The winners of the 2007 Independent on Sunday/ Bradt Travel Writing Competition have been announced. Douglas Schatz, Stanfords' managing director, chose unpublished writer Louise Heal's entry The Boatman as the overall winner. While deciding the judges were unaware as to who the authors were, and Douglas was unaware as to which authors had previously been published, meaning his decision is a signal to how much untapped talent there is out there.
Jonathan Lorie, director of Travellers' Tales, announced the winner of the unpublished category, giving the award to Christopher Walsh for Vietnam. Memphis. Other Points East.
Louise Heal, a past student with Travellers' Tales, wins a trip to Sri Lanka, while Christopher Walsh wins a place on the next Travellers' Tales course to Granada, with tuition from Chris Stewart, the funnyman behind Driving Over Lemons. The winning articles can be seen below and will be printed in the Independent on Sunday on 15 July 2007.
Meanwhile Brian Bold had his name pulled out of the hat for guessing correctly that Louise Heal's The Boatman would be the overall winner - £50 of Stanfords' vouchers are on their way to him.
The Boatman
by Louise Heal
The river was at the bottom of a long road. I walked downhill past the Orthodox Cathedral, the High School and the doctors’ surgeries. I followed the road all the way to its end, to the forecourt of “AVG Motors Ltd”. After that there was just the river.
A small wooden shelter stood by the bank and I sat down on the bench. The river flowed slowly from left to right and water lilies grew along the edges. A rope was tied to a palm tree and stretched across the river to another shelter framed by palm trees. Behind the trees were acres of paddy fields. Behind the fields were forests and hills whose tops vanished into grey clouds. A long blue train moved slowly across the fields.
I could hear the faint sounds of car horns in the town, but they were far away. Here was birdsong, running water and the occasional voice. A kingfisher flashed in front of my eyes and landed on a branch. A cow moo-ed in a field and the kingfisher dropped into the water before flying off again. I could not remember the last time I had been somewhere this quiet. It was a perfect Sunday afternoon.
An old man wearing an orange shirt and dark dhoti poled a wooden canoe along the opposite shore to the shelter. A young girl walked out from behind the shelter and climbed aboard. The old man put down his wooden pole and took hold of the rope. He pulled until the boat pointed towards me. Then he pulled hand over hand on the rope and they came across the river. The girl paid him and jumped out. The old man tied his boat up and sat down in the shelter next to me. He nodded in greeting.
I looked at him. He had a white moustache, a white beard with flecks of black and black hair with flecks of white. He sat cross-legged and the veins on his calves stood out. I could also see the veins on the backs of his hands. He was no more than 5’ 4” tall and his frame was tiny, with no evidence of body fat. At home, I would have estimated his age at 70, but in India it was harder to tell.
A small house stood upstream on the riverbank opposite, with a tall tree by its front door. A little girl in a white dress stood under the tree next to a large pile of laundry. A woman crouched in the water, scrubbing at a garment, and the soap suds floated away downstream.
Suddenly the wind came up and it began to rain hard. Gusts of wind swept down the river and blew the raindrops along the surface. Two thunderclaps sounded and the rain fell harder. The drops engulfed the water lilies until their leaves dipped underwater. Clouds descended over the forests and the sky was a uniform steel grey.
The woman took the little girl by the hand and they ran into the house. The pile of laundry remained under the tree. The old man stayed with me in the shelter. A young boy, holding a bag of books over his head, ran down the road and joined us.
Just as suddenly, the rain seemed to have stopped. I could see no drops on the river and the water lilies were still once more. But I looked towards the garage and saw that the rain was still falling, in a mist so fine that the droplets were barely visible.
Then the clouds lifted above the hills and a patch of blue sky appeared. The wind began to die down. The woman and little girl came out of the house and the woman went back to her laundry. The little girl stared at us across the river.
The old man untied the rope and went across the river with the young boy as passenger. The boy walked away down the riverbank and disappeared from view.
A man and boy walked up the river, chattering as they went. The old man was busy winding a turban onto his head, but waved at them in acknowledgement. When they boarded the boat, he pulled them across the river and came back to sit next to me.
