The problem was the possibility of rabies.

  We took Werner to the Queen Elizabeth hospital where they gave him an anti-rabies jab. He would need several more at different intervals throughout the next few weeks and it was vitally important that he got them on the right days. Not only that, the complications of rabies jabs are compounded by the fact that the serum is manufactured in batches and subsequent injections have to be from the same batch.

  Werner and Kathy were on their way to a trek through the Philippine jungles, where they would be lucky to meet with a village let alone a town with a hospital. The timing indicated he would need one injection on the flight to Manila and one a few days later when they were on their trek. The one on the flight could be handled by using freeze bags and the aircraft’s refrigerator, but rabies serum deteriorates rapidly and there was no way Werner could carry the third injection through the heat of the Philippines’ climate. He would have to hope to find a hospital with the right batch number somewhere on his journey.

  Me? I would have got on the next plane back to Switzerland, abandoning the holiday. Death from rabies is one of the worst ways to leave this imperfect but precious world of ours. Madness, hydrophobia, agonising pain. A death to be avoided at all cost, I would say. But Werner Hartmann-Campbell is made of sterner material than Garry Kilworth. Werner decided that his trek was important to him and the pair of them boarded their flight for the Philippines with Werner saying, ‘Well, that nurse in the hospital taught me one thing – how to shoot up.’ He was treating it all as a joke, but I really did fear for him and was anxious for news of them over the next two weeks.

  The story has a happy ending. On the day Werner needed his third injection they came across a small jungle hospital run by nuns. Incredibly, in the nuns’ fridge was anti-rabies serum bearing the batch number required by my intrepid Swiss friend. Well sir, I certainly had sleepless nights over that incident, but I have no idea whether Werner did. When he returned to Switzerland he was contacted by the Swiss tropical diseases department and asked to write an article on his experience.

  Werner later wrote to me about a desire to visit Australia.

  ‘The trouble with Switzerland,’ he said, ‘is that the horizons all tend to curve upwards. I want to go the Outback where I’m told I will be able to see to infinity without the landscape pointing at the sky.’

  I’ve not yet learned whether he got there, but I certainly did.

  ~

  One evening I went to pick up Annette from Osborne Barracks after she had spent a long hot day in her non-air-conditioned beat-up Vauxhall getting lost in the streets of Mong Kok. We came back to the apartment on Rhonda Road to find a young couple sitting on the steps of Vista Panorama. They had fold-up bicycles with them. Their expressions registered weariness and mild depression.

  On enquiry we found that they were an American pair cycling round the world and they had been expecting to stay in the apartment of Annette’s workmate, Sue. However, we knew that Sue and James were on holiday.

  ‘You can stay with us the night,’ said Annette, ‘then perhaps look for somewhere else tomorrow.’

  It was our policy at that time to offer beds overnight to waifs and strays and to tell them we would help them to look for a cheap hotel the next day. If they turned out to be reasonable human beings we let them stay. If we found we couldn’t cope with them, we did indeed intend assisting them in finding alternative accommodation. We had already given a bed to a temporarily homeless army corporal and his new wife overnight and on that occasion we learned they were delightful people and we had no cause to tell them their was no further room at the inn. In fact we never needed to chuck anyone out into the hordes that swarmed in the streets of Hong Kong, a testament to the fact that most people are reasonable human beings.

  So we let the American cyclists stay, and indeed, they were a charming couple and full of stories about their travels. They called themselves the Roamin’ Wyomin’s, hailing from that state. They lived by sending home printed newsletters about their adventures a
nd the woman’s mother sold these to neighbours and friends to provide travelling money. These two stayed a week and then left their bikes with us while they went up into China. They promised to be back within two weeks, but three weeks later there was still no sign of them. In fact they had tried to argue with Chinese officials about Tibet and had ended up in jail. A letter of apology to the Chinese government was finally penned and they were allowed to leave China. They came to us rather bedraggled but still full of enthusiasm for their onward journey. Later we learned it took seven years for them to complete their circuit of the globe. They continued cycling. Where they are now I have no idea, but I’m sure it’s not in Wyoming.

  ~

  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.

  ~

  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 driv
er 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.