Hello Sir, You Want Bike?

Insert moto, Tuk Tuk, girl, boy, marijuana, cocaine, heroin, boom boom or a massage into this sentence and you have the ubiquitous greeting of the South East Asian short trip transport professional. Here is a man who, despite your initial doubts and flashbacks to high school physics classes about inertia and another, more vivid flashback to the clause in your travel insurance that says something fatal and non-recourse about motorcycle riding, will be able to ride you to your hotel on a 38cc moped with your 22kg pack stuffed between his legs and you on the back. With hope the high pitched keening noise you are making will be covered up by the wind whistling past your driver’s ears at 25km/h, or he will be too engrossed in finding out where you are from so he can sling the requisite stereotyped responses back at you.
“Ah, Australia, a dingo ate my baby,”
“What the...”
“Many kangaroo, many koala,”
“Um yeah, but getting back to Lindy Chamberlain,”
“You want to see my friend’ hotel?”
The appropriate answer here, if any, is no. Negotiating with moto rivers, stall holders and the guy who’s selling you the cocaine which is actually pure smack which will land you in the stinkiest cell of Bangkok’s worst prison for the next 25 years with a cell mate called Shirley – sorry, the negotiation is all about not having a negotiation at all.

This a fundamental rule not ignored, but seemingly alien to most foreign, or should I say, white, tourists to SEA. Getting back to the fundamental cornerstone of transport touting. “Hello my friend”. Think on this for just a while. How many of your friends recently offered to hook you up with an underage prostitute of either sex, or perhaps something in between, sell you heroin, or drive you to a restaurant for 25c. If you have good friends perhaps one out of the three might be acceptable. Two out of three and you need to start seriously thinking about the circles you move in, and if you have the whole triumvirate, well, I hope your parole hearing goes well next month. My friends come over to my house, often wearing shoes, drink red wine and talk about politics and how they’re really going to stop drinking so much when they hit their next major birthday. They rarely, if ever, sleep in hammocks strung between two poles of their major mode of transport and yell indiscriminately at passers-by.
It was with some amusement, having realised the place in my world where Tuk Tuk drivers resolutely reside, that I heard some foreign friends discussing how annoying the relentless touting was becoming for them after a couple of months in Cambodia. I realised then I had reached a state of peace, perhaps Zen. An equilibrium with the Tuk Tuk community which was symbiotic, and imbued with a mutual respect. I would ignore them, pay no heed to their cries of “ hello mister”, “hello friend”, “you like lady”, until that time that I did indeed want to go back to my hotel, get loaded on pure golden triangle number four heroin and get sucked off by a chimp. In the meantime they remained road noise. As ubiquitous, and as worthy of notice, as the road swishing by under your tires as you wind on down the road.

Having been alerted to the fact that not all travellers were as enlightened as I, I undertook to observe my fellow adventurers, and it is with some sympathy I recount the sad tale. Here were people, who, it seemed must have been in sore need of companionship. Were their lives so hollow, so bereft of human contact, that they had to fly all the way from Berlin to befriend this wizened little brown man who was about to bilk them out of an extra $US2 by feigning complete lack of understanding of the previously struck deal the moment they arrived at their hotel?
I had to sneak closer, and discern what these poor lost souls were actually talking about.
“You want moto...”
A slightly sunburned woman, about 50 years old, with tuckshop lady arms and stringy blonde hair and a beak nose, who had apparently stolen Elizabeth Taylor’s sunglasses, considered her reply.
“No well, actually we were thinking about doing some shopping and Trevor’s still in that DVD shop back there seeing if they have the third season of The Bill and then I think we’re just going to get some lunch.”
Oh dear. Two very bad mistakes here. One is a common misunderstanding, even in the West: that anyone actually gives a toss what you are doing, how you feel etc; haven’t you heard of pleasantries idiot? The second was engaging in the first place. It’s like the angry chimp at the zoo. Don’t make too much eye contact, otherwise poo will be flung. It’s a much more pleasant experience in south east Asia – very rarely involving poo - but one which almost inevitably ends with you buying some postcards from a child pretending to be crippled at a silver factory in a suburb of Bangkok even the locals haven’t heard about.
Unless the driver is one of the admittedly many who speak excellent English, all he heard from the aforementioned communication was “Shopping! DVD! Lunch!” It would be a statistical anomaly large enough that hordes of World Bank economists would descend upon this particular individual and study him for years if his relatives did not own at least one of these particular establishments, if not all three. (If you do track down this mythical individual, please contact World Bank headquarters at Geldnehmenstrasse 15, Geneva, or some such).
The resulting negotiation is somewhat akin to watching a cancer patient trying to resist being bundled out of a Ricky Gervais show by two burly security guards. A tenacity borne of poverty, entrepreneurialism and the promise of lunch, is always going to beat the inherent nature of the Western beast to be polite. Unless of course it’s an American in which case they’ll buy everything but then complain, and rejoice following a filling $US3 meal of steak and fries that they don’t have to tip in this hellish backwater.
I’ll close the door on that distressing scene right now. It’s enough to equip you with the tools necessary to avoid such a problem in the future.
1. Remind yourself that you have no friends in South East Asia: Should someone call out “Cameron England, journalist and resident of Australia” you should perk up your ears, and then politely remind them I have long since moved on. Otherwise, generally if someone is yelling at you that they are your friend, they are not.
2. Learn not to react: It’s like your little sister scaring you when you were a kid. If you jerk spastically and flail your arms around washing machine-style every time someone yells “hey you”, you’re going to need a chiropractor within a week and your trip will be ruined.
3. Make no eye contact: remember the metaphorical poo.
4. If you want to have a conversation, seek out the lonely slightly depressed looking single male traveller in the bar on Pub Street. He’s craving social interaction. The guy wearing flip flops and reclining on his moto has three or four friends he has spent most of the day giggling at stupid foreigners with. He doesn’t need your friendship, nor the details of your day.
And lastly 5: If you do indeed fall off the back of a moto, careening home drunk at 3am through the streets of Siem Reap, don’t tell your insurance company. They, also, do not want to be your friend.