But I don’t like the word “traveller”. It smells of one-upmanship, of smugness.

There’s that sense that, just by hitting the banana pancake trail instead of the all-inclusive resorts, the camp site instead of the villa, the traveller is somehow better than the rest, their experiences somehow more meaningful than other people’s.

That you are a “traveller”. And that “they” are “tourists”.

That because you hang out with backpackers, and they hang out with package holidaymakers, you are somehow better.

That, because you are smoking weed in a $3 beach hut on a cheap Thai island, while they are drinking fruit cocktails around the pool on an expensive Thai island, you are, somehow, more integrated into the local culture than they are.

Tourist or traveller? Well, I’m not a big fan of package holidays.

At least since they stopped being a cheap way to get flights, way back in the dark ages.

But –- honestly — whether that holiday is a fortnight in Torremolinos/Cancun/Kuta or six weeks in a tour bus across Africa, whether your reps are organizing bananas down the swimming trunks competitions or a barbecue over an open fire, it is still a package holiday.

But, f*ck it. I’m a tourist, too. Here’s why.

I Use Guidebooks

For most travelers, the use of a guidebook is a sign of a tourist. Now, I like a personal recommendation as much as the next person, and regularly go places that aren’t in guidebooks.

However… Sometimes you just want to roll into town, with a map, and a list of guesthouses, with roughly accurate prices and reviews, all wrapped up in a good old-fashioned book, find a clean bed, and hit it.

Guidebooks are also bloody handy for letting you know, for example, where everyone will be watching the sunrise and the sunset over XYZ landscape or monument.

And, frankly, guidebooks are generally written by proper writers who know their stuff, and have more or less accurate historical background and cultural info. Very helpful, IMHO. Because it’s never good to pass within an hour’s journey of one of the wonders of the world and miss it.

Whether you’re tourist or traveller.

I Pay More Than Local Price

I am not a local. Ergo, in the developing world in particular, where the very fact of being able to leave my own country and bounce around theirs makes me richer than 99% of the population, I do not expect to pay the local price for services such as transport.

A traveller will spend hours haggling with some third world cab driver over the equivalent of 20p or less. (I’ve done it, in my youth.) As a tourist, I’m happy to pay 25% over, or thereabouts, without quibble. (More on this here.)

I Loathe Hostel Dorms

I didn’t go to boarding school. But, all the same, paying good money to sleep, in a bunk bed, with a room full of strange adults is just, well, painful, whether or not you’re working at the time.

I’m not shy about my body (possibly a little too un-shy for some). But I am a noisy, wriggly sleeper. One of those people that jerks, snorts and thrashes in the night. Activities I prefer to keep to myself, in all honesty.

I like to spread my stuff around, read and write in bed, and stay up late. Which is not ideal, even in the posh hostels where you have your own light by your bed, because the bloody things are full of light sleepers.

For some reason, this doesn’t apply when trekking. I’ll quite happily bunk down in a mountain hut, or sling a hammock wherever everyone else does, roll out a mat in the village rest-house, or whatever it may be. In the city, it’s just wrong.

I Love Theme Parks

Theme parks, water parks –- sign of the devastation of local culture and impending globalization?

Yeah, probably, though there’s something very Guatemalan about a Guatemalan water park, and very Vietnamese about a Vietnamese one, and very Thai about a Thai theme park, and these are not all for the tourists by any stretch of the imagination.

But they are also amazing fun. Show me a 360 degree aqua loop water slide, or pretty much any roller coaster on the planet (let alone Battlestar Galactica, and I regress mentally to about age ten.

Fun as an adult. F*cking hilarious with a kid in tow.

I Like To Eat Out

Like all the best travellers, I like street food, and local eateries where you chow down with your fingers from paper cones. I also like to sit down somewhere swep’up with a sea view and pig out on crabs, lobster, oysters…, head into town and gorge on steak or sashimi, treat my spawn to posh ice creams, buy nice stuff from the markets and cook it up.

I’m also a sucker for sky-high bars, revolving restaurants and the like, not to mention grown-up cocktails and nice beers. So shoot me.

It is relatively easy to eat for a couple of dollars a day in most of South-East Asia, even without going to the extremes of cooking your own rice and beans. We, err, haven’t.

I Own Impractical Clothing

Posh undies – check! Impractical shoes – not currently (I broke the last pair on their second outing…). Frock that is barely legal in most of the cultures we’ll be travelling for the next couple of months – check! Makeup (albeit caking through underuse) – check!

I may cut my hair with scissors. But I do like to think I might need to get dressed up from time to time, and my flip-flops tend to the sequined, not the canvas.

I do not, to my knowledge, own a single piece of technical or “travel” clothing. At least since I junked my hiking boots for a pair of Converse fakes that take up less space and are, well, so much prettier.

I Do Not Like To Walk With My Pack

Yeah, yeah, yeah, we’re carrying too much stuff. We like books. We trash electronics and a Kindle would last about a nanosecond with us.

