By the Seat of My Pants

by Lonely Planet

  For many minutes, the shack seemed to get no larger. Finally, with a parched tongue and peeling shoulders, I staggered onto the front step of the square white building. Inside it was cool and dark. There was a single wooden desk, long and venerable, a remnant from the British Raj. Standing behind it, silent and attentive, was an elderly man dressed in an immaculate white kameez. With his white moustache and starched collar, he looked like someone straight out of Gandhi’s Congress Party. Behind him, through double doors, was the storeroom, filled with high wooden racks. They were covered with ancient luggage that looked like it had been checked in by Rudyard Kipling.

  Mustering my remaining strength, I heaved my suitcase forward. The man pressed his eyebrows together, and he began filling out a small tag with the stub of an oversized pencil. His eyes peered up at me.

  ‘Your good name?’ he enquired.

  ‘Sir…’ I croaked. I was dehydrated, sweating profusely, and at the point where my anger and frustration were ready to erupt and parboil anyone within earshot. ‘Sir. Getting here, to this place, was an absolute nightmare. No journey through hell, no walk over glowing coals, could have been worse. Do you understand me? It took me thirty stinking minutes to get my bag to this stupid place. There are no handcarts, no shuttles, and the pathway is a wreck. It’s an outrage. An insult! Tell me, if you can, what is this room doing so far from baggage claim? What’s the point? Shouldn’t you be in the baggage claim area? Wouldn’t that make sense? How the hell are people supposed to…’

  As I ranted on, the man reached down with both hands. On the desk before him was a huge journal, bound in rich leather, with a ribbed spine. It looked thick enough to be the Calcutta telephone directory. The spine was blank, but on the cover was a single word, stamped in gold script:

  Complaints

  The man pushed the book forward, and it slid across the dry wood with a hiss. ‘Yes’, he sighed. ‘Please… please, you make a note of this.’

  ‘Oh, I’m going to make a note of it, all right. A long note. This is unacceptable. I’m going to give you airport wallahs a piece of my mind.’ I declined his pencil, and pulled an indelible pen from my passport case.

  I opened the book, and began flipping through the pages. The tome was of some antiquity, with the earliest entry dating back to the late 1950s. I don’t know when the Dum Dum Airport opened for business, but it is quite possible that the book was inaugurated during the facility’s first year of service. The first entry, in fact, was written in 1958, in ink. The blue script was fading, but the words were clear:

  Best of luck viz your new endeavour. Airport clean and modern. This storage facility, however, is inconveniently distant from the terminal. Please address this problem for the convenience of your patrons.

  Kind regards,

  R Sivarakham, Esquire.

  Similar entries followed, firm but polite. I flipped ahead a few pages to 1966. These were the halcyon days of the Magic Bus, which plied the overland circuit through Europe and Central Asia, migrating through India before reaching the hashish-clouded teashops of Kathmandu. In fact, a troupe of hippies had passed through the airport in July of that year. Their spokeswoman offered a comment:

  Namasté, but why is the Left Luggage place so far from the airport? It took us forever to get here, man. And the cement is so hot that my thongs melted. No lie! Anyway, if you can fix this, we thank you in advance. Otherwise Mother India is the best. Janis.

  (PS: Also, the pathway from the luggage place to here is broken in a few places, those rocks are sharp. Owww!)

  (PPS: Much fine weed growing in the field, the cows are very friendly!)

  Many pages later, in 1974, an Indian visitor named Agarwal weighed in:

  Sirs: If you will not change the location of the Left Luggage depository, at least attend to the pathway from the airport. I sprained my ankle in a pit, and my wife lost the heel of her shoe. Also the livestock should not be allowed to roam free. Their mess is not appropriate at an international air terminal. Requesting your immediate attention to this matter.

  The tone of the discourse had hardened somewhat by 1980:

  What the hell were you thinking, putting this place a kilometre from the airport? I know the place is called Dum Dum, but it’s named after the bullet, not the imbecile. Suggest you send one of your peons to carry a bag both ways, you will find it is a huge pain in ass. Correct this problem at once or I will fly into another city on future trips to India.

  In 1987:

  What the hell is Left Luggage doing so far from the baggage claim?! For the love of Christ, or Buddha, or Krishna, or whoever! Can’t you at least fix the goddamned path?

