The Grumpy Old Blog

Crime! Drugs! Drug lords! Murder! Poverty! Litter! Rotten transport! Lousy roads! Third-world hotels!  You must be absolutely mad!  What on earth is possessing you to go there? This was the general reaction when I mentioned where we were heading for our holidays this year. But the detractors and smart-Alecs couldn’t have been more wrong. Crime, well we certainly saw none, nil drugs, yes, some abject poverty, but hey, there are around a dozen people currently sleeping in doorways on Manchester’s Deansgate. There was no litter anywhere, with tripartite bins for paper, glass/tins and non-recyclables on most street corners, superb, speedy, reliable and cheap public transport with no peak fares (like we here in the UK pay for our quite substandard services), no road potholes, fabulous hotels . . . .   yes, Colombia is nothing but fantastic! Well, providing you exclude car drivers. They are like the drivers in Rome or Paris - suicidal! We kicked off in Med...

There is no doubt that airports can be quite amusing places. That is apart from being told by a burly security supervisor at the x-ray gate that thanks to the only contribution Yasser Arafat ever made to society, I had to remove my belt, shoes, watch and place my AK-47 in the tray provided. Watching people going around their travel ‘business’ in airports and on board the aircraft is hilarious. There are those who are plainly not very good at it, continually checking all manner of minutiae with the other members of the party. “Do we go to the gate?”, “Have we time for a beer?”, “I MUST get a pizza”. There are those who have plainly not done it much before and like their fellow travellers to be made fully aware of the exact opposite, as they point and gesture to the monitor shouting out their destination and boarding gate at every passing opportunity to one and all around them. There are those who think they are something special – despite the fact they are travelling via bu...

Well, the Cambodians are lovely and hospitable. The Thai people are lovely and hospitable.  The British, Australian, New Zealand, Russian and American tourists are by and large well-behaved, although to be brutally honest, the Americans can be a little loud both of voice and check trousers.  And the Chinese. Yes, the Chinese.  What can be said about the Chinese that won’t have Chairman Mao turning in his ashes’ pot? They are noisy, rude, inconsiderate, thoughtless, and, if China was to get nuked, all that would remain would be hordes of Chinese people glued to their mobile phones.  They mobile at breakfast. They mobile on the plane during take-off and landing. They mobile while eating, shopping, crapping and probably even in their sleep. They mobile while walking busy streets, an oriental equivalent of the living dead. They mobile on tours, on excursions, when having things explained and while the tour guide is trying to get them back on the b...