Day 17

19 September, 2003

The sea is gentle, the sky filled with the big rain clouds, the fruit of which we have been experiencing off and on through the early hours. We are fifty miles from taking our leave of the Indian Ocean and the Bay of Bengal, taking the right turn into the most dangerous waters, piratewise, the Malacca Straits. Last night I watched, once again, Pather Panchali, the wonderful Bengali movie of the fifties with an intelligent and sensitive score by Ravi Shanker.

I have a fond memory of my father and I, maybe 1965-6, going to see this movie in a Boston “art house” movie theater that was on the side of a big concert house, the Back Bay theater, just up Mass. Ave. from Symphony Hall and across the street from the Christian Science mother church. It was particularly memorable as a relatively known Boston rock and roll group played on stage before the movie. Although I imagined this might have annoyed my father greatly, it thrilled me. I also remember seeing Tales of Hoffman at the Back Bay theater as a child, and on April 4, 1968, the British band Cream played there and I had a third row seat in front of Eric Clapton (who was to become an acquaintance a couple of decades later). The Christian Science church, who owned the real estate, tore it all down in the next year, building apartments in it’s place.

I am becoming fond of our seabird, as she is so ungainly on “land” yet so elegant in flight. She is a bit bedraggled from the rain, but she is busy combing out her undercarriage with her long swan like neck. She has taken up post on top of the bright orange enclosed lifeboat number 2, hanging two decks below my window. I watch her comb and clean. She starts wagging her tail so vigorously she falls backwards onto the doorstep of the lifeboat at the same time she emits a big milky stream of excrement, right where one would be scrambling in, abandoning ship. As I am assigned to lifeboat 1, I can chuckle!

For breakfast, Schmelling Max. What the boxer had to do with it I don’t know. A slice of good brown bread, some thinly sliced ham and a fried egg on top.

Sure enough around 10:00, we come through one of the other great passage points of the world. We cut out of the Indian Ocean and into the Andaman Sea. Having passed the Nicobar Islands,we come to the top of Sumatra where we squeeze between two beautiful islands, in local parlance, Pullau Rondo and Pullau We. Rondo, as it’s name implies, is a perfectly round, tree covered dot a mile or so across. It has some rocky pillars, standing in a watery kind of Stonehenge off it’s southeastern flank. Island We is large, boomerang shaped, and mountainous, covered in teak and mahogany, sandy beaches, some good harbors and towns by the harbors, stretching out over the beaches. Looks interesting as a possible, “gotten away from it all” retirement spot, other then it is in the revolutionary beset province of Indonesia, Medan.

The sea in the area, is striped with violent and visible currents, as the various differentiations, such as tides and temperatures, clash. The famous Thai resort of Phuket is about two hundred miles to the east, northeast. As we slide behind Sumatra it shelters us from the prevailing southeast monsoon that has been our companion for days.

I spend an hour and a half walking the bridges and talking to the captain during this passage. Then lunch, pork loin and mmmm spinach! It is so long since I lived on canned or frozen vegetables, I had forgotten how mediocre they are. But this spinach has held up all right. I lie down for an hour reading, hoping to usage my back. It is getting boring, this back business. I hope it is not so much in this writing.

It seems we have slowed down, so I get myself up to examine. It is just that the sea is so calm comparatively, it feels as if we had almost stopped. But we are bombing along at full whack, with six other large ships being funneled into the last and thinnest part that we should enter some time tonight. The sky is overcast with a threatening gray, the water a matching opaque slate. As we are heading south it is getting noticeably hotter. It feels like the Red Sea again. A big orange dragonfly buzzes beautifully around me. Considering that the mountains of Sumatra are barely visible in a cloud shroud about twenty miles to starboard, it is either an intrepid flyer, or maybe an on board larvae that was waiting for the freshwater rain to come alive.

As I write this, we are overtaking an LPG (liquified petroleum gas) ship which I see right outside my window when I look up. The big L.P.G. on it’s side is extra warning to anyone thinking of ramming it, let alone lighting a cigarette. It is, of coarse, a floating bomb!

The rest of the day is uneventful. The ship still holds to the antiquated papal edict of fish on Friday. Many local small fishing vessels in the nicely cooling sunset. Watched Born on the Fourth of July. It is amazing how my emotions are still so effected by the world from the late sixties and early seventies, the years I came of age. Tonight, full piracy blackout. Shades all drawn, doors all locked.

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