Tramp Royale (34 page)

I found myself projected both in time and space, not merely back to the American middle west but back thirty years as well. This was no boulevard church with a microphone at the pulpit; this was a piece of my childhood. The ladies in the choir wore chang sams, all else was the same, even to the notice board with its movable figures which set forth the attendance last Sunday versus the attendance this Sunday, even to the announcement that the Ladies' Aid was giving a box supper next Thursday evening. I think perhaps it was the nicest thing the Hos did for us.

We visited other churches, among them several Buddhist temples and one Mohammedan mosque. I was not favorably impressed by the Buddhist temples, either by their alleged beauty nor by the attitude of the priests, who seemed to be indifferent to anything but the cash entrance fee. The mosque was much more attractive in its bare, austere beauty than were the temples, which were tastelessly jammed with ornate, overdecorated junk.

We had to remove our shoes to enter the mosque, of course, and Ticky swears that that was when she picked up athlete's foot-which I consider unfair to Islam, as there were daily opportunities to contract it in hotels or aboard ship, especially aboard ship. Ticky just resents that she was told that she must take off her shoes, or stay out.

Earl (the student of yoga) and Marianne, his wife, were also at the Raffles and were tracking down Hindu fakirs among the Tamil colony . . . but this was one religion we did not choose to look up; we had had enough fakirs for a lifetime in one day in Mauritius. There was one adept in town who did a very odd stunt: he would cut off the tongue of one of his followers without letting it bleed-then (so it was seriously claimed) stick it back in place and heal it. I don't know and I did not trot along after Earl and Marianne to find out. But it seems to me you would soon use up a lot of followers that way.

Instead, we went to the botanical gardens the morning that show was supposed to take place, a choice less educational, for me if not for Ticky, since my knowledge of botany is limited to digging dandelions, but a good deal more fun and easier on the stomach.

It was fun because of the monkeys. We purchased a supply of peanuts and bananas from junior merchants near the entrance; as long as the supply lasted we had little time for plants. Wild monkeys swarm in the gardens and they expect tourists to feed them. They gathered around Ticky like a kindergarten class, accepted bananas from her, peeled them carefully, and ate them daintily. Ticky sat on the grass and stowed the peanuts in her lap in order to have both hands free to make fair distribution and maintain discipline, as the monkeys, like children, tried to shove and crowd and each get a lion's share.

While she was thus busy, one more enterprising monk sneaked behind her, made a long arm, and snatched her entire supply of peanuts out of her lap. He headed for a tree top while Ticky shouted, "Hey! come back here."

When she was forced to realize that he was not going to come back, then or later, she turned to me with her eyes round with astonishment. "Did you see that? Why, he's
dishonest."

In two more years they will have to let those monks vote.

The day was on us when we would have to leave Singapore, with its crowds and its pungent odors and its trishaws (the coolies no longer pull; they pedal instead) and its pint-sized taxis and its febrile, sleepless activity. We did not want to leave. While it symbolized all the ills of the East and the sins of colonialism, we found the city itself warm and friendly and wonderful, from the little goats that scampered loose on the streets and never quite got hit by the automobiles to the bazaarkeepers who would look you in the eye and try to cheat you, all with the warmest good will.

We wanted to entertain the Ho family at least once before we left; the obvious thing-almost the only thing we were equipped to do-was to invite them to dinner at the Raffles.

But a worry was niggling at the back of my mind. "Ticky, have you considered that we might have trouble? The Hos are not 'European' as the South Africans so squeamishly put it . . . and this place is the last stand of the pukka sahib. We may run into 'Jim Crow' rules. I certainly would not want to subject them to embarrassment."

Ticky nodded. "I've thought of it," she replied crisply, "and I've thought of an answer. We'll serve drinks up here; they can't stop us from doing that. Then we will go down to dinner and if anyone makes the slightest fuss we'll come back here and have dinner served privately up here. Then after dinner you and I will check out of the hotel and as we leave we'll set fire to it."

