The story...
Girvin takes us to September, 1974. Having just turned 17 years old, Girvin found himself at the other side of the world, in the middle of a war zone.
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Girvin wrote...
After all the excitement of travelling to Vietnam and seeing the world as a 17 year old from Newtownabbey, the time came to go home. The telegram came through that we were finishing off in Japan in a port called Kagashima. We got the train to Tokyo where we were to spend the night in a hotel and go home via Anchorage, Copenhagen London and finally Belfast, the names just rolled of the tongue. The hotel we got booked into in Tokyo was called the Takwana Prince Hotel.
There were four of us daft lads from the UK and the luxury that greeted us when we arrived was out of this world. I had a room of my own with electric curtains; we would have been lucky to have curtains at home never mind electric ones.
We headed down nervously at tea time and had Kobe beef steak which cost £50.00 each (and that was in 1974). It was so good we had it again for breakfast before we left.
The bill for the four of us for 24 hrs was £1725 and for years after we still thought the company would ask us for the money. It was a perfect end to a fantastic adventure. We and no-one at home could even have comprehended that there was life after Portrush and Barrys…
Girvin sailed on the Anco Sovereign. for a picture of the ship.
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