Mysterious Girlfriend Read online

  Mysterious Girlfriend

  Chris Johnson

  Austin Macauley Publishers

  Mysterious Girlfriend

  About the Author

  Dedication

  Copyright Information ©

  Introduction

  Chapter 1Sarawak, Borneo

  Chapter 2Thailand

  Chapter 3Bolivia

  Chapter 4Burma/MyanmarIncluding Rakhine State

  Chapter 5Laos

  Chapter 6Southern India

  Chapter 7Vietnam and on to Thailand

  Chapter 8North India

  Chapter 9South Africa to Mauritius

  Chapter 10Laos and Thailand

  Chapter 11Baltic States

  Chapter 12Albania

  Chapter 13Shanghai, China

  Chapter 14Thailand yet Again

  Chapter 15Romania

  Chapter 16Central America

  Chapter 17Indonesia

  Chapter 18Laos and Thailand, Again!

  Chapter 19Croatia

  Chapter 20Black Sea

  Chapter 21London, England

  Chapter 22African Safari

  Chapter 23The Silk Road, Central Asia

  Chapter 24Montenegro and Croatia

  Chapter 25Bosnia Herzegovina

  Chapter 26Laos and Myanmar Revisited

  Chapter 27Mexico and Colombia

  Chapter 28Finland

  Chapter 29Malta

  Chapter 30Oman

  Chapter 31Eastern Caribbean Islands

  Chapter 32Cuba

  Chapter 33The Silk RoadKazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Western China

  Chapter 34East AfricaMozambique and Zanzibar

  Chapter 35Northern India AgainTraveller or Tourist?

  Chapter 36Ivory Coast

  Chapter 37Canada

  Chapter 38Sabah, Borneo and Hong Kong

  Chapter 39Conclusions, If Any

  About the Author

  Educated at St Dunstan’s College, London, and Churchill College, Cambridge, in Modern and Medieval Languages, Jeremy worked initially for an international airline and later for IBM and other companies dedicated to information technology and its application to aviation services.

  He has lived in various parts of the world while working, including the USA, the Netherlands and Singapore. He has been married for over fifty years, has two daughters and two granddaughters and currently lives in Wokingham, Berkshire.

  Dedication

  To Maggie, my long-suffering partner in life and travel.

  Copyright Information ©

  Jeremy Burton (2020)

  The right of Jeremy Burton to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with section 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.

  Any person who commits any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

  A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

  ISBN 9781528937504 (Paperback)

  ISBN 9781528969130 (ePub e-book)

  www.austinmacauley.com

  First Published (2020)

  Austin Macauley Publishers Ltd

  25 Canada Square

  Canary Wharf

  London

  E14 5LQ

  Here we travel and complete our voyagings,

  Until our endless journey after death begins.

  Naser-E-Khosrau (Persian Poems)

  Figure 1 – Light Grey areas visited, Dark Grey not yet

  Introduction

  I need to set the record straight at the outset. The following chapters represent an eclectic consolidation of daily or weekly travel blogs distributed to a small, private, dedicated and long-suffering readership over more than twenty-five years, and so polished prose will not be a feature to look out for. It is rough and ready because in the early years, at least, I was often faced with significant challenges to be able to get a bulletin together: unreliable power supply in internet cafés, which sometimes required a lengthy journey across an isolated island to a shack with a single clapped out computer. Most of the time, it was a battle between rising hourly computer charges and system failures necessitating data re-entry.

  My words are not intended or likely to challenge the dominance of the Lonely Planet and the like, but rather to record on the hoof comments and thoughts and the sort of day-to-day incidents likely to occur to any modern-day traveller.

  So, why did I start the recording events while on the move in the first place? In fact, it arose out of a problem I have had to put up with since the 1960s, a problem which forced me to keep track of my work and leisure travel, namely, that I have been frequently separated from my luggage, not once, not twice, but more than 30 times over the years. Consequently, I decided to keep a log in order to try and predict when the bag would next go missing. The answer? For me, on average, about every 120,000 flight miles or every sixteen trips, so when it did happen, it seemed to be a natural corollary to add words to the statistical data. After over four million flown kilometres, it is really time to stop but, like doing the lottery, it is difficult to give up once you’ve started.

  My travels, often undertaken in the company of my wife in later years, have taken me to more than 130 countries using 120 different airlines and 250 airports, but a preference for Asia is apparent from our choice of destinations and return visits to these countries. Over the years, it has become clear to me that, especially where there is a lack of common language, openness to local food often helps to establish a rapport, and in Asia for me, this is no hardship with memorable dishes including fried scorpions, durians (without alcohol if you want to survive), balut (a developing duck embryo eaten from the shell), bear’s paw, drunken prawns (live), and sea slugs, but I have drawn the line at huge fried Cambodian spiders.

