Ticket to Ride

By Robert Bowman

In this second volume of memoirs, wistfully entitled Ticket to Ride, Robert Bowman again draws on events and experiences from his interesting international legal and commercial consultancy career, which has spanned the last four decades.

In so doing, he inexorably draws the reader into the highs and lows of working internationally at the sharp endwhere nothing is quite what it seems and every day throws up new challenges. In this volume of Dispatches from the Coal Face of Life, the reader relives the poignancy of the early and sudden death of Beatle John Lennon in New York city, the raw excitement and deadly confusion of a live shoot-out in Downtown New Orleans, a visit to the distant River Kwai on the Thai/Burmese border before the days of package tours take the traveler there, and a desolate trip to the Delta region of Nigeria.

In this new splendidly entertaining volume, the reader climbs Diamond Head above Honolulu and travels on the famous Blue Train across the Karoo from Johannesburg to Cape Town and then goes across the sea to meet the ghost of Nelson Mandela on Robben Island before shooting the rapids and climbing a volcano in the southern Philippines, and then returning in triumph through the dramatic snowy scenery of Glacier National Park and the Rockies on Canadian Pacific 1090.

In this unique book, the reader gets to sample another unforgettable walk on the wild side of life. Grab it and taste it while you can, before it melts away into the distant blue yonder.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Dec 11, 2017
• ISBN: 9781546209942

Book preview

2017 Robert Bowman. All rights reserved.

Robert Bowman has asserted his right under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.

This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the Publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than in which it is published and without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by AuthorHouse 12/08/2017

ISBN: 978-1-5462-0992-8 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-5462-0993-5 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-5462-0994-2 (e)

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

CONTENTS

Remember…………

1   Pearl

2   Ticket to Ride

3   New Orleans’ Sunday, Bloody Sunday

4   Up To The River Kwai……..but why?

5   The Fisherman

6   Nine to Five Man

7   Bali Hi, Bally Bike

8   Autumn Leaves

9   For Whom The Bells Toll

10   Island in the Sun

11   Jungle Bells

12   Coming Home

13   Desert Song

14   Girl

15   Trans Karoo Blue

16   Of Diamonds and Pearls

17   ‘Please Don’t Shoot the Rapids —

Climb the Volcano!’

18   That Was The Trip That Was

19   Canadian Pacific 1090

20   Requiem

Remember…………

For Bob and Rita…….and Bobbitino, with all my love……….

And this one, of course, is also for my old Dubai friends David and Fila and Arthur and Irene- who were there at the original conception ... and were there to witness the eventual birth.

And for all those- maybe most of us- who know, at some time or other, what it is like to travel hopefully and finally arrive .…… and for all those who stay at home, whether on the prairie or in the village, for this is but a small part of the world that awaits you.

Many thanks again to Janine for her graphics, Derek for all his computer wizardry and Chris Martin in Alberta, Canada and RHP, New York for kind permission to use their photographs.

‘The first condition of right thought is right sensation – the first condition of understanding a foreign country is to smell it……….’

T.S.Eliot ‘Rudyard Kipling’

The Author

Robert Bowman is, like Steven Spielberg, firmly in the first wave of the Baby Boomers and has the scars, mentally and physically, to tell the tale.

As a British International lawyer he has, as he wryly says, toiled at the ‘Coal Face of Life’ during the course of a remarkable international career that has spanned 4 decades and 5 continents.

Having passed his Law Finals with Distinctions, he was originally based in the City of London but was then head-hunted to Hong Kong and went on to be based in Greece, Monte Carlo and Dubai. During the course of his interesting career he has travelled extensively for his Clients….and sometimes even for himself. During these highly active and often dangerous years, he has invariably had close encounters of the wrong kind with an extremely varied and eclectic cast of characters in ‘interesting’ situations.

His first volume of memoirs Wicked To Fly was an immediate success and this is his long awaited second volume Ticket To Ride, which he has just finished in a valiant effort to stem the inexhaustible cries for more. He anticipates writing a third volume in due course, tentatively entitled Stick It To Survive, which might finally still the pent-up and dangerous demand.

Over the years, he has written numerous articles, lyrics, scripts and novels, is a past winner of a London Sunday Telegraph Travel Writing Award and is already the author of a best-selling travel book on Greece.

He still runs his own International Consultancy dealing with legal, commercial and investment matters. When he is not travelling on cases for his numerous Clients, he tends to divide his time between the United States and an island in the Mediterranean Sea.

