TRAVELLER'S TALES

New Zealand Listener, Volume 25, Issue 630, 27 July 1951, Page 16

TRAVELLER'S TALES

ICKSHAS have disappeared from post-war Singapore, Winsome Bach discovered when she was there recently. The visitor rides instead in a "trisha," a bicycle with a sort of sidecar balanced with a third wheel. Trishas, and traffic islands along some of the main thoroughfares are two legacies from the Japanese occupation, but there are still Chinese to be seen carrying a_ long pole across their shoulders that supports ovens, food and equipment for providing hot meals on the roadside. Jegahs (nightwatchmen) on __ their wooden beds laced with rope still sleep in the alleyways. The Indian temples and Mohammedan mosques — remain, along with the huge entertainment areas known as the Worlds-the New World, the Old World and the Great World-full of stalls, booths, sideshows, exhibitions, roller-skating, boxing, wrestling, dancing, Chinese food and restaurants, films and stage shows. The torrential rain that floods roads in half tn hour, the Keng Wah orchid ‘that blooms once in seven years ("we went out through the night with torches to see one blooming,’ Winsome Bath recalls), the sound of the tock-tock bird, —

on whose consecutive note-count the Chinese gamble. "Give me all this ‘again, but give me a_ long _ purse," say$ Miss Bach. But although she and _ her sister, because of transshipment difficulties on their way around the world, were stranded in Singapore. with very little money, they extracted the utmost enjoyment out of strange jobs in strange places. Miss Bach; who is a lecturer at the School of Physical. Education in Dunedin, will tell in 4YA’s Topics for Business Women on Satur- | day morning, how she worked her way to South Africa and Canada and home again, in a series of delightful trav- | eller’s tales, beginning © on July. 28.