Mastodawn

#LatourOnTour #Travel #Vietnam

After many phone calls, we finally found the first tourist. She loudly yelled “hello good morning” in a German accent as she entered the vehicle and is putting the “germ” into “German” by sneezing all over the place, so I think we’ll get along great! /s

#LatourOnTour #Travel #Vietnam

Found two more tourists and reached the main vehicle. Sadly no seatbelt on my chair, but others have seatbelts and don’t use them. Life’s unfair, I guess, and so might death be, the way things are going.

Okay so it seems that the reason that we left 15 minutes late is that the German tourist thought she was going on a tour with two friends, but each of them managed to book the same tour at a different time, which was why they weren’t there at the pickup point.

Tony the Tour Guide has been making phone calls for the last 20 minutes, and it looks like we’ll reunite the German tourist with her friend once we get to the first stop.

Hopefully that means I get to take her seat and seatbelt 🥳

Update: I’m in her seat!

Not enjoying this tour as much as the last one. While Handsome Hau seemed to have been genetically engineered to be the most energetic and cheerful tour guide, Tony the Tour Guide is mostly focused on making sure that everybody understands what he says. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but it makes him speak very slowly and it makes him repeat everything seemingly endlessly, and my brain needs a bit more stimulation than that.

We ended up swapping the German tourist for another tourist, a guy this time, and immediately lost him. That cut our sightseeing cut short again, which annoyed me.

Thankfully some of the others in our small group are nice and interesting people, so I’m at least having a few good chats. And I still got to see My Son, or what’s left of it after the Americans bombed it.

lol the other tourists just told me to stop asking questions 🥲

Tony: do you have questions? Any more questions? Just ask me, okay?
Australian tourist: *turns sharply towards me* sssshhh

I must admit that I have earned the “huh. Interesting question. I don’t know the answer. Nobody ever asked me that “ badge on many a guided tour, which suggests that I ask a lot…

#LatourOnTour #Travel

Abhijit Menon-Sen Mar 13

@anna For what it's worth, I've worked as a guide, and the more questions people asked, the better the tour was. I used to put a lot of effort into preparation, and nothing is more disconcerting than having people be quiet and not really engaging.

@amenonsen aw thank you! What’s the coolest fact you memorised for one of your tours?

https://toroid.org/partridge-snipe

Abhijit Menon-Sen Mar 13

@anna I don't remember. 😅

But, for example, two facts that I probably did mention at some point are: (a) female and male marsh harriers migrate separately into India, and (b) the drab male Greater Painted-Snipe does all the egg-incubating and chick-rearing, while the female is much more brightly coloured… but even 17th century descriptions by British authors in India mention that the female is more brightly-coloured, so the descriptions must have been based on specimens, and not just observations.

The Partridge Snipe

Edward Buckley's seventeenth-century Latin description of the “Partridge Snipe” is detailed enough to identify the male bird, but ignores the more colourful female, Author: Abhijit Menon-Sen

toroid.org

@amenonsen oooooh thanks for sharing 🤩

Are you a bird nerd?

Abhijit Menon-Sen

@anna The guided tours were for fairly serious birdwatchers. So yes, I was a bird nerd, but I'm in recovery now.

Soon I'll be just a bird.