I did not feel the same compulsion the girls apparently felt, to desert ship at every opportunity; in fact, I always felt uneasy when I did not sleep aboard. Yet in Java I, too, took a holiday from the sea by accepting the Harrises’ offer of their mountain retreat as a place to do some very necessary writing. (Unless Barbara and I mailed off a couple of salable articles before we left Java, there would be no checks awaiting us in Durban—and no Christmas for the Phoenix.)
Our trip into the pundjak, the pass through the mountains of Central Java, was an invigorating change from the fetid city. Each morning we awoke in the crisp, cool air of the hills and were greeted by a magnificent vista of twin mountain peaks thrusting against the sky.
As Barbara expressed it: “Imagine! A view like that just by opening your eyes! What luxury! No getting dressed, no going up on deck—and not a speck of water in the foreground to muck it all up!”
There are times when I suspect that Barbara is just a landlubber at heart.
In these surroundings our writing flourished and almost before we knew it the Harrises’ car had arrived to take us back to the city with our completed manuscripts. Here we rejoined Ted and Minnetta, who had also managed to squeeze in an overland trip, to Jogjakarta, seat of Javanese culture. There Ted, exploring the vast archaeological ruins in the vicinity, had the experience of being accompanied by an armed bodyguard. Being an American, he was obviously a millionaire and a rich prize for kidnapers! (Little did they know!) At night, through the solicitude of his hosts, the bodyguard had slept across the threshold of Ted’s room, but whether such protection is conducive to better slumber Ted didn’t reveal.
Our last few days were divided between laying in last-minute supplies for our crossing of the Indian Ocean and accumulating memories of a diffuse and very confusing place. Jakarta is vast, sprawling, and amorphous. It is a city of beautiful residential areas with red-tiled houses set well back from shaded streets—and of squalid kompiangs where hundreds of families are herded together without sanitation, light, or even air. For these crowded thousands, the canals that traverse the city are laundry, swimming pool, public bath, social center—and privy.
From the deck of the Phoenix we could see, in one direction, the beautifully appointed yacht club where a constant procession of limousines drew up to discharge members and their friends who came to swim, sail, or water-ski, or just to relax with a drink on the shaded veranda. In the other direction, just across the road, a procession of another sort moved slowly from dawn to dark—a long line of tired, ragged women, each waiting with a pail or a battered old kerosene tin to get water at the single faucet which served as the sole drinking and bathing supply for hundreds of people in the dock compound. It was a desperate imbalance, which obviously could not endure for long.
Generally speaking, the officials in Indonesia were very helpful and pleasant. One of them, Commander of the Navy, Jakarta, presented each of us with an imposing document which called upon “Whom It May Concern” to give us all possible aid and assistance. I flashed mine several times in the course of my shopping expeditions, until an old-timer pointed out that, in the present state of the government, there were almost as many to whom a letter from Major Lie would be an invitation to shoot me as there were those to honor it!
A Voyage around the World—October 4, 1954–July 30, 1960