It’s been a while since I’ve had a good rant, and besides I know you prefer reading about me getting annoyed than about me having fun.

While on the British Defender there was one slightly crazy German on board. She managed to annoy several people including the skipper with her ways. Somehow, and I’m still not sure how as I hardly even talked to her, she invited herself along in our van as she wanted to make her way up to Cairns via Mission Beach… exactly our plan.

Espe’s attempt to put her off, “there is space in the van but there is no where to sleep”, was responded to with “no problem I’ve got a tent”. I didn’t want to take her but my inability to say “no, piss off” once again got the better of me. Espe suggested that to counter the German invasion we invite Guillaume along. Guillaume was a very friendly French chap who was on the boat with us. OK, so the French don’t have the best track record against their neighbours, but we figured one ally would be better than none.

Things started off ok but soon deteriorated. In short she didn’t actually listen to or register anything I said to her, she made a mess of the van cluttering it with all of her stuff, she demanded to sit up front with us as the view was better, she deformed my sun glasses when clambering around in the front of the van and complained at our slow progress. Despite all of this she happily enjoyed the benefits of charging her phone of my battery, using my fridge and stove and eating my cereal only to go on and complained at petrol costs. Thankfully she left us at Mission Beach and took the bus up to Cairns as we were “wandering about aimlessly”. She left without even the slightest hint of gratitude for getting her that far / putting up with her for so long. She was young, 18 I think, but very immature for her age. Basically she was after a free ride but when it turned out not to be what she was expected she got frustrated.

What, in actual fact, frustrated me the most is that I did not express how much she annoyed me. It was pretty clear that she was oblivious to the things that wound Espe and I up yet when she left us she was clearly upset with me, firstly for not getting her to cairns and secondly for splitting the petrol costs between three instead of four. So many things I would have loved to have pointed out but instead refrained. This is something I do far to often, holding things back out of politeness when I should really voice it all. The only condolence is I can I can vent here.

As Sir Isaac so kindly pointed out, for every negative comes a positive, and as generally seems to be the case for me (although I’m sure this part is psychological) the positive tends to outweigh the negative.

Guillaume, our other passenger couldn’t have been more of a contrast. A true gentlemen, courteous, generous and entertaining. A legendary chap… Guillaume decided to pack in his job and travel to Australia. Apparently this had been a dream for some time but he didn’t realise it was attainable until a friend of a friend buggered off to Oz. Now Guillaume is here and one of the main things on his agenda is trying to improve his English. He has a good level already, despite an endearing accent, but has bucket loads of motivation and questions and it is a pleasure to help. Along with helping him improve it has been great fun mocking his pronunciation of I ate / I hate. A bad sign though is that he has picked up the Harrow “init” along with the occasional “bugger”. Still I could be teaching him worse words…

I was expecting to meet more great characters (an expectation based on previous travelling trips) but I think I now know myself better than ever and although I can get along with most people there are few who leave an impression and leave me happy to have met them. Guillaume, however, is one of those.