Anywise. I take taxis, tuk tuks, motorbike taxis, and am currently driving us to Papua on a motorbike, because I do not like carrying 20kg of stuff any further than I have to.

I may travel with a backpack. But I am not a masochist.

Thanking you.

I Have Never Had A Tattoo

Though I do still dally with the idea, I have to say.

But tattoos, like the ability to play pool (or, I sometimes think, learning to surf), are something one should acquire by the age of 26 at the absolute latest. And I kinda missed the boat on that one.

Especially since David Beckham tattooed his kids’ names on himself around about the time I was contemplating an artistic Z.

I See A Backpacker Ghetto And I Run Like Hell

Bangkok’s Khao San Road is just horrid in all the wrong ways. Not sleazy. Not edgy. Not Wild West. Just a bunch of Western kids in hippie pants getting vomiting drunk on whisky buckets.

My spawn is wildly appreciative of comedy T-shirts (if, mercifully, not hippie pants), and has spent many a happy hour guffawing at the offers in Chiang Mai Night Market, Khao San Road and Vang Vieng.

But anywhere where travelers outnumber locals, magic mushrooms feature regularly on the menus and drinks are served in buckets, I am unlikely to enjoy.

Exception to this rule? Vang Vieng in Laos. Because anywhere where you can tube rapids,
enjoy rope swings and water slides, and –- were one not a responsible adult in charge of a child –- get absolutely muntered while so doing amid a dazzlingly beautiful karst landscape still, rather guiltily, gets my vote.

I Read Trash Fiction

I was pleased to see that Ubud’s wonderful library, Pondok Pekak, had Anna Karenina, something I’ve been meaning to read for a couple of decades now.

It also had a large selection of the oeuvre of British crime novelist Ruth Rendell, and pathology-porn fictionaliser Patricia Cromwell.

Would you like to guess which ones I read?

Sure, I had the flu, or summat. But I didn’t even take Anna Karenina out of the library.

My spawn has been on my case to read E.H. Gombrich’s A Little History of the World for the last few months. A splendid, deeply cultured work of central European thinking, written for kids with adults in mind as well, it’s a wonderful book.

I’m on, err, chapter seven. And, yes, he’s still on my case.

Yep. I’m definitely a tourist. Particularly given we are, after all, on tour.

But what about you? Are you tourist or traveller? Or neither?

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Or, more accurately, that mixture of social media, gibbering quietly at the parlous wifi and jabbing at the Google Analytics reload button* like a starving lab rat that mysteriously displaces my actual work for, y’know, clients, while I await my spawn’s return from school…

Anywise. I am working. Or consider myself to be so, anyway.

So when a chap comes up to me and asks “Do you speak English?” I am not entirely welcoming.

“Err, yes,” I say.

“Can you help me get some money out of the ATM?”

“Which ATM?” I say.

“The one up there.” He points.

“That one? Just select English as the language when it offers you the choice between that and Indonesian.”

“I don’t think I can do that,” he says.

I am pretty certain that said ATM speaks fluent English. Or Indlish, at least.

“Well, if it doesn’t, try the one in Circle K. Same side of the road, round the bend, a couple of hundred yards,” I say.

He looks at me like a stranded puppy.

“Can you come with me and help me?” he asks. “I need to get some money out before I get my flight. The travel agent said I should take it all out before I get to Sydney. I’m sorry to have to ask…”

I am a muppet when it comes to tech and anything mechanical, so have a degree of empathy with his plight.

“OK,” I say.

Now, Ubud being a safe place, and this being my local, I routinely leave my laptop and camera bag on the table while popping off to the loo or, for that matter, round the corner.

But this feels weird to me. The guy, who is 50ish, has a patterned shirt that isn’t a chain store shirt. He has blue tinted shades. He has a scrawny, strung out, hippie look about him.

And he’s Australian. He’s not some fat Mid-Western tourist fresh off the Eat, Pray, Love solo-friendly bus tour.

He’s not part of a group. He doesn’t have a driver.

If he has the nous to get to Ubud under his own steam, he should be capable of working an English-language ATM.

So I gather up my stuff, leaving only the bike helmet as a sign to the staff that I’ll be back to pay.

I walk with this guy to the ATM, an air-conditioned box which forces one into uncomfortable intimacy with one’s companion. “It’s Visa, right?” I say. “Both these take Visa.”

He endeavours to put the card into the slot where the receipt emerges.

“No,” I say. “The card goes in there.”

He tests it, tentatively. “Yep,” I say. “That’s the right way up.”

In it goes. A screen appears. “Select ‘English’,” I say.

At this point I am beginning to seethe a little.

As I look dutifully away for the geological time span it takes him to locate and enter his PIN, I am thinking of the deadline I need to hit, and how very productively I would be beavering away at it right now, right this second NOW, if only this muppet had not picked me, of all the people in the pizzeria, to assist him with his card travails.

