Slow Boats to China

by Gavin Young

  Afterwards I walked out into King William Street and hurried past the quick-sandwich shops, the window full of telex appliances and the doors of Christian missionary societies, and took a tube to Green Park. In Cook’s, kind Mr Chattell gave me a shipping list, the ABC Shipping Guide, and like a squirrel with a nut, I carried it home and devoured it.

  About half of its pages was devoted to cruises: no good to me. The other half showed that people who wanted to move about between small collections of islands, or from one port to another one nearby, faced no problem. If you felt a burning desire to travel by sea between, say, Gomera and Tenerife in the Canaries, you could easily do so; if a sudden impulse drove you to cross from Cape May, New Jersey, to Lewes Ferry, Delaware, the Delaware Bay Service was daily at your disposal for a small charge.

  On other pages, long-distance round trips on large cargo–passenger ships were advertised. Farrell Lines, for example, would give you a round trip from the United States to South Africa and back again; the Moore–McCormack Lines would take you from New York to Cape Town to Dar es Salaam to Zanzibar and back every three weeks. Lykes Brothers Steamship Company would take you on a round trip to Japan. There were others, but none offered the flexibility I needed.

  By now it was obvious that I must play the trip to Canton by ear. There was no point in relying on elusive dates and problematical itineraries of ships subject to whimsical change. I would take what came along the way, trusting to luck that any delay would not be horrendously long. I had taken leave of absence from the Observer, telling Donald Trelford, the editor, that the journey shouldn’t take me much more than four months; that seemed a longish time as I pored over my maps in London. I would board any vessel moving in the right direction: a tanker, a freighter, a dhow, a junk – anything. Nothing that went too far at one time; that would reduce the number of ports of call – and I wanted to see a good number of ports.

  I was embarking, in fact, on a game of traveller’s roulette. I bought a cheap atlas and marked with a ballpoint pen a number of ports either because I liked the sound of them or because I’d been there before as a foreign correspondent: Smyrna, Alexandria, Port Said, Suez, Jedda, Dubai, Karachi, Bombay, Cochin, Colombo, Calcutta, Madras, Singapore, Brunei, Bangkok, Manila, Hong Kong, Macao, Canton. As an afterthought, though without much hope, I added the Andaman Islands, in the Bay of Bengal; the sombre vision of a tropical penal settlement and sudden and agonizing death from native poisoned darts had lodged in my mind since my first reading of Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes thriller The Sign of Four.

  Where should I start? I went back to the lists again, but the decision was soon made. Not Rotterdam or Southampton; the Channel and the west Mediterranean were well known and well travelled. I would start in Europe, but as close to Asia as possible: Athens. Friends had told me of a steamer that shuttled passengers from Piraeus to the Greek island of Patmos, near Smyrna in Turkey-in-Asia. From there I could find my way slowly to the Suez Canal (even then the canal looked like a Becher’s Brook, a first and formidable major hurdle).

  That decided, I booked a flight to Athens and began to gather together the things I would need on a sea voyage of indeterminate length.

  Notebooks, ballpoint pens and books were the first requirements. Conrad’s Under Western Eyes and Mirror of the Sea, Ford Madox Ford’s Memories and Impressions, a handful of thrillers, Joseph Heller’s Good as Gold, Vintage Wodehouse. I was taking two cameras and I wanted to keep my money safe, so I bought a metal suitcase at some expense. It had a combination lock, and the salesman assured me it would take gelignite to open it if the lock was turned. It was heavy, so I took a light zip-fastened bag as well.

  God knew where I would find myself from week to week, so I arranged with my bank to send money to certain places on my way where I could pick it up by producing my passport. I don’t like travelling with bundles of notes or even large numbers of traveller’s cheques. I bought a money belt, too, but in the end I used it only in the Sulu Sea, thinking that the pirates there might strip and search me without stopping to examine the back of an ordinary-looking belt. (The result of this subterfuge was that a number of banknotes were so damaged by salt water and sweat that for a long time in the Philippines I hesitated to try to pass them.)

