Travlers Tales.

[peter]

Yes - I've been there [both Singapore and the Airport]. Kuala-Lumpar airport is a close second if not actually as good; both were hyper-modern. Singapore is a bizarre place - the only one I've ever been where flies were illegal [along with chewing-gum and driving in town with mud on your tyres]. If locals put their rubbish out uncovered and drew flies then it was a punishable offence. I went to the zoo, where they pulled off the odd trick of having animals with no apparent means of containing them in their enclosures [mind you it was night-time and I may have been pissed]. The fake island of Sentoza has a beach complete with palm-trees and rocks [all plastic and hollow to the nock] - the only thing that is real is the water, the sand being shipped in from outside! Back to toilets though, in India, in the hotels, people were employed to dry your hands with a towel after you'd washed them - a sort of human [no - a real human] hand dryer.

[michaelm]

The other airport that I found bizarre was Dubai airport. I was there in the late 90s at the time it was a huge construction site while they were expanding it. I just overtook Heathrow for the most number of passengers per year, but when I was there it seemed very cramped and inhospitable.

It was a stopover flight for me, so we were only scheduled to be there for an hour. When the plane landed we knew there was something odd about the place as the doors opened we were nowhere near a terminal building and just had that kind of portable steps that used to be the norm at one time. Everyone walked down and didn't know what to do as we had been given no instructions other than we could disembark. A bus pulled up and the doors opened - people asked the driver if they should get on but he didn't speak English. Those who spoke Arabic talked to him and got on, so everyone else did.

We were driven to a terminal building so everyone got out. Signs were Arabic and English, so it was easy to know where we were going. Passports were checked by 2 guys just inside the doors of the terminal, so there was a big line outside of people waiting to be checked by these two guys, neither of whom had a good grasp of English, so it was best to give short answers to their questions as we noticed the difficultly people in front were having if they gave long answers.

Once inside it was obvious that the terminal was in mid construction and the signs were pretty meaningless. Security in the airport was military personnel which short black machine guns. If you walked the wrong way they would walk up barking orders in Arabic and point the gun at you, motioning which way they wanted you to go. It was actually pretty overwhelming for some people who were visibly shaken by someone aggressively motioning with a machine gun...

There was nothing to do at all in the tiny space that everyone was motioned into. It was about half the size it should have been for everyone on the plane to be able to have a seat. I think everyone was pretty glad to get on the plane for the next leg of the flight.

[peter]

Security in some airports is an 'odd' affair to say the least. In Zambia they threw open the doors and every-body piled out onto the grass lining the plane taxi-ing area to lie around drinking beer and smoking. In Tibet I que'd for two hours, busting to pee waithing to get through arrivals. On doing so I went looking for a loo and wandered randomly back into the pre-gate area I had been standing in and back out again without so much as an eyebrow being raised.

[michaelm]

It is weird in some places. Probably just over 10 years ago in San Jose in Costa Rica they had no real terminal with facilities and when you got to the airport they had folding tables outside the terminal doors where they searched your luggage manually and you got in once they were done with the search and checked your passport against a list of people due on the next flight.

It started raining while we were getting checked in, and so people behind us were opening their suitcases in the rain...

I think the first thing that you got to when you entered the terminal was a cashiers desk to pay a fee for using the airport. All of this was before even getting to the airline desk.

[aliantha]

Hilo's airport is a little better than that. But it is definitely not the kind of thing I'm used to. There are just two runways. The whole thing is open-air, and the car rental facilities are in open-air kiosks that almost look like carnival booths.

[peter]

Mind you - It's easy to point the finger. I recall traveling back from India with a very distuinguished old man who told me on one occasion he had landed in Heathrow in the early hours of the morning and knowing he had items which had to be declared had been amazed to find that he could walk though customs and arrivals without seeing a solitary individual. He had a seriously responsible job in the forign office and not being prepared to risk entering the country illicitly, had spent twenty minutes searching Heathrow for someone to 'check him in'!

