While queueing up for my visa, I found myself reflecting on the other travellers awaiting their turn. Plastic folders with printouts of hotel confirmations, itineraries, and insurance appeared to require urgent sorting. Money belts were hurriedly pulled out from backpacks, and expensive-looking North Face shirts that promised sweat-free exploration emerged from underneath.
It all felt decidedly like Brokedown Palace, the 1999 movie that will forever make us nervous standing in line for immigration, wondering if somebody may have had access to our luggage. With a certain glee, I watched — and judged. I never print out anything. It is all on my phone, my credit card will do the rest. With close to 100 countries under my belt, I knew better. Or so I thought.
As the officer dutifully handled one traveller after another, I noticed many carried bundles of dollars with them. The immigration website had indicated that all credit cards were accepted. But had I not been through this before?
About a year earlier, landing at Bujumbura International Airport, offering a promising entry into Burundi, we carried a wad of dollars. While we had the visa fee covered, we had not considered that a negative Covid test was required. Ours from Amsterdam wouldn’t do. It had to be one done on the spot.
Cash can be a tricky matter. At Bujumbura, there were no cash machines. The rest of the city proved not much better. You learn to figure it out. Once, landing in the remote South Pacific island country of Tuvalu, we discovered that due to holidays, ATMs or banks were not in operation. The friendly lady at the hotel we were staying at overlooking the airport’s runway offered to borrow us money, if we could show her that we would repay her, something which took the better part of the day to make use of a spotty internet connection.You would think I would know better by now. A friendly Nepalese immigration officer asked for my papers. I handed over the reference number for the form I had filled out pre-arrival. My credit card swiped without much further ado, the machine ‘declined’. It’s moments like these that you know the rest of the queue is watching you, plastic folders with multiple printouts happily sorted, and an abundance of cash on hand to prepare for the worst.Of course, the ATM was out of cash.
As I contemplated my options, I watched an elderly American couple pull out an envelope heavy with cash. They were part of a group all dressed in similar outdoor gear, clearly with the intention to scale the dangers of Nepal, ready to show the world how much they were in tune with what to expect. Obviously, they had been ‘here’ before.
‘What’s the matter, honey?’ they wanted to know. I guess I was looking a little pale, perhaps even a bit panicky. The situation explained, they pulled another $50 from the envelope and said, ‘Consider it done.’
As an inherently judgmental person, I was obviously too stunned to thank them properly. When I met them again at the luggage belt and offered to bring the money to their hotel, they wouldn’t hear of it, and said they hoped I would do the same for another traveller someday.
The kindness of strangers, I wish I was more attuned to it. Obviously for days on end, wandering around Kathmandu’s dusty streets, I kept looking out for this kind couple. Being not particularly good with names or faces, I was worried I might not recognise them. When I did meet them at the city’s most elaborate Buddhist stupa, they were just as kind as they had been at the airport.
I continue to feel the burden of kindness. Recently, a fellow traveller was without a pen to fill in the on-arrival form at Delhi airport. I happily gave him mine and waited (impatiently) until he was done so that I could proceed to immigration myself. If you see me being kind at airports or unlikely destinations otherwise, know that I am in the process of figuring this out.