The Waiting Game (with Peanuts)

Peanuts are a good food for waiting.

Trapped in their cases, they are difficult to extract. I attack them with thick, lumbering fingers and a piece of shell comes off. Not enough, alas, to allow the insides to come free. I apply pressure once again and lose half the contents on the floor.

Crunching away on what's left, I have a go and the next one. There's a lot of focus in getting enough to eat from a bag of peanuts. Head bent, neck cramped, fingers worrying away at the little details, it's a couple of hours on the clock before the bag is finished. Time has wandered away.

I mention this because, of late, I have been doing a lot of waiting. A period of blankness has hit my travel: no sights to write about; no cultural events to observe. Just the waiting.

Everything started with a transition between countries. I travelled from Laos to Thailand in the space of three days, from Si Phan Don to Pakxe, from Pakxe to Ubon Ratchathani (Ubon) and from there overnight to Bangkok.

Great masses of time existed without anything to fill them.

The idleness really hit home in Ubon. Having eaten at the station, what was there to do in the five hours before my train departed? I did what any bored traveller would: grooved to the tunes in my head.

In a sweat-stained white dress shirt, hat perched - barely - on my head at a crooked angle, my head started to bob to the Red Hot Chilli Peppers. Sooner or later, I don't know when, my arms got into the act and I was rocking out on a train platform.

The dog that had been begging at my feet cocked its head sideways and took a step back. Two little girls - watching, gaping - stepped behind their mother. Who is this guy?

I ran out of songs and started people watching. A little boy had decided to pop the cap off a plastic bottle using only his feet. His first stomp sent a flip-flop flying. Retrieving it, he tried again. Success! The cap came off with a staisfying pop and he looked up, wide-eyed. Did I do that?!

When the people got boring, I wandered off and bought some peanuts. They were a revelation! The train started and with hours before sleep I spent my time emptying the bag: fumbling, cracking, tossing upwards, cursing, cracking again, looking on the floor, eating the rest.

Then the peanuts were gone and I could read my book for a while before curling up under my Thai Railways blanket.

With arrival in Bangkok, I sprang into relative action. A tuk-tuk took me into the centre of town and a guest house. From here, I booked onward travel to Malaysia and started another waiting game.

Waiting defines cultural experiences on the road. The trip to get from place to place, the hauling bags, the hanging around gives the people and places and sights their importance. They wouldn't be nearly so exciting without the work to get there, without the waiting. It's only a matter of filling the time, which is helped, ably, by peanuts.

Travel is nothing without its mundanities.