From Burma to Myanmar Page 16

A day later I boarded the train to the south, very glad to leave Bangkok, especially Kao San Street—the tourists there were mostly an embarrassment. I had bought a train ticket to Hat Yai before I had left for Burma, planning to travel from there across to Songhla the ‘city between two seas’, an ancient trading port situated in the narrowest part of the Thai peninsular between the Gulf of Thailand and the Andaman Sea. I intended to stay there until it was time to go to Singapore and catch the Buxstar home.

  I looked up Songhla on the internet and to my horror found a big red warning from Smart Traveller, the Australian government travel advisory website. It was the fourth and final stage of their warnings. One is, take usual precautions, two, travel with extreme care, three, travel only if necessary and four—in letters of fire—DO NOT TRAVEL. I checked other sites. They were all the same. And they included Hat Yai. This area that straddles the Thai/ Malaysian border was formerly an Islamic kingdom called Pattani and this is where the majority of Thailand’s largest religious minority group, Muslims, live. Some of them want an independent state and opt for secession. A radical few want to use insurrection and armed resistance to obtain it. This has led to terrorism, and frequent bombings and shootings occur. A policeman was killed two days after I crossed the border there.

  Oh, poo. My ticket to Hat Yai was paid, so I had to go. But Songhla, the city between two seas, would have to wait. I decided that when I reached Hat Yai I would keep moving south to Penang Island in Malaysia. This seemed a nice safe place to spend the ten days I had to wait before going down to Singapore.

  My two-berth sleeping compartment on the train was excellent. On arrival at Hat Yai at nine in the morning, only two hours late, a young man took possession of me on the station platform. When I said, ‘Penang’, he said, ‘Mini bus’, and trundled my bag out of the yard, across the road and down the street to an office where I paid twenty dollars to get all the way to the island. There was no need now to go to Butterworth and take a ferry across, like in the old days. Since 1985 there has been a wonderful enormously long bridge.

  19 Home on the Buxstar

  The five-hour trip was comfortable. I was ferried across town to the mini bus in a lovingly polished, elderly yellow Mercedes driven by an old fellow who clutched the wheel tightly with two fists and drove very slowly, peering through the windscreen intently like a learner. The two immigration posts at the Thai/Malaysian border were painless, but I am extremely careful still at borders after the trouble I’d had previously. I would have been even more cautious if I had known that a policeman would be killed there two days later.

  By five in the afternoon we were at Georgetown, the capital of Penang Island. The bridge crossing had been a breeze and I marvelled at the engineering feat that had created it—a ­thirteen and a half kilometre wonder. In Georgetown the bus trip finished in the centre of town at Komtar, the transport hub, where I found a taxi driver and asked him to take me to a hotel on the beach.

  He turned out to be another chatty fellow but this time I could understand him. He said he would take me to the less expensive and less touristed beach. He did, and at the Naza Taiyya Hotel at Tanjong Tokong I negotiated a price for a room for a week.

  The hotel had an absolute beachfront position and the sea views from my room on the fifth floor were spectacular. It overlooked a long sweep of sandy coast, lined with coconut palms and mangrove trees, that curved around to a far headland. Directly in front, the hotel was a little island covered with green trees that looked close enough for me to swim out to, and on one side was the misty outline of Sumatra. Along the beach beside the hotel was the Chinese Swimming Club and I could look down from my room into their Olympic-sized pool and watch swimmers training in the lanes. Behind that the distant skyline was pierced now and then by thirty-or forty-storeyed narrow blocks of buildings. They were unattractive to my eye, and I wondered why they didn’t topple over.

  At night I would leave the sliding door to my room’s balcony open so that I could hear the surf breaking on the sand below and see the rain, which came most nights, accompanied by flashes of sheet lightning that lit up the entire sky.

  Next morning I managed to catch a bus to the centre. The receptionist told me that the bus that stopped on the hotel’s side of the road went to the city but that the bus on the opposite side of the road went to the beach at Batu Ferringhi. But I was so sure I had come up the other side of the road from town in the taxi, I stood there instead.

