Gathering tales for a traveller’s treasure chest of memories

Press, 13 January 1987, Page 12

Gathering tales for a traveller’s treasure chest of memories

By

SUSAN KUROSAWA

It’s never the paintbox-pretty sunrise over a big sweep of African landscape or the absurdly

cheap feast of good cheese and seductive wine in a Greek taverna that we vividly remember of our travels. It’s the defiantly. unseasonal tyhoon that wraps Hong Kong in a thick, sodden blanket or the evil curry from a hawker in the bowels of a Bombay bazaar that remain indelibly stamped on the passport of Our mind. Sure, we may journey for pleasure and edification but it’s our displeasure and dismay at any number of travel mishaps that provide the most fertile fodder for traveller’s tales. If you do lure friends (or, more likely, relatives too polite to refuse) around for a show-and-tell evening of slides, the true entertainment value of the exercise lies riot in what went right but what went horribly, irretrievably wrong. ' . Who cares if the sublime souffle at Michel Guerard’s stratospheric watering hole in rural France was enough to provoke a shuddering orgasm of the palate. Tell us, instead, about the sleazy little bistro on the Left Bank where the grubby waitress handled your complaint about a dirty glass by spitting on the offending spot and polishing it with her sleeve. The worse the predicament, the more it can be embellished and exaggerated once you’re back on home turf. Some destinations specialise in surprises. Stories of Indian trains and South American border posts warrant entire pinner parties for their proper telling. If

you’ve had the foresight to enter Russia, cycle through China or spend the* day on a Yugoslav nudist beach you could find yourself dining out handsomely on this repertoire from here until the eve of your next trip. The surge toward activity-oriented holidays has meant that the most unlikely people come tripping back, with horror tales. I was most put out last week to discover that even my bank manager had been kissed, by a camel in the Rajasthan Desert. He wasn’t the least bit interested in my tale about a rather personal body search by an Immigration official wearing a large white bedsheet at Dubai Airport. It’s the pure perversity of human nature that we spend thousands of dollars to have a good time but we secretly hope that things may go a teensy bit awry so we at least have some tantalising tidbits to write on those gleeful postcards home. I’m not suggesting we should seek out potential disasters. Earthquakes, typhoons and hotel fires do pot make pleasant party patter. But slightly frisky earth tremors, cute thatched bungalows with leaky roofs, and being signed by wayward kebab are just fine. Each holiday hiccup should be viewed as a potential A-grade traveller’s tale. “Nice trip, dear?” your partner may inquire. “Well, yes,” you smugly reply. . “The plane was punctual, the water in ’ the hotel was lovely and hot, my eggs for breakfast were beautifully boiled, the taxi driver didn’t mind a jot about changing a $lOO note, my business meetings were very productive and

dinner was superb with my steak cooked just the way I like.” The size of his or her responding yawn will be directly related to (a) the newness or (b) the politeness of your relationship. How much more interesting for all concerned if your plane to Rome was’ seven hours late but your bags arrived in Rio dead on time for Carnivale. Imagine if the taxi driver spat on you when you tried to tip in kiwi dollars. What if you’d decided to air your beginner’s Berlitz at the board meeting and ended up turning Signor Verdi’s mother-in-law into a goat. And that’s not to mention being seated by a steely-eyed maitre-d’ for dinner at a table right in the firing line of the men’s toilet. Now you’re talking! Now, as I’m being allowed to write this column and I have no dinner parties in this month’s diary, I think a few horror happenings of my own are in order. Its irrelevant whether or not they’re totally true but I offer them as raw material for anyone seeking inspirations in such matters. First, the Japanese bath-house. There are separate changing rooms leading into segregated entrances above which flutter dainty curtains with the appropriate. Japanese characters for male and female. How civilised. These doorways lead into the same big, all-ln-together tub. By the time the steam clears sufficiently for me to realiese that at least a dozen toothy rice farmers are surveying my foreign equipment with undisguised astonishment, all I can do is shove a pink mound of face-washer between my legs and mince to the bath.

As with gagging at the tea ceremony, suffering horrid leg cramps at a traditional banquet and making a total fool of myself trying to torture a minuscule piece of green paper into an origami frog, I am once again the novelty in the cultural cracker. Then, of course, there’s India. In this marvellously muddled land you merely have to place your big toe outside the hotel lobby to have an experience. Such activities as purchasing a first-class railway ticket, hiring a car and driver or haggling over the cost of a Kashmir rug are guaranteed to result in hours of pure burlesque. I defy anyone to rub shoulders with Mother India and not come away with a giant swag of larger-than-life stories. In China, there’s much tale-telling merit in the rural conveniences with their open-trough squatting system and efficient, hairy-snouted porkers who do a fair old job of disposing of any excess. This tale goes particularly well with a follow-up story of the official feast where you were served roast cat, sea slug soup and something which you swear could have been sliced buffalo penis. What the hell if it was only a dog’s hind leg. It’s a great story. And how about the time I was late checking into a hotel in that wellknown fun spot, downtown Cleveland, they’d giyen my room away and every ’ other two-bit dive in town was booked out./1 had to spend the night at the bus station and, hey, hang about, this is one heck of a story. It’s worth a threecourse meal to hear the rest ... Susan Kurosawa is a Sydney-based travel writer.