Virle mentioned that the strap on her helmet was a bit dodgy – had a habit of suddenly coming loose. Insisted it was fine, but it wasn’t fine with me. Long story short, it was noon before we set off down the west coast road. Our place takes a day off food on Mondays, which we had of course forgotten, so we decided on a brunch, and found a nice place en route for curry and rice, except the rice turned out to be rotis, and the curries turned out to include the most inedible meat I’ve ever encountered. Nominally beef, it had no doubt once been part of a cow, but with our best efforts neither of us could make any impression on it. It was like trying to tear shreds off lumps of car tyre. But the fish was fine, and we set off again in good spirits…BANG! Oh dear. The bike ground to a halt and wouldn’t restart.
Called the man. He turned up, made a few fruitless attempts to start the beast, asked where we were headed. We said St Anne’s Shrine, he said he’d drive us there, then return with a replacement. Top rescue, dood! We got a few blissful minutes in his AC’d car, visited the shrine, which turned out to be a peaceful but unremarkable Catholic church, surrounded by and filled with gaudy plaster iconography, then went round the back to a pleasant enough beach where we frolicked in the surf and sunbathed for an hour or so. Almost the moment we got off the beach my phone rang, and five minutes later we had our bike back. Apparently the spark plug had been bust, presumably by a rock.
We did a bit more pootling around on the bike, visiting the lagoon, then headed to another beach, where we did a bit more frolicking, sunbathing and reading before deciding that was enough sun for today and heading back to the ranch. Where we met a very nice German lady, Ines (‘It rhymes with Guiness’), just arrived after a 25 hour journey, and looking it. We invited her to join us for a beer down at the sunset, and maybe dinner later. All of which went very well, and we now have an excellent contact in Barbados, which sounds wonderful. Never really gave it a thought before, but after her accounts we’re seriously tempted.
While we were waiting for our dinner, men started passing through carrying baskets on poles, heaving with fish. Turned out they’d caught an entire shoal of tuna – around five tonnes – and we were invited into the shed to see. It certainly was an impressive load of fish. A sobering thought, though: an entire shoal, probably hundreds of years in the ocean, gone.
After a long wait our grilled-fish dinner arrived and proved to be absolutely delicious, though it wasn’t as big as we’d expected, and I wasn’t sorry when Ines said she’d done with her noodles (dodgy tummy – no fish for Ines, boo hoo) so I got to finish them off. She was a great companion, and in between excoriating Trump, consumerism and all parts north, told some wonderful stories of past travels.
Such as, being one of the very first into Vietnam when it opened its borders for the first time since the war. ‘People in the streets plucking hairs from your head – they’d never seen blond hair before.’ They doubled down by being also among the first into China: ‘We arrived at the border and there was nothing there. Nothing. Just a border post in the jungle. They questioned us for two hours, unpacked all our luggage, went through item by item, inspected our books. Then we were taken outside and ushered onto a train.
We had no idea where it was going, or how long the journey would be. We had no Chinese money, they wouldn’t accept Vietnamese, and no-one had even heard of dollars. We were on that train for 36 hours. No-one could tell us anything because no-one spoke a word of English. Every now and then we would stop at a rest stop, and we’d go for a wee at these open huts on stilts, where we’d be gawped at by dozens of Chinese women all laughing away and trying to get a look at our privates because they wanted to know if we were blond down there as well.’ And lots more along similar lines. Excellent evening, best since Delft.