  It was going to be wet at sea and possibly cold, so I took my old green Grenfell anorak from Vietnam days. I had thick-soled, strong shoes and a pair of lighter ones to wear ashore. Medicines: I bought Septrin, Mexaform (for diarrhoea) and aspirin. I washed out my father’s hip flask and filled it with Scotch. A newly acquired Polaroid camera was to prove almost as useful to me in breaking the ice with shy and hostile strangers as beads were to explorers of old.

  I couldn’t think of anything else.

  At last I was ready for the traveller’s roulette to begin, and drove to London airport to catch the Athens flight.

  *

  There is no better place than a crowded European airport on an August morning in which to say a tearless farewell to air travel for a few months. With its look of a tarted-up transit camp, London airport stifles euphoria at the best of times. Even so, I felt none of the elation you might expect in an adventurer departing for Eastern seas among crowds of August holidaymakers morosely contemplating the big boards announcing delays in their flights to Vienna, Rome and Lisbon.

  I had spent a late last night – reluctant, when it came to it, to abandon friends for a seagoing mystery tour almost half across the world on unscheduled ships. In thirty years of travel I have seldom begun a long journey without the feeling that I shall never return, and this beginning was no exception.

  I edged my way to the bar and ordered a small black coffee. ‘Oh, and a Fernet Branca, please.’

  ‘Brave man,’ the barman said, and poured so generously that a small puddle of the dark-brown liquid formed around the base of the glass. I took his generosity as a good omen.

  The Fernet Branca’s bitter warmth raised my spirits a notch or two. Soon a precise English female voice on the loudspeaker system announced that the Athens flight would leave on time, and this helped as well. But it was a false prophecy. Another two hours went by before we were allowed to board and listen to the captain apologizing for the delay, caused, he said, by air-traffic congestion. And another hour before the arrival of plastic trays bearing the airline’s ‘paprika sauce’ congealing on ‘turkey escalopes’ that retained the consistency of corrugated cardboard. The delays in the shipping world, I know now from experience, run into days or weeks, not hours, but only one out of the bizarre diversity of vessels I was to take on my long sea road to China produced food less appetizing than that airline meal between London and Athens.

  I bought a cognac to wash away the taste and then the clear white Alps were below us. Later still, at last, the even clearer blue of Salamis Bay. Motorboats drew snowy trails among the islands and headlands basking in the warm sea. Seagulls wheeled and whitecaps flickered against the blue water – blue and white, the colours of the Greek flag. It was like a photograph on one of the postcards my fellow passengers would be sending home, whose recipients would sniff in disbelief at the unnaturalness of the colour reproduction. Here Europe ended; somewhere in the haze and glint of the eastern Mediterranean Sea, Europe and Asia came together. Beyond Athens airport the first of my ships waited for me; and, beyond that, Asia.

  For the moment, Athens, much less Asia, was inaccessible beyond six long lines of passengers waiting for passport control. Evidently four jumbo jets had arrived at the same time.

  A woman near me was saying, ‘It’s better at London airport, isn’t it? Better organized, really.’

  I went through customs behind two florid young Englishmen dressed in identical brown blazers with brass buttons who bantered, Bertie Wooster-fashion, in strong Yorkshire accents.

  ‘To the yacht and straight into the sea, what?’

  ‘Yeah. Second one in pays for the champagne.’

  ‘Roger, old man.’

  When I had reached the city cen
tre and checked into a modest hotel on Mount Lyccabetos that someone had told me about, the receptionist told me I still had time to see Thomas Cook’s before they closed. I wanted to make sure I could get on the next ship heading through the Greek islands to Patmos. I had been told that the hotel had a ‘lovely view of the Acropolis’, and I suppose that if I’d been a giraffe I might have spent some time peering at it around the corner of the hotel. My room, though perfectly comfortable, was gloomy and on the ground floor and looked out onto a busy construction site. ‘It’s the month for the tourist groups,’ the receptionist explained. It occurred to me that perhaps all the passenger ships were going to be full too, so I hurried to Cook’s office in Constitution Square.

