I found myself writing about my father because I used London to Singapore as half the distance I ran during the 20 years when I ran every weekday.
I picked that as a measurement because that is the route my father, Wendell and my stepmother Lu took on their post retirement trip. They stopped in Jerusalem for two years. I met them enroute for a week in Kabul in 1971. I’ll tell the Kabul story in tomorrow’s blog.
Here is the story of the island in Malaysia. You can google the island they bought near Mersing called Pulau Setindan. The resolution is still inadequate.
The bamboo house they built would not be there. My father was over 6 ft tall which doesn’t work in a Malay house. So the first floor where they lived (second floor was the bedroom), was dug out about 1.5 feet deep so he could stand up straight.
I used to lie in a hammock outside and ponder the probability of a coconut falling 40 ft and hitting me on the head.
Here is the earlier blog:
"My father claimed to have been conceived on a train because he always wanted to travel and he did all his life. When he was in his late sixties he set off from England in a British Ford camper van. He and his wife, Lu, spent several years traveling as far East as one can go driving. For those of you who know geography, that, in 1968, was to the tip of Malaysia. Along the way he taught cultural anthropology. He was also a rabbi.
When he could drive no further he bought an island on the coast of Malaysia off the town of Mersing. I visited him there as did most of my family and many world travelers. He knew that an island on the South China Sea, at the equator, would bring many visitors. Some years there were 90 visitors who arrived by plane in Singapore sixty miles away. He had to go to Singapore every two weeks, anyway, to get his Malaysian visa extended.
My father and Lu lived on the island for seven years. The local fishermen sold them fresh fish everyday from their boats. They had a garden and coconut trees. He used to joke that he was the only farmer in the world with a two week visa.
I wanted to see what had happened to the island since they left 25 years ago. Google images barely shows the island, but not anything closer to the ground.
(Photo on the left looks like the right island and the right beach.)