[independent travel] let's go get a new guidebook

Independent travel started rather late for me.

I was on a Thomas Cook Oberammergau tour to see the Passion Play [the last before they had trouble finding virgins in the village] and had noticed something quite interesting.

Whenever the bus stopped, two of our fellow passengers, Jim and Beckie Wheeler, disappeared up the road whilst the rest of us were decanted into the hyper-plastic buffetmart.

Watching other Brits speak their Pidgin French at the checkout counter, buying their supplies for the next leg of the journey, observing the checkout girls' absolute refusal to speak English and seeing the bile rise all round, I thought I'd follow the two 'independents' next time we stopped.

Thus they invited me to a little cafe/store up the road from the hyper-plastic buffetmart next stop and the passport to success seemed to be to attempt to speak French, be mercilessly ribbed by the French for five minutes, at which point they'd relax and drop into English.

Worked a treat and independent travel had begun.

The Grand Tour of Europe [or extended eat-a-thon] followed the latest marital disaster and that's the point where a not quite middle-aged but jaded, faded youth, humping round a red and grey Travelpak complete with straps, padding and clips all over it, found himself at innumerable rail stations, too snooty to use the hostels and too lazy to go beyond the square for a hotel.

In later years I realized I'd been doing a Bill Bryson but without the sense of humour and lucrative book deal to accompany it.

Travel Guides

There's been much in the news lately about these works of fiction called travel guides and Bryson himself drew attention to one he called Let's Go Get Another Travel Guide and it's true.

After wasting good pack space lumping that thing around I took someone's cunning advice and cut the guide into easily handleable sections which then got lost at different points in the pack along with the remains of yesterday's cheese sandwiches and underwear.

Bryson quotes Joseph Raff, in Fielding's Britain, 1996 [from Notes from a Big Country, Black Swan, 1999, p201]:

Be affable and cooperative but don't be overly conversational. Hold your passport casually in hand - don't flaunt it!

He quotes John Whitman's:

Get the clerk's name when you check in ... read all materials closely so you know your rights.

Uh-huh.

Independent travel for me came to a shuddering halt in the early 90s when I took a Brit reg car over to Northern Ireland midway through a three week IRA campaign and found myself at the wrong end of six SA-80 assault rifles on the outskirts of Newry, following a checkpoint bomb blast two hours earlier, which itself followed the pub I'd been sipping at in Cookstown some hours prior to that being blown to smithereens about the time of the Newry debacle.

It wasn't so much the rifles but the 20 year olds on the other end of them and those boys were very, very nervous as to why a Brit reg Sierra should pass their checkpoint, stop 200 metres away, turn and slowly make its way back to them. While they searched the car, my eyes were fixed on those twitching trigger fingers and the mouth was dry.

Well, I was lost, wasn't I? The Travelguide had let me down yet again.

From that little experience and that of taking the wrong turn-off in Belfast and finding myself in the Falls Road, vainly hoping to see flagpoles every hundred metres sporting the Union Jack, I concluded three things - I needed a new guide, a new brain and a new way to travel.

I don't know which method JMB used to get to San Diego Zoo but she certainly gets around and thankfully posts about the experiences.

Maybe she could also post her thoughts on Travel Guides. Finally, here's one travel guide you really can trust.