Recently, I found myself stuck waiting on a chartered bus which was running a little behind for the next adventure. The chairs in the lobby were uncomfortable and set me to pacing about, so I guess I ended up exploring the building more as a way to kill time than out of any real curiosity about the place. Up on the third floor, after slipping past a set of tensile barriers in order to have a peek at a closed-off area, I stumbled across an unused sitting room complete with a dusty pool table and cloth-covered furniture. A tall set of bookshelves lined the walls, the rows of English-language titles serving as artifacts which bore testimony to the volume of expatriates who’d traveled through the space in decades past. Their reading material seemed eclectic and wide-ranging, with all manner of magazines from the late 1990s lined up against classics like “C++ for Dummies.” The books were neatly stacked, end-to-end, almost as if some junior manager secretly feared that these travelers might return at any moment, upset at having lost their page.
I only had time to snatch a single book from the stacks before a harried custodian came along and shooed me out of the restricted area, but it seemed like a good one. For some reason, this mysterious tome called “The Traveller’s Handbook” was beckoning me.
My bus pulled up before I had the opportunity to explore any further, and so I settled in for a long ride in coach class, thumbing through the pages and hoping to glean any lifestyle tips from my vagabonding elders. These were the pioneers of global travel, after all, those brave souls who’d somehow managed to survive their trips in the in the days before GPS systems and Lonely Planet guidebooks. Though it dated back to 1981, the book was still remarkably insightful, offering a unique glimpse into how many affluent British people might have viewed the rest of the world at that time. For example:
“Poland may appear flat and uninteresting, but on the ground you will find a unique mood and scenes that are positively medieval.”
“Air travel in the Soviet Union is, like everywhere, dull. When an aircraft lands at an unscheduled airport – with or without facilities – and everyone is delayed for hours with no explanation, you’re not expected to ask why.”
“From Jeddah it is possible to go to Sana’a, Yemen, where the beaches are said to be good, and where many expatriates working in Saudi Arabia go on holiday.”
“Generally, one should keep as up to date as possible while traveling in West Africa, and carrying a shortwave radio is the simplest method of doing so.”
“Black travelers in South Africa, however, have to make special arrangements about accommodation unless they can afford to stay at international hotels all the time: these can now take people of any race.”
“Japanese food is similar to Chinese, but includes a lot of raw fish, not instantly regarded by the Westerner as edible!”
“To go to New Zealand is like traveling in a time machine back fifty years.”
“The joys of travel in North America? There are so many! A random list gives us such marvels as the Bell telephone system, cheap Xerox copies, Amtrak, motels with color televisions and vibrating beds…”
“Air passengers traveling in the budget economy zone can expect no service at all on short flights, and only minimal catering on flights of an hour and a half or over.”
“One’s excitement at visiting the New World for the first time can so easily be shattered when confronted by US customs and immigration.”
“For the person who likes conversing with strangers… hitchhiking must surely be hard to beat as a principal mode of getting about.”
“The most robbery-with-violence-prone city I know is Bogota, Colombia, where in certain streets you can be 99 per cent certain of being attacked.”
“Carry with you as many small presents as you can. They need not be expensive: in fact, white elephants from your own home will often suffice. The tie your Dad was going to chuck out because he hated the zigzag pattern would probably look great on an African.”
Yeah, by the time my bus reached its destination a few hours later, it was pretty clear to me that a lot had changed since the 1980s. But in spite of the book’s obvious generational biases, I still ended up slipping “The Traveller’s Handbook” into my backpack to finish some other day. After all, I’ve got absolutely no idea where this guy’s headed next, but it sure does look cool…