The wind had now died down completely and the river flowed gently again, with the palm trees clearly reflected in the water. The kingfisher flew back and sat on the rope, casting a royal blue glow on the water beneath him.
The old man sat silently, waiting for his next passenger. I got up to leave and said goodbye to him. He smiled and raised his hand in farewell.
Douglas Schatz, the deciding judge, had this to say: The Boatman is a beautifully written piece about the comings and goings on an anonymous stretch of river in rural India. The coming and going of the locals who live by the river, of the monsoon rains that briefly lash it, and the eponymous boatman who ferries pedestrians across it. On the surface not much happens in the story, but that is really its point. The rhythm of its quiet observances evokes the timelessness of the peoples’ lives in this place and of the river that runs through it.
Vietnam. Memphis. Other Points East.
by Chris Walsh
If you’re on the late-night Memphis bus queue at the Dallas Greyhound terminal, the leery and weary staff are gonna pay you no never mind if you don’t get yourself, your luggage, and your punk attitude, up against that wall, mister, and wait your turn with the rest, to board for points north and east. Or so it was rumoured in the line.
Things in Texas are large. Boisterous. You sense that none of the meek inherits management of a cheap overnight transport service to Tennessee, and so you hush up now and crawl along with the chastened until they find you a coach seat, up close and personal with strangers.
For a bunch of intimate road hours with students, tourists, criminals, the bewildered, minors, the elderly, itinerant workers, and, if God caught something in his eye and turned away that week, the certifiable. A miscellany of the carless, clueless, and careless.
And Nguyen Thi Bui, wavering in the doorway.
Bui from Vietnam. Going through Dallas, Little Rock, and Memphis on her geriatric way home to Washington D.C., a family bosom to return to in time for an important festival, but struggling to make herself understood by a driver clearly ill at ease with her clipped foreign speech, crumpled ticket, and persistence. Too many variables for a nocturnal coachman.
She accepted my help in soothing the man at the wheel, and then the offer of the vacant seat beside me. I guessed that a slight senior was unlikely to wish me harm in the night and I would get the sleep I needed. After all, Memphis didn’t know I was coming to say hullo and I wanted to put my best foot forward.
Starting slowly, starting firmly, she got our journey underway as Dallas peeled off in the dark. The “thank you”s first; the “where are you from”s and the “what do you do”s right behind them, to go with the sandwiches offered at the end of a slender arm.
She liked America, she said, and, too, my idea of spending six months criss-crossing it by coach, by train. By choice. The grandmother in her had me promising sufficient bus stop caution, dietary attention, and phone calls to concerned family back waiting for news in the South Seas. The guy behind was less pre-occupied with my well-being and told us to shut up so he could sleep.
I couldn’t say for sure who leaned in first, or whether we had slowly leaned in together, over the hours of talking, but as Bui reached back into her memory of other journeys in exotic places, and softly murmured details of a startling and turbulent life as a student of Education, as a Buddhist philosopher, and as a refugee mother, our cheeks touched and neither of us was troubled to move the other away.
A survivor of physical and psychological torture in a Saigon prison and a Vietnamese country schoolhouse of the 1960s, she quietened somewhat as fidgety police dogs worked our bus in a random drug inspection during our brief pickup stop at Little Rock, Arkansas.
And, in her mother tongue, politely acknowledged a newly-boarding passenger who’d done something, was something, or had something just perceptible enough for Bui to recognize a countrywoman.
This countrywoman was to take her away across the aisle for the remaining hours of travel I didn’t share with anyone at all.
At Memphis I left the bus. Bui made me promise to call on her if I ever got to Washington, myself. If, too, I were to perhaps consider Vietnam as a place to visit some time then she would, she assured me, smoothe the path for a memorable stay.
Go there, she said, it’s different.
A gentle wave from a graceful frame, and she was gone.
Bui. Bui from Vietnam through Dallas. Little Rock. Memphis. Points east.
The photographs above, from the awards night, show left to right: Kate Simon, editor of the Independent on Sunday travel section, overall winner Louise Heal, Douglas Schatz (managing director of Stanfords), and Christopher Walsh, winner of the unpublished category, and Jonathan Lorie (director of Travellers' Tales).
Author: James Innes Williams
Date: 12 July 2007
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