On My Way to Samarkand: Memoirs of a Travelling Writer

by Garry Douglas Kilworth

  The huts let in the rain. There was little food on the island because it was Ramadan and the fishermen had not gone out. No alcohol of course, the island was Muslim. Damp beds, banana porridge and Fanta lemonade. This was to be our lot for the next few days. Rob was appalled and asked a stall holder if he had any chicken.

  ‘I can kill that one,’ said the man, pointing with his chopper at a skinny pullet that ran beneath the tables. ‘Make you nice curry, sir.’

  It made a curry, but nice? Well, better than nothing.

  On top of it all, the rain had washed the signatures off our passports and most of the print off our air tickets back to Hong Kong.

  Then the sun came out.

  Hurrah.

  We went for a walk in an ancient forest with trees like cathedrals. Rob was now ecstatic. That man did love his trees. A four-foot monitor lizard dropped from a branch and thrashed away through the undergrowth. One lean snake slid across the path. Magnificent birds flew through the canopy and out over the seashore: hornbills, frigate birds, a sea eagle. We found a crystal clear stream and waterfall where we stripped down to our underwear and bathed. The next day we went in search of coral gardens beneath the waves. Rob learned to snorkel and was in heaven, following the multi-coloured reef fish over their coral lairs. Rob later told me it was the best holiday he had ever had.

  We flew back from Tioman, much to the consternation of Sarah, who did not like the flimsy 8-seater aircraft we were in. Below us the rivers were like brown serpents weaving through the rainforest. The shallows and lagoons of the Pacific revealed every shade of green. Again, Rob was fascinated by it all, never having been to the Far East before, with its clear light and brilliantly painted waters and landscapes. He kept borrowing my video camera to capture it all for when he was back in London.

  Once back on the mainland we remained on the east coast, staying at some thatched huts at a place called Cherating. The mosquitoes there were horrific but everyone survived. Rob and I bought some quails’ eggs in a local market and made a fire on the beach to cook them that night. It was Boy’s Own stuff. We were back to being twelve again. We had river trips in local canoes at Cherating, seeing iguanas on the banks and a reticulated python in a tree. There was a massive charcoal burning hut close to the camp where we stayed and Rob was fascinated by that too. He liked anything that had its roots in antiquity.

  The four of us finally flew back to Hong Kong to continue the holiday. We had a weekend at the huts on Lantau, where Peggy had been attacked by the giant spider. We visited other islands, Lamma and some off Sai Kung, where we had a day out with Cath and Richard Beacher. As with all our visitors we took them to our weekend haunt, the United Services Recreation Club (USRC), with its swimming pool and tennis courts and other facilities. There we drank ‘gunners’ a refreshing beverage of iced ginger beer, ginger ale and angostura bitters, which was drunk by just about every expat that ever lived in Hong Kong.

  At the USRC that day was Bob and Jan Thomas, who lived in the apartment above us. Bob and Jan were teachers at the Gun Club School, a primary for expat kids. Bob was a man who took up causes and at that time he was incensed with the British Government. The janitor at Gun Club School was a man named Mr Ho, who had been a cook in the British Navy at the time of the Falklands War. He was on board HMS Sir Galahad when it was sunk and had spent time in the freezing water before being rescued. In 1996 we were handing Hong Kong back to the Chinese and the Head of Gun Club School was transferring to Singapore. He wanted to take Mr Ho with him, but to do that Mr Ho had to have a British passport. The Tories wouldn’t give him one, even though Mr Ho had fought for her in their stupid war and almost lost his life. Bob was on a mission to get Mr Ho his passport and had conscripted my assistance. It was my job to write to the newspapers about the injustice.

  Mr Ho never did get his British passport.

  After a great holiday it was time for Rob and Sarah to go. We drove them to the airport, kissed ’em goodbye and then went off to the cinema. When we got back late that evening we found a note from them, saying they would pay us a visit very soon. Shortly afterwards there was a knock on the door and there they stood.

  ‘What the hell?’ I said.

  Rob grinned. ‘The plane got struck by lightning as we took off over the harbour.’

