Gieboldehausen, Go For It, and My Notebooks from 1976: After Kuala Lumpur

Hi everybody, I’m back.

Since the last instalment of my notes from the seventies I have been to a German biker meeting, in Gieboldehausen in the north of Germany. It’s quite a long way from where I live, so I made it a voyage of discovery, staying overnight in Brioude and Besançon on the way there, and in Strasbourg on the way back. I had never been to any of them before, and all three cities are wonderfully interesting, but the one that struck home was Besançon.

I hadn’t known it, but this city is famous for everything to do with time, and it was once the home of France’s biggest watch manufacturer, LIP. There were three floors of a museum dedicated to it. I don’t know if you remember, but when I got my bike out of the Triumph factory, the place was in turmoil. Now I learned that in 1973, at exactly the same time, the same month even, that the workers at the Triumph factory in Meriden where seizing the factory and locking out the management, the workers at LIP were doing the same thing. That I should stumble on this by accident just seemed remarkable to me. Here’s just one of the graphic posters they produced at the time.

On permanent strike: support the fight of the workers

The fight went on for years but in the end, of course, both struggles were doomed.

I had a reason to go to Gieboldehausen.

My autobiography, “Don’t Boil the Canary,” has been translated into German and it has just been published. Translating a book as long as that one is a tremendous undertaking, and to have had it done by an established professional would have been much too costly. However, I have an angel. Her name is Eva Strehler, she wants to become professional, and she approached me more than a year ago to say she wanted to translate my book as an exercise, without payment. She did a couple of chapters and to my surprise they were good. So she ploughed on and gradually more people became involved in the project, reading the chapters, making suggestions. My cousin Christine, a quite literary doctor in the north of Germany, read them and discussed the problems of translating English vernacular into German with her friends. Ralph Wüstefeld of Gieboldehausen, who is one of the originators of the MotorRadTreffen, or MRT as it’s known also became involved and, being a businessman, he also arranged for it to be printed by Books On Demand. The title “Don’t Boil The Canary” does not translate well into German. It was my cousin who eventually came up with the title, ironically, in English: “Go For It.”

So finally the book was published, and I went to Gieboldehausen for the launch. More than 500 bikers who all have a taste for adventure received it very well and, more to the point, bought a lot of copies, so Eva will get something for all her hard work. She is quite a unique individual, well known for travelling with a sidecar and her dog, Polly. While all the excitement with my book was going on, she was away on her bike travelling through Iran. And then, disaster!. In a heavy traffic situation her dog got spooked and ran away, and is now lost forever. As if that wasn’t enough, when she finally gave up looking and left for Turkey, some miserable thief stole half her belongings. I know how one bad thing leads to another, which is pretty much the theme of these next episodes from the notebooks of my journey.

From My Notebooks in 1976: After Kuala Lumpur

[I remember, now, that Carol wanted me to take her to the Cameron Highlands, an area well known for its beauty and pleasant climate. It was shortly after our parting there, as I was riding down to go to the island of Penang, that I discovered that the stator, the very same spare part that I had just mailed back to England, was kaput. I was able to go on riding as long as the battery was charged, so I had to make frequent stops. At one such stop, where I stayed overnight, there was a three-day funeral in progress, involving tremendous noise all night. I described it in “Riding High.” Eventually I made it to the capital of Penang where Lucas had a branch, and they arranged to have a new stator flown out. I resigned myself to a three-week wait.]

Georgetown, May 8th

Shriven is the best word I can find to describe how I feel; stripped, shorn, reduced, after a series of incidents that have exhausted me.

There was a rough, socially paralysing and exorbitantly expensive passage from Perth to Singapore; followed in rapid succession by the harrowing conclusion of a crisis in my personal affairs, a 48-hour fever and a tropical cold that dragged on for a fortnight.

Singapore itself is an eardrum-shattering ordeal of torrential traffic and K.L. is no better. Between the two was rain. Just north of K.L. the motorcycle suddenly ceased to function, due to the failure of a part which could only be obtained from England.

I struggled on to Penang, determined at least to wait somewhere pleasant. For a few days, life picked up again. I got the front forks straightened out again – they’ve been crossed since Argentina – and . . . .

[Here my notes petered out. Then this on the next page.]

