Navigating the Downsides

I love travelling. I have gone from a child wistfully staring at a globe thinking “When I grow up I shall go there”, to an adult snatching every opportunity to venture somewhere new. Never having had a gap year, I feel I’ve now cobbled one together in bitesize chunks, briefly studying in Montreal, working in Singapore and India, exhibiting in Washington D.C. and Hong Kong, attending a conference in Salzburg, and unexpectedly traversing New England on the Megabus when an Icelandic volcanic eruption prevented me from going home. Trains have taken me from London to Barcelona, Chicago to Dallas, and right up to the Burmese border. I’ve eaten durian in Malaysia, learned of the death of Michael Jackson from a Paris hotel room, and watched Andy Murray win Wimbledon from an Irish bar in Ho Chi Minh City. I’ve even ticked Liechtenstein off my list. And yet there are still things that make travelling annoying. Some of these, in no particular order, are:

Air Travel
I have a love-hate relationship with air travel. On the one hand, I love long-haul flights. They are effectively enforced relaxation – a rare period when all I can do is sit back and watch films and read, knowing that at regular intervals someone will come and feed me and offer me and offer me unlimited alcohol and caffeine. Bliss. At the same time, I find much of the rigmarole that surrounds air travel to be self-important and unnecessarily frosty. Customers who have paid not inconsiderable sums to be deposited from one bit of the globe to another in a pressurized tin can with wings are treated with suspicion and often outright hostility by supercilious staff committed to ensuring that it won’t be on their watch that someone successfully hijacks a plane with a pair of nail clippers or an oversized tube of toothpaste. I once had a cake confiscated from me at Guernsey airport and was given no explanation by the stony-faced woman, who coldly told me they took “threats to national security very seriously” when I asked if there’d been a recent surge in cake-based terrorism. You can all rest assured that after trips to almost 20 countries in 5 years, my bags, shoes and body are all well-checked and deemed terror-free. Conversely, the safety of train travellers is clearly not given anywhere near as much weight, as they waltz onto platforms happily scanner-free the world over, for local, national and international journeys. Makes you shudder when you think of all the nail clippers and cake they’re potentially carrying.

Sign at Hong Kong Airport

Immigration
As an immigration adviser I’m always intrigued by other countries’ immigration systems, and generally I’m pleasantly surprised. In fact, I’ve regularly queued longer simply to get back into my own country, due to a lack of staff at the desks, than to enter supposedly hostile countries for which I’ve needed to wade through a rainforest of paperwork to obtain the correct visa. Probably the friendliest and easiest passport control I’ve ever encountered was in Vietnam, whereas the one place I’ve had problems was the US, where I was taken off and questioned on my reasons for being there. I was staying with a friend in Indiana then travelling to Texas to stay with another friend before returning to the UK. Seemingly knowing two Americans out of a population of 300 million was highly implausible, and I was quizzed on where I’d met them, how long I’d known them, and what they were doing before I was allowed to leave. I was eventually let in not on account of my story (they found my plans to travel by train from Chicago to Dallas highly suspect) but the fact that the exchange rate at the time meant that my salary sounded pretty good when converted into dollars. I’ve consoled myself with the fact that this is the country whose landing card asks: “Have you ever been involved in espionage, or sabotage, or terrorist activities, or genocide, or between 1933-1945 were you involved in any way in persecutions associated with Nazi Germany?” I wonder how many people say yes?

Toilets
Foreign toilets are the object of seemingly endless inappropriate over-dinner conversation among seasoned travellers, who seem compelled to tell you in minute detail exactly what was going on with their bowels during each lavatorial encounter. But unfamiliar bathroom facilities are a cause for concern if you don’t know what to expect, or aren’t sure of the etiquette. Visiting universities overseas, I was amused by pictures showing students how to use a western-style toilet (often a picture of someone standing on the seat, with a huge line through it). Similarly, I found squat toilets took a bit of getting used to, and were a good impromptu leg muscle workout in the process. Incidentally, the worst experience I ever had wasn’t anywhere in Asia or North Africa, but in a pub in Paris – I went into what looked to be the only toilet but was driven out immediately by the overpowering small of ammonia and filth around the hole in the floor I was supposed to use, which included more than one used condom. “Est-ce-qu’il y a une autre toilette pour les femmes?” I asked, hoping my best schoolgirl French would elicit some sympathy. “No,” he smirked, in English. “Is mixed.”

