Taro's Travels

How do you politely tell someone that they're driving you and others insane? On the last night in Hanoi, I left Long, Cam, Jock, and Margie at the Draught Beer place down the road while I had a shower. When Cam came up to the room, he was shaking his head: X. - one of two people joining the tour at Hanoi - was "quite a character", he said. Long had met up with him to do the pre-tour briefing, and he'd then come down to the Draught Beer place where he'd sworn and ranted and generally made a bad impression - so I didn't see him that night. I didn't see him the next morning at breakfast, either, but reports were that he'd come back to the hotel with five local travelling companions of possibly negotiable virtue (who'd been refused entry by the concierge). I met him the next afternoon - obese, and had obviously done some hard living. It was hard to tell exactly how old he was -- mid-50s, perhaps. And boy did he swear. He was not, at first glance, the ideal roommate. We caught a train that night, so it wasn't until Kunming that my impression was confirmed. I need extensive periods of silence. If there's a silence available he likes to hunt it down and kill it. Lights out is no obstacle to him talking. Earplugs are no obstacle to his snores. He is not, at last glance, the ideal roommate. Many of his interactions with foreigners are painfully embarrassing. A number of people have independently joked about becoming New Zealanders. On the one hand, he'll happily have long one-sided conversations at people who speak no English: as we approached the Chinese border, he was ranting to our driver on politically-incorrect names he prefers for Aboriginals. On the other hand, when he actually needs more than a monologue, he'll complain at length that shopkeepers and others don't speak English. He's a model of inappropriate behaviour - the bus ride from the border to Kunming was 13 hours of plain horrifying behaviour. And there's been worse. He's worst, I think, when under stress. In one-to-one conversations he can be quite reasonable. In some matters he's considerate. He's certainly friendly and outgoing. He's not - despite some impressions - stupid. He does quieten down sometimes. The problem, though, is that his worst behaviour poisons everything, meaning that I don't want to have a one-to-one conversation with him. It's as though he just doesn't filter what he says. There are a couple of possible medical reasons, one potentially contageous, that I've thought of but how do you politely ask about those? And just how do you politely tell someone that they're driving you and others insane? You don't, I think. You just avoid as much as possible, which is horrible and cliquey; cowardly, too. But it only - only - needs to be done for another 18 days, and I'm now sharing a room with Rachel (many thanks!!), which is less stressful for me, at least.

In a previous entry, I wrote that I'd managed to get my passport wet. Chinese Immigration at Hei Kou looked _very_ closely at it for quite a few minutes. It probably didn't help my trustworthiness that with the humidity and heat inside the hall, I was sweating buckets. I'm hopeful that there won't be any trouble getting into Tibet (you need a separate visa for it).

There's a lot of fried food available. In some places, fried food is just about all you can easily get. I'm so over fried rice. Even non-fried food is not necessarily safe: I'd a salad for lunch in Hanoi, and there was half a centimetre of oil in the bottom of the plate. On the other hand, Saigonese fried chicken is truly great (I ended up eating chicken baguettes from one Saigon place multiple times. Yes, I know that I said that I'd wait for France).

To get to Tiger Leaping Gorge, we squeezed into what our tour guide Tina called a "public bus" bound for "Tiger Leaping Gulch". I think this may have been as public as the average "British Public School". It was a minibus, and there were only three Chinese (excluding Tina) on it. The remaining passengers were all members of our tour.

Five minutes after leaving we pulled into a petrol station. A little petrol, four litres of oil, and a lot of passenger grumbling about inefficiency later, we were back on the road again. We then stopped at the next petrol station for some water - there was a tank with a hose into the engine. It seemed that we might be visiting every petrol station along the way, we joked, but our driver skipped the next one.

We really shouldn't have tempted fate.

The fan belt broke. We stopped. David, who'd been an Army Engineer, managed to install the replacement without anything needing to be dismantled (it's wound on while the engine is running). We continued on.

We stopped. The oil filter was replaced. We continued on.

Then the minibus ran out of oil. We stopped.

According to David and Thilo, the minibus had a few related problems: The radiator leaked - which is why there was a tank with a hose into the engine, which sprayed water - manually controlled - in an effort to keep things cool. The oil filter was the wrong size, which meant that unfiltered oil was circulating. And the engine had just been hideously damaged because we'd burned through all the oil.

Ten litres of oil were procured and poured in. We continued on. And the engine clattered, and clattered louder, and clattered loudly. Running out of oil had irreversably damaged the engine.

20 km away from Tiger Leaping Gorge, we stopped. Rather than hang around for some unknown period while the engine was rebuilt, we hired a truck to port us the rest of the way - including a wild ride on a cliffside road - unsafe but memorable.