We bought mountain bikes a couple of weeks ago and sometimes I sling my bike in the back of the car when Sue goes to a school and then cycle home. Today she dropped me in the middle of nowhere at 7.30am and I decided to go home on a route that took me via a river ferry. I cycled to the ferry and joined the queue of early morning workers. The tide was ebbing strongly and the ferry was making hard work of the crossing, it was pushed a long way down river before reaching our side and punching back upstream in the slack water by the bank.
On the ferry I started taking photos when the Captain gesticulated at me from the bridge. He looked very stern, but a deck hand motioned to me to go up to see him. So I climbed up some rusty iron handholds and joined him.
"Welcome" he beamed. Looking desperately around for a present his hand lighted on some sachets of instant coffee which he thrust at me.
"Drink!"
"Thank you." I said, dropping the sachets in my rucksack.
"You sixty?" (He sees my face drop). "Fifty?"
"Fifty-six." I say, smiling.
"You holiday?"
"No, my wife teaches in schools."
(He nods thoughtfully.) "Ah ... You teach?"
"No, I bicycle." We both chuckle.
"I seaman."
"I Doug."
"I travel Macao, Australia, all over. Now ferry."
"Ah, I see. Tide very strong."
"Yes, King tide." He says, frowning with concentration as he heads for the jetty on the opposite bank.
The bridge is like something from the "African Queen" with instruments held together with electrical tape and in one corner a gas stove with a wok and a chopping board next to it. We hit the piles next to the jetty with a thump then lurch up the hard like a landing craft being beached then grind to a stop.
"Thank you." I say, before going back down the handholds, nodding to the deckhand and wheeling my bicycle up the ramp. Back on the shore I wave to the Captain on the bridge. Before me lie miles of oil palm plantations.
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