Salad Days.07

There was a dramatic change after the Canal. Our first port of call after the Panama Canal was Callao in Peru, the port for Lima. Up to this point I had only touched foreign soil in Europe and Saudi Arabia. My first taste of South America had me hooked straight away. Callao may or may not have been worth a night out, I didn't stop to find out. Lima Central was merely a 20 minute taxi ride away. 

My knowledge of Spanish back then was very limited but I knew how to say 'cuanto cuesta' and could grasp the numerals thrown at me, or so I thought. The taxi driver gave me a price which I thought was reasonable but as I handed him a note, he jabbered away at me. It became apparent I had gotten my decimals wrong and the price was one tenth of what I expected. He was indicating he didn't have enough change. For me it was such a negligible amount I waved it away and told him to keep it (it was actually the lowest denomination note I had). As it turned out, I earned more in an hour than he did in a week. He was almost in tears with gratitude

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Lima could have been like any European city yet there seemed to be a different feel to the place. There was a vibrancy to the city and I was keen to experience as much as possible. After taking in the sights I inevitably found a bar and ordered food and a drink. The initial worry of whether I would have enough money had long since passed. It would have been extremely difficult to spend the paltry amount I had. In the bar I heard three guys talking in English and went to investigate. It was the first English I heard in Peru and turned out the guys - all about mid-20's in age - were Kiwis. 

Since leaving the Canal there had been an aroma permeating the ship. I had tried pot at that stage but it had always been in solid form, even so the smell of weed was unmistakable. Future experience would show me the weed consumption in the merchant navy was far higher percentage-wise than ashore. Even so, this ship I found, had an inordinate number of smokers on board. It got so bad the Captain sent word down with the Mexican bosun (a smoker himself) to stop the crew smoking in their cabins as the air-condition circulated and the engineers were walking around like zombies.

Most smokers had been busy talking to the Canal guys at the locks but I was green and missed out. It didn't matter, there was plenty to go round. The other deck-boy had bagged off* in Panama and had a polaroid photo taken when he was with the girl in the bar. It took pride of place in his cabin and he was roundly mocked as he professed an undying love for the girl that had made him a man. Yeah, fucking hilarious. He was told by all and sundry she was probably noshing on a foreign seaman right at that moment. The little shit didn't like me. I had avoided the crossing the line ceremony having already crossed on the tanker, he didn't like that and I could sense he wanted to have a go. Probably chose me as I appeared to be less of a threat than his real tormentors.

*bagged off = had sex

The point to all this was that during negotiations with the Panamanians, boxes of rolling papers exchanged hands and by Callao there were none left on board. To add to the problem, they were very hard to find in Peru. The Kiwi guys had found a similar problem and they told me to buy the New York Times from Central Station in Lima. They told me they had tried every foreign and national paper on the news-stand and the New York Times was the best for using to roll joints. I went back with the Kiwis to their yacht where they made up for my missing out in Panama. Their story was fascinating. There was a fourth Kiwi on board their 40 foot yacht.

Five friends had bought the yacht with the intention of sailing up the west coast of the Americas. One had become serious with a woman and was unable to go but the others went anyway. When I met with them they had been gone 5 years already. They sailed up and down the coast buying goods in one hemisphere and selling them in the other. It obviously didn't reap rich rewards but it allowed them to eke out a living and continue in their adventure.

I never had a problem anywhere in Peru but the reality is that it's not all an adventure playground. One of the guys off the ship had his watch snatched off his wrist but nobody had any sympathy. Seamen knew very well not to go ashore with jewellery or even expensive clothes, jeans and a T-shirt were the norm, it made us almost invisible in most countries. Wearing rings and watches were magnets for trouble.

Lima was very interesting but the rest of Peru gave me a vastly different image, before then we had another scheduled stop to discharge cargo. We headed south to Chile and the port of Valparaiso, or 'Valpo' as the old sea-dogs referred to it.