WHEN THE GOING WAS GOOD

Not for Ken Jackson the pampered package tour or the all-inclusive luxury cruise. Peter Stock pauses to appreciate some notable travels in Asia and yet more remote corners of the planet.

To quote Ken Jackson, a retired American lawyer and long-time FCC member, his employer “sent me to Hong Kong in the mid-1980s and for no apparent reason left me there”. Jackson does not elaborate on what he did in the office or in court (if anything at all) over the next 20 years, but he certainly gave his wanderlust free rein. He happily admits that his pocket-sized, 172-page memoir, The Smugglers of the Sulu Islands – which also includes some of his travels since he retired – is simply “a record of where I went, how I got there, who I met and what I felt”, and to having had no formal training in journalism or creative writing. Given the book’s straightforward, entertaining text, perhaps that’s no bad thing.

The underlying message of Smugglers is that “BC” (Before mass Computerisation), getting around Asia – and further afield –was much more of an adventure. Smartphones didn’t intrude; Twitter and Facebook and Instagram and the like didn’t dictate; you goggled at maps rather than Googled them; and you took selfies by balancing the camera on something reasonably flat nearby and dashing to get into frame before the shutter clicked. Travel was less predictable, more random, more fun. And there was a greater incentive to talk to the people you met on the way, whether it was a passenger in the adjoining seat on a bus, the dude hanging out in the bar or somebody you ran into on the beach, at the top of a mountain or in the street.

Jackson never seems to have bothered with such “getaways” as Bali or Boracay, preferring somewhere edgier. Nor does he write about anything so trite as a must-see. Rather, he leads us a merry, sometimes slightly scary, but always inquisitive dance around some of the lesser-known spots of Asia. It’s amusing to be reminded, as Jackson does in his chapter on Dalat, of the days when tackling Vietnam often entailed jousting with vulgar numskulls in police uniforms on the qui-vive for infiltration by foreign spies cunningly posing as innocent tourists. The Great Calcutta Cricket Riot speaks for itself (“the strong arms bombarded the pitch with bottles, and the ones with matches lit everything except their own clothes”), while his jaunt in a speedboat to Batambang turns out to be a waterborne nightmare in a craft that barely stays afloat. In Java, he seeks out the old trading port of Bantam, aka

Banten. “I didn’t go to sightsee… I was a pilgrim. I wanted to stand on the same mud, sweat under the same sun and be bitten by the same bugs as those ancient expats”. Glamping, set-jetting, lisness (look it up) this is not.

There are half-a-dozen chapters on Hong Kong, mainly concentrating on the SARS epidemic of 2003, which, in the light of the tribulations visited on the city by COVID-19, nowadays seems more like a mild sniffle than the mammoth kerfuffle it was at the time.

The remainder of the book is given over to Jackson’s wanderings around the rest of the world. While the landscapes are not so exotic to him, his quizzical eye dims not a whit. In Britain, he treads a wary path between the Protestant and Catholic communities of Belfast, and explores the semi-mystical, little-visited island of Lundy. Other travellers might take a cruise around the Caribbean – Jackson plumps for the more earthy option of a gravel boat. The Cromlech of the Almendres, an untrammelled prehistoric stone circle in Portugal, is compared favourably with England’s fenced-in, over-regulated Stonehenge. And –ever the eccentric itinerant – Jackson finds time to visit Cape/Cabo Verde way out in the Atlantic Ocean where he stumbles across the Portuguese dictator António Salazar’s concentration camps for political prisoners. All in all, this makes a very good read for anyone enthused by evading the tyranny of the beaten track. n