The Sun Has Set

...........but the nostalgis lives on.

Sitting on a cruise ship deck, watching the flying fish skimming over the blue expanse of the Indian Ocean is a wonderful way to relax and think about – well nothing, really. Tiny and almost transparent, the fish shoot away from the side of the ship and speed like ethereal darts 20, 30 or even 40 yards across the surface of the sea, before they impale themselves on a wave top and disappear.

One day we caught the tail-end of a cyclone, the wind howling and the sea rough, and watched half-a-dozen petrels flying at breakneck speed only a few inches above the waves, twisting and turning through the maze of wave crests and troughs with a precision that any fighter pilot would envy. In spite of the MV Aurora doing 22 knots into the teeth of a half-gale, they easily kept pace with the ship. Feeding off plankton on the wing and visiting land only to breed, they are brilliant examples of Darwin’s law of the survival of the fittest.

The wildlife was spectacular, but the cruise from Durban to Singapore was really a sentimental journey for me. We stopped in Mauritius, where I reported my one and only royal tour for Reuters; in Penang, where I was born; and finally Singapore and its famous Raffles Hotel, at which my father always stayed on his way to and from Malaya, as it then was known, during his rubber-planting days.

Apart from the navel-gazing aspect of the journey, enhanced by the company of my journalist daughter, Carlotta, on a break from wintry, warring Kabul, we sailed across mainly balmy seas to the island of Réunion. A tiny speck of France, no bigger than Leicestershire, it rises steeply from the wastes of the Indian Ocean, 500 miles east of Madagascar.

Discovered, like so much in this part of the world, by Portuguese mariners in the early 1500s, Réunion was colonised in 1642 by French settlers who planted coffee and imported African slaves, from whom the mainly Creole population is descended.

Imran, our Creole taxi driver, dropped us in the attractive little resort of St-Gilles-les-Bains where we swam in a luxuriously warm sea and had lunch and a bottle of white Bordeaux in a pretty French restaurant overlooking the marina. Réunion is merely an appetiser for Mauritius, about 140 miles to the north-east and which it closely resembles.

Mark Twain quoted the locals as saying: “Mauritius was made first, and then heaven; and heaven was copied after Mauritius.”

This was still almost true when in October 1956 Princess Margaret, young and beautiful, visited Mauritius at the start of her first solo royal tour. She stayed at Government House, in a secluded spot called Au bout du monde, “at the end of the world”. We, the press party, were put up at the equally exotically named Pamplemousses, “grapefruit”. We all swam in the turquoise sea at Blue Bay, although not at the same time as Princess Margaret. Those were pre-paparazzi days but her private secretary presumably did not want her swimsuited figure splashed all over the popular press.

Mauritius is best known, of course, as having been the home of dodos, those luckless, flightless giant pigeons which were so trusting that they walked straight up to the first Dutch sailors to arrive on the island and were repaid for their friendliness by having their necks wrung and their plump bodies consigned to the cooking pot. Within a few years, alas, they were indeed “as dead as a dodo”.

We now sailed north-east without seeing land for five days, arriving early one morning on the magical Thai island of Phuket, so brutally savaged by the tsunami on Boxing Day, 2004. In Patong, the resort which was one of the hardest hit, Carlotta booked a room in the beachfront Impiana, which bore the brunt of three tidal waves, suffering £1m worth of damage. And yet you would not think so today. The hotel is immaculate, the beach unscarred. I have never swum in more beautiful water, although the motorboats dragging the parasailers into the sky were irritatingly noisy, the only flaw in this particular paradise.

From Phuket it is only a night’s sail to Penang, where I was greeted by a young python slithering down the path towards me – for old time’s sake, perhaps, since I dimly remember an encounter with a cobra when riding my tricycle on our rubber estate, aged four. After the python was captured and I had been assured it would not be killed, I walked to the E&O, the Eastern and Oriental Hotel, where my parents often stayed, passing some fine old colonial buildings but not, alas, the hospital where I was born. It was burnt down years ago. Arriving hot and sweaty, I drank a disappointingly weak gin sling, thinking that previous guests such as Rudyard Kipling, Somerset Maugham and Noël Coward – and my father – would not have approved.

All my hopes were now pinned on Singapore and Jane, a local friend. First stop was Raffles Hotel, opened in 1887. Despite no longer fronting the sea, the foreshore having been reclaimed, the entrance is still impressive. The famous Long Bar with its portrait of Shanghai Lily was in full cry, the peanut shells littering the floor as of old, a relic of early planters’ louche manners.


The MV Aurora

Across the lofty hall we marched to the tiffin [lunch] room which, I discovered, serves only curry, adored by my father but too hot for me. Instead we chose the bar and billiard room buffet where oysters flown from Canada lay on ice beside local sweet crab, clams and sushi slices of salmon and tuna. A side of swordfish reposed under its croûte and pasta was cooked to order.

It was in this very billiard room, legend has it, that one night in the early 1900s a couple of guests were having a game when they heard strange scratching noises from down below. They sent a “boy” to investigate. He reported back that a tiger, thought to have escaped from a nearby circus, had taken sanctuary in the undergrowth beneath the hotel, then built on brick piers. After urgent consultations, a certain Mr Phillips, the headmaster of a nearby school and the owner of a rifle, was called in. After crawling into the bushes under the hotel he came face to face with the tiger and, sadly, shot it dead between the eyes.

This well-known tale reminded me of my father’s story of how, walking one day through his estate he came to a ravine bridged by a fallen tree.

At exactly the same moment as he stepped on one end, a large tiger stepped on the other. My father, who was not carrying a gun that day, stood stock still, staring at the tiger which stared back, paw raised. For what must have seemed a very, very long time, they eyed one another, both unsure of what to do until, silently, the tiger turned and slipped away into the jungle.

Just as well. Otherwise, who knows, I might not be writing this.