It seemed a good plan. But it turned out to be unnecessary; no one lifted an eyebrow at "non-Europeans" eating in the main dining room of the Raffles, although we had seen no others. The Far East is changing-Rudyard Kipling might have trouble recognizing the place.

X
The Underside of the Orient

This chapter is not for the squeamish.

On second thought, I will not be any more graphic than I have to be; if you get the notion that Indonesia is a good place to stay away from, that will be sufficient.

You may remember that we had not only been unable to book transportation from Singapore to Australia but also had not been able to get an Indonesian visa. The visa we did manage to get in Singapore through the intercession of a shipping agent who knew the ropes and was able, by personal favor, to get the consulate to bypass the processing of our papers through six different government departments. We made out endless forms again, naturally. Indonesia not only has the longest and most complicated forms in the silly business but also wants them made out in quadruplicate-original. But we did get the visas.

We found out that our experience was not unique but customary, for we ran into a couple in Singapore from California who had tried to get Indonesian visas from the consulate in San Francisco, only to be forced to sail without them. They tried again in Singapore, as we did, and found their own papers in Singapore, on file with the consul there-whereupon they were required to pay ten dollars apiece to have their old papers canceled before they were allowed to start over and reapply. There is something wildly comical about such super red tape; it excites admiration rather than fury.

I had wanted to go to Bali, but our visa was good only for Djakarta. I did not go to the foot of the line and start over, not merely because I was worn out with red tape at that point but also because I had learned something much more disheartening. For the tourist and photographer Bali has long had two outstanding points of interest, endlessly reduplicated. But the revolutionary government, in its wisdom, has decided that the folk ways of Bali were destructive to the dignity of the new nation; a law was issued requiring sarongs in Bali to start just under the armpits, as they do elsewhere in the islands, instead of considerably lower down as has always been the Balinese practice. Now Bali is just like the other islands of Indonesia.

"Come to Beautiful Bali" indeed! I'll take Minsky's.

And besides that, we couldn't get to Bali anyway. Shipping was awfully tight and we took the only ship we could get, one which stopped only at Djakarta, then went down the east coast of Australia to Brisbane and Sydney. We wanted to land on the west coast of Australia, cross the continent by train, and leave from the east coast. But we had no choice; the only cabin we could get from Singapore to Australia was the one we took, and we got the last cabin in that ship. There was a sister ship going to Fremantle at the same time, but it was chock-a-block, not a berth to be had for love or cumshaw.

The ship we managed to get would have been uncomfortable at best, for she was an old tub which had been designed for Chinese coastal service, overnight trips with two to three thousand Chinese stacked almost like firewood. Now with the Reds running China and that trade gone perhaps forever she had been sketchily refitted as a cargo liner, but the result was far from comfortable. Our stateroom was a third the size of the one we had in the
Ruys
and there were, of course, no private baths. The toilet and bath facilities for men were adequate if not appealing but Ticky found that she shared one facility, bath and toilet combined, with all the other female first-class passengers in the ship; in the course of a three-week voyage this produced more than one acute and embarrassing emergency.

But the worst thing about the ship was that it was filthy dirty. The ship had no purser; the chief steward, an Indonesian, doubled in brass and carried out neither the duties of a purser nor the duties of a chief steward properly. In consequence his Chinese staff, with whom he could communicate only through his Chinese assistant, ran the ship to suit themselves. Now it is an unpleasant fact that lower-class Chinese have no notion at all of Western concepts of sanitation; this is not a racist remark, it is simply a fact. Inasmuch as the stewards in this ship received no instruction in these matters and were subjected to little or no discipline, they did as they pleased-and what they pleased was often disgusting.

For example (and I will keep the examples down to a minimum), discarded towels were laundered only if visibly dirtied; otherwise the room stewards would let them dry, refold them and serve them as "clean" linen. The same practice was followed with napkins. The menus were fancy jobs of four-color printing but the cooking was poor and the food and the dishes were dirty-I once found a cockroach baked into a dinner roll. I won't describe the food-handling methods nor the condition of the galley, but they were nauseating.

