A Long, Long Way From Where I Am Supposed To Be

I like these little tourist stories folk are sending in. Here's another one from Charles:

'Dog walking late yesterday afternoon, a youngish couple in the ubiquitous hire-car (you know the type, no hub caps, blazing headlights complete with two ill-behaved children in the rear). "Hey mate, you English?" "Yes", I replied. "Where are we?" "Well, you are now heading for Formentor and if you wish to continue, carry on to the Cap and on a clear day you'll see Menorca, fantastic and spectacular views," I replied. "Nah" said one of the brats, "that sounds boring." Bending down a bit more to speak to the driver I noticed one of those Sat-Nav things on the window, a compulsory gizmo that seems to be a must-have for every driving tourist nowadays. "Surely that thing shows your whereabouts?" I asked. "Would do mate but the effing battery is dead."

'Now bear in mind that this oaf has pulled up fifty metres or so on the Formentor road from the roundabout by the Port Football Club and has zilch chance of reversing. I too am risking life and limb with a quivering canine lump by my side, as the traffic squeezes past my protruding arse. "Look, the most sensible thing you can do is drive up to the top, pull of the road, and look at your map," I said. Wait for it...

' "Map, what map? Tossed that into the bin a couple of days ago." Bloody hell, this guy is heading back to Can Pic to a hotel he has forgotten the name of and had no recollection of how he got here or where he was heading! Anyway I gave him directions to Alcudia, but he had never heard of that place either!

And the season has started...'


Apart from the rich vein of humour and discussion that can be extracted from the local hire-car industry (and one day I may well), here is enough stuff with which to conduct an entire seminar - indeed a whole semester's worth of seminars - regarding tourist behaviour. But for now, I shall limit myself to two matters of importance - maps and mates.

Firstly to maps. Not only whole rainforests, my friends, but the entire Finnish pulp industry are co-opted to produce local maps. Walk into a hotel lobby and the machete of a rainforest is required to cut through the growth of maps to be encountered. Tour operators have diversified their business - they are now publishers of maps. Everywhere, maps and more maps. So many maps, and so many thrown into the bin. Someone who once worked for a major UK tour operator told me of the job that it was to collect the discarded maps on the transfer coach from the airport.

And yet a map is almost a pre-requisite for the visitor, you might have thought. But maybe they don't teach maps any longer. Maybe that's the reason. "What's this?" "A map." "Dunno about that." When I was at school there were two things you learned in geography - maps and oxbow lakes, the former singularly useful, the latter singularly useless, unless there happens to be an oxbow lake on a map, which in the case of Mallorca there is alas but not one example.

And secondly, mates, as in the use of "mate". Everyone is a mate, so much so that it comes as a surprise, a shock even, when one is not a mate. This morning I was heading towards the Vanity Golf hotel in Puerto Alcúdia. From the beach came a group - males of bellydom and a Kylie or two with baby-buggies. One of the chaps spoke. "Excuse me, sir." Sir!? Sir, sir!? So universal has mate become, that I had quite forgotten about sir. I was hugely impressed. The only time I have been addressed as sir in Mallorca has been by Spaniards; the British never, until today. I shall reciprocate. From now on, I shall only use sir or "my good man", and all bar owners will be referred to as "landlord". Anyway, the gentleman (see, not bad this formal language) enquired as to the location of the nearest bank. You need a map, my good man, I thought, wishing only to send him off in his search for a local finance house replete with a geographical representation of where such an establishment might be found. But I didn't. For next to us was ... a bank.


QUIZ
Chain - Mark Wingett, who played DC Carver in The Bill, was Jimmy's mate in Quadrophenia. And how do you get from Quadrophenia to King Crimson?Yesterday's title - Peter Gabriel, "Games Without Frontiers". (See this here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bz-qeJOo7cs). Today's title - who? Think Sunderland FC.

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