I sat in the pool in Vietnam and enumerated to a friend all the seas I had swum in and why there was no need to add the South China Sea to the list. But it was just there, on the other side of the pool so eventually I did. I kept thinking how somewhere the Chinese were building reefs into islands so that they could prove that they owned all this. Why, it’s just sea?

The sea was very warm and very salty. Very shallow so I had to walk a fair way out and the water level was still not up to my waist. Beaches have never been a big deal. I grew up beside the Pacific Ocean and so there’s always been water. I went to Bondi a couple of times when I was a teenager but there were more interesting places to go and friends who had parties.

I grew up near Bondi so I’ve been body surfing in most of Sydney’s beaches. I’ve swum in the Coral Sea off Cairns and Noumea both. I don’t think I swam in the sea off Bali but I do remember having breakfast by it. And watching the sunset. That would be the Timor Sea.  I swam in the Gulf of Carpentaria in the aboriginal settlement near Nhulunbuy and didn’t encounter a crocodile.

In Israel I swam in the Mediterranean and Red Seas. I was in a boat on the English Channel but didn’t swim in it. Too cold. I went to Margate Beach in Kent with my uncle and it looked like Bondi except all the people were sitting facing away from the ocean. What’s the point of that? I don’t really care about swimming in oceans but I can spend hours looking at them. Amsterdam has lots of canals but the local pool made waves every day at 10am so we swam there. Besides the canals were dirty.

I haven’t swum in the Atlantic nor the Indian Ocean though I’ve seen the Australian side of it near Perth, mostly from the train as it rattled along the beach front on its way back to Perth from Fremantle. I have swum in the Pacific the other side, in Ixtapa in Mexico with my cousin. I’ve seen both sides of the Caribbean: the dismal oily beaches off Champoton, where the car broke down and I spent hours sitting at the beach front watching trucks go by, and the sunny tourist side at Tulum where the water was crystal clear and you could see the ruins on top of the cliff. We didn’t have swimming costumes so we stripped down as far as we dared and swam in our clothes. I found shallow caves under the cliff. We had no towels so we squelched around the ruins till we were dry enough to get back in the car. We spend the night on a futon in Playa del Carmen before too many tourists found it.

Later I saw lots of ocean in India but I swam mostly in hotel swimming pools. We stayed overnight in a boat in Kerala and took rowboats among the villages on islands, where everyone has a three-step bathroom in front of the house and women have to bath in their saris. I took another boat in a river in the Sundarbans near Calcutta but we didn’t reach the Bay of Bengal nor did we see any tigers, man eating or otherwise. I did see a river where they were tipping statues of Durga for the festival. I think it was the Hoogly, I know the Ganges is somewhere there but I suspect I didn’t see it.

I’ve also taken a boat in Halong Bay in Vietnam where the rocks look like teeth and you spend most of the day sailing along stony jawbones. They say these are the remains of a dragon which protected the Vietnamese from ancient Chinese conquerors but even back on land I noticed the mountains in the distance looked like giant rows of teeth. Dragon’s teeth?

I’ve been to China too, in a boat on the Yangtse where we sidled past the Yangtse Dam when it was new and they took us to a museum and tried to sell us modern pottery as if it were antique and someone had dug it up from ruins. “Chiang dynasty,” the tour guide kept repeating but I wasn’t fooled, pottery dug up in ruins isn’t pristine clean no matter how many times you wash it. A good thing this didn’t fool me, because pretty much everything else in China did. They really didn’t care much about fooling the tourists, they took us on rowboats around little Yangtse tributaries and pointed at rocks. “That one looks like a duck,” they said. I haven’t drunk that much, I thought, then I found out that they really could see a duck. If the rock looked enough like a duck they took it to Beijing and displayed it in the private garden in the Forbidden City for the royal family to enjoy. In this post-pandemic world I can’t go anywhere so I body surf in Broken Bay or swim in the local pool. Occasionally I go to Sydney and if it’s really hot, I swim in a pool there. Sometimes we go to an ocean beach and sometimes we swim in the bay but there’s water everywhere on the east coast of Australia, so it’s no big deal.