OnTheRoad

It's strange how things seem to work out with this travel thing. I'm beginning to develop a possibly dangerous optimism, a confidence that whatever happens it'll work out OK. Because, despite a lack of anything but the most general of planning and organisation, an almost compulsive see-what-happens approach, thngs always do. Perhaps this is simply a combination of the Kiwi "she'll be right" attitude, combined with laziness?

Take today, for example. Waking late, after a long trip yesterday and insufficient sleep the night before (last night also, come to think of it), my attempts to arrange transport onwards to Khaplu were initially unsuccessful. All transport was fully booked or had left already. My attempts to locate a cargo jeep also failed. I'd fallen back to a kind of lazy hitchhiking (sitting on my bag in a patch of shade and getting up for any jeep or van that went past), when a local walked past and asked me where I was going. A few minutes later, after being introduced to the super-secret-not-listed-in-lonely-planet local transport location I had a ticket in my hand and a seat awaited me.

Similarly yesterday; arriving at the Gilgit bus station, all seats were already taken. Feeling perverse, I sat down and waited, hoping that someone would fail to arrive on time and I could take their place; slim chance that, and it did indeed fall through. Not to worry though, such was the demand for seats that another van was called into service and off we set.

It doesn't just apply to transport, but to other aspects as well. Even bureacracy bows before the inevitable success of the journey. An old example is my fun at the border as I tried to leave Thailand and enter Cambodia; look back through the posts, details are there somewhere. A more recent example is my change of travel plans (I'm now re-entering Pakistan after India, and nixing the Nepal -> Tibet step). I had a difficult situation, as visas can only be extended within five days of expiry, and I wanted to change my visa to allow reenty, as well as extending it, but I had to leave seven days before my visa expired. Trusting my luck to the bureacratic winds of fate, I hit up the visa office anyway, to see if they could be talked around.

Half an hour and $US10 later and a new visa was in my battered passport, allowing me to return within three months, valid for a month on entry. Much better than the $US100 it costs out of the country (not to mention the $NZ50 our useless embassies charge for providing an A4 "Letter of Introduction"; I'm deducting that from my taxes, Govt of NZ).

Thinking of my passport, that's another story waiting to happen. It's not in the best of conditions; water damaged on the day I received it, back in May 2005 (due to the last one being too badly damaged... *cough*, I'm noticing a pattern here) and abused by insufficient care, it now looks the same front and back (the golden NZ crest having rubbed off - cheap bastards) and it's pulling apart in numerous places. Sooner or later some border official will give me grief on this. Probably I'll be stamped out of one country no probs (preventing my return), but rejected entering the next, leaving me stranded in the no man's land in between. No doubt somewhere between China and Myanmar, or something equally unappealing.

Nonetheless, the thought of this bothers me little. I can tell that somehow, inevitably, I'll get through. And the worse the events, the better the stories afterwards.