  ‘Are you all right?’ asked Annette, anxiously.

  Sarah said, ‘We’re fine, but we had to fly around in circles getting rid of the fuel before we landed, so we’re a bit dizzy.’

  They had one extra day with us, then they really did go home.

  ~

  Our last journey while we were in Hong Kong was to Sumatra, in Indonesia. It was over Christmas and New Year. We landed on the coast and made our way to Lake Toba, which had an island in the middle on which there were some beach huts. Sumatra is volcano country and we passed many of these smoking giants on the way. We stopped in a town above the peaceful and beautiful Lake Toba, which had a backdrop of immensely high cliffs and thin waterfalls, a paradise on view. It was Christmas Eve and we decided to attend Midnight Mass, the locals being mostly Christian. (They told us their ancestors ate the first two missionaries, but then felt a bit guilty and let the third one convert them!) It was a lovely service, though the congregation was split with women on one side of the aisle and men on the other. This was not, my feminist friends, a sexist class system, but in order to keep the sopranos and the baritones (and indeed the several bass singers) in separate choirs.

  The singing was absolutely beautiful. Yet they were only a normal town with a normal congregation. We have been to several other services since, on the Cook Islands in the Pacific, in Sarawak, on Fiji, and the singing has always been of the highest quality. Nothing like the dreary mumbled hymns of an Anglican church in England. The service was of course in Indonesian, but we all knew our own words to ‘Silent Night’, Indonesians and any tourists – there were Germans, Dutch and Swedes who had gone along like us – and we came away quite lifted. Christmas ain’t Christmas for us, without a Midnight Mass.

  The next morning, Christmas Day, the two of us went down to a wooden jetty where the ferry came in. All along the lake’s shore was a market which consisted of people with blankets spread on the ground and their produce laid on it ready for sale. Some blankets had only a handful of green beans and it is times like that, seeing real poverty, that my heart sinks. I feel wretchedly useless, knowing I can’t feed the whole world, and I feel guilty because I’m so fortunate. These are not good sensible feelings, for if I was strong enough I would be working among such people and doing what I can to assist them.

  While we were buying our tickets for the ferry at a kiosk made of boxwood a strange thing happened. A Land Rover pulled up just beyond the blanket market and a man got out dressed as Father Christmas. He was obviously a Westerner and the sweat was running down his face under the false white beard because it was a very very hot day and he was wearing very very thick clobber. He marched through the market to the edge of the lake, put his hands on his hips and stared out over the water. Then he swore deeply, turned, went back to his vehicle and drove off.

  The whole market was stunned. Chatter had ceased. People stared at each other. Even the dogs had stopped barking.

  The mouth of the man in the kiosk had dropped open and he asked us in hushed tones, ‘Who was that? Moses?’

  ‘No,’ I replied. ‘Santa Claus.’

  The vendor screwed up his face.

  ‘Oh, him,’ he said, in a contemptuous tone.

  He never did explain the reason for his disdain for Father Christmas.

  23. Wychwater (again)

  We returned to England over Christmas 1992/3. Peter and Marti Beere had left the house a couple of months previously. Rick was now installed while making repairs to his own flat in Westcliff. We spent a quiet Christmas, seeing everyone we needed to see, then immediately set off on a five month backpacking tour of the world. We had purchased New Zealand Air tickets and set out eastwards. So long as we kept g
oing in that direction we could land anywhere we wanted to and stay as long as we wished. Our first stop was Singapore, then we flew on to Australia, to stay with Pete and Carolyn Worth in Melbourne.

  After two weeks in Victoria State we went up to Sydney and stayed at the YWCA. Then on to Queensland, staying first at Rockhampton. There in a cabin on a beach we met some miners from the interior and their wives. The men had come to the coast for the fishing. The wives? Well, it seemed they were simply there to look after the men. Some of the wives cornered Annette one day and asked to see inside our cabin. It was the same as theirs. We couldn’t see the point, but let them in anyway.

  ‘Where’ve you been?’ asked one.