  There were many entries I could not read, in every imaginable language, but even the most superficial command of French, German or Spanish revealed an increasing, and increasingly futile, sense of outrage. By 1989, the pleas had become almost absurd:

  PAVE THE ROAD. PAVE THE ROAD. PAVE THE ROAD. PAVE THE ROAD. PAVE THE ROAD. PAVE THE ROAD. PAVE THE ROAD. PAVE THE ROAD. PAVE THE ROAD. PAVE THE ROAD. PAVE THE ROAD. PAVE THE ROAD.

  (PS: Please see footnote, below.)

  I glanced down:

  PAVE THE ROAD!

  Page after page, spanning five decades and hundreds of pages, the same complaint – until, a week before my arrival, the most recent pilgrim had simply uncapped a thick laundry marker and scrawled, across two pages:

  FUCK YOU

  I looked up from the register, and regarded the little clerk with astonishment.

  ‘Have you looked through this book?’

  The man wagged his head, an ambiguous gesture that could mean anything. I lost it.

  ‘Well check it out, mister! Every complaint is the same! Thousands of them, exactly the same!’ I picked up the book then smacked it on the desktop, raising eddies of dust. ‘What’s the use of this charade? Nobody even sees this book!’ I shouted. ‘It’s never been opened by anyone with the slightest bit of authority! Are you aware of this? Do you care? Yes? No?’ I took a single, very deep breath. ‘Sir. Listen carefully to what I’m about to ask you. Is there any way to get any official of this airport to spend five minutes with this book?’

  The man nodded pleasantly, and pushed the volume back towards me.

  ‘Of course’, he pronounced. ‘Please. Make a note of it.’

  LET THE BUYER BEWARE

  EDWIN TUCKER

  Staying true to the flightless kiwi of his native New Zealand, Edwin Tucker rode his bicycle 36,000 kilometres across twenty-two countries. Now living in Canada, he is writing the account of his two-and-a-half-year journey, and is still dreaming of the open road.

  The harsh open vastness of the Tibetan steppe is largely devoid of life; even oxygen is scarce. The sun blazes as if I have climbed closer to it than my present four kilometres above sea level. Below me, a grey ribbon of gravel, the unpaved road, lies across the yawning desert plains of southwest Tibet. Even without the effects of altitude, the scenery around me is breathtaking. The richly coloured ochre and graphite outcrops of the Himalayas shore up a navy-blue sky as if a deep sea has been turned into the heavens.

  Spring is usually associated with the colour green, but not here. Not where the altitude and cold have squeezed the water out of the air to a humidity level of 10 per cent – twice as dry as the Sahara. There is nothing green here in April: no trees, no bushes. Wispy yellow straws of grass are the only vegetation.

  Despite its desolation, I am not alone in riding my bicycle across this seemingly empty landscape. Also bumping along the Freedom Highway – the road from Kathmandu, Nepal, to Lhasa, Tibet – are two companions, Matt and Scott. Matt, from Australia, is cycling home from Scotland; Scott is an American, and like me he is riding his bicycle around the world. We have banded together to form our own tour group, birds of a feather on otherwise different migration routes. Staunchly independent and bloody-minded to the extreme (how many other people would ride a bicycle across the ‘Roof of the World’ to prove a point?), we will not let authority
or the world’s highest mountain range stop transcontinental progress under our own steam.

  We ride more or less together, but the huge scale of Tibet spaces us out and into our own worlds. Matt stops to try to capture the wonder of it all on film. Further on Scott puts down his bike and attends to the only colourful flora around, flourishing and messy stowaway bacteria, gut flora from the waters of Nepal. I ride on, stopping a few kilometres upwind for my own contemplation of the sublime surrounds.

  As luck would have it, I have chosen to take a breather within calling distance of the only local I have seen beyond the few small Tibetan villages we have cycled through in the past week. A shepherd, parting a way through his sparse flock of sheep, saunters over. Dressed in dusty black trousers and an earthy sweater, he could be in his late twenties, though his face is haggard from the effects of his harsh life and environment. As with most rural Tibetan men, his long black hair is held in a braid beneath a traditional red headband. He makes a proud figure, as tough as the resolve needed to survive out here.