Books by the same author

Short Story Collection: Targets Full of Feathers

Ticket To Ride

Photographic contents:

1. John Lennon in New York City, December 8th 1980

2. Downtown New Orleans

3. The besieged Hotel in Downtown, New Orleans

4. NOPD Police cars block nearby Canal Street

5. Pedestrians take cover as the gun battle breaks out

6. The real Bridge over the River Kwai

7. Across the River Kwai bridge

8. Fishing Boats in the Greek islands

9. A Fisherman at Work

10. A Balinese Temple

11. A Balinese Dancer

12. Robben island, off Cape Town, South Africa

13. Inside Robben Island jail

14. Welcome to Las Vegas, Nevada

15. Downtown Las Vegas

16. Giraffes in the Karoo, South Africa

17. Cape Town, South Africa

18. Downtown Honolulu and Diamond Head,Hawaii

19. USS Arizona, Pearl Harbour

20. The Rice Terraces, the Phillipines

21. The Rockies, Alberta, Canada

22. The Rockies, near Banff, Alberta,Canada

23. Canadian Pacific transiting the Rockies

24. Sunset at Cape Sounion, Greece

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The Seventies I suspect for most of us – especially for my own post-war so-called ‘Baby Boomer’ generation – was a strange decade. The years 1971 to 1980, far from being a decade of Hope following the turbulent Sixties saw Peace Rallies, war in Vietnam and Cambodia, Three Popes, Four American Presidents (two elected, one appointed and one President-elect) and also, unbelievably, Four British Prime Ministers (three elected, one appointed).

That was surely enough ‘Change’ to satisfy even the most bored.

It was a fateful decade that saw the first American President in its History to be actually hounded out of office before being justifiably impeached (and to be called ‘a crook’), the first ever non-elected President, the first to actively draw on his knowledge of peanut farming to deal with then novel problem of the release of American hostages (and who also bothered to consult his 9 year old daughter about Nuclear Proliferation) and the first divorced, ex-Hollywood actor riding into The White House. The World, let alone the DC Belt Way, had never seen or experienced anything like it before. It was a strange 10 years alright. No wonder some claimed to have seen Armaggedon coming and the Apocalypse just over the troubled horizon.

In 1970, the Beatles were singing ‘Let It Be’ and then a year later giving the legal nod to The High Court in London to let it not be. They went off in their separate creative ways to decidedly mixed results but those that ‘understood’ could not really blame them as artists wanting to break their chains and try to progress. But whilst the beginning of that decade saw them acrimoniously splitting up, by the end their Life had come almost full circle and they were together again – if only in their united grief for the early death of their charismatic founder John Winston Lennon. The man who had been telling everyone to Give Peace A Chance at the beginning of the decade had suffered the ultimate Sixties fate at the end…gunned down in America by the usual deranged man. How ironic that he was fated to suffer the same death as befell the Kennedys and Martin Luther King in the previous decade.

Some of the pieces in this second volume of memoirs were written over that troubled decade and the remainder in the decades since. The Seventies to me,personally, was always The Challenge decade, during which I successfully qualified as a lawyer and eventually saw me break ‘free’ of my own ‘chains’ and use my profession to take me out to some of the remote and stranger parts of the world.

In retrospect, the Seventies was the start of an international career that would inexorably transport me on my very own Ticket to Ride into the Eighties, Nineties and through The Noughties.

This book then is ‘free-ranging’. It is a book, I would like to think, which is without defined established frontiers – un livre sans frontières. I hope you can humbly accept it as your own Ticket to Ride….to different parts of our wonderful world, to see and breathe in places and live Life to experience different emotions. It is a ride on which you will meet strangers and, maybe, in places re-meet old friends. I hope the images and people that live within these pages give you as much pleasure on your ride as they surely gave me on mine.

Remember…………

Darling - sit and read these in the sun

and remember all the times of great fun

we had together upon a distant foreign shore

when feelings were respected, not ignored.

Sit and read these, darling, in the night

and remember there was n’ere a fight,

for didn’t we live and think in perfect harmony –

feeling both mentally and physically free?

Darling,please sit and read these in the dawn

when colours splash the sky and there’s no yawn

because words will always mean something to me

and, from the way you think, I know you agree.

Remember when you sit and read these, honey,

of all the good things that Life can bring…..

For everything, my love, was and is for real

whether together – or apart – we can still feel.

And when you have sat and read these

think of me as I talk softly to you on the breeze -

Always Remember and never forget these times

For they are part of the love for you, I will always find.

Pearl

Oh, white cultured Pearl set amidst yellow, desert wastes…..

