#MilitantFactionsQuotes 28: I used to think that I could change the planet just by traversing its ex

#MilitantFactionsQuotes 28:

I used to think that I could change the planet just by traversing its exotic limits. I was the Holloway Hemingway, a round-the-world revolutionary with all the right visas and jabs. Now that I know the bittersweet truth I can sit on the papier-mâché balcony I have constructed with travellers cheques and Kingfisher Lager and snarl at the pushy Kashmiris trying to sell me the clothes off their children’s backs.

I am a tourist. There is no difference between me, a backpacker, an explorer, a globetrotter, a Guardian Netjetter, or some whitey with dreads half-arsedly doing bad tai chi and bad acid on Dead Dog Beach at dusk. This gives me something I choose to perceive as an advantage over people like the dismal Dane or arsehole Afrikaans in the Panaji, Goa branch of Thomas Cook:

‘I’ve had enough of this crap!’ he snarls through his ginger beard at the dignified woman behind the counter. ‘All I ever get over here is bullshit!’

-From "The Cockroach Clause", first published @ The Writers Link (2001), and one of the stories in Mark Piggott's fiction/non-fiction collection "Militant Factions" available in paperback or Kindle from Amazon.