You Don’t Know Someone Until You Travel with Them

Summary

The Karakoram Highway is one of the world’s greatest road trips. When I decided to repeat the journey with Kim and Jo, I didn’t want the spare seat in our car to go unfilled. I wanted to share this special experience with a friend. Such a trip is expensive and difficult to organise for a solo traveller, whereas adding a fourth passenger to an arrangement we had already made was relatively easy.

M, our former yoga teacher and friend, joined us. She is usually lovely and exceptionally chatty. However, there had been occasions when her comments and behaviour gave me pause for thought. I had generally given her the benefit of the doubt.

On the trip, she was her usual lovely, chatty self—except when she wasn’t.

Some of what we observed struck me as extreme frugality, shallowness, ignorance, backstabbing, entitlement, inconsiderateness, pushiness, demandingness and self-centredness. These are strong words, and it is difficult to reconcile them with someone who can be so lovely much of the time.

Since returning, I have been left with a sense of ingratitude. I feel as though I spent two weeks of my life travelling with someone who took and took without giving back.

The experience has reinforced a familiar saying: you don’t really know someone until you travel with them.

Background: An invitation to share a special trip

The Karakoram Highway is one of the world’s great road trips. When I decided to repeat the journey with Kim and Jo, I was determined not to leave the spare seat in our car empty.

I wanted to share this very special experience with a friend. Organising such a trip for one person is difficult and expensive, but adding another passenger to our existing arrangements was straightforward.

I initially offered the place to my old school friend Boo. When he couldn’t make it, I offered it to M, who had been a highly respected yoga teacher of mine for several years before losing her job for remaining unvaccinated during the pandemic.

I gave M a month to make arrangements to join us. When nothing had been sorted out after that time, I withdrew the offer so that the next person in line, Thomas, would have sufficient time to plan.

M then came back to say that she had already committed herself to the trip. By this stage, she should have known that my trips are never as simple as just turning up and joining in. She had previously missed opportunities to travel with me to South Borneo, along the Pamir Highway and to Romania.

It took another five weeks for her to arrange her flights. This wasn’t because she had been sitting on her hands; the logistics were genuinely complicated. That was precisely why I had given her a month in the first place. The time had not been used productively.

I was pleased that the fifth seat in the car would be occupied, although Kim would have preferred the additional space and comfort of travelling with one fewer passenger. Leaving the seat empty would have increased each of our costs for the 12 days of car and driver hire by only USD90. Kim nevertheless went along with my decision.

The doubts I had before the trip

M is a very likeable person: friendly, warm and exceptionally chatty. Over the years, however, there had been occasional comments and incidents that gave me pause for thought.

Looking back, I can see that some of these incidents may have been early indications of traits that became much more apparent during the trip. At the time, though, I hadn’t seen them as a consistent pattern.

Some examples stand out in retrospect:

I once asked how her mother, who had dementia, was doing. M replied, “She just needs to die.”
When Belinda, another yoga teacher, was undergoing chemotherapy, M said, “I would rather die than do chemo.” I pointed out that it was different for people who wanted to live to see their children grow up. There was also an irony in this: M subsequently underwent a course of Efudix, a chemotherapy medication, to treat sun damage on her face.
We once had M house-sit and look after our cat. Without asking, she brought along her mother’s dog. I found this unacceptable, particularly because we had a very needy 15-year-old cat.
We invited her on an outing on Kim’s boat, on the understanding that she would supply lunch. She brought leftover food that had been given away by a supermarket. She apparently has connections through which she sometimes obtains such food and brings it to yoga class.
When she visited me in Kuching, I wanted to take her to an Iyengar yoga class. She suggested bargaining down the price for two people, even though the cost worked out to only NZD7.50 at the exchange rate at the time.
At the end of her stay in Kuching, she borrowed NZD50 from me because she couldn’t find her wallet and cards. She never repaid me. I forgot about the loan until it was too late to raise it without feeling awkward and rude.
Before I spent two weeks in a hotel quarantine in Malaysia during the COVID-19 pandemic, I asked her for suggestions for a yoga self-practice routine. I never heard back.
At the end of a yoga class, I approached her to ask some questions, and she said “Come for some free advice, have we?”.

Individually, these incidents might have seemed minor or explainable and didn’t mean that she would make a bad travel companion. Taken together, though, they had left me with some doubts. Because she is mostly disarmingly pleasant, and I normally give people chances, I gave her the benefit of the doubt.

