Fushiki to Beijing - Grounded: A Down to Earth Journey Around the World - page 50

“We'll need a taxi to the Tanggu railway station first,” Lachlan says calmly, coming down off the gang-
plank behind us. He wades into the fray, suitcase in hand, and begins to shout in Chinese and wave around
his free arm.
He's soon squared off with a middle-aged woman. She's negotiating on behalf of her husband, who
drives the cab. She flashes numbers with her fingers in rapid succession and yells a lot. Lachlan yells back.
(I don't even think he speaks fluent Chinese—it's just the universal language of haggling.) When she makes
her final offer, Lachlan laughs loudly and turns his back on her. “This is a very disagreeable woman,” he
murmurs to us, looking at his watch. She's now jabbing the back of his elbow.
After several more skirmishes, they come to an agreement. We toss our bags in the taxi's trunk and sit
three in a row in its backseat. The woman and her husband sit up front. The woman looks miserable. We
assume Lachlan has negotiated masterfully, saving us a considerable amount of money.
“What was our final price?” I ask him, as the cab turns out of the parking lot and onto a roadway.
“Six dollars total, for the three of us,” he says, not bothering to conceal his pride. “She wanted eight!
Positively absurd.”
THE Tanggu train station is packed to the gills. Lachlan weaves his way to the ticket window as we obed-
iently hold his suitcase for him. He comes back with three tickets and the news that the train won't leave
for another hour.
The waiting room is a warehouse-sized kaleidoscope of chaos. Shrieking children. Groups of men sleep-
ing. Families engaged in elaborate picnics in the middle of the floor. Lachlan takes a quick peek inside and
shakes his head. “It does no good for my Latin humanism to be in a room with fifteen hundred Chinese,”
he says. “They are a people very in touch with their bodies. The last time I took a taxi from a train station,
the driver spat, farted, and lit a cigarette before he started the engine.”
So we leave the station and walk to a nearby town square to wait. Rebecca goes off to explore a grocery
store across the street. Lachlan and I find a bench to sit on. Attempting to make some casual conversation,
I ask his thoughts regarding recent U.S. politics.
“Oh, I detest talking politics,” he says. “It all just comes back to Plutarch and Machiavelli, doesn't it?”
Things go downhill from there. Sifting through his pretension, I manage to learn that Lachlan's lived in
Hanoi with his Vietnamese wife for the past few years. Before that, he was living in Thailand. He hasn't
been back to the States in two decades.
Whenever travelers and/or expats encounter each other abroad, as Lachlan and I have, the parties will
swiftly sort themselves into a hierarchy. Lowest on the totem pole are the vacationers—the people on two-
week or three-week breaks. They enjoy taking holidays, but never leave home long enough to truly aban-
don their workaday lives.
One rung above the vacationers are the restless wanderers. I'm in this camp. We knock around for several
months at a time, perhaps even a year or two, and consider ourselves far more grizzled and worldly than
the vacationers. Still, there's a gossamer tether that, in the end, always reels us back to a relatively sane
existence. We restless wanderers look down our noses at the vacationing squares, but in turn we are looked
down upon by the apex predator of the travel jungle—the permanent drifter.
The permanent drifter leaves home in a profound, spiritual sense, never to return. These adventurers,
hedonists, and enlightenment seekers have no attachment to their roots. They've trimmed their roots clean
off. They anoint themselves citizens of the universe, floating far above any petty notions of regional affili-
ation.
Lachlan has paid his dues as a permanent drifter. I can feel him looking down his aquiline nose at
me—at my less-developed conception of human existence and purpose. The thing about permanent drift-