The taxi ride

You can tell a lot about a city by its taxi drivers. Whenever I'm travelling, one of the first things I ever do is catch a cab somewhere. Anywhere, really. Can be a cafe I want to check out, a museum, a market I want to spend the morning at. I think it's one of the best ways to immerse oneself in a city's atmosphere and find out about what's making headlines locally, which politician or sports star is sleeping with whom, what's the social issue du jour, etc. 

It's also a great way to know about a city's culture mix and successive wave of immigrants. Take New York, for instance. It wouldn't be the least bit unusual to get a Puerto-Rican taxi driver in the morning, a Pakistani one at lunchtime and a Senegalese one at night.

That's one of the things I really like about Sydney. You see, people take cabs all the time here (parking in the CBD is prohibitively expensive) and I could literally write a book with all the conversations I've had with taxi drivers here. 

Some of them were really nice and chatty, others so rude they'd make chef Gordon Ramsey sound like Lady Di. Some thought they were on a Formula 1 racetrack (dude, your fault if I throw up my breakfast on your leather seats), others didn't know their left from their right and couldn't even use a GPS properly. Many had emigrated to Australia more or less recently. One guy was a university teacher from Ukraine and we talked French literature the whole way. Another one was from Russia and was a massive fan of Gypsy jazz. He spent the whole drive doubling as a DJ, playing his favourite tunes for me on his stereo. 

So anyway, now that I'm blogging again, I thought it could be nice to take you on a trip through "taxiland" and tell you about some of the colourful characters one gets to meet on Sydney's roads.

And yesterday, ding dong, I got a WINNER! Do you remember Guy Ritchie's movie "Snatch"? The one in which Brad Pitt was cast as a hilarious Irish Gypsy boxer who spoke so fast, and with such an intelligible accent, that you barely understood a word he was saying? Well, that was my psycho taxi driver - minus the Brad Pitt sexiness side of the equation. Think a guy in his mid-40s, with geek glasses and a Andre Agassi 1990s haircut. Classy.

 
 
He kept on talking and talking, and after constantly asking him to repeat his questions, I just gave up. To be honest, I was a little scared too. He was so spooky he looked like the kind of guys capable of abducting you and keeping you hidden for years in a remote caravan park. Without Foxtel. So I just nodded politely to his rant and hung on in there. 

The long drive from the CBD to Manly was just one bizarre, surreal monologue and some of the bits I did understand included "Bob Hawke was great", "F*** John Howard for introducing the GST", "why would you bother travelling to Europe when you can just stay here and enjoy a Saturday night BBQ with a cold beer", or even "greenhouse and global warming are just a scam". As good as a Sunday Telegraph's annual best-of. Thank God, I finally saw a light at the end of the tunnel and arrived in Manly in one piece. Of course I lied about my address and asked him to stop me one block away from home. Just in case.

So tell me, did you ever end up in a cab with a super annoying taxi driver, wishing you had taken the train instead? 

Comments

[gé]

Thanks to my job and the associated travels I have many stories about weird taxi drivers, but definitely Sydney and Melbourne have a large share of those, including the rambling drunk road-rage prone type!