
Transport
Getting from A to B on your holidays, or travelling, or backpacking, or whatever it is you’re doing, can bring with it a whole heap of interesting – potentially terrifying – scenarios. But transport is all part of life’s rich tapestry and the source, if you’re lucky, of many things that make travel so life-affirming great. Or bad. Things can go south, after all, as EitM can attest. A mugging at knifepoint in a taxi in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, tends to make an impression.
But that’s besides the point. We survived the mugging and learned a lot about hubris and complacency. In short, neither of those things really helps when you’re all alone in an unknown place. With the right precautions, a degree of sense and a portion of luck, though, the actual travel element of travel tends to be the most memorable.
Pretty much everyone will have their own transport tale. Characters met, crashes had, places been, culture shock felt. Just about our favourite transport thing is getting public buses in Indonesia. The foundation of our bahasa skills has come from chatting with bus conductors. These wise spirits, having sensed our willingness to learn, took it upon themselves to become temporary teachers. So doing, they gave us two good things: the means to communicate, and an energising chat with a stranger.