[A friend of mine who was moving to Fance and was driving back and forth with belongings etc, was horrified to discover he had picked up the wrong passport by mistake instead of his own. In for a penny, in for a pound, he travelled both there and back again on his mothers passport and amazingly made it through in both directions without comment. All the more suprising was that he was 6" 4' and weighd 20 stone and she was a tiny little woman of 80 - and that they looked at it!]

[michaelm]

Yeah it was easy to get in and out of airports at one time and if I remember correctly at one time most airports would let companions go to the gate with you without asking for ID from them.

Even after 9/11 there were a few times I realized there were lots of loopholes. Glasgow airport (the bigger one) was one of them - I forget the details, but I realized that the way that they checked security that you could get someone else on the plane with your ticket as they didn't check passport and boarding pass together at the gate.

The other place was Atlanta airport - they x-rayed your bags when you entered the airport then gave them back to you to check in nearer to the gate. What's the point of checking them and then giving people the opportunity to open them and put something in before the bags get loaded to the plane?

The best one was the airport on Grand Bahama Island before they rebuilt the terminal. You went through US customs and immigration in the Bahamas, but then in some of the gate lounges they had doors to the outside that you could open and go in and out of...

[peter]

Just spent a few nights staying in 'The Four Seasons' in Prague. Had the slightly strange experience of placing my shoes outside our room for a complementary overnight shine and having them returned the following morning a different colour. Luckily for them it was probably the only pair of shoes in the Hotel that they could have got away with that on and most likely the only pair that had been bought in a second-hand shop for a fiver!

[michaelm]

Not an experience of mine, but that of a guy who toured Eastern Europe and the USSR with orchestras in the 80s - he told of the many weird and wonderful things that happened in hotels in that part of the world.

In particular was a hotel in Moscow where the musicians were all escorted to their rooms and when they reached the floor they were staying on, they found that at the top of the stairs and by the elevators (and on every floor after some exploration) there was someone sitting at a desk with a large book, a clock and a pen. After a few days they persuaded a guy who could speak Russian to ask one woman what they were all doing. After bribing her with cigarettes she told the guy that her job was to memorize the faces of everyone as they were escorted to their rooms the first time and note the name that the escort gave. It was all recorded in her book and she then noted all movements between floors and the time taken.

On another occasion they had their tour bus stopped on the border with Russia and another Soviet country and the border guards took incredibly expensive instruments and threw them around as if they were the most durable objects in the world.

In another hotel they were all served food in their rooms, which only ever consisted of boiled potatoes and vegetables. They went out looking for somewhere to eat and found that the prices of the menu items was way beyond the poor wages of musicians. The only people at that time who seemed to be able to eat out in Moscow were the super rich.

Another guy I worked with had toured with a band covering well known Western songs at a time when attitudes were relaxing. They submitted their proposed set list to a Russian promoter who would vet the lyrics and then they could perform anything on the list that came back. After the first time they went, one of the band decided that instead of taking luggage he would stuff as many pairs of Levis as possible into a suitcase, sell them all and buy some clothes there with some of the profits and make additional money from the trip. Unbeknownst to him, rules on buying Western clothes were also relaxed and at that point there was a huge black market in cheap jeans and he was threatened by the local mobsters so ended up with jeans he couldn't sell and no extra clothes of his own.

One final one - a friend's sister moved to East Germany in the mid 80s to work for a circus. When he visited her he came back with stories of East Berlin. The best part for him was watching minor automobile accidents - he said that in the UK if two cars collided you would have dents in the cars - there you had cars made from a plastic like Bakelite, so when they collided you got this big cloud of dust and shells of cars with huge amounts of the body laying on the road in small pieces. He was fascinated by how much damage a minor fender bender could do to the cars.

[deer of the dawn]

In the early 80s I did considerable hitchhiking around the country. The skinny little dude I ran with was no kind of protection for a young woman, but I was young, cute, vastly stupid and charmed as well. My friend and I had gone from the East Coast to Oregon, attended a Rainbow Gathering, had dysentery as we hitched down the Lost Coast, slept on beaches, etc.