  I waited at the stop with a gathering crowd for thirty-five minutes watching six buses go by until finally one pulled over and let us on. And, I went to the beach! Enough said. It took a long time to come back again but I had plenty to spare, so why not?

  I began my way to town again and eventually arrived at Komtar, the transport centre from where I had started the day before. Close by I caught the free ‘hop on and off’ tourist bus, seemingly patronised almost entirely by locals; tourists who did arrive were swamped in the stampede to get on. After a while I began to be able to work out where I was. The bus passed some lovely buildings. The central area of Georgetown has been proclaimed ‘World Heritage’ and there were marvellous sights everywhere I looked. The bus also stopped at the impressive Queen Elizabeth II pier from where the ferry runs to Butterworth on the Malaysian mainland.

  Penang was established as a British trading post in 1786 and became part of the federated states of Malaysia in 1957. Although Malaysians are mostly Muslim, Georgetown is a mixed bag of ethnicity and religions. Chinese, Indian and other Asian cultures all seem to cohabit with tolerance. I saw every possible style of dress in the streets and within a few feet of each other there were Christian churches—Methodist, Anglican, Adventist and Catholic—and Buddhist and Hindu temples as well as many mosques.

  Back at the end of the tourist bus circuit I went into a nearby shopping plaza. Many of these temples to the God Mammon dot the landscape of Penang. Shopping seemed to be the national sport. In this mall I found brilliant shops full of feminine gee gaws, thousands of pieces of jewellery and ornaments, all very cheap but pretty. Many were for use on head coverings or as hair decorations. Make something taboo and this is what happens. It becomes a focus of attention.

  None of my three adaptors fitted the electric plugs here so the next day I walked to Tesco’s, two bus stops towards the city, where I was assured I would find one. Wow, what an enormous supermarket, with an incredible range of goods—some of the assistants zoomed about the place on roller skates. But the extensive meat and fish counters left a lot for the hygiene police to focus their attentions on. They were all open to the air, not to mention fingers. And smelly too. Even though the goods were packed in ice I didn’t fancy this method of display. The bakery goods were on open trays too and I saw a small boy poking the cakes. Nice. I bought cheese and a local hard crunchy chip, which, I found later turned out to be a mistake.

  Returning to the Naza, I decided to investigate a side road. Well, truthfully, I thought it would be a short cut along the beach but I am becoming increasingly embarrassed about admitting the mistakes I make. This small road, lined both sides by rows of tiny, two-storied wooden houses fronted by plants in big pots, led to a lovely little bay piled with huge rocks on which the sea broke in spray. On one side was a large old red-and gold-painted Chinese temple, and on the other, high on a cliff above the water, was a ramshackle cafe. There was a stone breakwater with a couple of small boats moored at it, but there was no further access along the coast. This bay was enclosed.

  Back in my room after this detour, I munched on the rock-hard crisps and broke a tooth—a front incisor. I had a seriously horrible-looking gap where a piece of tooth had gone missing. I must have swallowed it! I needed a dentist, fast. The reception desk people gave me the name of a doctor gigi (‘gigi’ is the wonderful Malay word for teeth) not far away. I checked the clinic out on Trip Advisor on the internet and decided to risk it. In the past I had read conflicting reports from health tourists who had come to Malaysia for what would have been far
more expensive treatments in their home countries. Some told horror stories, others were all praise.

  I took the bus four stops in the town direction to the surgery where I was shown immediately into the dentist’s chair. And I was out and fixed in twenty minutes! I had imagined injections, several visits and long consultations about treatment and cost. But a slim young woman of few words sat me down, opened my mouth and set to work. No discussion, no waffle. She and her two assistants belted into me like mechanics doing a tyre change at a pit stop in a car race. There was just drilling and pasting and, most of all, there was no pain. My tooth looked great, better than before, a perfect match for the one on the other side—and it cost a mere thirty six dollars.