  Cook’s was oddly hard to find but, after an interlude of dodging through crowds of blond tourists in shorts, I found it in a corner of the square on the second floor of a tall modern building. A friendly Greek lady there told me that the next ship to sail in the direction I wanted would be the steamer Alcheon, a Greek passenger vessel leaving Piraeus the next day at two o’clock in the afternoon for her regular run through the Aegean. She will stop, as usual, the lady said, at the island of Mikonos, and reach Patmos in the middle of the following night. Eleven hours; it seemed worthwhile to book a cabin.

  The Cook’s lady blew her nose into a Kleenex, made a telephone call and reported, ‘Tomorrow there’s only one berth left. In a cabin with three other people.’

  ‘Any way of knowing who they are?’

  ‘No.’

  It didn’t matter. It was a stroke of luck that there was any berth at all. ‘I’ll take it.’ At least it would be somewhere to lodge my ironclad suitcase. As I put my ticket and passport away, the Cook’s lady said, ‘I should board at one o’clock, if I were you.’

  With my first steamship ticket in my pocket, there was time for a quiet evening in Athens. I had no intention of sightseeing; I had been to Athens several times before. I had pottered about the Parthenon and could remember enough nights filled with retsina, smashed plates and table-dancing to twanging bouzoukis, the Greek equivalent of the zither, in tavernas full of apaches. Enough of that – at least until Cyprus. For someone about to walk the plank from Europe into Eastern seas, only the peace of Orfanides’s beckoned with a wrinkled, ouzo-scented finger. But first I stopped at the bookstall of the Grande Bretagne Hotel and bought the Kümmerly and Frey map of Greece, the Geographia map of Turkey (which covers Syria, Cyprus and Lebanon too), some prickly-heat powder and half a dozen postcards. Then I strolled around the corner to old Orfanides’s.

  I say ‘old’ Orfanides. For whoever Orfanides is and whatever his age – let’s hope he’s still alive – he cannot be young. His bar, too, has the right kind of old dusty shelves, the right number of old dusty bottles around its walls, a marble-topped wooden bar inside at one end, and small tables at the opposite end and outside on the street. ‘The Oldest Bar in Athens’ is Orfanides’s claim – ‘Established in 1916’. The fan on a wall over the bar is massive and rusty and is probably one of the first revolving fans ever made, but it works. It is needed because it is unlikely that one’s blood temperature will remain unaffected by the intake of alcohol made possible by the provision of a thick finger of ouzo for ten pence and a glass of Samos wine for twenty.

  I took a table on the street and, when I had ordered ouzo, ice, a glass of water and a small plate of olives, I took my Alcheon ticket from my pocket and laid it carefully on the table next to the map of Greece. The rush of leaving England and friends, the many details I’d had to tidy up before leaving and the flight itself had all combined to smother any sense of what I was now embarked on. I wanted to brood on that first ticket. I wanted a reminder that I was going to China on slow boats, and that my destination was several months and thousands of miles away. I wanted to let the blissful thought seep into my head that, after nearly twenty years and fourteen wars, I was not embarking on one more harassing sprint for the Observer. In other words, I needed to slip into neutral, and Orfanides’s was a good place for that. Once it had been a comforting place in an ugly time.

  In 1967, when I was Paris correspondent of the Observer, a trio of colonels seized power in Greece. I knew what to expect from London and it soon came: a telephone call from the Observer’s foreign news editor. ‘How about a trip to Athens?’ he said.

  The next day I had found the lobby of the Grande Bretagne crowded and chaotic. My friends Jo Menell and John Morgan with their BBC television crew were struggling with cameras, recording apparatus and miles of cable halfway in and halfway out of the glass-front doors. We had last met in the horrendous pandemonium of Vietnam the year before. Full-scale repression in Greece and mass graves of Greek and Turkish civilians in Cyprus were still in the future when I came upon Jo and John. At the time, the situation seemed mildly laughable but, in the days that followed, laughter died away, and the grim routine of revolution closed around the Greeks. Telephones whirred and clicked in a sinister way; friends of friends vanished overnight.

  That first evening, Jo, John and I went despondently to Orfanides’s. The bar was full of equally despondent Greeks. Jo rapped the table and said ironically, ‘Gavin, you’re about to see the revival by the military of Greek democracy in its finest and purest form. Except that they’ll probably institute the death penalty for everything from homosexuality to zither music. They’ll have Socrates spinning in his grave.’

