I went fishing with my friend Evan yesterday.  Evan has been knocking around Asia since the Boxer Rebellion, building roads and bridges and oil fields and whatever needed to be built, having lots of wives and lots of kids and a few bouts of malaria on the way.  I think he was born in Australia, but he left there a boy, probably stowed away on The Beagle, so his accent now sounds like a South African raised by a Filipina nanny in Cornwall.  He swears in Vietnamese, and sings dirty songs in French.  He's a shameless racist and one of the nicest men I know. We were on Evan's boat Annabelle Lee.  Evan had called me because a bunch of package tourists had chartered the boat, but then most of them overslept and didn't make it to the pier.  I live very close to the pier, and Evan invited me to come along and enjoy the bait, liquor and lunch already paid for by the tourists.  I grabbed a hat, a book and a bottle of sun-screen and ran for the pier. The tourists turned out to be four salarymen from Kyoto, who should have stayed home in bed like their buddies. They were splayed out on the bench seats in the cabin of Annabelle Lee as we pulled away from the dock, and one of Evan's boat boys was trying to offer them trays of fresh fruit.  The last thing these guys wanted was food; they were green and swooning and two were dressed in clothes that they'd obviously slept in.  The second-to-last thing they wanted were the thirtysix cans of Tiger Beer that were reposing like Odalisques on the bed of crushed ice in Evan's cooler, so Evan and I retired to the wheel house with a couple of frosty cans each and took the boat out to sea. Evan launched into his usual litany of complaints about doing business in Thailand.  The taxes were killing him, he said, the guests were always rude and stupid, his boat boys had to be watched every minute, and the competition made catching a paying client harder than catching a 200 kg blue marlin.   I said "Too bad." when it seemed appropriate and enjoyed the beer and the view. The day was clear and calm and the sky a pale blue without a hint of weather.  The engines droned quietly under the insulated decks and I didn't mind a bit listening to Evan bitch.  He's been everywhere, done everything, and has more stories to tell than Aesop, but whenever I'm with him all he does is complain about the charter business on Phuket.  He talked at length about clients who demanded their money back if there were no fish, and others who, at the end of the day, calmly ordered him to clean and cook their catch and deliver it to their hotel by dinner time. He went on and on and on, while we chugged around Phang Nga Bay, weaving our way between the limestone karsts and watching the dolphins playing in our bow wave.  He lambasted the port authority for the state of the rickety wooden pier that brings his guests out to his boat, and the municipal government for leaving garbage to rot on the beach.  He railed at the Immigration Department for making him renew his visa every three months, and at the Labour Department for refusing him a work permit.  He chided his landlord for gouging him on rent, and the boatyard for twisting one of his propeller shafts.

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Evan screamed an oath and turned the wheel over to the boat boy.  He launched himself out of the wheel house door and his flat old feet hit the deck with a slap, then he was making his way astern shouting curses and waving his arms.  I picked up his half full can of beer and finished it for him, chatting with the boat boy for a few minutes.  Then I climbed down to the deck and went astern myself, expecting to see Evan keel-hauling a Sony executive.

Instead what I found was Evan leaning over one of the tourists, who was in the fighting chair holding onto a straining rod for all he was worth.  Evan was flushed and excited as hell, shouting encouragement and slapping the guy on the back while his three friends took hundreds upon hundreds of photographs.

Our captain was jumping up and down on his withered legs, pointing out to sea with his spindly arms and giving instructions in Japanese he'd learned when he helped rebuild Tokyo in '46.  His nut brown face, seamed by a thousand deep and shallow wrinkles, was split by a broad grin so wide that I expected to see his dentures ejected over the side.  Despite the wrinkles, despite the cataracts and the bushy white hair sprouting from nostrils and ears, it was the face of a boy pulling in his first fish.  Despite everything he'd spent two hours complaining about that morning, it was a face full of youth and enthusiasm, and most visibly, of pure happiness.

And of course, being of a bookish nature, what I thought of as I looked upon my friend was On The Beach.  In that wonderful novel, written in 1957, Nevil Shute gives us a very staid romance about the last days of the human race.  His premise is that a nuclear war has left the Northern Hemisphere a glowing wreck, with radiation floating southward in the stratosphere at a speed of about a hundred miles per week.

We follow the lives of a group of very British Aussies in Melbourne, southernmost major city on the globe, as they face the end days, drinking gin and smoking cigarettes and planning their suicides over games of bridge.  The radioactive dust is expected to begin raining down on Melbourne on September first, which just happens to be the first day of the trout fishing season, which is annoying to the many fishermen in and around Melbourne.

A group of them petitions the city administration, which is slightly harried holding things together as day by day Darwin, Townsville, Brisbane, Perth and Sydney go dark.  But the fishermen are insistent, and well connected, and like most serious anglers, they wouldn't dream of fishing before the legal season opens, even if it is the end of the world. 

And in the last act of government in human history, the date of the opening day of the fishing season is moved up two weeks.  It's a fantasy, of course.  But the part about the opening day of trout season rings absolutely true to me.  I don't know a fisherman anywhere who wouldn't do whatever it took to spend his last days fishing, Evan included.

A Ramble in South-East Asia - In February of 2004, after teaching English in China for a year, Ron Hannah and his partner Ruth Forbes crossed the border into Vietnam, seeking adventure and fleeing the coldest winter in fifty years.  They met peasants and monks, students and fellow wanderers, and they spent an unexpected three weeks in Thailand without even the benefit of a guidebook.  For these travelers, this was a time of growing perceptions of the nature of mankind and of global interdependence and vulnerability.  It is an experience from which everyone who reads this eBook will gain.Through Ron Hannah’s candid and descriptive prose, and through Ruth Forbes’ gorgeous and immediate photography, you will re-live the wondrous days passed in these exotic places, at once wishing to linger here or there while anxious hasten to the next locale.  For anyone whose travels will take them to this part of the world, the experience will be both exiting and rewarding.