Je voudrais un taxi...very much

I have a talent for getting myself into minor crises while overseas: getting locked out on my fifth floor balcony in Cambodia at 2 in the morning; being dropped off at a guesthouse in Vietnam at 1 in the morning, drunk, then realising woozily and with a mild spurt of adrenaline that i wasn’t staying there and actually had no idea where I was staying. Being stranded 15 minutes’ drive from my hotel in France because apparently there were no taxis willing to take me there was one of the more perplexing however.

In South East Asia I expect to mildly ripped off, taken advantage of, or just thoroughly confused as to why anyone would lock a fifth floor balcony in the first place. But I was quite unprepared for the response I received in a small french cafe in the town of Voiron, after I had managed to convince the proprietress that as well as a shower, I also needed a taxi. She was a picture of French elegance. About 50 years old, honey-blonde bobbed hair and a tan to match. Her offsider would have played well in the cafe in Amelie. I had originally told the latter, in my overly imperative French, “I need a taxi”. She twittered to herself, giggling and clinking glasses together as she looked past me out to the road. I didn’t understand much, but the proximity of the word taxi and her giggles didn’t give me much hope. After much twittering and hopping from side to side, and confused frowning on my part, she managed to squeeze out, “jus a minute please” in English, and wandered off, passing the baton to my would be saviouress, who proceeded to pull out her little black book and call what I supposed were two taxi companies. After a disturbingly short pair of phone calls, she turned to me, pursed her lips in that oh-so-french indifferent moue I had the feeling I would soon get very used to, and said “non”.
“Thank you madam I’m just going to go outside and scream for a while,” I said calmly, shouldered my day pack on a chafed shoulder, and stepped outside to ponder my bewilderment for a few minutes over quite a lovely glass of Kronenbourg.

I had been quite proud of how I had managed the previous crises. In Cambodia I had briefly considered sleeping on the balcony, before prising open my window, sliding my arm between the inexplicable window bars (it was five floors up with razor wire on the balcony!) dialling reception three times, and calmly explaining that the imbecile on night patrol had locked me out as I sat one metre from the balcony door reading and enjoying a quiet beer. In Vietnam I simply wandered the streets of Hanoi with boozy confidence until I found my guesthouse, knowing vaguely that most were in a similar quarter of the city. But I was not expecting to be told, in a reasonably small, but certainly not provincial town in France, that there simply were no taxis.

To give you some context, it had not been an enjoyable trip so far. My first flight sat on the tarmac for two hours in Adelaide while the engineer rebooted the computer system. During this time it was made quite clear to me that someone in my vicinity had no shame about dropping their guts in public, and that the Chinese woman next to me would look at me with furious judgment in her eyes every time this would happen before re-latching her face mask in disgust. This delay precipitated the need for me to run to my connecting flight in Kuala Lumpur and I was fairly sure my bags weren’t making that run with me. I was right. Them despite the next flight from Amsterdam to Paris being delayed two hours, my bags failed to catch up, and were delayed two more, spurring me into a cumbersome trot though Charles de Gaulle airport with five minutes left to make my train. Thankfully that was delayed by an hour and a half, so I needn’t have bothered. I was pretty happy though, that despite all of the near misses, and the constant state of anxiety this kept me in, I had made all of my connections. I jumped on my final train to Grenoble with relief. In an hour I’d be in Voiron, then safely in my hotel...sanctuary at last. The tour group was supposed to meet me at Grenoble, but since I had missed my original train, I decided to get off at Voiron, where the hotel was, and catch a taxi. Chances are no one would be waiting for me at Grenoble anyway - very good chances as it turned out. For some reason I’d been booked to arrive a day earlier than everyone else, so there was no one to be concerned about the fact that not only was I late, I’d been wandering around a French town for two hours and had not seen a single taxi. I rang the hotel a few times, completely failing to convey the key information that I did not have a map and was not in a car. The lack of taxis perplexed me. Did the French simply drink drive habitually, or... horror of horrors, limit their alcohol intake to such an extent that they could drive their own cars? I’d heard rumours of this bizarre cultural practice but wasn’t fully prepared to believe it as yet.

Having been wedged securely between a rock and a large helping of french indifference I wandered outside the cafe to ponder my fate. I even went so far as to turn global data roaming on, on my iPhone, to see if I could at least GPS my hotel’s position - a move which has bankrupted small international trading firms the few times it has been successfully attempted by hapless travelling salesmen. Even this failed. I screwed up my resolve, and dialled the hotel for the sixth time, and whined so dolorously about my plight that the receptionist, who was probably still at a loss as to where I’d left my car I previously admitted to owning, called me one of the three taxis in town, explained to him the capitalist concept of payment in return for goods and services, checked that there were no general strikes scheduled for that day, and convinced him to come and pick me up. As we drove to my hotel I wept tears of joy. Tears that would only be matched in their magnitude by those I shed over the size of my dinner tab that night, in anticipation of running out of cash less than halfway through my European adventure and having to write stories on the street for money.