  I give a small wave and say, ‘Tashi delek’ – Tibetan for hello. He addresses me with, ‘Hello. Pen.’

  Someone somewhere is no doubt basking in self-deification with the thought that they have done the world a great favour by handing out pens to children in countries of need. Though this may have originally seemed like a benevolent gesture, a generation of travellers has suffered from those best intentions. Hands outstretched in welcome are now offered palm up in a pandemic bumming of pens across all of Asia. Even here, at 4000 metres, the interaction between a Tibetan and a New Zealander – the only two people in sight on this vast plain – begins with the local greeting to any Westerner, ‘Hello. Pen.’

  Ironically, the Tibetan has struck – albeit too late – the mother lode of pens. I had bought a hundred snazzy souvenir pens in Iran as gifts to hand out to the friendly people I would meet on my journey to thank them for their hospitality. As one might be nervous when carrying excess cash in their wallet, I had been anxious crossing the pen-hustling continent with a coveted cargo of writing instruments stashed in my panniers. Yet across so many kilometres of cycling, I had met so many worthy people that I had flitted away my supply and was now down to my very last personalised pen. This single pen was tremendously important to me; it was a connection with the ninety-nine other brethren in possession of my ‘Around the World By Bicycle’ pens.

  Just in case I don’t understand English, the Tibetan shepherd resorts to that age-old hurdler of the language barrier: he repeats himself. ‘Hello. Pen.’

  Now, as keeper of the sole remaining souvenir pen at my disposal, I have become the pen miser. How can I try to educate the world’s most populous continent that tourists are not all walking pencil cases? A stand must be taken. I decide to educate anyone who asks – starting now, with this man. I do not have a pen to give away. I have a valuable pen. This pen is of such great importance to me that I would not trade it for anything less than a life.

  ‘Tashi delek. Sheep’, I reply. I don’t know the local word for his charges, so I point towards his collection of thin cream-fleeced animals as I attempt to teach him a lesson.

  Puzzled, he swivels around to look where I’m pointing. Dismissing my nonsensical reference to his two-dozen ewes, some with spring lambs, he returns to what he knows of dealing with foreigners. ‘Hello. Pen’, he entreats.

  After acting like the stereotype of a New Zealander, pointing enthusiastically towards his sheep, I try a different tack. I produce the pen from my handlebar bag. I baa like a sheep and point to the flock with one hand, then toggle the pen forward with the other, mimicking an exchange. With missionary zeal I am going to extremes to save my fellow travellers from this ubiquitous greeting. Obviously, I think, it would be a cold day in hell before a shepherd would give up a precious spring lamb for a twenty-cent pen. This may be Tibet, but as a nation, China produces twenty-nine billion pens annually – more than twenty for each and every one of its men, women and children.

  By now Scott and Matt have come upon the scene of a cycle tourist baaing, pointing to some sheep, and holding a pen, all the while being watched by a perplexed Tibetan. The shepherd turns to them imploringly, already sharing with them an affinity regarding my mental state. Though we foreigners speak the same mother tongue, even they are struggling to make sense of my one-man crusade to translate value. ‘I’m trying to teach him that pens don’t grow on trees’, I call over my shoulder.

  After more miming from me, the shepherd finally understands. Astounded by my proposal, he throws his arms in the air and walks off. Either he is genuinely appalled at my gall to liken the value of one of his sheep to my pen or he is trying to negotiate a better price. Regardless, he gets my point: in my mind, my pen is equal to his sheep. His understanding is further illustrated when he returns to try and redress the balance of trade. He says his third word in English: ‘Money’.

  Feigning shock, I continue the ruse that my pen is every bit as valuable as one of his sheep. Having none of it, he strides away to his flock and stoops. Then he comes back with the nearest lamb, turning it under my nose while explaining its value and merits in Tibetan.

  Docile and meek as only a spring lamb can be, this cute little animal in a wool tuxedo murmurs a pitiable bleat as it hangs draped across the shepherd’s palm.

