Llama for Lunch Read online

  I had alighted from the taxi at the hostel in balmy predawn air, but the day quickly became boiling hot. About lunch time it rained very heavily and soon afterwards the day became frightfully humid. It felt just like Darwin in the build up to the wet. In the evening I surfaced long enough to talk to one of my room mates, a likeable English lady.

  Next morning I pronounced myself cured and, feeling fit as a flea, went in search of fodder. I found a place called Chop Chicken across the road that had decent food – not fried, breaded or crumbed rubbish. I ate as though I believed that food was about to be abolished, then worried that I, too, would soon be joining the obese brigade.

  The youth hostel was located in the old Clay Hotel which, in its past life, had been the home of Desi Arnaz and a gambling casino owned by Al Capone. The front part of it was a beautiful Art Deco building and the dormitories were in attractive, Spanish-style blocks at the rear. However the dorms were dog boxes inside, with little room to move between the two sets of bunks and no space for your luggage.

  My room was filthy, but it did have a fridge and an adequate bathroom. Of the four of us in this room, one got up and left shortly after I arrived. The English girl I had spoken to the first night went off in the afternoon to find somewhere better. I tossed up whether I would join her but in the end couldn’t be bothered. The fourth inmate was a gorgeous Argentinian with whom I practised my Spanish during our brief encounters. She rushed in, gave everyone great big kisses on each cheek, said, ‘I am Elenora,’ got cleaned up and went out on the town at ten at night and didn’t return until lunchtime the next day. She did this every day. The phone rang every twenty minutes all day and late into the night and it was always some man looking for her. In the end I took the phone off the hook after she left each night.

  There was a supermarket across the street and the prices were not the only shock I received there. The first time I visited it I saw two American girls sitting on the footpath against the shop wall. They were clean and nice looking, but I could not believe what they were doing. Begging. As a small black man went by they asked him for money and he gave them some.

  From the foyer at Clays, where you could make phone calls seated in comfortable cushioned cane chairs, I rang the ship’s agent, who informed me that the Atlanta was sailing on time. I rang a hotel in Lima and booked a room for when I left the ship, hoping I had got the message across. You never know.

  An attractive young German, who said he was working in Miami, sat down and talked to me. I learned that he wanted to go to Australia by ship. When I left he followed me out and we walked together for a while. He said I should come to a nearby bar later that gave free drinks to ladies after ten. I told him that, unfortunately, these days I couldn’t stay awake until ten, let alone after. Travelling is tiring stuff. Still, I hope this practice catches on in Australia.

  Apart from tourists you don’t see many Caucasians in this part of Miami. To my astonishment hardly anyone spoke or understood English in shops and cafes. They all spoke Spanish to me – maybe it was the hair, I still looked like an Indian. The gorgeous mad Argentinian who came flying in like a whirlwind before racking off until the next day told me that my face is Argentinian. I hope that’s good.

  Miami Beach had a deco area with many beautiful old pastel-coloured buildings that curved in the typical fashion of the era. The post office was semi-circular and lovely outside, but not so nice inside. A sign warned, ‘No loitering or soliciting,’ and there were no seats or comfortable spots if you had the desire to defy the admonition.

  I had serious doubts about entrusting my letters to the dilapidated blue objects found in the streets that were alleged to be mail boxes. They looked more like rubbish bins to me and nothing reassuring was written on them about collection times. I was floored by the amount of packaging and waste that occurred here. I bought two stamps and was given them in an envelope too small to do anything with but immediately throw away.

  I made another phone call to the ship’s agent who said, ‘I’ve been looking for you. There is a problem with the ship.’

  Oh, no! The bloody thing has sunk, I thought. It was still afloat, but on the way down the coast from New York one of the crew had been diagnosed with hepatitis B. The ship had pulled into the next port and put him ashore, and now the vessel was quarantined until the medical authorities cleared it. The options for me were to take a refund, sail on the next ship in a month or, if I still wanted to sail on the Atlanta, to produce proof of full vaccination against hepatitis B. Fortunately I had this qualification and could prove it via my yellow vaccination book, a copy of which I had to fax to the agent. Just as well I’d had inoculations against everything known to man and recorded them. The ship would now be sailing a day late. Sadly the crew member who caused all the ruckus with the hepatitis died an hour after he was returned to his home country, Burma.

