The Unexpected Perks of Travelling Alone

The other day, a young girl made my day.  I'd been driving for a long time and was pretty knackered at the end of the day.  After I had parked the car and on my way to the hotel, a family walked past me.  Out of the blue, the girl from the family came running back to me.  She gave me a Ferrero Rocher and said "for you" and off she went.  Sweet!

Yesterday, I went to take a look at the Khalidiya Mall after the book I was reading had mentioned it.  

While I was looking for the entrance to the mall from the car park, a woman dressed in an abaya and a black hijab on her head came walking towards me from the opposite direction.  She was a bit out of breath when she told me that there was no entrance where she came from and led me to another side of the building. Eventually, we found the entrance. Immediately after we got into the lift, she pulled out a bottle of perfume from her handbag and asked if I wanted some.  I didn't know how to react but only with my eyes wide open.  She told me to stick my hand out and she squirted some into it.  Then she started putting the perfume on herself.

These Muslim females are a lot friendlier to strangers than I had expected; it really caught me by surprise!

These two incidents reminded me of some unexpected nice strangers I had met through the years when I was travelling on my own.  It didn't really happen much when I was travelling with my husband though.

In 1983, I don't know what got into me that I wanted to try travelling to China alone!  In those days, one needed to get an address stamp on the re-entry permit (which was a little booklet back then) or risk not coming back to Hong Kong.  I thought I could just walk into the largest hotel in Guangzhou at the time -- Dong Fang hotel (the Oriental hotel) and get a room.  Unfortunately, it was the Easter holidays and I had totally underestimated the popularity of travelling in Guangzhou in those days???!  There were no rooms!

I was puzzling what I could do while sitting in the hotel lobby when a young couple approached me and asked if I needed any help.  It turned out that the girl was the chairwoman of the Hong Kong Federation of Students and she offered to add an extra bed in their room and let me spend the night! The next day, she managed to find me a room via a Chinese department which doesn't exist anymore. Lucky me!

Ten years passed and I was on an overnight train from Bangkok to Suratthani.  Sitting opposite to me was a Thai woman who kept talking to me without me understanding a word she said.  Then a Eurasian girl who was built like a fashion model walked into our car and sat right across the aisle from us.  I noticed that she was eavesdropping on our "conversation", so I "turned" to her for help.  Without any hesitation, she hopped over our side and joined us.

The Eurasian girl was half-Thai and half-German, and she had lived in the UK for a year.  From her, I found out the other Thai woman was trying to tell me about her story and why she went to Bangkok.  She was so thrilled talking to us that she started buying us cold beer and Tom Yum Goong (from which she ate only the prawns and left the soup alone).  They even taught me the food I could order in Thai (that subsequently led to a restaurant letting me into their kitchen and showed me how to make Yum Woon Sen the authentic way).

I don't know during which part of the conversation that they started talking about joining me in Koh Samui,  but by the time the train had reached Suratthani, the Thai woman had to go west to PhiPhi island to take care of her children.  The Eurasian girl, though, did join me.  She dumped her boyfriend and we shared the rent of a bungalow which she never spent a night in.  Instead, she found a new boyfriend on Lamai beach straightaway.  Occasionally, she and the new boyfriend would come to find me and have dinner together.  She even made the boyfriend drive all of us on a scooter to Chaweng Beach where all the parties were.

The next year, in 1994, I had a minor accident when I was driving alone in Langkawi. I fell off a scooter right in the centre of a tiny village, a minuscule "piazza" surrounded by small shops, where villagers were sitting outside chatting.  They all came to my help.  Some helped push my scooter to one side; others helped me sit down and tried to calm me down with cigarettes and beer. 

It turned out that I was in the Chinese village. They became my friends and started taking me and my friends out to have free drinks in the restaurants and bars along the Padang beach. The community was so small back then that everybody knew each other.  Of course, being Chinese, they smuggled bacon onto the island and offered to share it with us (which we politely declined).

On the day of our departure, we had to check out at noon but our flight was at 6 p.m..  In those days, there was no such thing as late checkout.  So my new friends drove a jeep (or a van?) to our hotel, picked up all our luggage and took us to have more drinks until flight time.  Then they drove us to the airport.  It was a pity that I had lost the contacts of these lovely people after a fire at my home a few years after that.  

There are a lot more stories like these but they would have to wait for another time.  Isn't it great to travel alone?