The land of the leaflet

When Charly and I were in Tunisia, we had a man try to sell us a camel ride into the Sahara using a single sentence containing words in four languages. I marvelled at this feat of communication, but I marvelled more that he had picked up very quickly that we tourists didn't just want a camel ride, we wanted information. This nebulous stuff was clearly more precious to us foreigners than water, or the camel ride itself. We wanted an official camel, from an approved Bedouin, not some mangey beast herded by a toothless Tunisian at the side of the road.

Of course, when we shrugged this guy off and trudged to the tourist office in the sweltering heat, "Gappy" was already there, sat behind his desk. He was civil enough not to rub our noses in our Western uptightness. He knew what we wanted from the get go but had grown accustomed to the process you have to go through to make we tourists comfortable booking anything. It's same, same, but different, in Asia, where, in contractual negotiations, this fine phrase means something like, "Look. For fuck's sake, I know what you want to do and I can do it for you. You read it in the Lonely Planet and it says you can go to this amazing remote place, and don't go by car cos it's not as good as going by boat, and only pay 60,000 Dong/Baht/Kip, blah, blah, blah. And look, it's a fair price, possibly not the cheapest, but you'll have a good time and are you going to seriously argue with me over 50 pence".

Needless to say, this is not the way in NZ, where tourist information is a multi-million dollar business. There are leaflets offering you deals on multiple extreme activities everywhere, even in toilet cubicles. Deciding which paraglide/parasail/hang-glide/glide/rope swing to do is almost impossible, and I long for a short, dirty-looking man to come up to me on a street corner and bully me into doing something I'm not very certain about, but ultimately am likely to have a great time doing.