Soon after writing this I met Charlie, seen here in the Cameron Highlands; he soon restored my confidence in travellers
Perhaps I will permit myself another whinge here, because this thing about 'other travellers' is beginning to frustrate me considerably. I've already mentioned how inane the conversation of other travellers can sometimes be on the main travellers' route through Southeast Asia, but I think it is more my problem than theirs. Every travel-orientated conversation seems the same; it starts off with 'Where have you just come from?' swiftly followed by 'Where are you heading?' and 'How long have you been travelling?' and continues with 'So, which countries have you visited?' And the worst type of conversation occurs when one traveller gets so stuck inside his own frame of reference that he doesn't notice the eyes glazing all around him. Try this, a genuine excerpt from someone suffering from Boring Traveller Syndrome and inflicting it on anyone in earshot:
'I'll probably end up popping back into Singapore, to renew the Malaysian visa, if nothing else, because you get a month's visa extension in Sarawak, but I don't know if you need to have a full mainland visa before going into Sarawak, and of course I can go into Brunei and back into Malaysia, but then Brunei is really expensive and probably not worth more than a few days – we're all on a budget, you know! – and there are no direct roads into Brunei from Sabah or Sarawak so you have to take the ferry, and then there's always the question of flying from Peninsular Malaysia into Kuching in Sarawak and back from Kota Kinabalu in Sabah, which costs more if you buy the tickets in Singapore rather than Johor Bahru, which is only a few dollars on the bus over the causeway and saves you heaps, and they never ask for an onward ticket to get into Malaysia, even though you're supposed to have one, unlike in Indonesia where they always ask you for an onward ticket, and you only get a two-month visa, which is never enough to see the whole lot, so you have to leave the country and re-enter by flying to Darwin from Timor and back into Indonesia, as long as you first get an Australian visa, which is a different matter altogether...'
This type of conversation doesn't interest me much any more, if only because I've heard it so many times before, and travel logistics are only interesting when you discover them yourself en route. I've heard every possible story about Australia, New Zealand, Southeast Asia and India – or at least it seems that way – and it's rare I find someone who really makes me stop in my tracks and think, 'Wow, this guy's an interesting character.' If I do, I tend to get into a conversation with them and team up for a while, as with Charlie, who proved more interesting and on my wavelength than many a Kiwi Experience protégé.
Perhaps the most annoying thing, though, is the fixation with how long you've been 'on the road'. There's an instant class system based on experience that permeates any gathering of travellers, and as travellers who've been at it for more than two years are pretty rare, someone like me elicits a bit of a dazed silence when I mention I've done this, been there and am going there for this long. It's disconcerting, and even if I do meet someone else who's done heaps, a sizeable number of them manage to be so smug about their achievements that they're unbearable. These days I tend to keep quiet about what I've done unless someone specifically asks: the bragging backpacker is a sorry breed indeed, and perhaps that's why I'm getting increasingly disillusioned about my fellow travellers. They're all so full of themselves and simply don't want to hear from someone who's done anything that might make their travels look mundane. Sod 'em.