  In short, I have never lost my curiosity to cover new ground, to see what is just over the hill, to convert pre-conceived images of people and places into personally experienced pictures which are more rounded, three-dimensional rather than two.

  Chapter 1

  Sarawak, Borneo

  Having discovered the graves of the British Brooke family in a peaceful graveyard in Sheepstor on Dartmoor and following up their incredible history, I made the Malaysian state of Sarawak one of my first overseas trips after moving to Singapore with my wife and family in the 1970s. It has held vivid memories ever since.

  Most trips will start in the state capital of Kuching on the northern coast of Borneo, and so did ours, starting, of course, with the Astana, the former palace of the White Rajahs, the title taken by the Brooke family. The family founded this British protectorate as an independent kingdom which lasted over a hundred years until the end of the Second World War. This, the family achieved based on their assistance to the Sultan of Brunei in dealing with piracy and other political issues, but eventually, the setup began to look like an anachronism in a world changed after 1945.

  The city has a distinctly Malaysian feel with shophouses, old colonial buildings and some interesting museums, but we were keen to move into the interior and the traditional homeland of the indigenous ethnic Iban Dayak tribes. After a six-hour road trip through pepper farms and occasional stilted dwellings, we transferred to dugout canoes on the Skrang River and headed for our home for the next few days: a Dayak longhouse. The river trip was interrupted when our boatman jumped ashore to pursue what might have become his dinner, but it escaped and we eventually, after nearly tw
o hours, reached the foot of the steep ladder into our stilted longhouse where the heavily tattooed and semi-naked residents turned out to inspect the new temporary tenants.

  The wooden building was not one of the new purpose-built tourist-blocks that are now springing up but the genuine home of local tribesmen and their families. A long veranda runs the whole length on one side where women and children work and play, and along the other side, a number of separate private living quarters. The women sit in clusters weaving and sewing, but the only men in evidence are those no longer actively fishing and hunting, at least until dusk. Around twenty families live together in the typical longhouse.

  As suggested by our Chinese Malay guide, we had been encouraged to bring suitable gifts for the community, mainly sweetmeats and cigarettes which are shared out amongst all family members from age three upwards, whatever our misgivings about encouraging smoking at such an early age.

  Evening entertainment turned out to be us, as we were encouraged to show our latest dance moves, after which our hosts donned their finest warpaint and feathered headdresses and gyrated to a pulsating drumbeat to show us their customary moves. We were regaled by a story of a visiting family of Italians who had decided to sleep in the open on the veranda. In the middle of the night, one of the women woke to find herself face to face with a large snake which she attempted without success to throttle. This turned out to be just as well, as the snake was deemed to hold the spirit of an ancestor, so its demise would have been tantamount to murder in the eyes of the locals.

  We were forewarned that these tribes had a history of headhunting into the mid-twentieth century when Japanese invaders were some of the last to succumb to this treatment during the Second World War. As for Buddhists, Dayaks believe the head to be holy, so ‘fresh’ heads for them are believed to hold magical powers which can provide communal protection and good harvest.

  What we had not fully anticipated was that our sleeping arrangement in the headman’s quarters meant we were to sleep alongside his family members under a collection of decaying shrunken-head trophies, hanging on the rafters above our still-attached heads. Our sleep that night was not what you might call peaceful, but then again, nor was breakfast. Last night’s fishing expedition had provided a generous supply of local bony fish, which were cooking in hollowed-out bamboo lengths on an open fire. Nearby stood a wicker basket holding a squawking chicken, an ominous sign that encouraged me to remove my young children from the room shortly before the sacrificial creature had its throat cut, and it was offered to me to be blessed before its blood was sprinkled over the fish. Some blood escaped through the floorboards much to the excitement of the wild pigs corralled below.

  The morning’s plans involved a hunting trip using poisoned dart blowpipes to bag a tree-hugging mammal for dinner, but with two under-eights in tow, the chances of success were never going to be good, where silence was essential. In the end, plan B meant that the pigs bore the brunt, but without the poisoned tips, of course.

  On our departure, I negotiated the sale of an ancient feathered parang llang machete belonging to our host to help fill the community’s coffers, the three notches on the blade claimed to represent heads taken in battle; unable to confirm the veracity of this claim.