The ship's doctor could have and should have made sure that the ship was run in a sanitary fashion, but he himself was a loafer who did not care. Some ship's doctors are excellent but there is a percentage who are the drones of medicine, who sign up for the easy life and are too lazy even to carry out the scanty duties of a ship's doctor. Unluckily ours was this sort. The ship's rules required him to be in his office at nine in the morning and five in the evening; he seemed to feel that he had no other obligations. I recall one morning when a passenger hurt his knee rather badly at deck sports. The ship's doctor was sitting a few feet away, watching and sipping a drink; the passenger went up to him and showed him his damaged and bloody knee. The doctor glanced at it and remarked coolly, "I shall be at your disposal at five o'clock"-and turned away.

While we were not well off in first class, the passengers in second class and in third were in squalor. Second and third class in the
Ruys
were modest indeed, but they were spotless and smelled clean. In this ship they were filthy, reeking holes with a stench better left undescribed. The major shortcoming about ship travel is that, if you do have the bad luck to get a bad ship, you are stuck with it as thoroughly as if you had received a jail sentence. For three endless weeks we could have quit this ship only at Djakarta-which we would have done had Djakarta been an improvement, which it is not.

Of course the Captain should have tightened up his ship by cracking down on the doctor, the chief steward, and his first officer. But, while there is never any real excuse for a Captain since he can never be relieved of responsibility for everything that takes place in his ship, nevertheless I felt a sneaking sympathy for the poor man in this case; he was so busy handling his ship that he hardly had time to worry about the internal administration. The passage from Singapore to Brisbane is no soft snap.

We first became aware of this the first day out, at boat drill. Abandon-Ship drill is never perfunctory in a well-run ship but in this case I was surprised at the extreme and careful thoroughness with which it was conducted. It had a wartime flavor to it; one might have thought that the ship's officers expected the ship to go down at any moment.

We decided later that such was very nearly what they did think; those waters are still infested with mine fields left over from the War and never swept. I once got a look at one of the charts we were using; penciled into it in many of the passages between islands were mine fields.

This voyage would not have been the sinecure which cruising the open ocean is in any case; we were hardly ever out of sight of land, the charts are only moderately reliable (some of the surveys are much more than a century old), and shore lights are not too well tended. The second half of the voyage, through the Great Barrier Reef of Australia, is comparable to driving a narrow and twisting mountain road; reefs and shoals abound, the channel is narrow and must be piloted with great caution-we passed the wrecks of ships whose masters had not been cautious, or lucky, as may be.

The ship had neither radar nor gyro compass to make the shiphandler's task easier, nor did the master have any pilot but himself for the dangerous passages. It meant that he was on duty almost continuously a great deal of the time, night and day-his skill and years of experience against very real dangers. I know that he gave unsparingly of himself to keep his ship safe, so I don't quite have the heart to blame him personally for the faults in the ship's housekeeping. He kept us safe.

But just the same, it was a filthy tub.

Every ship that leaves Djakarta takes its quota of Dutch refugees who are leaving "Holland in the East" for good. The Dutch have been there for three and a half centuries; many of them have known no other home for generations. Those who still remain run the risk of surprise arrest and imprisonment, even of assassination-while we were there, in a town we visited, an entire family of Dutch dairy farmers was murdered by terrorists.

One of the refugees gave me a genteel tongue-lashing aboard ship, the theme being that the United States had forced Holland to surrender the Dutch East Indies to "communists," and that we would someday be sorry for our folly.

But Indonesia is a very complicated place; whatever the truth may be, it is certainly not that simple. It is true that we played a role, through the United Nations, in helping the Indonesians to gain their freedom. We were not alone in it, nor could the United Nations have forced the outcome on the Dutch had the Dutch been physically able to maintain their rule there after the defeat of Japan. Out of the maze of facts and allegations, one thing is sure: the Indonesians were fed up with the Dutch and wanted their freedom-and the Dutch were not able again to subjugate them.