“Now, do I put savings, checking or credit?” he asks.

“Ah!” I say. “That might be the problem. If it’s a Visa, they often like to treat it as credit. Check credit.”

“No,” he says. “It’s savings. I’ll check savings.”

“Ooookkkkkaaaaayyyy,” I say.

Because if there’s one thing I like more than dropping “work” to assist total strangers with basic life skills, it’s having my advice ignored when I do so.

The machine offers him three choices. I nod encouragingly as he tentatively, and agonizingly slowly, selects “Withdraw Money”.

The princely sum of 1,250,000 rupiah, or around 120 Australian dollars, appears on the screen.

“Is that what’s in my account?” he asks.

“No,” I say. “That is the amount this machine will allow you to withdraw in one single transaction. You can withdraw that amount again until you hit your daily limit on the card or there’s no money left in the account.”

He types in the number. All those zeroes are confusing, so I nod approvingly when he gets it right.

The machine spits out an enviable wodge of 50,000 rupiah notes. “What do I do now?” he asks. “Do I count it?”

I am cursed with a very expressive face.

I look like my Polish grandfather, and, like most Slavs, have features that are tailormade for a range of emotions from ineffable contempt to “pistols at dawn” by way of melancholy and bitter, angry drunk.

“What are you going to do if it’s wrong?” I say, in my best British English.

My face, meanwhile, is bellowing (in fluent Polish) “CRETIN! LET ME BACK TO MY VERY IMPORTANT WORK!”

“Ah yes,” he says. “Now how much more can I take out?”

“Like I said,” I begin.

I am by now at that stage familiar to all teleworking parents when childcare or school is about to end, bringing our loved ones back to us, and we count the toll that social media has wreaked on our productivity and search for someone to blame other than ourselves.

“It depends on how much there is in your account. It will let you take out 1,250,000 at a time,” I say, in a controlled manner.

He types in the number. The screen flashes up, in fluent English, “Insufficient funds in your account.”

“That means I can’t take out any more?” he asks.

I begin to wonder whether he is simply taking the piss. But it also seems, well, rude, to abandon him to the machine.

“You have either hit your daily limit for withdrawals or there isn’t enough money in there,” I say.

“How do I find out how much is in there?”

“You will need to ring your bank and ask them,” I say, by now so irritated I am enunciating like the Queen.

“There will be a number on your card,” I add. “Why don’t you try a smaller amount and see if it lets you have that?”

He types in 500,000, and looks at me for approval before entering. I nod.

The computer says no.

“Do you think I’ve taken it all out?” he asks.

My child can work a bloody ATM. Why can’t this man?

And why on earth did he pick me?

“I don’t know,” I say. “But you’re looking at less than fifty Australian dollars now so you can…”

I pause. A thought has struck me. “… You can take it all out when you get to Sydney.”

“Will it work in Sydney?”

I look at his card. It’s a Travelex Visa with an Australian contact number, among others, on the back.

“It should do,” I say. “But if you’re flying to Sydney tonight, what do you want Indonesian rupiah for?”

“Oh yes,” he says. “It’s not dollars, is it? But if I take it all out here, I can change it at the airport. I will be able to do that, won’t I?”

“Yes. They’ll change rupiah at Sydney. You won’t get the best rate…” I begin, then decide to drop the topic. “You’ll be able to change them, yes.”

“And what do I do about the rest of the money?”

“I really suggest you ring the number on the back of the card once you get to Sydney.” I point to the Australian number. “Then you can ask them to refund the balance to your account. Or, of course, you could just use an ATM and see how many dollars it will give you.”

“So I’ve taken it all out?” he asks.

I have had more lucid, less repetitious and infinitely more entertaining conversations while walking people around the garden to talk them down from bad acid trips.

I am beginning to wonder, what with the Bali Spirit festival and all, whether this might, in fact, be the root of the issue. The shirt is loud enough. And he’s of an appropriate vintage…

“I can’t tell you how much there is on your credit card,” I say.

“Why don’t you find out when you get to Australia?”

He thanks me so pitifully for my help that I feel a little unkind writing this.

But, as I head back and resume my work, with that crazed productivity which strikes as the school gates approach, I cannot take my mind off this guy.

And so, gentle reader. Your opinions please.

Scammer, with accomplice ready to lift laptop and camera bag should the table be abandoned for a second, but compelled to go through with the rigmarole and wind me up while he’s about it? Doubtful.

Acid casualty in need of some assistance?

Victim of a wildly inappropriate travel product?

Or the ultimate touron?

*: Google Analytics magically tells me how many people are reading this site at any given time. It does lovely graphs, and pie charts. Provides elaborate content breakdowns. It is also the biggest time-suck after Facebook and Twitter for anyone endeavouring to work for themselves, wherever they are in the world.

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