#theglamoroftravel

It was on the golden sands of Pulau Kadidiri, in the Togian Islands, Sulawesi, Indonesia, as a wave of what I would dearly like to call “social diseases” spread along the beach like glandular fever in a boys’ boarding school that just took girls for Sixth Form, that I began contemplating a new hashtag.

And, after our social disease non-drama culminated in a small hospital, several hundred miles up north, yesterday, I cannot think of a saga more ripe for the Twitter tag #theglamoroftravel than this.

Some term conjunctivitis “pink eye”.

They certainly weren’t talking about the type that came to Pulau Kadidiri.

“Pink” is a grotesque misnomer for this ninja among bacteria. It turns the cornea the kind of suppurating, terrifying scarlet last seen in 28 Weeks Later and makes your lids look like you went ten rounds with Mike Tyson.

The islands are beautiful, btw. Here’s a flower picture.

The flowers on Pulau Kadidiri are especially lovely, I find, when one’s vision is unobscured by tendrilled blotches of floating pus.

I’m sorry. I digress.

Pulau Kadidiri is not a large island. Which means that the disease can be traced back four or five generations to an Irish girl who stayed at Paradise.

You know who you are. You left two weeks ago or thereabouts. And, no, I bear no grudge.

You might, however, like to know that the plague you imported has spread as far as Pulau Bunaken, down to Makassar and into Manado, leaving trails of golden tissues and thwarted romance in its wake.

Or then again, I guess, you might not.

Ooh! Here’s a lovely picture of the lagoon by the mangroves.

I will not attribute blame for the virus that left me sneezing with a European winter cold. On a beautiful, tropical beach.

Though, you too, in Bangkok, you know who you are.

And, yea, the horsemen of the non-Apocalypse brought not only pus but snot.

In fact, between the conjunctivitis and the cold, all that was required was a bout of traveller’s D&V and, I guess, an authentic “social disease” — though that conjunctivitis bug is one helluva contraceptive — to leave one running from every single orifice.

Ooh! Time for a pretty picture, I think. How about a Pulau Kadidiri sunset?

Anywise. It was the contrast of this idyllic setting with my rather unidyllic condition that brought to mind:

#theglamoroftravel

A hashtag, for those of you who don’t use Twitter, or have only just begun to use it, is a way of tagging tweets so that tweets on a similar topic are linked. You click on one, and it gives you a list of what other people have been saying on the theme.

And I would like this hashtag to cover precisely those times when travel is…

Certainly not dangerous. Not edgy. Not dramatic. Not exciting. Nothing, for example, that you could brag about in a bar.

But, just, y’know, a bit shit.

If you’ve travelled long term, I guess you’ll know the feeling.

It’s sitting in an “internet cafe” 20 minutes walk from the place you’re staying, packed to the gunnels with chainsmoking Filipino teenagers playing shoot’em-ups with the volume on max for an hour or more, while a single crucial email fails to send, your Skype won’t connect, your mum’s waiting at the webcam… and, fan-fucking-tastic!! A power cut shorts out the entire town. Till morning.

It’s when the sky dumps repeatedly, without warning and at random on laundry you have handwashed with water you have personally drawn from a well in good time to dry for your marathon journey off an idyllic island. Meaning that it spends 30 hours mouldering damply in your pack and even after it’s been through a PROPER bloody laundry half of it still smells of dishcloths.

As does your pack. Because do you have a plastic bag to put your laundry in?

You do not.

And why is that? Not because decent plastic bags are like gold dust in many developing countries and the last laundry stole it.

Oh no.

You were wise to that. You had a *spare*.

It’s because, 30-odd minutes into a sixteen hour bus ride not so much through the highlands as round and round and up and down every single hill within a hundred mile radius, your child has revealed a hitherto unknown capacity for motion sickness and emitted copious quantities of scarlet liquid in The Exorcist vein that crucial nanosecond before you got the bag which formerly held your laundry properly in position.

Aha, you might say.

(Or, of course, you might not, because many of us, to be honest, will never be there, and that is not, necessarily, a bad thing.)

You know those plastic sickbags they hand out when you whinge plaintively in Indonesian “anak sakit” and mime vomiting, while trying to empty your prized and precious plastic bag onto the roadside for reuse?

(You don’t? Your loss. Or maybe not.)

Anyway, you could use them for your laundry, couldn’t you?

…

I mean, they will hold laundry, won’t they?

…

Nay, I say.

For in this dialogue, I am Socrates and you, my friend, are Alcibiades.

