Run Over!

I’ve been reviewing the livejournal entries I made last April, when I did the round the world thing. Sparse, very sparse.

I’ve been mining them for snippets to print out and paste in my Levenger Circa travel journal (as facilitated by the wonderful Buffra) but it looks like I’ll have to write a whole chunk more, from memory.

Of course, this is nothing new. I’ve still got the final day or so of my Washington trip in 2005 to write up...

The problem with travel is that it takes up a lot of time, one way or another. Time when it’s not really feasible to sit down with a computer and an internet connection.

For one thing, there’s the physical environment of travel. Packing, waiting for a taxi or a train, checking in, moving around terminals (and some of the world’s terminals are massive affairs, with internal public transport systems spread over several huge buildings), going through security, queuing for checkin or boarding. Not to mention the flight or train trip or boat passage itself, though I can usually whip out my laptop, even if I have no internet connection.

If I’m in an airline lounge, there’s usually free internet and decent computers, and I lap this time up, getting a drink and a few snacks and settling in for the odd half hour, one eye on the boarding time for my next flight.

Travel makes for a lot of “froth” or wasted moments spent in finding things out, checking in and out of places, doing laundry, exploring, waiting for places to open, a million little things out of the day.

The exploring time, though pleasant and a necessary component of travel, is time spent having adventures that should be written up. If I’m working my way through a huge camping goods shop with Elhamisabel, I’m not writing. I’m adding to my problem. The fact that there are few things in this life I’d rather do than spend time and money in a gadget shop with Elhamisabel is beside the point. One of those things is eating icecream on a sunny day in the Romer with Elhamisabel. Or looking through an antique submarine in Chicago with Mojosmom and Tzurriz, strolling along the Charleston waterfront with WhyteRaven, gasping over photographs in a London exhibition with Semioticghosts, taking a dawn ride on the Staten Island Ferry with thebiblioholic, stumbling over seals in Dunedin with FutureCat, getting merrily tipsy in a bar with Gizmopuddy...

And when I’m not doing any of these things, I’m sleeping.

The times in my travels when I can sit down with a computer and a connection are rare indeed. And I spend a lot of that time checking email and livejournal.

So I put things off for the normal days when I’m back home. And then life runs over me and I’ve got a whole swag of other things to do...

(no subject)

Two thirty yesterday, and I got a call from my day driver. Seems that our cab began smoking and dumped its oil all over the main city rank early yesterday, and had to be hauled away by tow truck. Cripes. I'm glad it wasn't my shift, but it must have been traumatic for my codriver. Not to mention expensive in terms of missed income, though he was given another cab to drive.

But I don't have an Elite Cabs uniform and I'm not all that keen to drive a regular cab anyway, so I decided to have a night off, on the expectation that by the time my week begins again on Tuesday, my beautiful limousine will be back on the road.

Instead, I lounged around with my wife, went into Manuka with her and had a leisurely cup of coffee and a mango gelato at Artoven, and then browsed around Paperchain bookshop and windowshopped in the arcades. Paperchain is an independent of superb quality and (naturally) I bought a couple of books. Guidebooks for Hong Kong, actually, and we spent an hour or so reading them in bed, swapping snippets.

There are rickshaws in Hong Kong. Seven of them, and the collective age of the rickshaw pullers is about a thousand. You pay the man to pose in his rickshaw, but don't ask him to actually pull you anywhere, as onlookers will hurl abuse at you and the old geezer will drop dead half a block down the road.

Our hotel is on the waterfront, but well out of the central area. In fact it's not on the guidebook map, at least not the map that shows actual street names.

There's a Soviet aircraft carrier moored just over the border, turned into a kind of theme park. If I get a chance, I'll leave Kerri and DD shopping in Shenzen and take DS to have a wander over, eating hot dogs on the flight deck. (These are sausages in a roll, I understand.)