Whenever anybody mentions fast boat my stomach always gets a little queasy and my mind travels back almost involuntarily to a ferry ride I once took from Penang in Malaysia to Medan in Sumatara. Now I have never been a fan of boats in general, I prefer to travel serenely across the water, but this fast boat is apptly named. It goes flat chat across the Melacca Strait, in a little under three hours, come wind, hail or shine, or perhaps more importantly gale force winds. It rides low in the water and the sitting area is actually below the water level. Tinted windows, which are always fogged over, make it hard to see anything but the sun reflecting off the water, and air-conditioning combined with all of the men on board smoking makes it hard to breathe. The port in Penang is on the peninsular side of the island so that day when we boarded we had no idea of what were we facing. It didn't take long to find out though. The wind was blowing a gale and the wind chop was probably about 4ft, breaking in all directions. Rather than slowing down the boat this only seemed to encourage the boat to go faster, which meant that the pitch and roll as we hit the chop was even more violent. After about 15 minutes everybody on the boat, from the little tackers to old grannys and all in between had hucked up their guts in to the plastic bags we all received when we boarded. New bags had to be handed out three more times during the trip as they were constantly being filled. The combination of the background sound of wretching, the smell of vomit in the air, and the sight of plastic bags filled with spew rolling around on the floor combined with the movement of the boat pushed me to the edge and I thought I was going to succumb and join my fellow chunderers. Howeve r I was distracted by the slowing of the boat, and the crew scambling around opening the side doors, never a good sign when you are surrounded by ocean with no land in sight. If you think Indonesian aviation is dangerous then let me just say that Indonesian marine transport makes planes in Indo look as safe as houses !! Somehow we finally made it, vomit and all, and I swoar I would never ride on a fast boat again.....until next time.
So there I was sitting on the fast boat again, fortunately the seas were calm, lost on my own world listening to music on my headphones trying to drown out the combination of engine noise and bad Indonesian karaoke, when a Van Damme movie appears on the TV screens. Now anybody who knows anything about action movies will tell you that Van Damme is in a class of his own. Somehow he has managed to make 20 or 30 movies in which basically the same thing happens, Van Damme gets challenged, then disillusioned, then a work out montage to get him back to peak fitness, and usually ending up with our man Jean kicking some arse, literally, and saving the day. As the noise of the boat was so loud I decided I would watch the movie without any sound to see if it made any difference, and the strange thing is, it didn't. I didn't need to hear any of the dialogue to understand who were the good guys, who were the bad guys and what was going on. The guy is a true genius. The added bonus was that the continuity errors were all the more apparent. (Van Damme went from no beard to full beard about 4 times, in no particular order)
The one thing I didn't quite understand was why if the movie was set in a Russian prison was everybody speaking English, including the fellow prisoners and the guards. Another one of those mysteries of the universe I guess.
No comments:
Post a Comment