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WEST WITH THE SUN by Stuart Cloete

WEST WITH THE SUN

By

Publisher: Doubleday

Anyone on the lookout for a freighter-cruise-round-the-world book would do well to road old Africa pro Stuart Cloete's easy-going, easily entertaining West With the Sun. Accompanied by wife Tiny, a nice Norwegian crew and affable fellow passengers, author Cloete went from New Orleans to New York via Panama, San Pedro, Manila, Hong Kong, Saigon, Bangkok, Singapore, Jacarta, Surabaya, Semarang, Port Swettenham, Kuala Lumpur, Penang, Galle, Assab, Suez and , covering a fun and fancy free Far Eastern route of 23,000 miles. And amidst diary jottings, personal memoirs, shipboard witticisms and infectious oohs and aahs, the reader gets a scenic splurge, a sparkling spectrum filled with pyramids and Ipoh's cave temples, a Chinese wedding and the Spanish Main, flying fish like silver finches, Aberdeen's floating sea-food restaurants, generations-old sampan squalor and a Pacific with the look of ""navy-blue moire silk"". Mr. Cloete even diagnoses the world's ills (Darwinism, Henry Fordism and Freudianism) and prescribes the cure (enough food, love, understanding and use of contraceptives). And he also appends some helpful tidbits re clothes, gadgets, gift-buying, medicines, expense breakdown and exchange rates. A chatty and companionable Cloete's tour; it could give Fielding a run for its Travellers' Checks.