  ‘Oh, all over the place,’ replied Annette.

  ‘Have you been to the malls in Sydney?’ asked another, eagerly.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘That’s what I’d like to do,’ said the woman, firmly. ‘See the malls in Sydney.’

  We also met a teacher there, who taught at a school in the Outback where the students had to come in from a long way, some by small aircraft. She told us that on a Friday night all the parents made the trip into the small town to get haircuts, shopping, and all those things they couldn’t do or get out on the farms. One of the teacher’s jobs was to keep the grass runway mowed short so that the small planes could land.

  ‘And the kids like a swim in the river,’ she told us, ‘so it’s useful to have the parents there to watch for crocodiles.’

  From Rockhampton we went on to Yeppoon, to go to the Great Barrier Reef, which was fine. We met an Aborigine man there who unlike many of the indigenous people was philosophical about his land being invaded by Europeans. His name was Jack Splinter and he was an Outback scout, taking tourists into the interior.

  ‘Better everyone gets along together,’ he told me, ‘because yesterday is gone.’

  An enlightened man, but then of course he had a good job, showing visitors the wonders of his birthplace.

  After Yeppoon came Townsville and then a flight from Brisbane to Auckland, New Zealand.

  When we arrived in Auckland there was a gay festival going on and we had a job getting accommodation. That first night we went down to the shoreline and to a restaurant overlooking the harbour. It was a bizarre evening. There were three big tables near us. One was full of Japanese tourists, one was occupied by a party of gay men and the last by Hell’s Angels, Maoris. We foresaw trouble between the Hell’s Angels and the gays, but such was not the case. In fact the Angels were annoyed by the chatter of the Japanese and finally one big Maori got up and walked over to the Japanese table and mimicked machine-gunning the tourists making them gape at him in amazement. The gays were mostly interested in the harbour. The Round-the-World yacht race was in progress and every time a boat came in the gays would rush to the parapet of the restaurant and call and wave to the sailors on the yacht.

  We left Auckland in a hired car and toured New Zealand, almost from top to bottom, staying mostly at farms offering accommodation. We learned that New Zealand’s rivers, unlike our own in UK, are braided and therefore not contained by set banks. They roam over miles of landscape. One farmer told us that a river that had been a mile from his door two years previously was now six miles away. These farmers had once raised cattle and sheep but most we met had turned to deer which were hunted by parties of Japanese businessmen who wanted to shoot things.

  At Lake Taupo we gathered our breath. The night sky there was absolutely crystallised with stars. Breathtaking. We and some others hired the sailing yacht that had once belonged to Errol Flynn. The outgoing trip was good but we found ourselves in a storm coming back. Lake Taupo is enormous, an inland sea, and though we had a captain with us and four other tourists to man the rigging, it was not an easy home-getting. I felt we were in the pages of Moby Dick.

  The next day we left for Waimangu valley, an area of thermal springs, some of which are used to heat homes.

  We met up with a couple we had come across on a Malaysian island and had kept in touch with, as is our wont. They were environmental scientists and took us to a ‘prehistoric forest’ which went back to a time when trees were cycads. I foolishly threw away an apple core I had been eating and we then spent the next hour searching for the seeds of that core. They did not, of course, want a modern apple tree growing to blight their ancient forest. They also took us to some thermal pools – New Zealand has a lot of those – and warned us not to put our heads under water.

  ‘There’s a mite that enters your ear and eats away your brain,’ we were warned.

  For a land which has absolutely no dangerous wild animals, indeed which has had mammals only since the Maori landed there not long after the first millennium, this was a nasty shock. Is there nowhere on earth one can go without there being a killer on the loose?

  On 4 February, 1992, we set out for Franz Joseph Glacier on South Island. We attempted to walk up the glacier but the rain had been constant for several hours and the meltwater rivers were too swollen and turbulent to cross. Failing to reach Franz Joseph we then tried for Fox Glacier, some twenty-five kilometres further on. There were managed to wade across several fast streams to the nose of this aquamarine river of ice. There were huge caves under the nose, but the rain was still coming down heavily and we advanced no further that day.