Local etiquette
As if toilet etiquette wasn’t enough of a worry, I find myself constantly at a loss over things that come as second nature at home, I find myself in constant puzzlement when it comes to things like tipping or ordering at a bar. If someone were to produce a guidebook that simply listed every country in the world and what to do about each of these things they’d probably make millions. In New York I was chased down the street by an angry waiter who ordered me back in to pay a bigger tip. When I tried to politely stand my ground, apologetically saying “but we waited a long time and I didn’t think the service was very good”, he replied, “you don’t get to say if the service is good. In this country, we pay tips!” I’m ashamed to say I paid.

Local wildlife
While so often a thing of wonder (I fell in love with the small and pensive-looking lizards that seemed ever-present as I explored South East Asia), even familiar creatures can, in unfamiliar surroundings, be a shock to the system. In Hong Kong kamikaze flying cockroaches spent the whole of my first night decapitating themselves on my wall fan. In Morocco, a swarm of wasps tried to share our breakfast. And in Australia, as far as I can make out, most of the local wildlife can kill you.

Local delicacies
In my experience, these invariably contain offal. In fact, I think calling something a local delicacy is simply a cunning way to persuade tourists to eat offal. The problem is, as a tourist, you do often feel compelled to try something new. If it’s a durian fruit, don’t. I can’t comprehend what possessed the first person to take something that looks like a dead deep-sea creature and smells like a sewer (the scent can floor a man at 50 paces – it’s so pungent they’re not allowed on aeroplanes) and think “ooh, I wonder what that tastes like?” I’ll tell you: horrible. Utterly, stomach-churningly awful. I know there are some people who like it – it seems similar to marmite in regards to the strong reactions people have to it – but I think if I so much as see one again it will induce a sort of Pavlovian vomit. Other local offerings are just unfortunately named, and thus pleasing to the immature tourist (see below). Who couldn’t resit a Plop or Super Dickmann’s chocolate?

Tours
I’ve blogged several times about organised tours. I want to point out I’m not a travel snob (see below), and have used organised trips for ease on a few occasions. They’re extremely useful for visiting places you couldn’t/wouldn’t dare visit on your own steam – for example, I’d never have rented a car and ventured into the Atlas Mountains alone, and in fact I was both surprised and relieved when our convoy of tour jeeps made it unscathed. At the same time, though, there are also drawbacks to organised tours. 1) You’re tied to someone else’s schedule. On a visit to Israel, the queues at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre were simply too long to actually see and touch the supposed site of Christ’s crucifixion: before we’d even got to the front our guide was zipping up and down the line snapping “chop chop, back on bus, back on bus”. 2.) You can’t venture too far from the group: on a couple of tours I’ve taken I’ve looked longingly at a shop we’ve whipped past en route to a far less appealing destination, usually a shop where we’ve been cajoled into spending money on things we don’t really want (I’m the proud owner of a leather handbag from Morocco whose bright green dye ruined a perfectly good t-shirt during a rain shower, and a creepy olive-wood statue of the Virgin Mary with two eyes but no mouth.) 3.) “Meet the locals”: on several occasions (again, the subjects of other blogs) we’ve been despatched to meet some “genuine” locals in their “genuine” surroundings. On such tours the genuine locals generally break into some sort of spontaneous dance routine, for which just enough chairs have fortuitously been left out. I assume that when said locals visit the UK we all spontaneously break into perfectly-choreographed morris dances while singing sea shanties. I really hope so, or we’d be letting the side down.

The locals break into a spontaneous dance routine, apparently in front of some decapitated horses

Touts
Even if you don’t book onto an official tour, there’s always someone trying to persuade you to take an unofficial one. Some places – Marrakech in particular – have been almost ruined by the constant hassle from people trying to sell your things or become your unauthorized tour guide. That said, I did rather warm to the chap in Essaouira who tried to persuade us to buy a camel, thus: “You want camel? I sell you camel? No? You not want camel? You want hash cake?” That’s quite a diverse business model.

You want camel?