Seen from Space, it’s hard to see the dangers you may face…..

The dappled blue and dimpled green, dot and decorate the beautiful land,

Never, ever, would your enormous energy be thought bland.

For centuries, noble peoples have lived along your noble creek…..

Tending their camels and boats, new daily commerce they seek…..

These proud people lived a good and God-fearing life…..

They never feared Tomorrow….or what it would be like…..

Be brave, oh noble desert people gathered in your majlis’ below…..

Enjoy Life’s gifts and all that Almighty Alah may graciously bestow…..

Shed no tears or worries for the years ahead, for if you did but know…..

All your ardent Hopes and Dreams will only grow…..

Stiffen your sinews, oh proud and noble tribal race…..

Turn to face the sun and let its beauty bathe your face…..

Stand up and be strong and brave beneath the harsh rays…..

For the Future is yours, oh blessed land, where the palms gently sway.

Any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind;

And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.

Meditation XVII

John Donne (1572- 1631)

Ticket to Ride

I heard it first in Europe on the English news on Radio Tokyo.

Why, I shall never know because I have never found or listened to that particular radio station again. Voice of America took it up and later it was confirmed to me on the reliable BBC World Service. When I heard the report there was then no room for any further doubt or misgivings over a rogue report. It had to be true.

The report was brutal in its simplicity. ‘Ex-Beatle John Lennon was shot dead in New York City last night.’

A simple straight sentence. But still very hard to comprehend at first. Very hard to take in after all these years…….

But I am running late for a business meeting in downtown Athens. It is cold, unusually cold for early December. There are no taxis about so I have no alternative than to join the locals on the bus. That normally simple journey turned into one of the most memorable bus journeys I had ever taken in my life. When I eventually got off in the terminus in Athens I had seen and felt at first-hand what John Lennon’s death had meant. Nothing that was said or written in the world’s media in the following days and months communicated the actual feeling of loss that I experienced with others on that bus on that cold winter morning.

That night I sat down and wrote ‘Ticket to Ride’ to remember it. It was published a month later.

I took a ride on a bus today. Nothing special in that you might say, just the kind of journey thousands of people take every morning all over the world……except by the time this particular bus journey was over I was a little sadder and, maybe, just a little wiser.

Not unusually for this December morning in Greece, the sun was shining out of a blue sky but the biting cold wind that had bought snow to the Parnassus overnight still whipped the exposed skin with a vengeance. Not surprisingly, all the taxis seemed to have been hired that morning so I joined the queue for the bus to Athens.

The single-decker bus was late. And when it eventually did arrive, the mood of the locals wasn’t helped by the extravagant stop in a swirl of dust and the smile on the face of the young, moustached driver. We all boarded – a mixed gaggle of teenagers, young housewives, working men and old ladies in black plus a few foreigners – paid our fares and settled down for the trip into the city that usually took an hour.

Maybe it was the cold weather or because of their own worries but the passengers this morning did not appear to be chatting with their usual exuberance. It wasn’t surprising really, the newspapers some of them were reading were not that full of cheerful news, considering Christmas was just round the corner. Just gloomy reports of more cold weather to come, strikes in Athens, Soviet troop movements on the Polish border and a small Stop Press report of the unexpected death of a 40 year old musician in far off New York. It wasn’t surprising really that most of the passengers just contented themselves with staring out at the passing scenery.

I suppose no one really knew why the driver did it – least of all, perhaps, himself. Maybe he felt the leaden atmosphere and wanted to liven everyone up or maybe he just wanted some company, who knows? Either way, after a short while, the young driver turned on the transistor radio he had hanging discreetly by his seat. The heavy blast of rock music that suddenly bounced around the inside of the bus seemed to satisfy him and brought a grin to his and a few of his passenger’s faces. One or two of the old ladies in black tutted and gave him a sharp look of admonishment. He took the hint, shrugged and turned down the volume and the bus continued on its way to the subdued but steady accompaniment of some rock band.

It wasn’t too long afterwards that the music suddenly changed. Slowly and surely the chatter and mood on the bus changed. It was quite an extraordinary and eerie feeling to sit there and hear all human activity ‘die’ around you, just leaving the grinding of the gears to play to the background of the ‘old’ music that was now coming out of the driver’s radio. But it wasn’t just any ‘old’ music that those passengers were now gradually beginning to listen to one by one…it was familiar music a lot of them had grown up with, music they had literally ‘lived’ with, courted with, partied with. It was music the older ones amongst them had originally dismissed out of hand on first hearing but had then grown to like, music the younger ones present had heard before and respected even though,