  Chapter 2

  Thailand

  The island of Koh Phangan off the east coast of mainland Thailand is famed for its full moon parties, attracting the young and not-so-young, and to a lesser extent, for being the home of our youngest daughter, who has chosen to work in a remote vegetarian wellness centre.

  As a carnivore, not currently practising yoga, tai chi, qi gong or other spiritual practices, this was not going to be my preferred option for a relaxing spell nursing G&Ts on the beach. This foreboding was increased substantially when I discovered body detox paraphernalia in the bathroom carved into underground rock in my accommodation, but at least the large spiders became the least of my anxieties.

  But love conquers all, and we took each day at a time until a message from our other daughter in England warned us that the Iraq war was only days away, and she was unhappy that her parents and only sister were still on the other side of the world, so it was time to confirm return flights.

  The only cloud on the horizon, as it were, was the weather forecast.

  March is not normally one of the wettest months here, but the sea was unusually rough, which can be an issue when the only practical way off this part of the island is by boat. The alternative exit route over the mountain passes is not for the fainthearted or physically challenged, but by chance someone had chartered a private speedboat and offered us the chance of two seats. Sadly, this option disappeared when it became clear that the crew were unable to land the craft safely on our beach and abandoned the effort, so the only option left was to fall back on the more flimsy long-tail taxi boats, our normal method of reaching the main port of Had Rin where we could pick up the larger boats for Koh Samui and the airport.

  So, our exit plan was hatched to meet everyone’s concerns: my wife, (who bluntly refused to countenance the sea route) and daughter’s boyfriend would take the mountain route with passports and valuables, and I would take the luggage by boat with my daughter, though she had misgivings about taking to the waves.

  There were ominous signs that this was not going to be plain sailing. The crew had doubled the fare, ‘taking into account prevailing conditions’ and moreover, looked as though there had barely reached adolescence. The thirteen passengers did not exude a sense of calm and optimism either.

  As they cast off and attempted to turn the craft 180 degrees necessary to head out of the bay, the crew failed to complete the manoeuvre satisfactorily before we realised that a massive rogue wave was about to swamp our little boat half filling it with water. Simultaneously, all the luggage loaded to the fore somersaulted out of the boat as the next wave approached to break up and sink our boat beneath us.

  The beach was still visible between each wave and we were obviously causing great concern to those left behind, as sight of the passengers disappeared as each new wave rolled in. The wellness centre attempted to launch their lifeboat dinghy but failed, as thirteen passengers and two crew struggled to swim back to the beach in mountainous seas. The task was made so much worse by the layers of sharp coral just below the surface as we jostled with our floating luggage.

  Those on the beach had the wit to form a human chain to reach out towards the flailing swimmers and reel them into safety with a hundred percent success as no one drowned. I was in the doghouse for the rest of the week for attempting this foolish exercise in order to get to the airport which, in the circumstances, of course, we failed to do, for several days in fact until the storm had abated.

  In order to make an insurance claim once we reached Koh Samui, the larger neighbouring island, I headed off by taxi to report the incident to the local police station, where there had just been a round-up of local sex-workers who gave me a warm welcome in perfect English but pointed out that I needed the nearby tourist police station for my purpose. The welcome here was not quite as warm, nor was their English up to the same standard either, but I eventually left with a report all written in Thai, which I doubt would be readable by the insurance back home; I am sure the sex workers and I could have cobbled something for insurance purposes at my first port of call and it would have been a lot more fun.

  Chapter 3

  Bolivia

  After a challenging trip on an oxbow lake deep into the Peruvian Amazon in the company of a cluster of tarantulas, we have worked our way south to the amazing Lake Titicaca and its unusual inhabitants, located on the border between Peru and Bolivia. Apart from its fame as the highest navigable lake in the world, its most interesting feature comes from its few thousand indigenous Uru people, descendants of the Incas, now living a collective existence on a number of floating islands which require constant maintenance to keep them lake-worthy. Skills in weaving and farming together with income from around 40,000 visitors a year keep the
ir traditions alive and provide a basic level of subsistence.

  We left the lakeside town of Juno on the Peruvian bank in warmish sunshine heading to the islands for the day before disembarking just before dusk at the Bolivian border town of Copacabana, and with a favourable forecast, despite the altitude were dressed fairly lightly and casually without the slightest foreboding of what lay ahead.

  So, we hop on our bus at about 6 pm with a promise of dinner in La Paz, Bolivia’s capital, until we slowly became aware of truck after truck full of soldiers standing shoulder to shoulder in the back of their vehicles. Not a good sign at the best of times just as darkness was falling.