I had been visiting London on business when I decided to move from my hotel, the Thistle Marble Arch, in Central London to the Airport Hilton near Heathrow. To confirm my departure ticket I found the courtesy hotel computers in an alcove near the bar area on the main floor. One of two computers was broken beyond all repair. The other was being consulted by two harried, forty-something world travelers, a man and woman, with backpacks. The woman took me aside and told me not to interrupt her companion, Ken, because he had already broken one computer and he was evidently taking delight in breaking the other. As if he had heard her, Ken gave us a dark look just then before he ducked his head and began hammering on the computer keyboard again.
I looked around for assistance, but the night staff had discreetly disappeared. I knew that my only chance was to remain on station until the two travelers had either completed their apparently hopeless objective or surrendered their computer. Putting the best construction on the situation, the woman, whose name was Carrie, told me that the two of them, both South Africans, had come from Nairobi the day before yesterday, and here they were stuck near Heathrow when they should already be headed for Kuala Lumpur. She said that they had forward-booked all the way through, but now something had gone horribly wrong, and the booking concern was unreachable.
I sympathized, but I could do nothing to help except to listen to their tales of woe while I waited for my chance to use the computer. I asked why the pair had selected Kuala Lumpur as their destination. Carrie, in response, launched into her encomium listing every tourist sight from the Petronas Twin Towers to the Batu Caves, but when I pressed her for additional specifics, Carrie confessed that Ken and she had very little money between them. In fact, they had spent nearly everything they had saved on the bargain tickets for their airfares. She said that they were going to stay with student friends at the main campus of the University of Malaya. What they saw of Kuala Lumpur and Malaya would depend in part on the willingness of their friends to provide lodgings and meals while they were in the country. Ken came away from the computer he had commandeered to announce that he thought it had broken just as the first computer had done. He suggested that he and Carrie get something to eat. That having been done, he would try once again to get through to their travel booking agent. Perhaps then the agent will have returned.
Ken and Carrie picked up their backpacks and wandered towards the restaurant. When they had gone out of sight, I tried to see what I could do with the computer. As these things sometimes go, the computer allowed me access so that I could print my boarding pass as I had planned. I left the computer screen at the courtesy login page with the hope that Ken and Carrie would return and discover that they could accomplish their mission now that the machine had been fixed. In fact, though, their plight reminded me of classmates who had done their longhaired meandering tours of self discovery, including Kuala Lumpur, in the Sixties or Seventies of the last century. Ken and Carrie were not students, but they wanted to consort with students. They had the same affectations as my former friends with the additional ill grace of computer illiteracy. I left for the airport the next morning mentally wishing them well but realistically fearing for their safety. The wandering pair were miscast in the Twenty Teens, and their preferred métier had long passed beyond relevancy. The Kuala Lumpur that Carrie said they longed for had given way to international chic, and the gurus were now bankers and accountants for the super rich.
Thank you for reading and commenting. Please enter the Independence Travel Writing competition and tell your story.