  My room mates at the hostel were now an erudite Turkish professor of English called Aisha and a tiny ballerina from Canada as well as the fun-loving Argentinian, with whom I enjoyed fractured conversations.

  Trauma struck. I got flea-bitten. I worked out that it must have happened when I sat in the foyer making phone calls and leant my arm on the padded chair. There were cats everywhere in the hotel at night. The cause dawned on me as I leaned on the cushions again the next day and my arm started to burn as though it was being bitten.

  On the scheduled sailing day the Atlanta was delayed yet again and boarding time was put off until midnight. I hung about in my room for as long as I could before it was turf-out time and, suddenly, I was homeless and on the street. Then it started to rain. I headed for the library and read the local papers until the rain stopped, then set off for the library at the other end of town which I was told had access to the internet. This was the signal for the heavens to dump a deluge on my head. Wow, that storm was something else.

  The bus stop outside the library was said to harbour a bus that would take me across town to my destination, but another bus had broken down at the stop, so when the bus I wanted came it zoomed around the broken bus and didn’t halt. I walked. It poured more, and despite my trusty brolly I got soaked again. When the thunder claps and lightning flashes intensified I took refuge in the foyer of an apartment building and talked to a couple of people who were also sheltering there. Half an hour later it was still pelting down so I sloshed out into it again and found another bus stop. A helpful man came along and said, ‘Go across the road. This bus costs one dollar twenty-five because it goes over the toll bridge, but the local bus is only twenty-five cents.’

  Coming out of a second library I found rain still bucketing down. Four metres of water radiated out from the gutter so that the bus couldn’t pull in to collect me. While the driver waited patiently, I took off my shoes and, starting to wade to him, promptly fell into a hole up to my knees. I squelched soaking wet onto the freezing, airconditioned bus, much to the amusement of the other passengers.

  Back in the hostel lobby in my dripping wet, floppy pants I selected a wooden seat and avoided the flea-harbouring cushioned chairs. This was the fourth of July holiday weekend and many people had come from New York and other parts of the north to celebrate it in Miami. I talked to several of these holiday-makers in between reading a book during my long wait. Everyone complained about the dirtiness of this hostel. A young Englishman said he planned to sleep at the airport rather than spend another night in the filthy, smelly room he’d had here. And that had been the second room he had been shown. The first was even worse and he had refused it.

  Finally it was time to go to the ship. My taxi had a Turkish driver who said that Miami felt like South America. Miami was beautiful by night with all the lights along the wharf and the streets of town. This was Saturday night and, even this late, mobs of people crowded the streets. I asked the driver why some stood in big throngs on the footpaths, and he told me that they were waiting to get into nightclubs. What a scene.

  It was a long drive to the wharf. At the gate we asked
for the Atlanta and received directions, but I was apprehensive that the ship might not be there yet.

  The wharf was a huge place. We drove past cruise vessels and cargo ships and along an enormous pier stacked so high with containers that you could see nothing beyond them. Finally there was a break in the wall of containers and I saw a ship that, praise be, had Atlanta painted on its prow. She was much bigger than I had expected – two hundred metres long and 36,000 tonnes, I learned later. Her decks were piled high with containers and men scrambled all over her busily working. As it was well after midnight I thought that I might be told to come back tomorrow and not interrupt them, but a smiling Chinese officer came immediately to shake my hand and welcome me aboard. Then he shepherded me up the gangplank while a sailor came on behind with my bags. The rain had stopped and it was one of those clear, damp nights that are so lovely in the tropics.

  The beaming boy who bounded up the corridor to meet me, and who looked about sixteen with his very short hair and happy face, turned out to be the Polish captain, Wojciech. He seemed genuinely pleased to see me, sent the other officer away and showed me to my cabin. I worried that he might be desperate to get back to work and kept saying, ‘I won’t hold, you up,’ but he stayed, chatting and being pleasant.

