LIFE IN THE SOUTH INDIAN OCEAN Part Three

Before I came here I was an independently-wealthy college dropout, just traveling around the world looking for a place to live. It got pretty tiresome after a while, and it so happened that the freighter I stowed away on in Reunion ended up in Port Aux Francais as one of its stops. I have to tell you, stowing away with a noisy cockatiel, a crippled dog and a cat with leprosy was not easy.

I found that the ship's morgue was an ideal hiding spot. I turned off the refrigeration, climbed in with my pets, and we stayed on our backs on a slab in a drawer for what must have been a couple of weeks, hoping nobody on the ship would die (necessitating actual use of the morgue by the ship's crew).

Night raids on the kitchen provided us with food and water here and there, but where I ran into trouble was with the smell from me and the animals. I had to wait until night to take all the poop up top and toss it over the edge without being seen, and I had to steal towels from the ship's laundry to soak up all the urine (at least with the towels I could just put them back in the dirty laundry when I was done cleaning). Thomas created no such problems of course, given his condition, but it seems like Charley and I were eliminating constantly.

The problem with Tweety was that he kept trying to make noise. I kept him inside my knapsack during most of our ordeal, and that helped a little. I finally ended up devising a gag which I made from a shoelace. I wrapped it around his beak a couple of times, then tied it tightly in the back, behind his head, only removing it twice a day so he could eat and drink. He didn't like the fact that I was only offering him raw ingredients like wheat flour, sugar and raw meat, but he made do, just as Charley. Thomas and I were doing.

It felt good to stretch our legs and get off that boat. We made a night-time exit, with nobody noticing us. As I recall, it was very cold and windy when we made our landfall. We headed for what looked like a local activity hub. There was some loud music in one small building, and it looked like something was going on in there, so we went in. Being outsiders in such an isolated end of the world, we were noticed immediately, and regretfully we smelled so bad that the people, mostly researchers and crew members of the ships in port, were wrinkling their noses, anxious for us to leave.

I asked the person who seemed to be the bartender where there was available housing and he gave me a key to what he said was the summer housing (you can see a picture of it in one of my earlier posts). It wasn't a very long walk to the housing, which was basically a kind of set of glorified tin shacks. It was fine with me, because we were practically frozen. I took a hot shower, bathed Thomas and Charley, and let Tweety fly around the room. How good it felt!

After a couple of days hanging out there, I inquired about purchasing a boat and finding a place to live. I was told there were abandoned buildings in and around Port Jeanne d'Arc, 25 miles or so across the bay, and it didn't really matter to anbody in Kerguelen if I wanted to try and live out that way. There was a guy selling his fishing boat in Port Aux Francais, so I went ahead and bought it from him. He was nice enough to show me how to operate it correctly. I took notes and I learned quickly. A couple of days later I was tramping around in the barren, windy wilds of Joan of Arc Peninsula with my menagerie, checking out the occasional abandoned shack for living space. It didn't take long to settle on the cabin I included a picture of in one of my previous posts.

More on my Kerguelen beginnings later! Time to take Charley out again, he is still vomiting quite a bit.