In fact, as you may or may not discover for yourself one day, these suckers are so flimsy you need to double-bag them just to contain the vomit, and triple-bag them to get the stuff out of the window without spraying everyone in range.

And, to the two Indonesian ladies and both French Canadian girls, of course I understand why you moved. And, yes, I am still sorry. You were very nice about it.

Here’s a flower picture. To say thank you.

And, yes, yes, yes, before anyone starts, I know full well that one should not throw plastic bags of anything out of bus windows anywhere, especially not in areas of outstanding natural beauty.

A beauty, I might add, which it is even possible to appreciate when coated in a fibrous web of what was just plain ole tamarillo juice when you saw it on the breakfast table two hours ago but is now forming some kind of early stage civilisation on one’s jeans. (Or, and serious props to Z for this, when one has just emitted said alien matter.)

And, yes, yes, yes, I know full well that, just because pretty much every man, woman and child in a nation of 270 million people is doing exactly that on a regular basis, it is still no excuse.

And, you know what? If you’ve ever vomited, been vomited on, or merely been in range of the complex aromatics of eau de vomit with fifteen hours of bad road ahead of you, and kept the receptacle on or around your seat for the duration…

Then, then, I say, in the immortal words of Charlotte Church, then you can come and ‘av a go, luv.

I could itemise a zillion and one of the sort of minor unpleasantness the hashtag #theglamoroftravel was designed to encompass.

But, let’s move on from body fluids and talk about something more pleasant.

Like, you know. Going to the cashpoint.

Let us imagine that you, like many of us, have inquired about the availability of ATMs in the nearest decent-sized town, and received the answer: “Oh yes, three.”

You will, perhaps, like many of us, have taken this statement to mean: “In the nearest town there are three ATMs, generally in working order and stocked with cash, which accept either Mastercard or Visa and probably Cirrus, too.”

You will probably not have taken it to mean: “ATMs? Hell, we got a bunch of those! We got the Independence War Veterans’ bank! We got TWO branches of Our Very Own Very Small Island Bank. One has the ATM and the other does the fish food loans. We got the Halal Shariya “interest? what interest? just a small monthly service fee expressed as a percentage” Banca Usuriya. No problemo.”

You might, in fact, like some poor chaps we met in Palawan, the Philippines, spend all your cash reserves on the four hour round trip to the town with the ATMs. Only to find that your Western Mastercard don’t mean jack.

That’s when you end up hocking your passports and belongings to the guesthouse in exchange for a cash loan to cover the TWENTY-four-hour round trip to the “nearest” Western cashpoint.

Ha! That won’t happen to you, of course. Because you, of course, will have US dollars. And you can change greenbacks anywhere, right?

Well.

Up to a point, lord copper.

Plenty of smaller banks in Indonesia and the Philippines will not take notes that are folded, faded, torn or worn in any way. Just won’t.

Your precious dollars may be legal tender anywhere else in the world. But, if they’ve got a crease, they might as well be Monopoly money for all the good they’ll do you.

Some apply the same stigma to notes that are older than five years. And many regions — including all of Myanmar — will not accept notes with specific serial numbers. (Presumably on the basis that someone passed a fake back in the 80s and the counterfeiters have not moved on since then.)

But enough of practicalities.

What the #theglamoroftravel tag is really about is the little moments. The moment you finally get your arse into gear to do the museums or live performances you’ve been meaning to visit all week to find they’re shut on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday, it’s Monday morning, and you leave town on Wednesday evening.

The moment you arrive at the port fifteen minutes ahead of some ungodly early start to find the ferry left, well, *early*.

The moment someone knocks back your visa application last thing on a Friday because the background to the photo is the wrong shade of red.

The moment you wake at 3am having hiked eight hard hours up a mountain to find it’s pissing down and you won’t make the summit.

And, for that matter, it’s the moment when, on that idyllic, quiet island chain where everywhere is shut for Eid, you realise that the eyedrops you keep in stock for everything from infections to burning straw to Vietnamese city air are, unlike every other Asian over-the-counter medication you have ever bought, not weapons grade.

Just witchhazel. And that, faced with this lurgy, you might as well be pissing in the bloody wind.

Which brings me, rather neatly, back to our morning at the hospital. A saga, I fear, to be continued.

In the meantime. I’d love your thoughts. What does #theglamoroftravel mean to you? Is there a moment that encapsulates it for you? Drop me a comment, and share away.

Me? I think we’ll have a swim and go and see the tarsiers.