Frugal in the extreme

M is extremely frugal, despite telling us about spending NZD1,000 on a jacket, NZD1,000 on a sleeping bag and NZD1,000 a day on an Arctic trip. She has also told us that her father is extremely wealthy. At other times, she says she needs to spend her money because she can’t take it with her.

Her behaviour on our trip often seemed inconsistent with these statements. Some examples:

Naran: We stayed in a hotel some distance from the shops. M didn’t want to pay the hotel price for a bottle of water, perhaps NZD0.60 more than the street price. She hinted that she had run out of water, and Jo gave her a bottle.
Skardu: M begrudged paying PKR500, about NZD3.20, to visit the 1,300-year-old Manthal Buddha. I explained that entrance fees help fund the protection and conservation of such sites, particularly in a culture where idolatry is frowned upon and, in extreme cases, historical artefacts are defaced.
Shigar: She similarly resisted paying to visit the 700-year-old Amburiq Mosque. However, when the warden invited us in, she was happy to follow us onto the site without paying, taking advantage of Pakistani hospitality.
Other historical sites: She skipped several places, including some forts, explaining that she had seen many forts already and would forget them anyway. For me, a fort in the Rajasthani desert is not the same experience as a highland fort at an elevation of 10,000 feet.
Lunches: She often made lunch out of the hotel’s breakfast. While we ate lunch, she would have her omelette on stale paratha with tomato and cucumber, even though our lunches almost always included vegetarian options. She was also happy to finish our leftovers.
Breakfasts: At hotels where breakfast wasn’t included, she would generally eat elsewhere. Since she doesn’t drink coffee or tea, this worked out cheaper. Hotel prices were also slightly higher, although the difference was very small once converted into New Zealand dollars.
Hotel quarantine (MIQ): When she returned to New Zealand from the UK during the pandemic, she underwent managed isolation and quarantine (MIQ) in a hotel. She never paid the bill, leaving taxpayers to cover the cost.

It wasn’t simply that M wanted to save money. Everyone has different spending priorities, and frugality can be sensible. What struck me was the contrast between her reported spending on expensive possessions and trips, her apparent reluctance to spend relatively small amounts on the experiences we had travelled so far to enjoy, and her willingness to benefit from other people’s generosity.

Being present in the moment

Perhaps being present in the moment is a yoga thing. For M, everything seems to be “Wow, amaaazing, deeelicious, insaaane!” Sometimes the descriptions are exaggerated. For example, she said that the melon was “like sugar”. It certainly wasn’t like that to me.

She readily admits that she isn’t a planner. For me, being present in the moment doesn’t mean that planning is unnecessary.

She also said that she didn’t bother visiting some sights because she would forget about them anyway. Why not take a few photographs? Even if the details fade from memory, photographs can help preserve the experience.

More broadly, she doesn’t seem particularly interested in culture or history, or in developing a deeper understanding of the places she visits. For me, travel is not just about exclaiming “Wow, amaaazing, insaaane!” It is an opportunity to broaden my understanding of the world and make connections with the places and people I encounter.

It is only a slight exaggeration to say that M knew very little about the places we were going to visit or the places we had already been.

Living under a rock

M’s apparent lack of curiosity may be connected to her limited general knowledge of the wider world. She doesn’t read the news because it brings her down. From our conversations, it sometimes seemed as though she had been living under a rock.

Some of the gaps in her knowledge surprised me:

Despite frequently visiting India for yoga, she didn’t know what a tandoor oven was, or what naan bread, biryani and chow mein were.
She didn’t know how to count from one to three in Hindi.
She didn’t know that the Buddha had been a prince.
Perhaps the biggest surprise was that she didn’t know chicken contains fat. I had to explain that chicken skin is particularly fatty.
She didn’t know what UHT milk was, or what lipids were.
She didn’t know about Ozempic.
She didn’t know that capital punishment, including executions, still exists in parts of the United States.

There have also been things I explained to her previously that didn’t seem to stick, perhaps because she had little interest in them:

I explained how to make pure gluten as a vegetarian protein by mixing flour and water, leaving the mixture for a while, and then washing away the loose starch.
I explained that vegetarian food in some Buddhist cultures includes imitation meat and seafood. The desire to eat the food is not necessarily considered wrong; the objection is to killing animals.
I explained that food is sometimes packaged in nitrogen. She seemed surprised, but nitrogen is hardly an exotic or unnatural substance: it makes up about 80% of the air we breathe.

