A tiny island

When the Spring time change kicks in, I am obliged to send my camera on holiday till Fall.

What?

Nikon apparently does not acknowledge Daylight Savings Time, so in order to correct the timer on my camera, I have to choose a destination where the local time coincides with ours.

So this year my camera has gone to Managua for 6 months.

64 years ago, almost precisely, I sailed through the Panama Canal. Otherwise I am totally unacquainted with Central America. Panama was extremely hot, the canal unremarkable.

For the sake of accuracy, I decided to check the date of that extremely brief visit, which I was able to do because our arrival in England coincided with a dock strike that the internet tells me was in May.

Periodically, I come across a photograph that I took from the tender which brought us ashore in Plymouth, where we ended up on account of the strike. We were supposed to dock in Southampton, so this was a little inconvenient but as I recall, a special train was laid on to transport us to London.

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Of course, when I looked for it, I could not lay hands on that photo, but I did find one of the canal which you can see was unremarkable, as I said.

Because it was grey and cold, I had thought our arrival was earlier in the year, but this was England and it was 1962, which was exceptionally fresh.

My father had finished up his contract in Thailand at the end of 1961 and we spent the next three months on beautiful Penang Island, off the northwest coast of Malaysia, a little bit of tropical paradise.

Then in April, we began our journey back to England. After 6 years, I did not regard it as home and I wasn’t thrilled to be returning there for boarding school.

The reason we’d stayed in Penang was because my parents had no intention of arriving in England in winter. To delay things further, my father flew to the States chasing some sort of business, while my mother and I boarded a ship of the Royal Rotterdam Lloyd, the mv Willem Ruys, that took us via Australia and New Zealand, then across the Pacific.

At Pitcairn Island we collected an interesting passenger. Looking him up on the internet, I found a Facebook post by Johan Hanskamp that describes perfectly our own experience:

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John Christian joined the ship for the voyage to Rotterdam. He was a lovely man.

As I recall, he was the sixth generation from Fletcher Christian of HMS Bounty fame.

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When we stopped there, some of the islanders came out to the ship selling stamps and various crafts they made. These days it is possible to go ashore and even to stay on Pitcairn. Tourism will be a source of income, but the island is tiny and completely isolated.

It would be a fascinating place to visit, but tourism ruins large communities and it’s hard to imagine that it could improve a place with less than 100 inhabitants. But perhaps it is carefully regulated.

Johan Hanskamp, whose Facebook page I found, would appear to have been a crew member of the Royal Rotterdam Lloyd. It was interesting to see his remarks about the Willem Ruys after all these years. He may well have been on board when I was.

Mentioning having sent my camera “on holiday”, I never imagined ending up here.

Extraordinary!

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