Jupiters Travels: Four Years Around the World on a Triumph (53 page)

Meanwhile, in my delirium I decided that I was carrying too much stuff on the bike and planned to send a parcel home. Among the things I thought I would never use was a spare stator for the alternator, a heavy luxury in spare parts. I made up my package, wrapped and tied and sealed as the law demanded, and sent it off to England before setting off up the Malaysian Peninsula.

It was from Ringit in the Cameron Highlands that I wrote to Carol to tell her that The Journey was taking me over and that I would not be able to keep all my promises.

It was ten miles further along the road that the bike stopped. It took only a little time to discover that the stator coils had burned out. I roared with hysterical laughter, but thought it far from funny. It felt far too much like swift retribution to be a joke.

The map told me I was only one hundred and eighty miles from Penang, where I planned to stay a while anyhow. The first thirty miles of that were a non-stop descent to the main highway from Kuala Lumpur. They could be done, if necessary, without running the engine at all. I figured that an overnight charge in the battery would get me to Penang, and as I was still lucky enough to have come to a stop just outside a village, I found a small repair shop with a battery charger.

The night was not wasted. I spent it mingling with the crowd at a Chinese funeral ceremony, attracted to it by the sound of drums and gongs. I saw a coffin, massively constructed from beautiful woods, supported inside a room so that it soared into the air like the prow of a vessel. Beneath it professional mourners chanted and played strange music on even stranger instruments. Filial delegations made ritual
obeisance’s
. Some wore sackcloth hats bound with straw rope. Others had white head bands, red tabs sewn to their sleeves and carried bamboo branches trailing paper streamers.

The noise on the
veranda
of the house was continuous and, as I learned, was deliberately encouraged so that the deceased ancestor would know he had good company. People ate and drank, played cards and mahjong, shouted and laughed and banged happily on drums put there for the purpose. I rolled off a flourish myself, to help them along, for they planned to keep it going non-stop for four days and nights.

My plan to get to Penang worked well. The Lucas company, which has branches everywhere in the world, arranged for the stator to be flown from England, and though my ears were burning and I still felt shaky inside, I settled down to make the best of a bad job . . .

What I had already seen of Malaysia appealed to me. I liked the gracious wooden houses set back from the roads in grassy clearings with decorated shutters, window frames,
veranda
rails and eaves. The staircases that widened towards the lower steps seemed to welcome visitors with an embrace. Always there were tall green trees to provide shelter from the sun.

The variety of fruits rivalled Brazil. Many I knew, many I did not. Mangostin and durian both took me by surprise. The durian was a special challenge, with its pungent odour. It is highly prized in Malaysia, but it has also been compared with 'French custard passed through drains'. There was fruit to suit any taste.

In the streets, food stalls sold food of all kinds. They carried pineapples sculpted into wonderful spiral shapes, slices of mango, ginger, papaya on slivers of bamboo, shiny mangles to crush the juice from sugar cane, and mobile Chinese kitchens with compact and versatile charcoal stoves, where wizards of the wok conjured up limitless arrays of rice, noodle and soup dishes which went streaming out to purchasers up and down the street.

It was a manual civilization, everything guaranteed touched by hand, but highly sophisticated and a powerful antidote to Western hygiene.

Penang is a polyglot place, but the main ingredients are Malay, Chinese and Indian. In the city most of the Malays I saw were pedalling trishaws and usually saw me first, shouting, 'Hey Johnny, you want smack?' meaning heroin, not punishment. The Indians too were also often pedalling, but on ancient bicycles with large glass cases mounted behind the saddle containing bread and buns. Sometimes a fleet of them would pass at one time, all ringing bells or tapping pieces of metal.

But for all that there is no doubt that the life of Penang is Chinese, perhaps even more traditionally Chinese than China itself.

I was well placed to study it. From my room on the second floor of the Choong Thean Hotel, in Rope Walk, I looked down on a shop where five generations of the same family had been engaged in the management of Chinese funerals and celebrations. Every evening almost, on scooters and bicycles, they were off to some part of the town to erect their stages and screens, to play their instruments, perform their sword-swallowing and fire-breathing acts, to chant and wail in their black gowns. During the day they manufactured or sub-contracted all the ephemera that was sold.

Next door to the hotel was a shop where palatial mansions were built of paper and split bamboo, resplendent with the good life. They had terraces, balconies, elaborate porches in gilt and scarlet, television in the sitting room, a car in the garage, everything an ancestor might need to take his correct place in the hereafter, and all to be consumed by flame so that it might follow his spirit across the water.

