Slow boats for fun

Press, 21 February 1987, Page 23

Slow boats for fun

**>**”» By Gavin Young. 4< * IPL '< #Mja ’ (Reviewed by Joan Curry) Running away to sea is still possible. This book is the sequel to Gavin Young’s "Slow Boats to China” published a few years ago, but this time he took the first leg by air, Gatwick to Hong Kong, and started from there. In a variety of slow boats — tramps and freighters, coasters and interisland steamers, with an occasional unavoidable aeroplane — Gavin Young pottered home to Plymouth the long way round. And from the first hitch to Shanghai in a Chinese steamer, luUed to sleep by the ferocious clacking of mahjong tiles, he quite evidently relished every slurp and wallow. - He is a robust traveller who can make a voyage lasting a year or so, in a succession of more or less frumpish craft, seem agreeable. Whether he was charging across the South China Sea, or island-hopping through the teeming South Pacific, or swooping across to South America, to Africa and then up to Plymouth via Lisbon and Boulogne, his experiences should delight the heart of any armchair traveller who will assuredly be more comfortable reading about them than Gavin Young often was en route. He met a host of memorable people

and his book brims with stories about sailors and traders and beachcombers and lonely individtials representing their companies or their countries in remote stations. There was the captain of the “Coral Princess” in Rabaul, for example, who was sober and competent and highly respected at sea, but who turned into a pirouetting, wriggling. Sugar Plum fairy at night ashore when he got staggering drunk. Sad stories too, of the Vietnamese boat people who were too exhausted to take advantage of rescue and were lost, or the grim effects of alcohol or sickness or poverty or politics in some of the forgotten corners of the world. Amiable encounters with people like Magda the Estonian cook who thought that sailors were “dirr-ty pigs, they just want to sit around and drink beer,” but who fed them well from her spotless galley. Gavin Young also took time to dabble in bits of history; he came across Captain Bligh and Darwin and Captain Cook and Napoleon and Robert Louis Stevenson and lots of others who had passed before and left their mark. This is travelling for the pleasure of the journey, rather than to arrive somewhere in a hurry. It is gratifying for those of us who deplore the passing of the passenger steamship to know that it instill possible to sail the seven seas.