You Have Not a Leg to Stand On by D.D. Mayers

Author:D.D. Mayers
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: life story, paraplegia, car crash, wheelchair, hospital, survival, recovery, trauma, guru, biography, travel, kenya, schooling, tragedy
ISBN: 9781785382581
Publisher: Andrews UK
Published: 2015-08-19T04:00:00+00:00

The Middle East - Part One

Mombasa to Jericho

The first section of the trip was from Mombasa to Kuwait, stopping at Muscat and Bahrain and would take about ten days, depending on Company orders on the way. We’ve been back to all the same places again recently; you wouldn’t know they were on the same planet, the changes are so dramatic. Muscat wasn’t a city, by any stretch of the imagination. Looking at the photographs we’d taken then; the harbour was a natural harbour protected by a horseshoe shape of high natural rock cliffs. The small trading port, consisted of a few rows of white Arab-style little houses which almost immediately gave way to desert, with a sand track that ran for about a mile to a date-palmed oasis. What’s there now reminds me of the first Star Wars movie, when Liam Neeson goes back to his planet, a few hundred thousand light years away from Earth, turns to his young student, Ewan McGregor, and proudly says, ‘The whole planet is a city.’ Bahrain is the same. Back then, all those years ago, the taxi-driver automatically took us straight from the ship, to an especially designated beach for Europeans and the Sheik. As soon as we sat down on the sand, an Arab in a full-length white gown came running up with a tray of tea, milk and sugar, and fruitcake.

A couple of days after leaving Mombasa the standard of our evening food suddenly took a marked turn for the better. We were invited to the captain’s cabin for dinner. Not only did we have quite a sumptuous meal, it was downed with a couple of bottles of delicious rose wine, probably the only alcohol on-board. It quickly became apparent, however, why this delectable change had come about. The Captain’s eye was wandering, and his eye was wandering in the direction of our tall blonde chaperone. She played the game very well. I think she’d had quite a lot of practice. Her timing was perfect. The meals got better and better, the rose wine flowed with ever greater quantities before we contentedly disembarked at Kuwait, without him having his wicked way.

Potentially, a big problem awaited us in Kuwait. Well two really. On docking, I asked the first officer when our car would be lifted off. He paused, he said, ‘We sometimes have a little problem here, but I think we’ll sort it out.’ That didn’t sound too ominous. He said, ‘go into the city and I think we’ll have it off by this evening.’ Even then, the city was beautifully laid out. Tall, elegant, gleaming, glass and marble buildings, way ahead of their time, to us country hicks anyway. One of the most noticeable features was the number of extravagantly planted-up roundabouts. The rich density of colour and exotic variety of plants took your breath away. At their pinnacle, they nearly all had the tallest, multi-nozzle water fountains I’d ever seen. Where there weren’t fountains there’d usually be a little group of gowned and head-scarfed Arabs, sitting cross-legged on the bright green grass, sipping tea.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.