Other British tourists
British tourists can invariably found pissing in inappropriate places, fighting or simply shouting inane English sentences (usually involving the words “TWO. BEERS. PLEASE.”) slowly at unimpressed locals. I have constantly been embarrassed by my fellow countrymen abroad. In Prague we came across what was presumably a stag do, who stumbled out of an Irish bar in an array of women’s clothing then proceeded to have what can only be described as a “widdle-off” in the street. (The man in the blonde wig won, I seem to recall, from the enthusiastic cheering of his companions.) Worse, though, is the attitude that many British tourists seem to bring with them when travelling. In a lovely boutique hotel in Barcelona we came across the most unappetizing “English Breakfast” I have ever seen, apparently as a result of complaints on Trip Adviser that this hotel in Catalonia had the audacity not to provide one. It was as if the chef had had an English breakfast described to him without ever having seen or eaten one, with fried Serrano ham swimming in fat and what looked like congealing home-made baked beans. I went on a French rover cruise a couple of Christmases ago and there was an English tour group on the boat who seemed incensed at the impudence of the crew in speaking only French. Every time an announcement was made in French the English guide would stand up with much ceremony and repeat it louder than was really necessary in English, before whisking them off to do their own thing, lest they may contaminated by all this Gallic nonsense. At the other end of the spectrum from the public urinators there are the older British travellers convinced that with age and Englishness comes a supreme knowledge on how everyone else should run their affairs. “You wouldn’t get this in Maidenhead,” I heard one lady declare sniffily on the same cruise (I don’t know of what she was speaking). “It seems terribly silly you being a separate country,” another said to a Slovakian tour guide who had just spent ten minutes telling us why independence was so important to her fellow countrymen. “Why don’t you just join up with somewhere else, like “Czechoslovakia?”

Health and Safety
We may be a little obsessed with health and safety in the UK, but other countries more than make up for this. Dangling in a cable car above the South China Sea, I thought it was probably best not to think about the sign that declared “in wind, this cab may experience mild oscillation.”

Health and safety sign by the hotel pool, Vietnam

English Pubs
No. Just no.

“Real Travellers”
There is a hugely snobbery among travellers. Most particularly, there is a group that considers themselves to be “real travellers”, who look down with scorn and sometimes open contempt on those they consider to be “mere tourists”. Of course, the idea of the “gap yah” traveller has been the object of gentle denigration ever since Giles Wembley-Hogg first set off to Thailand in the Now Show in 1998, and were objects of ridicule in the last Inbetweeners film. But those who simply try to out-remote you ("you went there? Oh that's like WAY too touristy now? We went to like this tiny little island and got malaria and then got like kidnapped by pirates? But like it was an AMAZING experience, and like totally authentic.") I’m talking about travellers who think that their globetrotting gives them the right to disparage the actions of every other tripper in their midst. An ex-colleague of mine recently took a career break, and from what I can gather she stormed around the world shouting at people and assuming everyone was out to get here. She considered herself to be particularly savvy, whereas I’m pretty sure the rest of the world raised their eyebrows and wondered how on earth someone could survive on a day to day basis without ever smiling. When I returned from India she berated me for my foolishness in paying 600 rupees for a taxi. The taxi driver had picked me up from my hotel in Delhi, driven me to Humayan’s Tomb, waited in the car with all my stuff (worth considerably more than 600 rupees) while I wandered around the site, then driven me to the airport. He was at my personal service for around three hours, but my friend scolded me for allowing myself to be “ripped off”. 600 rupees is about £6 – in London they start the meter at £2 before you’ve even gone anywhere. It may well be above the odds, and she would have felt victorious and patted herself on the back for her travel know-how for talking him out of this piece of daylight robbery; I, on the other hand, would have felt like selfish bitch for depriving him of what felt to me a well-earned bonus and giving me what felt like a bargain. (I’m not trying to sound holier-than-thou here, but in India, and indeed other countries, many attractions charge higher prices for tourists then locals. I don’t object to services such as taxi drivers effectively doing the same.) Another seasoned traveller, visiting Singapore, point-blank refused to take a taxi after an event we’d been attending, saying he “always uses the same transport as the locals” and skulked off in the blasting midday sun to find a metro station in the vicinity. After he’d gone, one of the locals pulled out his mobile and promptly called a taxi for himself, which he kindly let me share. We drove past him half a mile or so down the road, presumably still looking for a non-existent underground station. I wonder if anyone has heard from him since?

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Irritating fellow passengers
So, back to air travel. For the vast majority of us who don’t have the option of choosing a lovely flat bed in First Class, it’s worth remembering we can’t choose our fellow passengers either. I had a particularly annoying flight back from Toronto, whereby a small boy went to sleep horizontally on the seat next to me, kicking me for the whole nine hours as his father gazed down lovingly at him, glaring at me on the only occasion I tried to gently move his feet off by lap. On another occasion I found myself stuck between a reincarnation of Flanders from The Simpsons, who upon noticing I was wearing a cross spent most of the journey trying to talk to me about my love for Jesus, and an increasingly drunk man who shared his life story with me (he was coming back from Thailand, where he’d been looking for mail order bride #2 after mail order bride #1 had the cheek to “get all fucking westernised and feminist and all that shit”) before saying “You know who was fucking brilliant? Margaret Thatcher.” He then climbed/fell over me continuously in order to make several trips to the back of the plane to help himself to the contents of the drinks trolley while the crew slept.

This is apparently what Opodo thinks of me...