A weekly ode to the joys of moaning about your holiday.
Remember those flashback episodes of your favourite TV shows where instead of a normal 30 minutes or hour of plotlines and laugh tracks you'd get a highlights reel? Some people would complain it was a cop-out but I always loved it. "Yes! It's a flashback episode of Macgver/Seinfeld/Starsky & Hutch!" I'd scramble to get a blank video, fire up the VCR and do my best to not record the ads.
As a pop culture-obsessed geek of a child, I remember that excitement so much. And given it usually happened at the end of a season or when a show reached a milestone like 100 episodes, I perhaps somewhat self-indulgently thought I'd do the same today.
That's right! Two years and 99 columns ago, the Herald published my very first "Travel Bugs" piece. In that time I've documented 182 different bugs, all under the banner of "the joys of moaning about your holiday". I never wanted to sound like a whinger because being fortunate enough to travel is a something no-one should take for granted. But rather, it's an acknowledgement that so often it's the things that go wrong or the things that frustrate us that can be the yarns that bond us and the yarns that make us smile. Just not necessarily at the time.
Across these now 100 columns, I've subjected readers to tales of being poohed on by pigeons in London's Trafalgar Square (May 9, 2017), the bladder-related pitfalls of mixing cheap Mongolian rice wine with Chinese bus trips (April 25, 2017), altitude sickness of the Guatemalan persuasion (August 1, 2017), "code browns" in not one but two Club Med swimming pools (October 10, 2017), how best to avoid diarrhoea on holiday (May 29, 2018), luxury hotel room bathroom doors that — by design — don't fully shut (June 12, 2018), violent Interislander crossings (June 19, 2018), and being interrupted while using the toilet in the wrong hotel suite, when the unsuspecting couple who's room it was meant to be walked in (November 20, 2018).