The trip home was kind of a downer. We couldn't buy a ride and we found ourselves outside of Cheyenne, Wyoming, with $14 between us and a good 3 days of road, if we were lucky. We had given up on the 18-wheelers and didn't bother sticking our thumbs out for them. One stopped anyway, a long way down the road. He walked back and was like, "Ya coming?"

As it turned out he was going within a few miles of our destination in Massachusetts. He was quiet and made no attempt at any hanky-panky (we were probably too wretched for any such thought anyway). He lived on sandwiches from machines and drove 20 hours a day. He listened to the CB continually, which was a really interesting experience-- the truckers rolled along in chummy fellowship, entertaining each other with banter and jokes as the hours got late; warning each other of bumps and speed traps. He only picked it up and spoke on it once-- I couldn't understand what he muttered into the mic, but it cracked the other truckers up seriously.

On a lovely summer afternoon he dropped us in the Berkshires. I think we still had a couple dollars left.

[michaelm]

Hitch hiking is so much just one of those things you can't predict. I related one experience above, but there was one other one that comes to mind too. This was while I was still living in the UK sometime in the early 90s.

I had been doing theater work from time to time for a guy who put on low quality populist shows for small tours or one off shows as a stage manager. This was essentially in between other shows that I did that were of better quality, but working for him was better than going to employment agencies and looking for a few weeks of work.

On one occasion we needed to talk about a forthcoming show and it would probably take most of a day, so I took the train into London (about 80 miles away), met up with a couple of friends and then went to his home/office in the afternoon. It turned out that we finished business pretty quickly and got talking about movie actors. He asked me what my favorite movie performance was and I said I really didn't have one, but he said he had been really impressed by the performances in Jagged Edge, which I hadn't seen. Anyway, rather than leave he put the movie on and we had a few glasses of wine while we watched it. The few glasses of wine turned into a trip to the nearby liquor store and ended up as a few bottles of wine while we were shooting the shit until much later in the evening.

I knew what time my last train was and made sure I left in time. What I didn't take into account though was being shitfaced, and got on the subway train in the wrong direction. I realized after a few stops, got off and got the train back the other way. By the time I got to the train station I knew I might not make it, so went to the platform I expected the train to be at and got on just before it left. Again, being shitfaced was not taken into consideration and I had got on the wrong train (mine had probably left).

Next thing I was aware of was being shaken awake in Guildford, only about a third of the way back. The train stopped there and the first one in the morning was about 5 hours away. I was resigned to sleeping in the train station, but unusually they didn't want to turn a blind eye to people sleeping there overnight and I had to leave.

I wandered around a little then realized I was close to a highway that led to the major highway that would lead me home. I walked along this road for probably 30 minutes with my thumb out before someone pulled over, but which time I was on the major highway.

The guy who picked me up looked terrible. It was quite cold but he had his window down on the highway. He explained that he was a radar engineer in the navy and had been on shore leave and essentially not slept. The reason he picked me up was he needed someone to keep him awake. Most times I would have got out of the car, but being drunk my judgment was not too good and so we had the ridiculous spectacle of two people barely able to keep awake nudging each other while driving at high speed on the highway. I'm not sure who almost fell asleep more, me or him.

He eventually dropped me about 5 or 6 miles from my house, and a passing taxi returning from taking a passenger to one of the London airports stopped and dropped me about 5 minutes walk from my house.

[Avatar]

Ah, hitch-hiking. Luckily the gods usually look out for the drunk, high, or terminally stupid.

--A

[deer of the dawn]

Ah, hitch-hiking. Luckily the gods usually look out for the drunk, high, or terminally stupid.

--A

I know God kept me from some crazy things happening. There was one particular guy who picked me and the same friend up, a few years before. We hardly knew each other then but decided to hitch to another state together. I still cringe to admit that I decided it was a good day to drop some LSD. Really, I was just too stupid to live... anyway this guy picked us up in some rust bomb muscle car. I got in the back seat, which was turned around to face the rear. Whatever... as I got in, a puppy crawled into my lap and trembled there the whole time. I petted it and petted it but it looked terrified.