  My heart softens, as does my resolve, at seeing the innocent lamb. However, the haggling gauntlet has been thrown down. I noisily click the pen a few times, make a show of impressing myself by writing on my palm, and theatrically place the pen in my shirt pocket, ooing and ahhing while presenting it as a real prize.

  The shepherd harrumphs and nods as he makes a grab for the pen. Uh-uh! I’m not going to fall for that one. This will be an exchange. Not believing that he’ll actually go through with it, I call his bluff and hold out my palm while clasping the pen tightly in the other. The lamb is placed in my empty palm and I let go of the pen and drop it into his fist. Done. He has his pen. I have me a lamb.

  I have me a lamb! Is this for real? As disbelieving as my cycling companions, I make to ride off, wondering if this is some kind of Tibetan joke. The shepherd, admiring his shiny new blue plastic pen, has already walked away, apparently happy.

  It’s not easy to ride a fully loaded touring bicycle on an unpaved road while holding a live lamb in one hand. Wobbling on the bike, I continue on the road to Lhasa, glancing back at my trading partner – who watches me leave with no obvious concern. Riding beside me, Scott and Matt ask me what I have just asked myself, ‘What are you going to do with the lamb?’

  I may come from New Zealand, where sheep famously outnumber people ten to one, but I’m also a vegetarian riding a bicycle around the world. The irony weighs heavy. In trying to teach a Tibetan about value, I have just bought a white elephant in sheep’s clothing.

  ‘It could be our mascot’, offers Scott. ‘Or lunch’, he adds.

  As the shepherd with his flock starts to diminish in the distance, the lamb starts to baa piteously for its mother.

  If I am not going to slaughter and eat this month-old lamb, then I have to return it. The fun is over. I turn the bike around. The lamb, seeing the flock now getting closer, becomes more and more animated, making me place it on the ground before it causes an accident.

  I get off the bike and approach the shepherd. The lamb scrambles back to the flock. ‘Hello. Pen’, I call to him. I have given back his lamb and I want my pen back.

  But he seems to feel that all transactions are final and no refunds or negotiations will be considered. At least that’s what I think he means when he pulls out his knife.

  ‘Whoa! Hey, buddy, that’s going a bit far, isn’t it?’ I say as I stop in my tracks. Literally drawing a line in the sand, the Tibetan doesn’t threaten me physically with his steel but stabs the dagger into the ground between us.

  I see that I have gambled and lost. He called me on my bluff. As much as I liked the pen, so does he. He’s keeping it.

  Well
, I think, since he’s going to be like that, I’ll just collect my lamb and be on my way. I wade into the flock, and the sheep scatter as I grope for a lamb, any lamb. The shepherd starts shouting and shows genuine anger. Leaving his dagger in the dirt, he produces a sling, the same simple device the shepherd David used to fell Goliath. This is getting serious.

  He picks up a stone, places it in the crook of the sling, and sets it spinning, his fiery eyes fixed on me, screaming his incredulity that I would dare reject his lamb and go for another. Dread rises, along with the hairs on the back of my neck.

  I stand stock-still as the stone is released. It hums through the air at a safe distance from my head. I’m glad I’m still wearing my bicycle helmet. I give up the idea of leaving with a lamb, apologise and ask for my pen back. ‘Hello. Pen.’

  But the Tibetan doesn’t want to give up his pen. Scott and Matt are ready to jump to my defence as the sling is loaded with another stone and set in orbit above the shepherd’s head. Now a screaming maniac, he is definitely more than I’d bargained for. I walk back to the bicycle with my hands in the air; I am a man in defeat. Punctuating that point, another supersonic crack splits the air and the stone sings past my ear.

  Back at my bicycle, Scott and Matt are already doubled over in laughter and having a hard time holding on to their bikes. I start to laugh too. We soon find that hilarity is an aerobic exercise. There’s not enough oxygen to sustain laughter at this intensity, yet gasping to catch our breaths causes us to laugh even more. A lack of air, a ridiculous situation and a dumb lesson have us intoxicated.

  This was supposed to be a simple lesson in intercultural exchange. In a position of power, I was the tourist lording privilege over a humble shepherd. Now humiliated, I think: how can I tell this story back home? It should have been a steal for any self-respecting New Zealander, but I couldn’t trade a lamb for a pen. My hands are empty, like my head and the air.