Slow Boats to China
For readers who love to travel under unusual and challenging circumstances, Young's book Slow Boats To China might be just the thing. His sea voyage from Piraeus, Greece to Canton, China, took seven months on twenty-three different boats, few of which were prepared for passengers.
Although Gavin Young had worked as a foreign correspondent for the newspaper Observer, covering wars and revolutions around the world in the 1960s, he had never satisfied a childhood desire of "running away to the sea". He wanted to experience what became "traveler's roulette", to sail on any boat so long as it went in the right direction.
Travel agents in London were of no help to him, seeing that he was not a tourist nor wanted to fly from one place to another. In fact, during his voyage he relied more on shipping agents for passage on their boats. And their interest was mainly cargo, now that most travelers flew to their destinations.
The only other passengers he met in the first part of his journey were poor Turks, Arabs or Egyptians who were searching for work in other countries, but couldn't afford to fly to them. Large groups would sack out on deck and share what food they had brought along. Their presence was something the ships' captains didn't relish, yet accepted it as a social responsibility.
At several points Young had to fly or travel by rail to reach a seaport where he could book passage. He was willing to sail on anything from a large freighter to a small junk. In the Philippines he was a passenger on a "kumpit". But the small open boat was stopped by poor Moro pirates (enemies of then-President Marcos of the Philippines). Young, however, discouraged them from robbery by taking Polaroid photos of all the men and then giving each the prints.
His last experience having to do with ethnic conflicts was as a guest on a patrol boat out of Hong Kong which was searching for illegal Chinese immigrants from the mainland.
The main drawback to Young's Slow Boats To China is that it was published in 1981, before the overthrow of Marcos, and before the return of Hong Kong to the Chinese. However, it is written so as to give a genuine appreciation for the many struggles people face in the poorer Asian countries, then and now.