FOOD AND BOREDOM

Hawke's Bay Herald-Tribune, Volume 81, Issue 37, 6 November 1937, Page 15

FOOD AND BOREDOM

■ 11 1 r 1 1 A Traveller's Experiences

In a broaucast talk Mr. Peter Flemming, author and traveller, said; "Roaming and roving are both rather selfconsciously romantic words j _but in my experienee the romantic aspects of travel, in So far as they exist, are less lnteresting than ihe sometimes rather aordid things which the traveller is thinking about nine-tenths of the time. Perhaps the most important of these is food, and I thougbt it might amuse you to hear the kind of food vhich you'xe liable to have 1 0 Hve on if you go in for roving. I once went along with a Japanese punitive column in Manchuria. We engaged in guerilla warfare against a lot of bandits, but jthe bandits for one reason or another never turned up, so a'dull time was had by all. Still, we marched a long way in very hot weather and I got some valnable first-hand knowledge of Japanese army rations. They are not very elaborate. We got a little basket of cold rice and a bit of tinned fish or pickled mushroom and that was all. Officers and men got the same rations and thrived on them. I doubt, however, if even Mr. Hore-Belisha could make ihe British Army swaliow them without a. murmur. "An oven simpler diet which I once lived on was the stuff we used to eat while we were travelling overland from ^Peking to India. This was called Tsaui ha, and it's really roast barley meal. In appearance it's practically indistinguishable from sawdtist, and I'm bound to admit there's not an awful loc of difference in the taste. You eat it hy mixing it in your tea — .with rancid br-t-ter if you've got any rancid hutter— • and making it into a kind of paste. It's very sustaining indeed, hut there were times — particularly in tlie earlv morning — when we couldn't wotic up much enthusiasm for it. "That's about as much as I cau say ahout food without spoiling anybody's

dinner. Almost $s important as food) from the travellers' point of view, is the question of boredom. I always used to think that once one got right away from civilisation, life was on© long thrill, with tom-toms throbbing, elephants charging and bandits ciittlng the tent-ropes, practically all the time. It didn't take me long to find out that it's not like that at all. An awful lot of travelling is like waiting for a 'bus which you have good reason to suppose will not turn up. Somebody promiaes to hire you a camel, or somebody promises to htiild a canpe, and there you are, stuck, with nothing to do, until the promise is either fulfilled or definitely broken. "One of the most spectacular methods of killing time which I've ever been driven back on was a thing wc used to do in the interior of Brazil. Practically all ydu need for this pastime are a lot of alligators, a good electric torch and a rifle. You go out after dark in a canoe, and sooner or later the torch picks up two little glowing specks of a curiously bright red colour. These "are the eye of an alligator, and whoever is p'addling your canoe makes for them, going very gently and quietly, The alligator, heing much more oi a food and much ,less of a public enemy than the alligators you read about in books, waits till you're right on top of him. When you are, yoit aim between the eyes and fire. Whereupon there's a frightful commotion, and that alligator will never be Head of the River. If you haven't got any alliga- • tors you can always play patience; and if you haven't got any patience cards you'll probably fihd yourself wislnng you were back in the one-and-threepen-nies at the local cinema. But that feeling never lasts, because — although I haven't time to enlarge on the suhject — there's a good deal more to roamiqg than just food and boredom.1 "•