On Whatever
Alison Prince
Travelling unravelling
The word ‘package’ has a lot to answer for. It started out harmlessly enough, meaning any kind of small parcel, but once it got attached to ‘tour’ it turned into a kind of virus. I’m in no position to be snooty about the concept – package tours of various sorts have taken me to some peculiar places, often with even more peculiar, highly enjoyable people. The wondrous Yorkshire Tours, run from a back bedroom in Huddersfield by a man called Laurie Shaw who wore carpet slippers held on by rubber bands, sent vaguely-driven busloads of lefties like myself to places behind the Iron Curtain at a time when proper travel agencies couldn’t get further than Austria. They were wonderful adventures, punctuated by a brew-up at the roadside whenever the bus broke down or we were lost. We occasionally lost a passenger, too. Someone got left behind at Dover because he had a visa for Ostend and the driver had put the bus on a different boat, and there was an odd occurrence in Moscow that resulted in one less passenger on the return trip. Those were, I suppose, loosely-wrapped packages, with bits falling out between torn paper and ineffectively knotted string. You don’t get that kind of thing now. Once packaged, you stay packaged. Not just sticky-taped, but sealed into a padded envelope.
You can see the point. Tour operators shudder at the thought of someone disappearing in a foreign city or falling in love with a Bedouin and vanishing, rather literally, in a puff of dust. The opportunities for individual irresponsibility are therefore strictly curtailed. There are ways round it, of course. A murmur of a terrible headache at breakfast will get you excused from a day’s excursion to another imperial palace with curly edges to its roof and a big gift shop. Wait until the bus has gone, then you can sneak out and explore on your own, making sure to be toying palely with a glass of mint tea when the rest of the troupe get back. Or better, eschew all groups and go on your own.
This is, of course, still possible. I don’t carry a mobile phone that is the slightest use to anyone else, so it’s fairly easy to fetch up somewhere totally out of contact. It’s probably a taste inherited from the family tendency to go off and get lost in remote countries for years on end, but I have a strange liking for staring round at some place that is not where I meant to be and thinking, ‘Now what?’ But it gets more difficult to do that. Too often, the trip has to be a properly planned one, to go and see people who naturally expect you to appear at the airport in something like the expected time, so the actual transit is simply something to put up with. Airports lean more and more towards being shopping malls that reluctantly release you to a departure gate after travelatoring though miles of white corridors covered with adverts. You are packaged. You have become an aeroplane parcel. The only thing that matters about you is your ID and ticket print-out with green luggage check.
What else can one expect? As a slightly weary Easy Jet employee said in a jammed check-in hall at Gatwick last week, “We’ve about two thousand people to deal with before your onward flight.’ I said that was fine, I’d go and kill some time, and he very nicely advised that I could get on an earlier plane. Ordeal shortened by a couple of hours. It’s a very different thing from the wait on some foreign railway station with people eating oranges and feeding babies, with a live hen sitting on top of the other food in one of those big, pink/blue/white bags. Once you start to value travel only for how quickly and painlessly it can get you there, the whole point shifts. You are not exploring but enduring. In a perverse way, I quite like it when the whole thing goes wrong. Not, of course, if it means trying to sleep on an airport floor for three days, but those heart-sinking moments when a Tannoy message announces that the train has broken down usually lead to some kind of adventure, nasty or not. Suddenly, the expected pattern has broken up and everything has changed. It’s uncomfortable at the time, but at least you stop feeling like a parcel.
I still have a great affection for buses. Of all transport methods, the bus is the most human and the most fallible. Traffic jams and mechanical breakdowns beset it, but there is a bold feeling of self-help about bus travel. Drivers on long-distance are free to decide which is the best way through some crowded bit and how to negotiate motorway traffic. The rich invective from a bus driver cut up by some idiot in a Vauxhall who’s in the wrong lane adds a certain pleasure to the journey, and you are at least not on rails. Trains make me feel slightly hysterical because they can only go along those rails, and there’s another one somewhere in front and heaven knows how many following behind. Buses are free spirits. It’s almost worth getting up in the dark to see the bus to Brodick come round the hill’s corner and pull up with its lights on and its windows all steamy. People nod and smile as you climb in. ‘Morning – cold one, isn’t it?’ And outside, an orange dawn starts to spread above the sea’s horizon. OK, we’re only going to Brodick. But if there is no herd of cows or fallen-over milk tanker, we will get there in time for the ferry. No packaging, you see. It’s proper travel, and I love it.
