Gooch Sassafras

1. Auflage 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4835-4474-8
Verlag: BookBaby
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: Adobe DRM (»Systemvoraussetzungen)

E-Book, Englisch, 358 Seiten

Adventure, Travel, Smuggling. Sex and drugs in Exotic locations, with guns.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Gooch, Richard

Leseproben

1

The pressure from Fa’s bony knee in the centre of my back was painful enough to make me give up the struggle, yielding into submission as he wrenched my head back by my knotted hair, holding the sharp-edged barrels of his cut-down shotgun hard against my right temple. The smell of stale alcohol reeked from his skin and breath. I could feel the bite of the honed metal starting to slice my skin. He was screaming in almost incoherent babble. My Khmer was poor for the amount of time I had spent with the wiry captain of the weathered longboat. The only words I could make out were “thief” and “sassafras”. Fa’s speech was completely impaired. My own voice sounded desperate ringing in my ears as I repeated the words “stop” and “listen” in my broken and nasal-sounding Cambodian.

”Na muh le baw!” I yelled. “I don’t understand!” over and over until the old man softened his grip on my scalp. The barrels of the sawn-off gradually eased away from the side of my face and his knee slide from the centre of my sweat-soaked back, hitting the deck near my ribs with a clunk.

I folded over the side of the wooden junk gasping for air. I could smell the Mekong river: sweet and organic, freshly turned soil mixed with corn leaves stripped from an ear, straight from the plant on a hot day. The taste of blood was a salty reminder that I had been cut in the initial blow from the butt of Fa’s weapon. It cracked me in the dark and sent a pulsing flash through my brain, illuminating white lightning in my mind’s eye.

Landing flat on my back when my hammock tie was cut, compressing the air from my lungs, I had the strength of a kitten for the first thirty seconds of Fa’s onslaught. I sucked hard for the first two or three breaths. Fa was twisted right out of shape and wasn’t really sure who I was.

I had been asleep, peacefully rocking in my sweat for what seemed to be the longest sticky night. Fa lunged at me and the ensuing scuffle was an exhausting, sweat- and spit-splattered cacophony of knuckles, knees and elbows. Eventually I was subdued with the heavily intoxicated old man screaming in my ear.

As I rolled over onto the deck, still panting slightly, the old man was back at me. He held me tightly around the throat and said, “Where the fuck my sassafras?”

I stammered, “C-calm down, calm down.” All the while thinking, what the fuck is going on here? I had been on the vessel with the old man and his son for two weeks. We had met on the shores of Lake Tonle Sap in Cambodia some weeks before, in a guest house run by Fa’s cousin Kham. I had been there for a month recovering from a nasty bout of amoebic dysentery. The first time I had been ill in the four months I had been in Vietnam and Cambodia.

Arriving in Hanoi in early July, the sapping heat of the tropics was a far cry from the cold, wet winter I had left in New Zealand. As I left the cool of the airport terminal building and stepped into the stifling heat of the exterior, I felt the strength being sucked out of me with every drop of sweat. I made my way to the city centre in a tuk-tuk. My nose, throat and lungs were instantly filled with the wet sticky feeling of the moist air in the early south-east Asian monsoon.

By the time the residential gloom of the city closed in on the light grey sky, I was starting to relax. I closed my eyes. The hot wind covering me in the back of the open motorcycle taxi dried my skin as we weaved through the city traffic at pace.

I imagined being in a sauna in the back of an Asian supermarket: I could actually taste the smells that surround me. The air was thick with water vapour being flavoured by the environment. It was oil, incense, coriander, coconut, tobacco and petrol fumes with just a hint of sewage and rotting organic material. Getting out of the sweltering city was my first priority, so after an hour of driving around the sights, I told my driver to head directly for the coast. He looked at me as though I was crazy wanting to take a tuk-tuk the hundred and thirty kilometres to the ocean, but I was loving the feeling of the wind on my body. Getting into a stifling car or van packed with tourists was not an option. With a “Yes, sir” he turned the tuk-tuk into the surging traffic and in a few lefts and rights we were on the highway out of town heading east to the South China Sea.

