Clifton Pier, the Bahamas

Its been quite some time since I've backpacked. Lugging an overweight samsonite around Heathrow and O'Hare isnt exactly what can be classified as a backpacking run. That outing to the beach in Clifton Pier in the Bahamas is probably the closest I've come to a real backpacking trip. Here is how things happened...

After Aruba and Jamaica, I came to be a salty old salt when it came to the rest of the Caribbean Islands. Those pre-concieved notions are largely true- with so much commercial boulstering, the islands assumed almost artificial proportions. Over the course of a few months, one tended to get a wee bit cynical. Beyond marketing mumbo-jumbo there seemed so little substance behind the smokescreen. Is there nothing sacred left anymore? Say it aint so! Well, as it turns out, it was'nt. When we docked in the little known port(?) of Clifton Pier in the Bahaman Islands,all was the usual seagulls and sunshine. Getting beach-worthy and taking a perilous hop onto an aged tug boat to land, we seemed on our way! An aged once-rasta watchman checked our anti terrorist credentials and wished us well. The ultimate responsibility of seeing that a ragtag bunch of sailors dont blow up his decripit poverty stricken palm beach of a country lay solely on his marijuana sagged shoulders. The very realisation of this was almost enough to bring me to the point of light headedness. Almost, but not quite.

The walk to the beach was interesting, to say the least. SUV's and big-rigs whizzed past as we trundled down the narrow road, smoking twisted marlboros in the too bright sun, making us feel that sickish inside feeling. We lost our lighter on the way back, thank god for small mercies, till we found it halfway there and restarted our puffing in right earnest. On the way we passed by what we were told was the Bacardi distillery. Peering in from behind the high fence (was it electrified? my memory fails me.), it looked nothing like the heaven I'd pictured it to be. No huge vats of limon and citrus , in just the right proportion, with little taps shouting out to us "come hither noble honest sailors, O ye sons of the sea, quench thy thirsty tongues, we await thee!". Damn.Don't you hate it when that happens? Shattered dreams? no? oh well.

The beach was beautiful, I'll give them that much. Man, was that beach beautiful. The typical carribbean island beach, but so atypical in so many ways. Deserted on a weekday, strangely enough that was the way I wanted it. Such divine loveliness had to be left unspoiled by God's spoiled spoilers- However bikini clad and hot they might have been. Quick to splashy-run into the water, the salt water stinging the eyes did nothing that would even make me blink. It was that awesomely superb! And I wasnt gonna miss even a second of it. Celestial bodies in microbial bathing suits enjoyed magnums of iced champagne in their speedboats as they cut through the deliciously clear, cool caribbean to make their way into the marina. A sun-toasted fisherman dove in, reappearing with a lobster from the briny deep.

No trip to the beach is complete without the customary sand castle. And this we capped off with a crenellation,everwatching its enemies with light from a solitary marlboro. Walking back to the ship, sunburned and no worse for wear from our beach shenanigans, we happened to come across something of a strange shrine. Low wooden columns ending in well carved spheres. Cordoned off. Very out of the Caribbean ordinary. A local tells us this is a sacred site, symbolising the women of the island, waiting patiently, but vigilantly for the men to come home from sea. Its times like this you think of home, and its never pretty.

Chilled heinikens welcomed us back onboard, with the promise of hard labour the next day. Hell, for shore leaves like this one, it would be totally worth it.

S.O.C.I.E.T.Y

What ensues is the sum of things that have been rushing through my head since I returned to shore..back home..to what is generally termed a "normal" life. Rushing through..not fleeting past, but like a freight train fully laden with lead, thundering over the rusty tracks of my brain. After a long time of work at sea, living a routine, which automated clockwork wouldnt do justice to, it's strange coming back home.To people- whose careers, like octopi, have entagled most aspects of their lives. And here I am- Cant help feeling like I'm wasting time while kith and kin toil their lives away. But on the other hand, I didn't get weekends off,and not public holidays, national holidays, state holidays or my birthday. This gives me time to write my memoirs- for posterity of course. I intend not to impress you with my eloquent prose (which isn't at all eloquent.)
Somewhere along the timeline, our paths deviated. Yours and mine, for there was good reason. You, dear reader, were here, and I was there , somewhere. But it isnt just you and me I'm talking about here. Between writing, and the other myriad ways in which I abuse my time and freedom, I happened to venture out for a game of football with the little juveniles that populate my little neighbourhood. The thing that struck me, instantly actually, is the magnificence of childhood itself. An innocence almost universal, pure as light itself, and twice as blinding. Somewhere, we lost our way. Lost who we are.

Facades, contrasts.