  My cabin was sparkling, immaculate, and as big as a state room on the QE2. It was a shock to find myself in such a large space after the claustrophobic dog kennel that I’d inhabited for the past few days. I could have held a dance in the bathroom and there was enough room for three people in the shower alcove if I should feel so inclined.

  From the centre of the cabin roof, however, an air conditioner blew out the most ghastly blast of cold air. It was like being in a howling blizzard. Trying to fathom how to turn it down, I cruised all around the room examining every switch, but none did anything to lessen the cold. I saw that the machine had two knobs on it so I stood on a chair to fiddle with them, turning them up and down to no effect. Then I noticed some buttons on the other side. I got up again to play with them, but the chair, a comfortable swivel job, started to swing. I hung onto the round vent of the air conditioner but now this also began to swing to and fro. I felt as though I was riding a hurdy gurdy so, deciding that it wouldn’t be nice to break a leg on my first night aboard, I desisted. Instead, I stuffed some clothes in the vents. They immediately flew out. I stuffed in a sheet, which fared a bit better, but I was cold around the ears all night. Next morning one of the crew showed me how to turn the airconditioner down. Easy when you know how.

  All the good wooden furniture in my cabin was either built-in or nailed to the deck. I wondered what the loop and chain in the floor were for until I found that they were to tie down the chair if the sea got rough. One wall had a porthole that opened onto the deck and next to it hung a wooden cabinet under which stood the bar-sized fridge. The upholstery and carpet were greyish-blue wool and a couple of pleasing modern prints hung on the pale grey walls. The bathroom had royal-blue towels and curtains. There was a wardrobe, a single bunk that was built into the side of one wall, a big desk under the porthole, a coffee table, a couch and a ship’s clock on the wall. On the desk was a phone and a CD and tape player and radio (on which I managed to get radio stations in port but which didn’t work at sea).

  As I didn’t get to sleep until two in the morning I thought that I wouldn’t be expected to front for breakfast, so it was quite late in the morning when I went down to meet the kitchen crew. They turned out to be all ever-smiling Burmese. Even the notices on the wall beside the kitchen door were written in Burmese script. The crew fed me coffee, cold boiled eggs, and toast topped with ham, cheese and pineapple. At lunch I met the other passengers, Laura and Len, a pair of retired Americans. He had a droll New ‘Joisey’ accent. She was gentle and motherly. They told me that we were keeping good company. Novelist Arthur Hailey and the president of Lufthansa had travelled on cargo ships of this line.

  In between meals and while we waited for departure I was glued to a riveting book about a woman, who could not sail, crossing the English channel in a small boat during the second world war while a German U-boat hunted her. Storms at sea and shipwrecks – good comforting stuff for an about-to-be sailor.

  Now and then I ventured out on deck and, from a safe distance, watched the containers being loaded. I was told that the trucks at the front of the ship were for the ship’s last port of call, Valparaiso in Chile. A great contraption with a crane in its middle ran along a railway line on the wharfside. Then an arm dropped down from it like one those penny arcade gadgets in glass cases that pick up toys, if you are lucky, and four prongs grabbed a container off the back of a truck that had been conveniently driven underneath. Then up and over it went to be neatly and effortlessly placed on the deck.

  We sailed at six. A large tugboat delivered the pilot on board. He turned the ship in the narrow channel and then took his leave by hopping back onto the bobbing boat – no mean feat seeing, I had been told, he had recently had a hip replacement. We steamed off and soon the row of tall buildings on the shore were gone. The sailors blasted the decks with a fire hose to clean off the soot and grime of port and an hour later I went out on deck and found that we were alone on a dark blue sea. There was a stiff breeze, the sun was setting and we had left the murk of Miami long behind.

  5 Pirates and Panama

  Next morning the ship was pitching and rolling on a swell that came at us side on from the west, while a wind from the same direction slowed our progress. I was on my way back from breakfast when an ear-piercing shriek from a siren began and did not stop until all the passengers had assembled on the bridge for boat drill. And a very thorough drill it was too. We had to put on our lifejackets and play with all their attachments, as well as learn to tie a knot on the cords so that we could be pulled up out of the sea by a helicopter. All thrilling stuff, if somewhat daunting. I thought I’d rather stay with the lifeboat than go dangling about lost in space, looking like bait on a hook to the sharks waiting below. By comparison, the lifeboats with their covered tops seemed very modern and comfortable. Of course, the pirates that infested these waters might come along to jolly things up a bit.

