Fighting for survival in world travel
14th August, 2007
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"Whatever happened to manners?" I thought as I dropped my right shoulder and crunched into the rib cage of a man trying to force me into a wall.
"Take that," I heard my wife yell, followed by screams of pain.
Welcome to international travel 2007, a head-butting, eye-gouging contest to see who can board the plane/train/ferry first while showing total disregard for fellow passengers. The opposition drew first blood on day one of our trip when we made the mistake of attempting to queue at Bangkok's airport and were routed by a flying wedge of grim-faced Spaniards. Caught off-guard, they bounced me against a wall. "Bastards!" I shrieked, but they were already through the gate and on their way to the aircraft. We boarded the plane and prepared for a ten-hour flight and, a minute later, the man seated beside my wife stuck his legs into "her" space and closed his eyes in feigned sleep. Seconds later they were open and staring at me as I leant across, shook him and pointed at his legs. He looked at me blankly. "Legs," I said, trying to bridge the language barrier between English and Mandarin. He snarled and moved them, but a minute later stretched them out again. I retaliated with a tap that must have come close to dislocating his shoulder and he sullenly moved his feet back. "Pig," I muttered, half hoping he'd try it on again. The Germans were the next to declare war. This happened a few days later when we were about to board a small ferry. I was on the point of stepping on to the gangplank when the pair of them, each weighing about 120kg, rolled down the dock like Panzer tanks. I stood my ground and bounced like a tennis ball off the woman's massive chest, which she was using as a battering ram to flatten anyone in her path. Then the Italians joined the fray. This was not heralded by an assault by a lone couple but by what appeared to be a goodly proportion of the population of the entire country, all of whom had decided to visit the same island on this Sunday. There's a cable car that holds about 80 people and which hauls you up to the township, which means a huge pushing, shoving throng develops when several thousand people want to ascend at the one time. "Having fun yet?" asked my wife as a large woman lifted her arm to reveal a forest of hair and rammed it in my face. I concede that underarm hair is a perfectly natural occurrence. I also defend my right to be repelled by it. "Oh God," I moaned, as body odour enveloped me. Then the cable car arrived and the crowd surged forward, large masses of people funnelling towards the turnstiles. My wife was sucked into this human vortex and for several minutes became part of a family of ten. Once through the gates, no prisoners were taken in the battle to board the cable car. "Use your shoulder!" I yelled, but my wife needed no coaching in the art of self-preservation, lifting an elbow and reversing it into the face of a man who tried to knock her aside in order to get on board. We then took a bus with some English people whom we offended when we sat in different seats on the return journey to those on which we had sat on the outward trip. It's just not the done thing, apparently. Americans we met neither pushed nor shoved and their armpits were masterpieces of depilation. They just talked. We had dinner with a group one night and it was my misfortune to sit beside an American woman who, having formed the apparent belief that I was mute, decided she would ask the questions and supply the answers. We escaped after two hours and my wife, who had observed me receiving the benefit of the woman's monologue, asked me what she had said. "Nothing," I replied. "Absolutely nothing." I love foreign ports. It's the foreigners who are beginning to bother me. |
