Full Circle
Day 104: Zamboanga to Sandakan
Sisal on the dockside, Zamboanga.
Select a bunk on the open-plan upper deck. Some people are already curling up to sleep, others lie and watch the incredibly violent guns and Kung-Fu video on closed-circuit TV. A man called Bert is feeding his prize cockerels concentrate of yucca oil from a plastic bottle. Cockerel sperm, he confides, is where the big money is made.I wander up to the bridge. The captain is 'resting'. The helmsman is beating his hands up and down on the ship's wheel in time to a Queen tape, and the first officer, a genial, portly man, secures a chart and shows me our route, south and west, parallel with the Sulu archipelago.
They ask me what I do. Playing it as low key as possible I say I'm a writer. They all seem vaguely impressed. One of them points at the book I'm holding, Robert Payne's The White Rajahs of Sarawak.
'You write this?'
I shake my head.
'What you write?'
'Er... well...'
It's too late. I've lost his attention.
'You give me your book. Yes? You give me your book. You sign it.'
Whatever I say will make no difference. I don't have any of my books with me. I have Rob Newman's Dependence Day, so I sign that and give it to him and he seems very happy.
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PALIN'S GUIDES
- Series: Full Circle
- Day: 104
- Country/sea: Pacific Ocean
- Place: Sulu Sea
- Book page no: 146
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RELATED LINKS
- Pacific Ocean
- Day 39
- Around the World in 80 Days
- Day 138
- Pole to Pole
- Day 40
- Around the World in 80 Days
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