Not everyone needs to know everything, of course. What surprised me was the combination of these gaps in basic knowledge, her limited interest in learning more, and the fact that we were travelling through places whose history, culture and everyday life offered so much to discover.

Brutal honesty and bluntness, with no filter

M is brutally honest or blunt about what she thinks of other people, seemingly without a filter.

She makes surprisingly uncomplimentary comments about her boyfriend(?) Leonard. She is equally forthright about other yoga teachers, including Belinda, Eira, Steph and Emma. Details at the end.

I can only take her descriptions of people I don’t know at face value. But when she talks about people I do know, I sometimes find her comments exaggerated, embellished or inconsistent with my own experience. This makes me wonder how much of what she says about others is accurate.

Two comments were particularly striking.

Weeks before the trip, when M brought up the possibility of sharing a room with Jo. On realising that Jo was overweight, she asked, “Does she smell? Sometimes fat people smell.”
Later, when the car felt cramped with four passengers and the driver, she remarked, “It’s not my fault that she’s overweight,” referring to Jo.

Whatever her private thoughts about other people, these remarks struck me as unkind and insensitive.

They also left me wondering: What does she say about me, and to whom?

Entitled and inconsiderate

I try not to describe M’s bluntness (above) as backstabbing. But I struggle to find more charitable words for some of her behaviour, which struck me as entitled and inconsiderate.

Murree: On our first night together, she walked into the nicest room, with the best view, and claimed it for herself. The next morning, she complained that it was too cold because there was too much glass.
The itinerary: In the car, she noticed that Jo had a chart of our travel plans and quipped, “I didn’t get one.” By then, I knew that she hadn’t read much of the information I had supplied. I replied, “You wouldn’t have looked at it anyway.” As it turned out, I later saw that she had printed a copy for herself all along. Why make the snide remark?
Luggage at Sost: While the bus driver was unloading bags from the roof at the Sost customs facility, M said within earshot of Jo and me, “I suppose Kim’s not going to help me with my bag.” Why not simply ask politely for help?
Repayment in Pakistan: On the bus from Pakistan into China, M repaid us the small amount she owed in Pakistani rupees. We were about to leave the country, so the currency would be of little use to us within an hour. Why not repay us in a useful currency, or settle the amount the night before, when we could still have spent the money on snacks?

On a previous trip to Pakistan, I had abandoned a long-time friend and female travel companion after she stole EUR150 from me. She had to make her own way by public transport to the Afghan border. I had told M this story early in our trip. Given that background, I was surprised that she couldn’t see her words and actions as “skating on thin ice”.

Pushy and demanding

M can be quite pushy and demanding. Sometimes this seems to be about getting every last ounce of value from what she has paid for—or perhaps a little more. At other times, it seems to be about getting her own needs sorted before those of other people.

Karimabad: She asked to change her hotel room. The room looked perfectly adequate to us and was of average size; it simply wasn’t as large as ours.
Sost: The hotel clearly stated that hot water was available only in the morning. M asked our driver to enquire at other local hotels about whether she could use their hot showers in the evening. Eventually, our own hotel agreed to turn on the hot water for us, but it didn’t seem to work until the morning anyway.
Kashgar hotel: While I was dealing with the receptionist to sort out our rooms, M barged into the conversation to deal with her own situation. She wanted to change her three-night booking to two nights and leave the third night undecided. The staff didn’t speak English, and I was already struggling to manage my own arrangements in limited Mandarin. I couldn’t readily help her while handling my own booking.
Kashgar restaurant: A similar thing happened when I was trying to order food in a restaurant. M interrupted my conversation with the waiter so that I could help place her order as well. Making myself understood in Mandarin was difficult enough without having to manage two orders at once.
Carrying items home: Before we parted ways, M asked me for the fourth time whether we could take a shoebox-sized collection of items back to Auckland for her. She is persistent and doesn’t seem to take “no” easily. On the other hand, she is thick-skinned and clearly not deterred by repeated refusals. We genuinely had no room, given all our cold-weather gear.

Any one of these requests might have been manageable in isolation. What wore on me was the repeated expectation that we should accommodate her needs, even when we were already busy dealing with our own arrangements.

Self-centred

Many of our conversations in the car and over meals revolved around M and, at times, her problems. At the same time, she didn’t seem to appreciate that other people might have their own difficulties or concerns.