  John and Jo had taken their camera into Orfanides’s to see if the elderly Greek customers there were willing to discuss the colonels. They didn’t expect that they would be, but neither the waiters nor the old gentlemen held it against Jo and John that they tried to film them. In the next few days we went there often, and one evening from Orfanides’s terrace we watched soldiers, priests and men in double-breasted suits parading by to impress wavering Athenians and foreigners with their ‘revolution’ and its permanence.

  Now, twelve years later, the colonels were in jail and in disgrace.

  I ordered another ouzo, watched the ice turn it to milk, put my ticket away, and felt glad to be watching a different sort of parade: the promenade of August tourists. A decorous lot, by and large. The hippies seemed to have moved on. Perhaps I would catch up with them in Goa or Ceylon; perhaps they’d just grown up and settled down with mortgages and televised soap opera. Elderly English: men in panama hats, white-moustached; women in sensible, low-heeled shoes and head scarves. Americans in small, round straw hats. Schools of young German males in shorts so brief and tight you wondered where they found room to park their genitalia, and their pretty but big-bottomed girls; slip-slopping their sandalled feet, they went past Orfanides’s to the grander Snack Bar, where a notice said in demotic German, ein deutsch sprechen.

  When darkness fell, I ate something in a small restaurant and then found a taxi. It was quite late enough. After all, I was leaving for China next day.

  One

  Piraeus to Jedda

  One

  The following day, the Greek motor vessel Alcheon, alongside her pier in Piraeus, dribbled a soft ribbon of smoke from her sloping funnel and prepared to sail. 1.55 p.m: the gangway would be hauled in soon; the passengers who were still boarding had cut it fine.

  From an upper deck I looked at the sweep of Piraeus in the sunlight. A screen of medium-sized high-rise buildings of no distinction spread out against the bright hills of Attika. A line of cranes bent and swung their heads. Other vessels of Greece’s big island passenger fleet awaited their turn to sail, their sirens impatiently mooing like cows sensing their release into a meadow: the Kydon; beyond her, the Omyros of Chios; next a torpedo-shaped yellow hydroplane with two fins, the Flying Dolphin; another gleam of orthodox white streamlining, the Ariadne….

  Gloomy Northerners with heavy packs shuffled up the gangway, but the Greek passengers easily outnumbered the tourists. Solid island women swiftly commandeered benches on deck where they hauled off their shoes, exposing crimson toenails and varicosed and unshaven legs. Three frenzied Greek w
omen had already pinned the young assistant purser in a doorway, buffeting him with bosoms that jostled each other like melons in black sacking. Having won their point, they petted him with shrugs and heavy sighs, as if enacting a grotesque parody of lovemaking. It seemed a more reasonable way of registering umbrage than the smouldering British way. I was about to be given a dose of the British treatment, and it increased my impatience for Asia.

  Two elderly Britons stood near a companionway. He was pointing out landmarks ashore with a shooting stick. He had a white moustache and an open-necked shirt with a silk scarf worn like a cravat. His wife, who probed the air with long front teeth and had the swooping neck of a camel, turned to me. ‘I was just saying to my husband it’s exciting, isn’t it, the last moment before sailing. Mysterious. Like entering the Tunnel of Love at a fun fair.’ Her head jerked backwards and forwards as she spoke.

  ‘Steady on, Maggie,’ the husband said. He glanced at me with distaste, touching his scarf as if it were a talisman against the evil eye.

  ‘We’re doing a tour of the islands,’ she said. ‘First to Mikonos. We have old friends there with a lovely house. What about you?’

  ‘I’m going to China,’ I said, and saw at once that she thought I was being facetious.

  ‘I see,’ she said in a chilling voice. He took her arm and led her away, aiming his shooting stick at a power station as if it were the Parthenon. ‘Uncalled for,’ I heard her say.

  What had upset her? Looking back now, I realize that I had no misunderstanding in the next seven months – not even with people who spoke no English – comparable to this ridiculous encounter with a fellow countrywoman on my first day at sea.