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Waiting. You know that
word and you know what it means: the sheer boredom and frustration of simple,
grinding, excessive and stultifying waiting is an exercise in patience that’s hard to
master.
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Lonely traveller at seemingly deserted Djerba Airport .
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Tunisia
focusses the mind on how to manage the urgency and the immobility of waiting.
You may think this chapter will be boring, but it’s not; read it diligently and
you’ll build character. Let me set out the scenario as briefly as possible:
When
we arrived we had to purchase a visa. The Tunisian website says Australians
could buy their visas at the airport. What we didn’t expect is for the process
to take more than two hours. Our transfer bus departed without us. Our baggage
ended up unclaimed and lucky not to be blown up. The visa was valid for only
one week, although we had explained we were staying for two. No problem, said
the Border Guy – simply buy another visa for your second week at the airport on
the way out. And so it was that after our incoming experience we got to the
airport three-and-a-half hours before the plane departed. We were moved around
from office to office, never finding the person who could issue the visa
because we usually were given incorrect directions.
We
had to buy a visa stamp from Customs (why Customs we never found out), then
backtrack all the way to our initial contact who took the stamps, instructed us
to go downstairs through the entire check-in and security process and then
return to the exact spot in which we were standing. Including the addition time
taken to repair the baggage transport machine, it took us at least another hour
to do this. Our friendly official licked the stamps, put them in our passports
and stamped something opaquely Tunisian on top and sent us off to queue up at
passport control, which also had two gates open for three planes-full of
people.
We had a great deal of time to reflect on Djerba Airport. The terminal has been built with an eye on the far distant future, perhaps two or three hundred years. It has entire second floor which is 95% vacant and a giant public entrance the size of Tasmania. It has so much space (empty), so few services (no arrivals, departures or gate numbers displayed), no restaurants etc, and only two check-in points open of twenty available, and so on and so on, that choosing the swiftest queue got to be a challenge (like ‘which thumb would you prefer to be broken?’). It was the unknown that got us; for example after an interminable wait to get to the passport check-in officer, we were next in line until he decided to walk away for an extended cigarette break.
This
experience continued relentlessly over and over again until the plane finally
departed an hour and a half late. Thinking
positively, if Tunisia could only harness the energy pent-up in all the waiting
that people have to do to achieve the smallest thing in their country, their
economy would benefit. In the copious time I had to think about it, I concluded
Tunisia could inaugurate a new University to train waiters – not the people who
put their thumbs in your soup, but waiters, trained professionals you
could hire to queue for you, wait for taxis, stand around when the train or bus
doesn’t turn up (oh, sorry, they’re aren’t any trains), make jobs so the
Government could employ more officials, or line up for visa and wander the
echoing corridors of Djerba Airport.
As
the famous Chinese philosopher Wai Teng said: All good things come
to those who wait unless they die in the meantime .The
Tunisians could have the world’s-best-practice centre of wait-training. There
are potential spin-offs to an anti-diet industry that could use new meanings
for ‘wait loss’, ‘losing wait’ etcetera, and there is already a world-famous
play about ‘Waiting for Godot’. Immediately I developed a concept report
complete with a tight construction timetable and submitted it to the Tunisian
Government. I’m still waiting for a reply. NEXT : Back to the Balkans.