Two incidents illustrate this.

Internet access in China: We spent an entire dinner sorting out M’s internet problems. She didn’t understand that Chinese Wi-Fi would not give her access to WhatsApp, Gmail or Facebook, despite our having explained this several times and advised her to rely on her phone’s roaming connection.
Oxygen at altitude: In Kashgar, she questioned why people would buy oxygen for trips to the border at an elevation of about 15,000 feet when she herself didn’t need it. I had to explain that we had spent nearly two weeks travelling at altitude and acclimatising, whereas people starting in Kashgar, at about 4,200 feet, would be ascending to that elevation in just a few hours.

In both cases, the issue was not simply a lack of knowledge. It was the amount of time and attention required from others to address matters that we had already tried to explain, or that could have been understood by considering the circumstances of other people.

Complaints

For someone who has travelled in countries with basic conditions, M certainly had a lot to complain about.

The cold: She swims in the sea in Auckland every day, rain or shine, in summer or winter. Yet she had plenty to say about the cold temperatures we encountered, even though the weather was unseasonably warm.
Spicy food: Despite having made numerous trips to India, she found the food too spicy.
Dumplings in Kashgar: We ordered a plate of vegetarian dumplings for her. The serving was enormous—about 20 dumplings, compared with roughly eight in the menu photograph. The next day, she ungraciously told us how sick she was of eating dumplings for lunch, then the leftovers for dinner and breakfast. She added that street-food would have been nicer and cheaper.
Seating in the car: She complained that she couldn’t see much from the middle seat in the back. Because of her severe motion sickness, she said she could sit only in the front passenger seat or in the middle of the back row. We took turns in the front. In my view, the middle rear seat still offered a reasonable view through the front windscreen.

I understand that travel can be uncomfortable, that food preferences differ and that motion sickness is a genuine problem. It was the frequency and manner of the complaints, rather than any one discomfort, that contributed to my impression.

Hard to please

I fully understand why someone might be vegetarian. M, however, has a number of additional preferences and restrictions:

She avoids spicy food, despite her numerous trips to India.
She avoids chickpeas where possible due to flatulence.
She doesn’t eat tofu or other soya products.
She eats raisins but not sultanas.
She can’t stand tea because of its tannins.
She drinks wine or coffee only if it is good wine or good coffee. Similarly, she says she can’t wear silver unless it is top-quality silver.

Everyone is entitled to personal preferences. But when these are considered alongside her tendency to complain, one gets the idea that she is generally hard to please. This seemed at odds with her enthusiasm for travel and her tendency to praise experiences in such glowing terms.

Natural is best

M favours natural products and approaches. I admire the underlying sentiment, but there are trade-offs, and what seems natural is not necessarily better in every respect. Her preference for “natural” shouldn’t really have affected how we interacted on the trip, but we did feel preached to at times.

Organic dried apricots: She loved the organically grown dried apricots in Pakistan. However, they were dried beside dusty country roads.
Stream water: She filled her water bottle from a country stream and remarked that the water had to be better than water that had been sitting in a plastic bottle for a month. But we knew nothing about possible animal activity and contamination upstream.
Hand sanitiser: After using filthy country squat toilets, I used hand sanitiser. She remarked that it was bad for the skin. I considered hygiene the more immediate concern.
Diarrhoea: With diarrhoea, M prefers to avoid medication such as loperamide, even when travelling by motorcycle. Instead, she stops by the roadside whenever she needs to defecate. I’m guessing she’s not shy; I caught a glimpse of her pulling her trousers down beside the car to urinate on the Deosai Plateau, where there was little vegetation to provide cover.
Strength training: I was surprised to learn that M is a qualified personal trainer, given her strong opposition to gym-based strength training unless it uses body weight. She even talked about wanting to lose some of her muscle bulk, although I couldn’t see that she had much muscle to lose.
Clay tea cups: Given the amount of plastic rubbish in Pakistan, M remarked on the benefits of the disposable clay cups used for tea in India. I recalled that they were single-use items and wondered what the consequences would be if the world adopted them on a massive scale. Large quantities of clay would have to be extracted, potentially devastating areas of land. I later realised that firing the cups also requires substantial energy, often from fossil fuels. The used cups take up more space than plastic cups and, because the clay has been fired, they do not simply break down into soil as unfired clay would. The comparison is not as straightforward as natural clay versus polluting plastic.
Banana leaves: A similar argument applies to replacing disposable plastic packaging with banana leaves. Natural alternatives may have advantages, but the overall impact depends on how much material is needed, how it is produced and transported, and how it is disposed of. With a growing world population, the question is not just what material we use, but how much of it the Earth must supply.