Chapter 2
Aruba

The first time on a ship, it feels like entering an alien world. Orientation returned to me a few days later. One of the things still vivid in my mind is the Caribbean in the morning sun. A rich emerald-ish turquoise, clear, reflecting speckled flashes of sunlight happily over its crests, as the ship bounced leisurely from island to island, at a rather relaxed 18 knots.
As much as a sailor will always remember his first ship, he will remember the first port she (and he) touched. All those stories he would have heard have finally come true- those faraway lands, Valhalla-esque mountains, magically sprouting from the sea, their peaks bathed in mist. In this day and age, 9 times out of 10, he will return disappointed to the ship, having been to a place much like his own, where there are dirty alleys, and the women aren’t that beautiful and there aren’t that many. He will often see poverty, sweat, and women walking the streets, heavily made up and all too unattractive (even to a sailor). Then he realizes that this world in which we live is a real, living, breathing place. Not a picture from the National Geographic.
Aruba is an island in the Dutch Antilles, the picturesque, proverbial jewel set on the beautiful blue Caribbean. We had just arrived, and emerging from the belly of the beast in my grease covered boiler suit, I was surprised to find the chief, telling me I had five minutes to get ready for a day out on the town. I took less.

Scrubbed n showered, full of that traveler’s energy, I descend the gangway to the concrete jetty, and see several malayalee names painted there, with a date from a decade ago. There are several such reminders across the world, from the largest ports like Rotterdam to the tiny ones like this one, that tell you that sailors have been there, done that, and have been for aeons. Whether they will for the aeons to come remains to be seen. Their names and nationalities will change, but in this sailors humble opinion, somewhere...a few decades down the line, some shippy from some country we probably haven’t heard of, will see the name of a tamilian iyer sailor, which in all probability he wont be able to pronounce and I’m pretty sure he’ll write about it in a blog...or someplace.
Taking a bus packed with some very pretty school girls, we make our way to Oranjstadt, a port town and alleged tourist destination.
After a walk about buying a few engine room consumables,we partake in a hearty pork lunch, sloshed down with pints of Balashek, a beer every Aruban is proud to call his own, we make our way to the town square. I suppose Arubas main attractions are as usual the sun, sand and surf. The sun however I had had plenty of in Chennai. I suppose I didn’t enjoy the long walk there as much as my fellow touristas.
Besides being breathtakingly picture postcard perfect, I couldn’t help but think of it all as a total façade, as unfortunately we sailors get to see the underbelly of everyplace, from the docklands and to the brothels. We know what really goes down.
A flea market, lines the road to the marina. Tiny shops run by Jamaicans selling T-shirts and other baubles, things for people to scream to the neighbors and friends “I’VE BEEN TO ARUBA – look at me I’m so COOL!”
Aruba also seems to cashing off the “Pirates of the Caribbean” popularity wave. I wonder if the people in universal studios will ever make movies about the desperate and lethal members of that profession that hunt the Malacca straits and the coast of Africa. That’s one movie I’d like to see.
The marina was definitely one of the best I’ve ever seen. Intricately built wooden piers jut out to moor the luxury super yachts and speedboats of the rich and famous. Larger terminals service the cruise liners of the world, rather obscenely bedecked and standing proud in their splendor, almost as if competing with each other, like prize peacocks, I don’t know.
I couldnt help but think of my own ship, a rusty oil tanker, hidden far far away from view, her rusty weatherbeaten hull in as much stark contrast to these....like chalk and saturnian cheese!
A string of beachfront restaurants pander to the retirees of the western hemisphere, flush with their cash and pompous in their Hawaiian flowery shirts and straw hats. I wonder if even after a whole life of toil as a sailor, I would be able to live that sort of life. Come to think of it, the first thing that popped into my head, almost by reflex, was that I didn’t want it. It wasn’t the grandeur; it certainly wasn’t a case of sour grapes. It was just something about the age. The fat helplessness. That got to me. but just like my little tanker,worse for wear and these humongous cruise liners, the sailor and the tourist are very very different people. I was a fly on the wall. But this fly has still got the whole world left to see, and probably will.

MY TRAVELS
A year of sailing – Nov 2006 to Oct 2007

Before I begin this chronicle, it would be prudent to say that the world I have seen, is hardly the one written about, and read about- watched countless times. It would hardly qualify as the world we know, the beautiful vision of places most people would give their eyeteeth to catch a glimpse of.
This really isn’t a lonely planet. The docks, the streets, the bars, the eateries, and brothels, are teeming with people, not unlike you and me –doing a hard days work, living each day at a time, wishing their creator would take them away from the all the strife, all the monotony- fill their lives with undreamed of wealth and happiness (in that order)- Without much care of who they are governed by, who formulates their policies , and certainly not how their own creator differs from the others.
My travels have changed me. As with Che Guevara, I have come to accept that my life will involve traveling the seas and highways of the world, merely scratching the surface of the places I see and feel. It goes without saying that I am not the person I was then, perhaps partly due to the ravages of time, and partly due to the sheer lonely introspection that has taken my mind across peaks and depressions (not valleys) that I had never known existed.
Before I’m accused outright of plagiarism let me go on.

