BOOKS

Solitary travel in antique lands

William Shawcross

Slow Boats to China Gavin Young (Hutchinson pp. 489, £8.95) Ihave before me a gaudy travel brochure from a firm called Kuoni. If offers, out of Dorking, a repulsive `Night Life Special' holiday in Bangkok. Here is how they put it: 'Ask a travelling businessman what he thinks of the night life in Bangkok and he will answer you with a wry smile! Fun, night life and oriental entertainment in all its variations are considered an unobtrusive part of life in Thailand and many people take the opportunity to enjoy some of the more exotic forms of relaxation! So for the "night owls" we have selected the medium grade Grace Hotel which.., has the reputa tion as the "hottest place in town" — especially the downstairs coffee shop which seems to be the meeting place of all the "night owls in town". The problem is we never know whether people go there for the reasonably priced meals or the very friendly company. Definitely not for families — but batchelors seem to rate it very highly.' It is hard to know which is more sordid — Kuoni's perversion of travel into tour sex, or its perversion of English.

Nothing sordid about my friend Mr Young. His book, which is about a real journey, is beautifully written. It is also very well published with good maps and splendid sketches.

It is the tale of how Mr Young fulfilled a childhood dream conjured up by the wild winds of the wreckers' coast in North Devon — to go down to the sea in a series of ships. He started in Athens and ended in Canton — seven months with probably as much melancholy as excitement. It's a hard trip to take — much harder than a train journey, for example — because ships are no longer sailed for people like Mr Young, solitary traveller to and from antique lands. Many travel agents, shipping agents, port officials looked upon him almost with anger — he was most inconvenient because he was travelling neither in a container nor in a group. If he had been in either one of these receptacles, he could have been easily computer pre-booked, given discounts or supplements and pushed efficiently around by tour operators or forklift trucks. What a lot he missed.

The nearest he got to a container, and that was too near, I suspect, was the expensive metal suitcase (with combination lock) which he brought to protect his money and film from pirates and the sea. He cannot have enjoyed coming out of the Army and Navy Stores with that instead of cleft sticks and I am not surprised he writes of it Without affection; he would have preferred an old Gladstone bag. In some ways Mr Young was not travelling alone at all, but I suppose that he would have made things even more difficult for himself had he tried gently to persuade officials that he was actually part of quite a group: 'Amongst my friends are Mr Somerset Maugham, Mr Ford Maddox Ford, Madame Edith Wharton and, of course, Captain Joseph Conrad.'

These and other travellers from Mr Young's own memory were with him throughout his voyages. Conrad, in particular, was an inspiration and a guide — just as Mr Young will be if (which I doubt, for think how containerised and grouped we will be by then) it is possible for some other foolhardy fellow to attempt such a voyage 50 years on.

When Mr Young does finally get aboard ship, what a time he has. The pleasure in the book is not just in his description of the sea and the ports, but especially in the sailors who shared his commune with him — Greek, French, Baluchi, Indian, Tamil, Malay, Filipino, English. Most of them are very agreeable and he thinks it is probably not possible to be a nasty captain.

Mr Young took some very big risks. He travelled from Sharjah to Karachi in a dhow without a proper engine; cars in the cargo had to be cannibalised to keep it going. Allah was merciful with the wind. Then he was nearly drowned in a storm which engulfed an overloaded 40 foot launch battling from Colombo to the Maldives. 'We are nearly on our beam ends once every minute and a half. The planks shuffle back and forth on the deck as the waves strike us and the grinding and creaking parts of the old launch drown the noise of the engine, pistons, prop shaft, wind and sea. A heavy case... has begun to crash into and buckle the only lifeboat which in any case is a poor light metal thing buried under a small mountain of pineapples, bamboo furniture and ceramic lavatory bowls.'

The most glorious part of the trip was in a sailing trader between Colombo and In THIS WEEK'S CONTRIBUTORS William Shawcross is the author of Sideshow: Kissinger, Nixon and the Destruction of Cambodia. He is now writing a book about how the world deals with disasters.

Jonathan Guinness was formerly chairman of the Monday Club. He is the heir of Lord Moyne.

Patrick Skene Catling's most recent novel was Jazz, Jazz, Jazz. He is currently writing a novel about narcotics in the Bahamas.

John Wilton was H.M. Ambassador to Saudi Arabia from 1976 to 1979. dia. 'I join Chandra and Darson beneath the main mast. It's like standing under a redwood tree painted black. Chandra is singing but all I hear is the creak of this mighty mast and, when I put my hand against it I can feel it shifting and quivering like a mighty muscle under great stress...

Ten sails up! They are hauled up with much effort and loud chanting and everyone, in cluding the captain and old Darson, turns to the haul,., As the Herman Mary moved on, brandishing her spars against a perfect sunset of orange and gold, the male voices rose and fell to the background of her humming and groaning. This moment remains one of the most vivid images I carry with me from the seven months of my journey. The great mast loomed as black and menacing as Beelzebub above the bowed figures...'

Chugging across the Sulu sea in a series of tiny launches, in dread of murderous pirates, he was lucky to be boarded only by a relatively tractable bunch of Moro nationalists. They did not take his life; they took only his binoculars and Mr Young was not sorry to get rid of these. They had blotches on the lenses which were reminders of something better forgotten, and they had seemed to grow like the loathesome stain in a story by Edgar Allan Poe.

Long ago, out on a patrol in Vietnam, the young soldier with whom Mr Young was walking and talking was blown apart by a shell. 'I heard a human sound quite close, half sob, half gasp. A helmet lay on the ground like an abandoned sea shell and near it was my friend from Nha Trang, clasping his stomach with one hand... "Hurt, me", he whispered again. At the inner corner of the delicate half-moon fold of his eyelid a drop of water had lodged. Rain? A tear? Soon people came and carefully carried him away, limp with his head lolling back as if a hinge in his neck had snapped.' Mr Young's clothes and glasses were covered in blood and he could never get the glasses clean. Staring through the blotches at Asian ships 15 years on, 'I remembered with anguish my friend from Nha Trang.'

Mr Young's book is poignant about the present as well as the past. So many of the poor people he met east of Suez have but one ambition — to get to Europe or America. Their yearning is often built on images of the West — ads torn from Time magazine, Playboy pin-ups — as far from reality as the glossy hotels and beaches which the tour operators concoct out of third world poverty for first world frolics.

Perhaps it is clear by now that I think Mr Young's book is tremendously good, on many levels. I think we could have done with a few more of his memories. Unlike some travel writers, he does not force embarassing confessions or tedious selfanalysis on the reader — indeed, in some ways he is too reticent. Perhaps he will give us more of himself in the next book. For the best news of all is that he has only completed the first half of his voyage and is about to sail across the Pacific and around the Horn. I am sorry that he insists on going alone; I'd like to be in his group.