One More For The Raft Lovers

To most of us, people who put to sea on bundles of logs or papyrus stalks for long drift voyages across big oceans are clearly nuts, even though the stories they write after wards are interesting enough.

Latest saga is from Vital Alsar who was one of four who set out from Ecuador on a balsa raft in May 1970 and ended up in Mooloolaba, Queensland, in November the same year.

His book, La Balsa To Australia, tells the story of the 8,564 miles, longest-ever drift and the adventures that befell the party on their express ride to Australia, never stopping to dilly-dally at any of the islands on the way.

There is a sameness about these rafting accounts, beginning with the original Kon Tiki, then William Willis, de Bisschop and Heyerdahl again, in his Ra which wallowed across the Atlantic to show that Egyptians could have populated South America way back god knows when.

It is therefore difficult to see what La Balsa set out to prove that hadn’t

been proved before by the great dis comforts and adventures of other raft voyagers. Nonetheless, for arm chair sailors it makes an adequate i entertainment and as it was, in effect, Australia’s very own raft voyage (proving perhaps that aborigines could have drifted there from Middle America), it achieved a considerable amount of publicity in that country, at the time.

Particularly publicity about La Balsa’s cat, Minet, which survived the epic drift only to be taken into cus tody by Australia’s over-zealous quarantine officers with their usual malice aforethought. The fate which hung over Minet caused such a hulla baloo that there was a stay of execution at least long enough for the wife of the captain of a foreign ship then in Brisbane to offer a home.

Minet, who was quite a cat, there fore makes this book one for cat lovers as well as for vicarious voyag ers on balsa rafts. —Judy Tudor.

(La Balsa To Australia. By Vital

Alsar with Enrique Hank Lopez. Hodder p Stoughton, Warwick Lane, London, EC-ir, 4AN, recommended price, $7.50.)