I relaxed for a week in a nice hotel on the soft sands of Ha Long Bay, dripping with sweat while my body acclimatised to the oppressive heat and humidity. This I did while moving from the pool bar to the bar next to the pool and back to the pool bar again. The sightseeing could wait for a few days. I was in no rush.

I spent some lazy days floating around the emerald-green sea in an open-hulled fishing boat, dumbfounded by the beauty of the limestone archipelago, two thousand islands towering from the sea and eroded by wind and water into dramatic monoliths, their sheer faces green with moss disappearing into the soft blue grey sky.

By the time a week was up I felt completely relaxed, at home and ready to explore.

I had spent a great deal of that first week thinking about my initial travel in this part of the world, in the early 1990s, with one of my best friends after a travel stint in Europe, living in Amsterdam. The bright-eyed young man who first saw these places was looking at them again with a wary squint. I was thinking about the reality of turning forty and how different the view was two decades on. Part of me wanted to be that wide-eyed again; I wanted to be surprised by life. The past twenty years had gone by like a flash: all those youthful memories were blurring together into a swirling ball of mixed experiences in my mind. It was getting harder and harder to define the individual places and times.

When I was ready to move, I made my way down the eastern coast of Vietnam, stopping in all the hot spots that were overrun by twentysomething Europeans and Antipodeans getting their rocks off on local whisky, beer and amphetamines. I enjoyed the youthful energy around the place and still had plenty in common with most of the travellers I met at the beaches, temples and bars. The ones who thought I was thirty never got corrected as they put forward their guesses during the mandatory opening questions: How old are you? How old do you think I am? How long have you been traveling? Where have you been? Blah blah blah.

A month went by, one hangover led into the next, a big night out drinking and dancing after that particular day’s ruin, market or waterfall led into the next. Always there were happy backpackers keen for a drink and a laugh and a fling for a couple of days. Making promises to be Facebook friends, meet up somewhere on the trail or have dinner the next day.

It all got very old one day and I got on a bus to the city.

I was over the wasted kids and ready to escape to some solitude. Disappear deep into the Mekong Delta on a kayak or something. I was having fun, but it was the same fun I’d had ten years previously, in my late twenties travelling through the Americas, and the same sort of fun I had in Asia my first time there. But not the adventure I felt I really needed. Not the adventure I had just sacrificed everything at home to have.

The feelings I had through my twenties and early thirties of wild excitement and genuine lust for life had faded over the last five years in New Zealand. Struggling to set up a construction business through the global financial crisis from 2007 and eventually having to buy out a business partner of seven years, with money I didn’t have, because he was “over it” had taken the sting out of me. On top of that there were two failed relationships and my mother’s near death and subsequent slow, painful recovery from a debilitating stroke.

The combined pile of shit added up to be the worst years of my life to date. I had no choice but to dream constantly of bigger and better things. I had a defining emotional thought pattern that emphasised the fact that life was a short, sharp, shot and needed to be taken on at the pointy end. I realised that when life sits you down some time in your fifties or your sixties, you get sat down properly. The feelings and freedoms of youth are gone forever.

During the previous years there was nonstop media banging on about 2012 being the end of days, I couldn’t help but think that whatever these people were predicting was actually happening to the planet constantly: the wars, the disasters and the global economy crashing in the news on a daily basis. I felt there was a reasonable chance that we were about to witness great changes in the human paradigm, whether it was some catastrophe that changed the planet physically or a mass shift in consciousness that changed the way we live. The feeling that something serious was going on seemed very real and compellingly exciting.

The day I turned thirty-nine my gut feeling, which has always guided me, said take the house deposit, shelve the business and get this thing out of your system. So I did. I went to the bank on Monday morning, the travel agent Monday afternoon and the airport the next day. Through immigration and I was on my way again. Buckled in, a drink in hand with a ball of excited energy starting to burn in my stomach for the first time in years.

After leaving the tourist trail along the coast of Vietnam I had been in Ho Chi Minh City for a few days pottering around on a motorbike, going to a few points of interest, getting lost for hours, enjoying the challenge of a new town. After three days I felt I knew where I was going.

I was sitting in a bar...