Meanwhile, there was a weird sound in the car. A grumbling, whining noise. The motor was loud and there may or may not have been heavy metal music playing but it was something else. My friend was in the front seat but it was so loud, there was no communicating with him.

At some point, we left the road. The guy trawled slowly around some large, closed warehouse, looking around. He went all around it, got back on the road, and dropped us off some distance along. I had to scrape the poor pup off of me and push it in the door as I closed it.

So I'm like, "What was that? What was the noise in the car? Why did he go around that building?" The guy's eyes were saucers and he basically had no idea what had happened. He said he thought the weird sound was the guy mumbling to himself the whole time. He had said he had to check on something at the warehouse. We were very confused.

In retrospect I was sure the guy was looking for a place to do some terrible thing to us; he was probably higher than I was, and the terrified puppy was just... I don't know.

But being teenagers, immortal, and hopelessly, criminally naive, we just chalked it up to a good story to creep out our friends later.

[michaelm]

Ah yes - the other kind of 'trip'. That alone could have a whole thread dedicated to it...

[Avatar]

Haha, we should make one for "crazy shit I did on acid." I suspect Deer, that the acid had a lot to do with making that more weird than it might actually have been.

The worst thing that ever happened to me hitching was getting my foot run over when I got out of the car. And it was more like "rolled over" than run over.

I was wearing my docs at the time though, so plenty of ankle support. No real injury at all luckily. Still walked another 10km afterwards.

And once I got picked up by somebody whose front seat passenger was hanging his arm out of the window, bleeding copiously all down the side of the car.

--A

[Linna Heartbooger]

These stories are so wild... the airports, the hitchhiking!

And once I got picked up by somebody whose front seat passenger was hanging his arm out of the window, bleeding copiously all down the side of the car.

[michaelm]

Haha, we should make one for "crazy shit I did on acid."

Do it! I definitely have quite a bit to contribute. Better make it hallucinogenics in general though, as mushrooms figure quite a bit in my past too...

[peter]

Once had to meet a new girl-friends parents as a teenager and had been so shit-faced pissed the night before that the following day when they picked me up from the train and drove the twelve miles to their house I was sweating so badly that the car was fogged to the point where they could not see out of the windows. I thought I'd die of embarrasment and the girl was not amused either - she dumped me a week later!

[michaelm]

Drinking makes for many good stories too...

When I was in Perth in Australia I was sharing a house with a bunch of people who liked to party a lot. While I was there I was often referred to as "six shooters" because of one night where I bought a round of shooters (Australian equivalent of drinking from a shot glass) and only one person actually wanted one as they were all being wimps that night. I decided to down all 6 that were left on the table and continued drinking. They lost me at some point during the night and I had wandered around for a while until I got back to the house. They found me in the morning sleeping with my head under one of the cushions on the couch, kneeling on the other cushion with my butt pointing up in the air and it took them about 10 minutes to wake me.

Another time I got rat-arsed at one of the local all night drinking establishments and when we got back to the house we raided the fridge for beer. It got messy for everyone, but at some point I decided to take my pants off and run around half naked. The bastards at the house got a video camera out and videoed the whole thing. I think half of Perth and most of our mutual friends saw that video...

[peter]

I believe if you look on 'YouTube' under the right heading.....


In my student days we used to play a game called 'Cardinal Puff' - a repetition game that involved getting a round of beers in front of a group of you and then in turns going round doing this long repetition thing where you enevitably took your eye of the ball, missed a line - and had to neck your beer in one. I'd necked five pints of Guiness and thought I'd be clever by getting a brandy for the next round [nice and small - easy to down you see]. When my next turn came [I'm sure you can see where this is going] down went my brandy with a smug look that rapidly changed to horror as I realised that five pints of Guiness were 'rushing out of the room' in response. I made it to the front door of the pub and pulling it open was treated to a display of just how awesomely capable your stomoch muscles can be if they choose to be so. Think more 'fire-hydrant than fountain'.