Not problems, “Adventures”
There are certainties in life. Death. Taxes. Travel problems. If you’re talking to someone who claims to travel frequently and everything always runs perfectly smoothly, they’re either a liar or in complete denial. Shit happens, the trick is to just roll with it and remember that one day you’ll be looking back at this and laughing. Not everything on your vacation is going to be particularly memorable, but if something gets messed up/goes wrong/is not what you expected, I guarantee you’ll still be talking about it years from now.
This I know from personal experience. Being an agent means nothing when I’m standing on a curb in Kuala Lumpur for two hours, waiting for my airport transfers which never showed up. The phone conversation with the company rep went something like this:
Rep: “Are you sure you have arranged transfers?”
Me: “Of course I’m sure, I’m the one who freakin’ booked them!”
Rep: “Oh.”
And I still had to make my own way to my hotel. But on the flip side, if I hadn’t been stuck there for so long, I never would have met some of the nicest people, complete strangers who went way out of their ways to help me out, or seen an incredible lightning storm.
Over the years all sorts of crap has happened to me. One time I was staying at a hotel in London, and one of the beds only had three legs, so it tilted at an interesting angle. When maintenance was called they went all high-tech and brought phone books to prop it up with. This same room had no less than 6 lights in a five by five room (well, it felt that small, anyway), but only three light bulbs, so half the time you tried to turn something on and got nothing. Maintenance was creative with their solution to this one, too, answering our request for more light by, while we were out sightseeing, moving those three bulbs to the other lamps. This was the only available room in the hotel, so changing rooms wasn’t an option, and, as it was a non-refundable, prepaid reservation, I didn’t have the funds to pay out of pocket to move to a new hotel in pricey London. But the location was great, steps from Paddington Station and Hyde Park, across from a cute little square that had live music some evenings for free, and surrounded by pubs and restaurants. Even knowing how crappy the hotel was, I would stay there again if it was the only one available in that area (and they could guarantee me light bulbs)!
Another time British Airways accidentally misprinted my boarding pass, sending me to gate 25, which was down this long gray hallway and felt like I was hiking to the middle of nowhere. Ten minutes before my flight closed, I discovered that gate 25 went to Cairo and my flight back to Vancouver actually left from gate 5. Ten Minutes, twenty gates, and this was at London Heathrow Airport, where each terminal is roughly the size of Luxembourg. It was very Amazing Race, running screaming through the crowded airport, dodging fellow travellers and hurdling luggage. I was the last person on the plane, and I smelled like a gym sock for the next nine and a half hours (I’m sure my seat mates appreciated that), but I made it. I’m actually pretty proud of this, I didn’t think I could run that fast!
Then there’s the time I was in Bangkok and we got the great idea to take the water taxis down the Chao Phraya river after dark to get a great view of Wat Arun, the Temple of the Dawn from the water. It started off swimmingly, water taxiing up, and stopping for a drink as we waited for darkness to fall. Finally the conditions were perfect and we go to board the water taxi, only to have people shaking their heads and saying “no” repeatedly. By now we had a fairly good idea of how the water taxi system operated, so we knew we hadn’t done anything wrong, but we couldn’t figure out why they wouldn’t let us on. Turns out that after the evening rush hour, all the water taxis only ran upriver, so we were stuck, on the wrong side of the river from our hotel, with no way of getting back. A taxi was looking like our only option (and not a good one at that, as our hotel was a very long – and expensive – distance away, and bartering with Bangkok taxis, especially for two women alone at night, was not a particularly appealing or safe thing to do).
The water taxi operators pointed us to a cross-river ferry that would, at the very least, get us back onto the correct side, so we hopped on that, the only passengers at this time of night. The view wasn’t the one we had been going for, but you could still see Wat Arun, and it was spectacular. This dropped us off in the midst of a night market, not a big, nice one like Chatuchak, but a clutch-your-purse-to-your-chest-and-look-around-furtively one. Fantastic. And it only got better, as when we reached the street there were no taxis to be seen, only Tuk Tuks. Every guidebook harps on how dangerous these little riding lawnmower taxis can be, but we were desperate, so we climbed in and agreed on a price to Hua Lamphong, the closest subway station I could remember the name of. Oh my God, this was a blast. Screw the guidebooks, zipping through the dark streets in little more than a pop can with an engine was exhilarating. We took them as often as possible after that.
It had started off as a big, stupid mistake, but it ended up being a really fun, incredible night that still makes me smile when I think about it. Murphy’s Law states “anything that can go wrong will go wrong”, but I prefer Holly’s Law, “Anything that can go wrong could go wrong, and if it does, roll wth it and laugh about it later”. At the time it may really, really suck, but everything, good or bad, only makes your vacation into more of an adventure, and isn’t that why you’re traveling in the first place?