In another shop incense sticks were made, some of them three or four feet high and thick as a man's thigh, entwined with dragons. At the other end of this short street was a hall where, on certain nights, Kung Fu was taught or the 'Lion dance' rehearsed.

The shops themselves were impenetrable to the eye, so crammed were they with divers objects, so crowded with people and furniture and so
mysteriously lit by shrines and candles. At night beds came out on the pavement in front of the shop and those who didn't fit inside slept out. At mealtimes, a space was cleared on the counter or work table, a cloth was spread and the shop was turned into a restaurant. Generations lived, ate, worked and slept in these confined spaces, absorbed by the microscopic detail of their worlds. Their energy and dedication appeared to me to be phenomenal and more foreign than anything I had yet seen. There were times, when I saw them flicking rice into their mouths with that peculiarly frenzied motion of the chopsticks, that I thought I detected a kind of madness. Why choose the slowest way of eating, and then become so painstakingly proficient at doing it quickly?

At the Temple of Heavenly Mercy I watched them park their motorcycles and rush, with their candy-coloured metal flake helmets still on their heads, to the counters inside the temple where the incense sticks and bundles of paper money were sold. The temple was full of acrid smoke from the burning paper, and they raced through their ceremonies, eyes streaming, desperate to get outside again with their smouldering offerings and fling them into the big iron incinerators that stood waiting on the pavement. If there was a single thought of an ancestor in any of them, it was inscrutably hidden behind expressions of irritation and impatience.

I was still not functioning well physically. The days were hot and humid. I was drinking too much cold fizzy stuff, and could not get myself really excited about doing anything. I worked at odd jobs on the bike, and one day, with the battery charged, I took it round the island thinking I would go fishing.

It had rained heavily, the sky was clearer and the air drier than usual. It was wonderful to be riding for pleasure again, on an unloaded bike. I passed over small mountains, forested and populated by monkeys and brilliant birds. The villages were quiet and unspoiled and nobody tried to sell me heroin. I watched what looked like a Chinese pantomime. Only the stage was covered. The audience, children and adults, was spread around a small area of grass, and I was able to see it from the coffee house across the road. An extraordinary woman appeared on the stage dressed like a Victorian huntress in bloomers and carrying a bow. She shot an arrow in the air. It went about a yard and fell to the boards, and a cloth goose came tumbling down from the ceiling. Everybody was delighted, myself included.

In late afternoon I found a quiet spot on the shore, beyond a fishing village where some men were burning the paint off their boat with bundles of flaming grass. I caught nothing, but became impatient for success. That evening in town, well after dark, I remembered that people usually went fishing off the Esplanade at night and I took my rod there with my highly corrupt prawn bait.

It was still very crowded along the promenade facing the park. Brightly lit stalls selling fruit, soup, noodles and drinks made an almost uninterrupted line along the kerb, and Chinese couples sat shoulder to shoulder along the sea wall sipping dayglo drinks from plastic bags. In Malaysia technology seems to boil down to three things; plastic bags, fluorescent tubes and two-stroke motorcycles. The sea bed around Penang is already lined with plastic, and for my first two catches I brought in two bags full of sea water.

Shortly before midnight the crowds thinned out, the stalls were wheeled off, and only dedicated fishermen were left on either side of me. I was very inexperienced and had no real hope of catching anything, but for a moment when I felt the tug on the line I did think I had a big fish. Then I saw it was a branch of a palm. My line was a very strong one, bought in Australia for a quite different purpose, and I was able to drag the branch into the strip of six feet below me under the sea wall. Then I had the silly idea that I could hoist it up and disentangle my line. I had a lead sinker on the line, my last one, and I wanted to save it. I leaned over the wall, straining with all my might, and something hit me very, very hard in the right eye.

I clapped my hand over my eye and gave some token gasps, waiting for the pain to engulf me. No such thing happened. First there was a stunning shock. Then a wave of nausea as I realized what I had done. The hook had broken away, obviously, and the sinker, catapulted by a thirty-pound line under breaking strain had scored a direct hit on my eyeball. Like a bullet in a grape, I thought. Even while shuddering with the horror of it, I was aware that the fisherman alongside me was quite unperturbed. I danced about a bit to dramatize my injury, to no effect. I dared to explore with my finger, dreading what I might feel, but the eyeball did at least seem to be a ball. Experimentally I opened my eyelid. Pitch blackness assailed me. It just seemed impossible that an eye could survive such an injury. I gave some thought to the kind of
eye patch
I would wear, and to whether it was possible to ride a motorcycle successfully with one eye.

I said to the fisherman: T have been hit in the eye.'

'You want me to gather your things-ah?' he replied, unmoved.