Chapter 1: November 2006.

Chennai.

My little odyssey begins in the city of Chennai, humid and dusty. A last minute change of plans meant I had little time to spare there. After all the groundwork, I could finally get to meet her. Though for but an hour, passing like a fleeting second, the image of her I will always have is as she was then. Cherubic and vibrant. She was one of the strongest reasons for making me want to shelve my best laid plans and stay right there with her for all of time to come.

Bombay.

Catching a flight to Bombay, waiting for the connecting flight to New York, having spoken to her one last time, it struck me like a bolt out of the blue- a revelation in the truest sense of the word- I was leaving. For how little, or how long, I didn’t know, and without being too dramatic, if I would come back at all. She cried when I called her. To this day little does she know that I broke down as well in that disgustingly sterile departure lounge.
The onward flight to JFK felt like 18 hours. I can’t be too sure. Flying over Greenland and points far northerly, all I can remember is the overwhelming darkness in that ineffectively lit cabin. I did make acquaintance with a compatriot going there for his studies, with the usual dream of a better life, so on and so forth. They say they’ll come back. They never do.

New York, (JFK actually).

Having been subjected to an extremely thorough security check, or as I call it, the mandatory invasion of all things personally sacred, I find myself in John F Kennedy. Cooped up in the airport for a couple of hours, it should suffice to say that I didn’t even get to breathe natural New York air. Blame it on the terrorists I guess.

Atlanta, Georgia.

The onward flight to Atlanta was uneventful. I did find out that I had missed the outward to Jamaica. On arrival, I find myself standing outside the enquiry desk. Its hard to remember exactly what it was that was occupying my mind then, but I suddenly hear this very loud strong female voice. With that thick mid-western drawl, it turned out she looked like Aretha Franklin as well.
“Sir, would you mind getting out of the way and letting the lady through?”
Respect, but the underlying contempt was all to evident. I wheel around to find this mousey woman behind me. Thoroughly flustered, she was, and as it turns out she was just standing there, with no intention of going to the desk at all. Although the desk lady did apologize, I can’t help but wonder what stereotype she had of Indian men.
The hotel stay arranged, I finally make my way out of the airport. Breathing American air, just walking along on that land of seemingly boundless opportunity, is the greatest desire for every working class Indian Joe. Not me though. Impressed as I was with the cars and the roads and the space and the place, badly jetlagged, all I wanted to do was get the hell into a nice warm bed.
Thick gravy dripping steaks, several hash browns later, and a hot bubble bath to top it all off, I finally give into the sandman, wondering all the time what in the name of God I’ve gotten myself into.

Montego Bay, Jamaica.

Its easy to imagine, in a plane stuffed to the gills with honeymooners, and holidaymakers, filling themselves with mohitos and other choice cocktails, peeling off layers of already scant clothing as the revelry went on, a pair of conspicuously Indian guys, soberly dressed in formals, will stick out like a sore thumb. Well, we did.
The Montego Bay airport isn’t very impressive. Typically tropical and quite disorganized, this was my first glimpse into the Caribbean islands- that float purely on tourism. Being pitied by the customs lady for not coming here on holiday, I was withheld till the agent claimed me. Like lost baggage.
He didn’t. It was only thanks to a kindly taxi driver who lent us his phone that we finally got in touch with our host, who had conveniently passed out in the arrival lounge.
On getting onto the massive SUV, we noticed his young, but enormous wife (? Im really not sure) suckling their baby Rastafarian. Bob Marley, dutifully hanging up against the windscreen completed out Jamaican welcome.
You could hardly call it a port. A small pilot boat was supposed to take us aboard. That was one boat ride I’ll never forget for as long as I live. Every roll felt like the little craft would capsize. When the ship finally came into sight, there was a rusty majesty to it- the patient might that has weathered the relentless pounding of Mother Nature. I later found out she was badly in need of a coat of paint.
They hoisted my old worn out bag and my even older guitar by a rope over the side. I climbed a very suspicious pilot ladder up to uncertainty.
It was then I was greeted by the smiles. The smiles that beam across the seas and oceans of the world- that betray strength, patience and goodwill. The hardened, hardy Filipino sailor had welcomed me into his clique.