What the Traveller Saw (22 page)

Scarcely any activity takes place in Bali without some sort of religious and esoteric sanction, whether it is the planting of rice, the filing of teeth, the painting of pictures, or the cremation of the dead.

Enchanting passenger on a bus from Denpasar to Ubud, 1969.

Ubud was the home of Balinese dancing, if not its cradle, and of
gamelan
music. The most inspirted of Balinese dances is the
Legong
, which is performed to the accompaniment of a
gamelan
orchestra made up of anything between six and twenty musicians playing percussion instruments.

Richard Angus Chechoo, one-time Cree chieftain, with his squaw and grandson in a small settlement on the bank of the Moose River. northern Ontario.

Small visitor at the great Exposition at Osaka, 1970.

East meets West.

The fish market, Aberdeen.

A few seconds after this picture was taken, someone took all our travellers’ cheques from a buttoned, inside pocket. Not only these but also the key to the hotel safe at the Mandarin Hotel. I had to pay a bomb to get another one flown out from England.

Boat children, Aberdeen.

Already a port under the Mongols, otherwise the Yuan (1276–1368), what is now known as Aberdeen was one of the earliest settlements on Hong Kong Island. From it, in the time of the Ming ( 1368–1644), incense made from a plant known as
guan xiang
, which was grown on Tantau (otherwise Da yu Shan), a neighbouring island, was exported to the Yangtze valley. It was from this plant that what is now Aberdeen, and later the entire island, took the name Hong Kong, which is itself the transcription of the local pronunciation of
Xiang gang
– Incense Port. All rather complicated.

Mexico – cities of the quick and dead.

Siesta time at a hotel in Copley, east of Lake Torrens in the outback, southern Australia, with the temperature way up in the hundreds.

On the beach in Martinique.

At that time the most beautiful beach in either Martinique or Guadeloupe was at Ste-Anne, east of Point-à-Pitre, but this was already overlooked by a luxury hotel whose main building resembled a collapsed
crêpe
. God only knows what has happened since.

Young Fijians, of whom there were inexhaustible supplies, all pelting down the road after us and shouting, ‘Ullo! Ullo!’