  I spent ten days exploring Georgetown. There were many places to eat and the food was very good, super cheap and available everywhere despite it being Ramadan, the Muslim month of fasting. In Chinatown once I passed a tiny two-storeyed shop house, only a few feet wide, with a balcony upstairs. A large sign on it said, ‘The Great Wall Waving Parlour’, which I think may have meant that it was a hairdressing establishment. But my warped sense of humour immediately had a vision of people paying their two ringgit and being allowed to climb the stairs to stand on the small balcony overlooking the street and do a QEII royal wave act.

  The first time I took the bus back from the town I missed my stop and ended up at Batu Ferringhi beach again. But the ride there was exceedingly pretty, with lots of coves and cliffs and little beaches and bays to see. Buses were a good way to meet local people. At bus stops they always smiled and said hello and chatted if they could, unlike most Europeans I came across, who generally studiously avoided looking at strangers.

  The national museum was interesting. Being fond of old cars, I especially liked their vintage Rolls Royce, despite the thirty-five bullet holes in its chassis. In 1951 communist guerrillas assassinated Sir Henry Gurney, the British high commissioner, in this car. Beside it was a Scammel Hornet, a peculiar-looking large three-wheeled truck that had once been used as a work horse all over the island.

  After a while I began to understand the writing on signs and a little of what people said so I started using my rusty Indonesian. It came in handy in Lorong Kulit, the thieves market, where it helped with bargaining and at least made it look like I had some local knowledge.

  In the evenings when it was cooler I liked to walk along the beach. Wreckage from the 2004 tsunami still remained in front of the Chinese Swimming Club. A pair of big iron gates, still padlocked but twisted at an awkward angle, lay rusting on the sand, along with a huge tree tipped sideways but still in a massive concrete pot. It was hard to imagine water could do that.

  Every morning after breakfast I would sit in the hotel foyer and read the local English language newspaper, some ­articles in which changed my view that Malaysia had a liberal Islamic legal system. One day the court news reported that a young woman had been imprisoned because she had posted Ramadan good wishes with a photo of herself and her two dogs on Facebook. (The dogs were a No No.) And a man was sent to gaol for six years and given a beating with the rattan for stealing a hat and a mobile phone. Another man was sentenced to death by hanging for murder but at the same time was given eight years gaol for assault. I wondered how that would be worked out.

  I had forgotten that the holiday at the end of Ramadan was approaching, so I received a rude shock when I tried to book my room for another three days and was told that the hotel was full. Five hours on the internet later I had still not found another hotel room. Even hostels were fully booked. I had the same problem with getting a seat on a bus to Singapore, and had to buy a ticket for one that went only as far as Johor Bahru on the Malaysian side of the Strait. This was not a problem. It is not far from JB to Singapore and I would be able get there easily with a share taxi, but it was another of the dreaded night buses.

  Fortunately I was saved from sleeping on the street. The hotel manager received a cancellation and told me I could keep my room. Then it was the holiday celebration of Ide el Fittr (the feast of the lazy mechanic). There were fireworks at night and crowds of people staying in the hotel, including some Saudis, the women in full purdah. I watched them load their plates from the special sumptuous array on the breakfast buffet and wondered how they were going to eat it in public while wearing a total face veil. It took me back to my days in Saudi with a shock. I had forgotten how restricting of all normal interaction it is for women to have their faces obscured. One small woman trotted back and forth with plates for her large husband who was seated close to me, but I did not see her eat.

  My last day came. The bus left Komtar at nine pm, but then spent two hours messing around before it finally left the island. Driving over the long bridge to the mainland, the dark night pretty with lights twinkling on surrounding boats and along the waterfront, we reached the four-lane main highway south along the peninsula and joined a traffic jam. Packed solid in a horde of vehicles, we crawled along for hours. This was the post-holiday crowd returning home from Ide celebrations.

  We arrived at Johor Bahru bus station at eleven the next morning, six hours late, and I lined up with a mob of people to wait my turn for a share taxi to Singapore. Immigration and customs were simple procedures and I was soon across the causeway and deposited at the hotel I had booked in Singapore, the Fragrance Emerald in Geylang. I was in the red light district again.