  Next morning, backpacked and booted, we set out along the Copland Trail, one of the many two-to-ten-day wilderness trails in NZ. We left at nine am and one hour later hit a raging torrent of freezing water. A party of climbers arrived and showed us how to link arms and walk across, keeping our boots on to prevent slipping on the rocks below the surface. This meant, of course, we had cold wet feet for most of the rest of the day. Then there were muddy ledges and suspension bridges to traverse, and deep rugged chasms to negotiate. The length of the trail to the first night’s stopover, the Welcome Hut, was a seventeen kilometre walk. There were difficult arduous treks along rocky river beds, through bush and up steep slopes overhanging deep gorges. We reached the thirteen kilometre mark when the trail ran out. The rain had washed away the scree leaving a loose three-inch path on a steep slope above a three-hundred-foot drop onto boulders. The alpine climbers had obviously managed it, but we had not the right equipment and, to be honest, not the courage or the skill either.

  So just before evening we began the long walk back. We had a tent and sleeping bags with us, for just such an emergency. We managed to reach the river beds in the light but rather than camp among an incredibly vicious swarm of sandflies we decided to go the whole way. Annette once again had to balance on a mossy log that spanned a deep gorge and cross a flimsy rope bridge while humming her favourite hymn ‘Dear Lord and Father of Mankind’. The line ‘Oh still small voice of calm’ is a genuine nerve-settler. With the aid of a torch we finally arrived back at the start point in darkness at nine o’clock, our legs like jelly. Rather than return to our campsite both of us fell fast asleep in the car.

  Before we left glacier land Annette had a birthday helicopter flight to the top of Mount Cook. She took a video of the flight. I only watched it once and ended up vomiting in the toilet with motion sickness. God knows what I would have been like on the actual flight.

  We pulled in on the way north at a small village and saw people gathering at the entrance to a church in anxious-looking knots. Stopping, we learned that two youngsters in their late teens had gone trekking along one of those lonely New Zealand trails. Somewhere out there the youth had changed packs with his girlfriend, hers being too heavy for her. Unfortunately, she was a diabetic and her insulin was in the pack the young man was then carrying. They became separated. The youth found his way back to the village, while the girl remained lost. Search parties had gone out just before we arrived and they were holding a church service to pray that the girl would be found. We stayed and took part in the service, but never did learn if the outcome was good.

  Over the next few days we made our way up to Picton in the hire car to cross over the divide bet
ween South and North Island, then on to Napier, an amazing town which is completely built in art deco style after an earthquake destroyed the original buildings in the 1930s. Indeed, even the fire station is art deco. Anyway, halfway to Napier we picked up a young Swedish lad with a backpack. He sat behind us while Annette studied his face in the rear-view mirror.

  Finally she said to him, ‘You’ve been to Hong Kong, haven’t you?’

  ‘Yes,’ said the blond youth. ‘Last year. I went with some students to visit the police academy . . .’

  ‘. . . run by Paddy, a friend of ours,’ finished Annette. ‘You had a group photo taken. It’s on Paddy’s mantelpiece.’

  Both the youth and myself were stunned by this observation. Annette had actually recalled his face from that group photo, never having met him, and only once having seen the photo. And on top of that, she had done it by recognising him in a car rear-view mirror.

  ‘I can’t believe this,’ I commented. ‘You must be physic, Annie.’

  The Swedish boy said politely, ‘Sir, I believe the word is psychic.’

  No sense of humour, some Swedes.

  ~

  From New Zealand we flew to Raratonga, the main island of the Cook group. After visiting a college and museum on that small island I began to gather fragments for the trilogy I was to write on returning to the UK, already mentioned. The Navigator Kings trilogy consists of The Roof of Voyaging, The Princely Flower and Land of Mists. Again, it is one of my best works, full of folk lore, Polynesian mythology and amazing voyages across the Pacific Ocean without maps, navigational instruments or indeed a written language. I am immensely proud of that project, yet the books sold in tiny numbers, not reaching the readership for which it was really intended.