My objection is not to preferring natural things. It is to treating “natural” as a sufficient argument in itself, without considering safety, practicality, resource use or environmental consequences.

Ingratitude

We gave M the opportunity to join us on one of the world’s greatest road trips at a very economical shared cost.

She expressed her gratitude verbally on a few occasions. However, her behaviour and actions did not leave me feeling that she genuinely appreciated the opportunity. Actions speak louder than words.

For me, the sense of ingratitude came from several things:

The snide and insulting comments directed at some of us during the trip.
The absence of a warm gesture at the end. Many people, given the opportunity to join a trip like this at such a favourable cost, might have offered to buy us a meal at the end as a gesture of appreciation. It isn’t that we wanted a free meal. Rather, a little warmth or generosity might have helped offset the effect of the unkind remarks and insults. There was no such gesture.
The NZD50 loan from Kuching. When we settled the minor trip expenses, I asked M to take into account the NZD50 she had borrowed from me in Kuching. This left a balance of NZD37 owing to me. M said she had no recollection of the loan and disputed the amount. I accept that I was at fault for leaving it so long and it is reasonable that she has no recollection. But I felt that someone who had appreciated such a special journey might have given me the benefit of the doubt and paid the NZD37 as a goodwill gesture. After a week and 3 follow-ups, she agreed to check her travel diary of the loan in three months time when she returns to New Zealand.

The last incident particularly crystallised my feelings. The amount was small, and I wasn’t trying to profit from the arrangement. It was the unwillingness to extend any goodwill in the context of everything else that disappointed me.

I had invited M because I wanted to share an exceptional travel experience with a friend. I had overlooked earlier doubts about her behaviour and accepted Kim’s preference for more space in the car in order to include her. In return, I found myself repeatedly dealing with behaviour that I considered inconsiderate, demanding or unkind.

Perhaps M would tell a very different story. This is my account of what I observed and how I experienced it. I cannot know her motives in every instance, but I can assess the cumulative effect of her words and actions on me.

I came away feeling that the generosity behind the invitation had not been reciprocated—not necessarily in money, but in consideration, warmth and appreciation. I feel as though I spent two weeks of my life travelling with someone who took and took without giving back.

You don’t know someone until you travel with them.

Appendix: M’s comments about other people

M is brutally honest in expressing her opinions about others. In the case of Belinda, whom I know reasonably well, her comments often seemed exaggerated, embellished or based on assumptions. Some appeared inconsistent with my own experience. This makes me wonder whether her descriptions of other people are similarly unreliable.

Leonard

“He has a very short fuse.”
I loved M’s impersonation of Leonard’s Hare Krishna chants complete with hands waving!

Belinda

“She is arrogant in the way she talks in class.” (I disagree.)
“She doesn’t look at her students during class.” (I disagree. She gives verbal corrections from a distance and makes hands-on adjustments.)
“She stole my Wednesday morning class and those students were my students.” (The situation resulted from a government ruling during the pandemic. Why was there no similar complaint about another teacher and friend who took over the Friday morning class?)
“She does lots of weights and posts on social media because she wants to show off her body.” (I understand that she is training in preparation for the age-related loss of muscle and bone density.)
“She has suffered from eating disorders.” (When? I have never seen her emaciated.)
“I wouldn’t waste my petrol to go to her class.”
“What she teaches shouldn’t be called yoga on the gym timetable; it should be called stretching.” (I disagree. There is very little stretching in her class; it focuses more on joint mobilisation, glute strengthening and learning to balance in motion.)
“Her teaching is dangerous: the flip dog is bad for the back, and the transition from tabletop to gate pose puts too much pressure on the knee.” (I don’t feel any such pressure in that transition.)
“If you look at what she teaches, you’ll know why she has back pain.”
Despite all the above, M says “I love Belinda to bits!”

Eira

I don’t know Eira personally.

“Eira is South African. Eira is all about Eira.”

Steph

“Steph grew up in Tonar Street. She’s tough as nails.”
“What you see is very nice, but it’s just a front because it’s her business and her income.”

Emma

“She starts her one-hour class with 15 minutes of supta baddha konasana.” (How often?).