  The Buxstar’s Singapore agent sent me a message with the ship’s arrival time and said that their driver would collect me at six the next evening. With a day to fill, I took a bus to Bugis Street and, walking around, came across the Singapore library. A fabulous place, I spent a happy afternoon there and, looking up my name in their catalogue, was pleased to find four of my books listed with photos of their covers.

  That evening, collected and delivered to the wharf, I was welcomed onto the Buxstar again. The captain, who was going on leave, was handing the ship over to a new master, a youngish Ukrainian man. There was only one other passenger, a male New Zealander. There was also a new cook, another Filipino who proved to be an excellent cook, and the food improved considerably. There were other new faces too, all Filipino, but sadly I found that Handsome Harry, the second officer with the fabulous smile, had signed off. Singapore is the Buxstar’s home port so this is where contracts begin and end.

  This time I had a cabin much the same as my previous one but on the fifth deck. (One hundred and twenty more steps per day to get fed and watered, but who was counting.)

  The ship spent all that day and until eight the next morning at the wharf, loading containers. The harbour was crowded with countless vessels. From the deck or my porthole I watched a constant movement of them coming and going. Apart from freighters—the Irina, Hamburg Sud, CMA, CGM, Hanjin—there were the blue-and-white fast-cruiser police boats, battered old junks, and the always busily coming-and-going pilots and tugs.

  We left port and, passing a small lump of an island covered with green trees that divided the waters at the entrance to the harbour, sailed out onto a calm grey sea. Towards nightfall thirty-six hours later, we approached Jakarta. As we drew near the wharf a small boat without lights circled us in the darkness. ‘They are not pirates, only robbers,’ I was reassured by a deckhand, who added that all the access points on our ship had been already secured with boarding repellers. Jakarta is not a safe port. Work began as soon as we tied up but, as the ship was due to leave early the next morning, no shore leave was posted.

  I stood on the deck as we left port and sailed slowly along a curved breakwater with a red lighthouse on the end of it. On the other side of the breakwater were dozens of water craft, from a fisherman in a rowboat to big freighters. As we sailed south toward the north-west coast of Australia, two warm, pleasant days and lovely cool tropical nights followed, and it was delightful to be out on deck.

  At breakfast the following morning the second officer told me that our ship had been diverted to the locality of a sinking boat that had sent an SOS. We were not in
busy shipping lanes here and the Buxstar was the only ship in the area apart from the Australian navy ship Parramatta, which was also on its way. We had been told to rescue the two hundred refugees on board the ship. I queried how we could find room for that many people and was told that this was not a consideration. It was necessary and it would be done.

  I changed into suitable working gear in case there were casualties and went up to the bridge to watch proceedings. The atmosphere was tense. I stood in a corner looking out over the wide expanse of lonely dark blue sea, empty except for a few white caps, listening to calls from the Australian search and rescue plane and the HMAS Parramatta. Eight of the crew scanned the sea intently, five with binoculars. It came to me then that the drills we had done were for real. That wide empty sea that looks so benign is also deadly.

  Suddenly a seaman shouted. ‘Small craft on the starboard side!’ We slowed, but it was a fishing vessel. In time we neared the area of the distress call and received a chilling message from the plane—‘No ship sighted, search now for survivors’. The ship had sunk! I was shocked. It had not occurred to me that we might be too late. Another message came that life rafts had been sighted and the Parramatta was now coming to collect them. We were told to continue looking for survivors and we did so until the aircraft told us we were released from the search and rescue effort and could return to our course.

  The captain told me later that it had been 14 degrees in the water and that the ship had gone down about the time the call came, five hours before help arrived—too long to stay alive at that temperature, he said. He looked upset. Some people had most likely died. Maybe he blamed himself for not getting there sooner.

  It took many hours to get back to our correct position, but there was no word of complaint from the crew. One day another ship might have to come to their rescue. This is the unwritten law of the sea. I had wondered why so many crew had been needed to look for as big an item as a ship but now I realised that they had known what I did not—that a ship that had begun to sink hours beforehand had very likely sunk by then. What they had been searching for so diligently were people in the water. In Australia later I heard news reports that said five people were known to have drowned when this ship sank but that possibly there had been more.