  During the day we passed along Cuba’s eastern shore and the ship made up some time. By afternoon the ship was doing twenty-one knots and skipping along on a calm ocean. I could feel just a faint rocking as I walked around the deck. Out on the dark sapphire blue of the sea there was only an occasional white pencil line to mark a wave, while the centre of the cream-coloured foaming wake that spread out from the ship’s side was a pure, clear aquamarine. Later I could feel, by the lift of the ship, that the speed had increased.

  After dinner the captain took Laura and me to inspect the bridge. It was a massive, immaculate affair containing lots of electronic stuff that was a complete mystery to me. The duty officer told us that we were now eight kilometres off the southern tip of Cuba and about to turn to start sailing around it through a channel that was narrow, but well buoyed.

  As dusk fell I could see the buoys flashing close by. I walked to the bow passing along rows of containers stacked under covers. The extreme end of the ship was open and had a look-out platform that you could climb up on to – like the gadget that daft woman in the movie Titanic was about to commit suicide off – and I sat up there for a while. It was glorious, but the wind was fierce. It tore at my clothes and flapped them behind me until I felt quite pummelled. Thunderhead clouds were massed along the horizon. Out of the dusk another ship in front of us took shape as I watched us overtake it. It was also a container carrier but the rows of lights strung along its sides gave it a festive look.

  There were white caps all over the face of the sea the next morning. They didn’t appear big until you looked at the troughs between them and imagined yourself down there swimming. When my apple rolled off the desk and went sashaying around the floor, I looked up at the porthole – one moment I could see the sea and the next, whoops, it went down, and there was only sky.

  Tha
t day the weather was overcast and it rained a little. In the afternoon a couple of large birds landed on us for a rest. By the time I went to bed the sea was quite rough. I heard my glass sliding back and forth across the desk and got up to move it so that it wouldn’t go bump in the dark. I woke during the night and felt the ship starting to roll and by dawn, although the sea didn’t look any bigger, there was definite pitching and heaving.

  I woke next in Cartagena, Columbia. The engines stopped sometime around six in the morning and I looked out to see that we were tied up to a wharf, not alongside but rank-parked. The ship next to us was a grim, grey job from which containers busily came and went. The weather was very humid – my sunglasses fogged up as soon as I stepped out on deck.

  I found that all the ship’s doors had been locked, even the laundry, as a precaution against theft. Why the laundry? I wondered, thinking that it would be hard to get down the gangplank clutching the washing machine unnoticed. Then Martin, the German first mate, told me that the precautions were also supposed to hinder stowaways. So for the first time I locked the door of my cabin. Martin also told me that he feared for his life in Columbia and never went ashore there. On a previous trip on another ship he had seen two men acting suspiciously and on investigation the seals of a container were found to be broken. The loot discovered hidden in it, eighty kilograms of heroin, had an uncut value of two million dollars. The ship’s guards were found to be involved and it was known to all that it was Martin who had pointed the finger.

  That night we turned our watches back an hour. I was thinking about climbing up to change the ship’s clock on my wall when, to my surprise, I saw that it had turned itself back. It must have been centrally controlled – I hoped.

  At breakfast we were joined by the Cartagena port captain and his offsider, some sort of ship inspector. When our ship’s captain told us that we had to leave port early and therefore couldn’t go ashore, the port captain gallantly offered to take Laura and me for a quick tour of the town in his car. Unfortunately he then received a call to go to another ship immediately, so that excursion was cancelled. Wojciech, our ship’s captain, said that we could take a taxi but there was no guarantee that, even if we managed to avoid being kidnapped, we would make it back in time for sailing. I did not fancy returning to the wharf to find myself abandoned in Columbia. As compensation Wojciech took us up to the bridge and gave us each a pair of high-powered binoculars so that we could look at Cartagena as we left.