Around the Rowan Tree, Day 57

Together it became an adventure to see the lush countryside with market stalls laden with exotic fruit and vegetables Margaret Gillies Brown

There wasn’t much time to get more than the essence of the places we visited, like the bustling, lime-white city of Jerusalem with its churches, its temples, its rich-coloured markets, its crowded streets, high wailing wall and its inherent history. I found small things mind-blowing; a white signpost with the name Bethlehem just as if it had been Errol. Were we really near to this place that had been a bright light in my imagination for all these years? Did it really exist?

But when we got there I found it quite easy to imagine the stable as it had been, even although the supposed site was now gaudily furnished and lit by many thin tapering candles.

Back on the cruise ship, after a dark night’s sail to Egypt, and a long journey in a convoy of coaches with an armed guard, we came to Cairo and to some of the famous pyramids on the outskirts of that city, sited far closer to the urban centre than I had imagined.

One year we went to southern Spain. While there we took the train from Alicante to Denia several times just to see the aquamarine sea on one side and the rocky ochre-yellow mountains on the other.

Another year we went to Greece, down south to the Pelopenese to a small coastal resort with a cerulean bay not far from Mycenae.

Incredible

How well I remember the journey there through the night in a rattling bus that shook our innards to pieces. At two o’clock in the morning we stopped at Corinth and disembarked.

A Grecian moon, the shape of a perfect pearl, was turning an ancient eucalyptus tree to silver.

In the opalescent light I looked down into the incredible canal.

There was a ship way down at the bottom, looking unreal, like an ethereal ghost ship and I wondered, as I had done as a child on seeing a ship in a bottle, how it had ever got there, the sides of the canal being so high and close together.

Hours later, an enormous crimson sun rose from the sea as we rounded the bend into our destination, which was Tolo.

The following year we got a little bolder and booked to go to an unexplored-by- tourist part of Turkey.

We were enchanted by its high mountains and turquoise rivers tumbling down the steep slopes.

We were captivated by the many ancient ruined towns and temples still uncommercialised and with pieces of ancient artefacts lying around at random; a finger carved out of marble, a bunch of grapes, a cluster of flowers, a reptile.

There were also the weedy and wild-flowered, wide, terraced steps of amphitheatres, so many that we began to bemoan “not another amphitheatre”.

Rounding a river bend one day we came on hundreds of terrapins basking in the sun on top of a green film of algae. Our shadows fell across them.

They disappeared with the speed of light through the green surface which closed up immediately as if nothing had ever touched it.

Turkey was very different to any place we had been before, seeing the women all dressed in long flowing trousers and being wakened by the muezzin calling the faithful to prayer at an unearthly hour in the morning.

A newspaper advert encouraged us to venture further. Trailfinders were offering cheap flights round the world.

We had always had, at the back of our minds, the thought that one day we would go to visit the parents of Richard’s wife, Linda. Often they had urged us to come and see them.

Opportunity

Here was our opportunity and to go round the world as well. We flew to Boston where we stayed for a night and then went to Detroit to catch the plane for Australia.

It was a long and tedious flight, the most memorable event being when, just as the sun rimmed the horizon, we saw though the cabin window the unmistakable cone of Mount Fugiyama suffused in pink light.

Australia was a leap in the imagination that I hadn’t expected at all.

Linda’s kind parents met us at dawn at Sydney airport and in our three weeks stay there took us around everywhere they could think of.

I was impressed by downtown Sydney, its colourful, high-rise castles of glass, its street canyons, its harbour, its opera house and by the impressive blue mountains not so far off covered in endless miles of eucalyptus trees.

We flew up to Cairns, which was a totally different place. Here we found all the tropical islands rolled into one.

We took a trip to Green Island in a ferry filled with Japanese honeymooners, went on a semi submersible to get a close-up view of the incredible coral and coloured fish.

It was on Green Island that we met a Texan in a broad-brimmed hat. We talked to him in the shade of palm trees over a cup of iced tea.

At one point I moaned about losing a day because of crossing time zones on our way here. He told me he had also had the same experience.

“But you will get it back because you are going back the same way as you came,” I said. “We’re going round the world,we won’t!”

“You’ll just have to have that one out with God!” was his reply.

After Australia we stopped off in Manila in the Philippines, again a completely different experience.

We met up with a most obliging taxi man who for very little money took us everywhere he could think of in the three days we were there.

Modern

He showed us Manila with its palaces and poverty. We wanted to get out of Manila to get an idea of the countryside.

This was not so easy. Manila stretches for miles and was jammed with cars and brightly coloured jeepneys which were used as mini buses.

The taxi man had rarely been out of Manila himself so together it became an adventure to see the lush countryside with market stalls laden with exotic fruit and vegetables at intervals along the road.

We saw how the people lived, the oxen that worked the land.

We watched men climb with ease up tall palms to harvest the coconuts in much the same way as they had always done.

We saw neat and clean children walk home from school often barefooted.

We saw lakes and islands and homes in the shadow of an active volcano that might erupt at any time.

Next stop was Bangkok in Thailand. A big modern city, to a large extent, except when you got among the golden temples.

We went further afield and sailed up the River Kwai to where on one bank above the river a huge golden Bhudda sat in the sun smiling at us.

Afterwards it was Abadabi and home.

More tomorrow.