Bewildered by his priorities, I declined the offer, got my own things together with one hand (I could not, for some reason, take my hand away from my eye) and left him my bait. Then I wandered off down the esplanade, and it came to me that I should really do something about it. All the time a little voice was telling me: 'You are blind in one eye', and I felt a bit unsteady.

Two policemen stood by the Town Hall.

‘I have had an accident,' I said. 'Is there a hospital?'

They didn't speak much English.

'Go to big police station
’
said one, pointing across the park into the darkness.

'No. No. Hospital
’
I said. By now I knew that's what I had to do.

'No car
’
said one, 'but - Ha! - here trishaw.'

The trishaw stopped and I said: 'To the hospital how much?'

'Three dollar, okay,' he said.

'Dollar fifty okay,' I said, and off we went.

The history of Penang is all bound up with British naval history. I sat in the little wooden cab between the two front wheels while the trishaw driver pedalled behind me, and in the prow of our small craft, with my hand over my eye, I imagined myself to be Nelson as we sailed through the night. A brilliantly uniformed policeman on a flashing Motoguzzi tried to get us to make way for the Prime Minister of Kedah State who was leaving an ornate mansion in his limousine, but I pointed ahead imperiously and cried: 'Hospital!' He fell back demoralized, and we swept past, raking him with a broadside.

At the hospital they put me in funny white pyjamas, taped gauze pads over both my eyes, and told me to hope for the best and above all not to move a muscle.

I spent a week in total darkness, being manipulated for my own good and hating it, discovering cups of cold tea on my locker hours after they had been put there, and learning about the other problems blind people have with the rest of us. I spent much time contemplating the path that had led me to that bed. I could not avoid the feeling that I was there because I had lost my grip on my situation and purpose; that I was adrift here in Penang as I had been ever since I had allowed the journey to change focus in California.

The degeneration followed, it seemed, when I gave away control, believing the seductive Californian notion that only good things happen when you let it all hang out. Maybe there was another trip to be made that way, but mine was not open-ended like that. It had to be conceived and executed and completed. The instructions had to be uncompromisingly clear and they had to be regenerated at every step, otherwise what could I expect but a drift towards decay and chaos.

The bike itself was a model for the idea I was striving towards. Only a continual desire to improve its performance, to make the systems more and more efficient and trouble-free, would keep it going to the end. There was no steady state. As soon as I lost interest, became tired of it, the bike began to fall apart. I would start losing things, a wrench, a pair of goggles, a useful piece of rope. Or something would come unscrewed and fall off before I had noticed it, and I would have to do some makeshift repair. Then, to realize that my pocket universe was running down and fraying

at the edges because of my own laziness, made it harder to find the extra energy and enthusiasm to pull it all together again. A lazy mistake saps confidence and leads to the next mistake. I was in hospital in Penang because I had misjudged my strength in California, or so it seemed to me then.

The chain of cause and effect had not yet run its course. A few days later someone came into this ward full of sightless people and stole my wallet from my bedside locker. When I knew it had happened, it was as though the last support had been kicked out from under me. The two passports, the papers, the wallet itself were precious. The bulk of the money, thank heavens, was in traveller's cheques. But the address books ... I felt as though the whole journey had been stolen from me and I was in despair.

I came out after nine days with my sight only slightly impaired and a crazy dwarf swinging a lantern in the corner of my right eye. I was grateful to have an eye at all. I spent a lot of time at the coffee house opposite the Kung Fu Hall, dredging my memory for the names and addresses I had lost. Those were the bitterest moments. I could have forgiven the thief everything but that.

A beautiful girl lived and worked there. She had the most delicious Chinese rosebud mouth. In the morning, when I went there for a steamed cake, she came down in a pink nightgown with the sleep still in her almond eyes. I wanted to believe she was the proprietor's sister, but she was probably his wife. In any event she had no interest in me, and I had to satisfy myself with looking at her when I could.

I was resigned to two weeks of outpatient treatment before it was safe for me to travel on, and I sadly abandoned my plans to cross over to Sumatra. There would be time for a short excursion into Thailand, and no more.

The British Embassy in Kuala Lumpur refused to send me a new passport, even though there was a consul in Penang who had checked me out. They insisted that I drive the five hundred miles to Kuala Lumpur and back, a dirty and expensive ride on the main highway, but they did not even look at me when I got there. It was the kind of treatment I always heard tourists complain about. I was unused to it, and it emphasized my sense of having lost my status. All over the world tourists had their passports ripped off. In every bank there were tourists claiming refunds on stolen traveller's cheques. It was never going to happen to me; but now I was just another tourist after all. I had lost my immunity, and it hurt.