Choong Thean Hotel, 42 Rope Walk, Georgetown

Colours, pale blue and cream. Wooden shutters, painted floors and walls. Ten rooms on two floors, $5 for one, $6 for two. Ground floor open-fronted with folding shutters. Cement floor, motorcycles and bicycles. One round marble-topped table, a desk in corner outside the door of the boss’s room. Several Indian ladies of various ages and sizes sit around waiting for custom, sometimes outside on the pavement, sometimes inside. Most of them get five or six dollars a time, though there’s a thin younger one who gets more and is said to have a good technique. The hotel gets $1.20 for the use of the small room at the back between the mah jong tables and the kitchen. A belligerent bouncy fellow with eyes like marbles runs the tables and gets 40 cents a game. The tables have slots on each edge for counters and pads f white paper pinned on the top to make a fresh surface for each game. Many of the customers are fishermen passing time between bringing their catch to market and going out again at night.

In the room beneath mine the abacus clicks away a lot of the time and there are usually several men there during the day, but what they are computing I don’t yet know.

Th’an sits in the front from about lunchtime to 2 am – sometimes with his head sunk on hos breasts dozing, sometimes dreaming of his forthcoming journey around the world – when he gets his 50,000 dollars. He doesn’t think he can do it for less., and he will of course buy travelling cheques. He will spend several months in each country and is particularly set on visiting France.

At other times his mood is more morose and he dwells on his misfortunes – the sale of his stamp and coin collections during the years of 73 and 74 when he could not get any work and had no food to feed his stomach. Then he remembers the Australian man who was so good to him – “I do not know the reason why” – and Th’an cried when he flew away. Afterwards he wrote many times and got no reply and at last he found out that the man was dead.

Th’an says that he could have been a police inspector if he had been prepared to have an operation on his tongue “to cut the string” but he had been tongue-tied since birth and was afraid to go in. He can manage to speak quite well, even in English, and his vocabulary is better than most. Uses words like “seldom.”

Among my fragmentary thoughts about life in Penang – the first excitement fades very rapidly unless something more substantial comes to support one’s interest. At the temple crowds of people dashing in and out with bundles of flaming paper (money?) and chucking them perfunctorily into the incinerators, eyes bleary from the smoke. Everyone also carries bundles of smouldering incense sticks and shuffles them up and down rapidly. The quantities of combustibles bought and consumed in front of one’s eyes is impressive – but there’s a total absence of any sense of purpose or reverence and a good deal of it is obviously automatic rigmarole made worse by the obvious desire to show off by burning bigger bundles than anyone else’s. Everything goes up in smoke and the industry that provides these ephemera must be huge.

Alongside the hotel in Rope Walk are several concerns engaged in making artefacts for religious ceremonies. From elaborate houses of paper on split bamboo frames to shoes ($2 a pair) motorcycles, human figures, etc. All to be burned in offerings. Opposite is a family which, for five generations, has been performing the ceremonies – dressing up every night – chanting, hitting sticks, gongs, bells – leaping over fire, and erecting and taking down their stages all over town.

The boss is a tough-looking man with stubbly grey hair, too busy to stop. The young man who talked to me says they all feel very serious about it. The idea of spending one’s life constructing such elaborate artefacts only to see them going up in flames is a bit exhausting to my mind.

I had spent a week in Georgetown, mostly working on the bike and while it wasn’t unpleasant, I wasn’t at my best either. The first nights I was disturbed by the fan on the floor below drilling up through my pillow, and a rich orchestra of noises made by the others in the hotel who seemed to take it in turns to contribute their coughs and snores rather than getting it over with in a single crescendo. There was something extreme about their noises – where in Europe you might have a few dry coughs, here it sounds like the last explosive rending of the tissues. In the tropics everything is bigger, louder, wetter, dirtier, quicker.

The days were hot and humid, I was drinking too much bottled fizz and not functioning well. Emotionally I was numbed. Then on a Saturday, after a false start the day before, I got the bike on the road at lunchtime and went round the island. There had been heavy rain, the sky was clear and the air much drier. I got my rod and tackle from the hotel and set off to find Bahu Manang where Th’an had told me to fish. But I’d got a false notion of where it was and far from being a bit along from Batu Ferringhi it was almost back to Georgetown on the other side of the island. It became a fine ride over small mountains, and into the valley between to see a play being performed (mostly for children it seemed) on a stage in a village. Two men were on the stage most of the time. One seemed to be a mandarin figure and the other his very obsequious lackey. At one point they left the stage, and a woman appeared dressed in an amazing costume, a huntress, modelled after an early Victorian engraving. She shot a limp arrow in the air and a red cloth bird fell, thump, from the ceiling.