Raphael Wilkins - Accidental Traveller

I shelter from a tropical downpour: a middle-aged man on my own, a long way from home. The rhythm of beating rain slows, then stops as if someone has turned off the tap. Weak sunlight illuminates Raffles statue. The harbour is edged with a row of tethered, rocking, rain-bespattered boats of similar local design. On either side of their prows they are painted with a black and white eye, inside a green rhombus edged with red and white. They each bear a number and are offering trips. Memories of boyhood with Grandpa: no seaside holiday complete without a boat ride. Why not? I am out of sight of anyone who might tell me not to. Today I am a tourist. In response to a hailed invitation from Number SC108F, I step along a slender, wet wooden jetty and down into the vessel.

It is a broad clinker-built motorboat with an open well, covered with a canopy whose edges are flapping. I walk down the port side to the passenger area aft, where there are wooden slatted seats with backs, facing forward. Amidships is a wooden construction like a crate on which there is a sound system. The gangway to the starboard side of this is closed off with more slats, to create a separate staff area forward. The canopy rests on curved wooden rafters, from which hang orange-shaded Chinese lanterns. On the first leg of the trip, across the harbour towards a multi-colour patchwork of eating-places lining the other shore, I am the only passenger. A few more board from a wooden jetty, the twin of the one I had used.

The tour begins by heading upstream into the city, past moored craft and under bridges gaily decorated, perhaps for a festival. Various sights are pointed out by the boatman through a scratchy loudspeaker. Then back downstream to the main harbour area, heading towards the sea. Sights include the old post-office, skyscrapers, a few traces of the old town which survived its transformation. A metal sculpture depicts a group of children leaping gleefully from the pavement into the water. The boat chugs out of the mouth of the harbour. Now bright sun lights up the lion statue, of white stone with a jet of water pouring from its mouth, and the boat turns to offer the full panorama of the waterfront prospect. Impressive enough: a prospect of wealth, enterprise and achievement, from central business district, to Ferris wheel and multi-coloured stadium, and forests of dock cranes beyond, but actually it is the water which takes my breath away. Limpid, silky, tropical, multi-coloured: turquoise, lilac, indigo and amber illuminated, glittering. Startled, I remember a dream.

In my young adulthood I was going nowhere in real life, and perhaps as compensation, I dreamt of embarking on exciting expeditions, only to find that at a vital checkpoint I lacked ticket, passport or some other essential. In one such dream, by some unspecified reckless, illicit act, I found myself on a ship in tropical waters, as dawn broke. From a porthole I gorged my eyes on calm tropical sea, thinking that it was worth whatever recompense would be exacted for this experience. The water was bright, vivid and exquisitely coloured: my dreaming self knew nothing from real life on which to base this image, only a yearning imagination. That dream never recurred, but thirty years later as the boat turned round, up from the depths that imagined image came to call snap to its real counterpart. The clean-edged skyscrapers of Singapore rose proudly, floating on their ripplely-edged reflections, and a voice in my head said, So, you see, youve made it at last.

It is springtime in Bloomsbury in the year 2007. Bloomsbury has beneficial qualities as a work-place. Just as mineral-infused spa water aids the joints, so a century and a half of literary, artistic and philosophical conversations have infused the fabric of the buildings, and as I walk around, this essence wafts out and aids my mind. I havent noticed any effect yet, but these things take time.

I am an educationist: a great field to work in because you avoid the bother of having to leave school, enter adult life and find a real job. You just stay on, but with enhanced status as a sort of senior prefect with privileges, such as being allowed to leave the school site and not having to take part in PE.

From my Bloomsbury base, I work mainly in London. I dont get to travel abroad as part of my work. It is a known fact that in order to be allowed to do international consultancy, you must already have a track record of international consultancy. How those in the business got their first assignment is something polite people dont ask about. I do actually do a kind of international work, because foreign delegations come here and I talk to them. I have been doing that recently: a group from India, organised by the British Council. They are linked with a similar group in England.

I am not an afternoon person. I wonder if I might be more productive going out to a tea-room. Or perhaps have an early finish in order (I only partially convince myself) to get a better working evening. The phone rings. I rouse myself enough to remember my name and to show an interest if someone wants to buy something.

It is Susie from the British Council, a very nice young woman. She is thanking me for contributing to the seminar. How polite to take the trouble to make a thank-you call! Perhaps she writes letters after Christmas. So now youve been part of the UK end, would you like to see the India end of the project? This wakes me up: did I hear that correctly? I burble and stammer in an attempt to seek clarification. Is this a hypothetical question about my likes, or a proposition? And if the latter: what, why, how, when and with whose money? Calmly Susie invites me to speak at a seminar in Delhi, at British Council expense, and offers to set up some school visiting to make the trip worthwhile, and to pay a daily allowance, and to make all the arrangements, and to have me escorted everywhere, and make it all OK. My head reels, my palms sweat and I express my grateful acceptance.

Putting down the phone, I, for whom an afternoon in Calais would be an enormous scary adventure, absorb how my life has been suddenly and unexpectedly transformed. I am going to India! This is what it must be like to be told you have won the lottery. Nothing will be the same again. Who can I tell? I spend the next half-hour wandering around in a daze, finding people to whom I can announce excitedly, I am going to India! Soon the daunting practicalities take centre stage: travel clinic, luggage, camera, half a chemists shop. Old India hands advise me. Meanwhile Susie organises everything to do with the visa and flights, which is just as well as I last flew before the era of electronic tickets.

I love Stanfords, the map and guide-book shop in Covent Garden for real travellers. Now I had legitimate business loitering there, among grizzled yachtsmen buying nautical charts, and people who look as if they have hitch-hiked from Vladivostock and are now browsing large scale maps of Greenland. I buy a guidebook to India, and a map of Delhi and place them proudly on the counter: yes look at me, I need these, because I am going to India.

After landing, headachy, leg-achy, I disembarked, following the crowds like a lost soul, scared of going the wrong way, getting lost in the terminal or doing something wrong. I wanted to get to the safe space of a hotel room. It was good to know that the British Council would be meeting me. I visualised a gentleman in a morning suit with a white carnation, a strip of red carpet perhaps, and a team of people to care for my luggage and comforts. Through immigration at last, and with great relief reunited with my suitcase, I bought some rupees and approached the exit. I was not yet used to Asian airports in which people meeting an arrival are not allowed inside, so I was beginning to get anxious. Then I saw a recognisable approximation of my name on a square of cardboard held by a smiling gentleman: the driver sent by the hotel.