Megaboastus, lord of travel

IT has been that time of year when far-flung friends and seldom-seen relatives send e-bulletins filling you in on what they have been up to during the past 12 months.

Illustration: Tom Jellett

IT has been that time of year when far-flung friends and seldom-seen relatives send e-bulletins filling you in on what they have been up to during the past 12 months.

From Departure Lounge's experience, such missives are just exercises in boastfulness, carefully edited to relay only the excellence of all concerned, and always including holiday triumphs, overachieving pets, sporting astonishments and medical and dental wonderments.

That little scamp Jack from the McCullys thrice removed could be a trainee drug dealer with impacted molars for all Lounge knows; the e-bulletin from his proud parents, however, dwells on Jack's award-winning budgerigar, which apparently can conjugate French verbs, and his achievements in the junior division of the Wests Tigers NRL team.

Lounge has forgotten how she is related to the McCullys, actually, and has not replied as she has little to boast about for 2010, certainly not a cracker that relates to multilingual parrots or tigers.

As it happens, last November Lounge spent two weeks looking for a Bengal tiger in the jungles of India and found, instead, too many robust specimens of genus Megaboastus. It's a two-legged species, often found on, but not necessarily confined to, safaris, and typically dressed from top to toe in camouflage khakis and greens and with silly hats and epaulets and far too many pockets. This genus can be further recognised by the volume and variety of gadgetry about its person. Engage one in even the idlest of passing remarks and expect genus Megaboastus to produce the latest in photographic devices and show you a record of its sightings from that morning's safari drive. In Lounge's most recent encounters, such viewings entailed close-ups of tigers mating, yawning, promenading across open grasslands and, quite possibly, line dancing and flossing their considerable fangs.

Typically, a defeated Lounge would be the last back to camp from her drive and a hush would fall over the assembled members of genus Megaboastus, so many of them in fact that they formed a veritable tribe. Lounge was the pariah, the pitiable sod who had not seen a tiger (much to the shame of her guide, who was on the verge of assembling a remote-controlled one on wheels), while all around were holidaymakers who were all but fed up with the creatures, such was their almost comical abundance.

Lounge's misfortune did not stop the more vocal genus Megaboastus guests from sidling up and showing her their most recent snaps and videos of the gorgeous big pusses.

Lounge had a moment of triumph when her guide showed her a jungle cat, about the size of a civet, peeping from behind a bush.

"I saw a jungle cat!" Lounge shrieked with joy to the assembled khaki masses during the cocktail hour.

"Did she have cubs?" came the reply from genus Megaboastus's top dog as he produced evidence of same, captured on his latest-model iPhone an hour earlier.

The score at the end of the week? Genus Megaboastus, a conservative 100. Lounge, half a point.

Such showoffish behaviour is by no means peculiar to the jungles of central India. Anyone who has been on safari in Africa will have met tourists of this mouthy type who can't help one-upping everyone, banging on about, say, how many leopards they've seen, which were performing who knows what unlikely feats, from hanging upside down in thorn trees to mating with jackals of loose morals.

Meanwhile, it's quite possible you have seen no more than the back end of an impala and half an elephant's ear.

Such situations do call for light revenge. Confuse the enemy, Lounge reckons. Be very Evelyn Waugh and, if in Kenya, for example, ask about a sighting of this east African nation's famous mountain range. To wit: "Did you see the Aberdares on your day trip from Nairobi?" Expect a reply from genus Megaboastus of the ilk of, "See them? Why, they invited us to tea."

(As an aside, fans of television's The Royle Family must have adored the recent Christmas special in which Barbara expressed a desire to holiday at the Bermuda Triangle while Denise's destination of choice was Yves Saint Laurent, "where all the chateaux are".)

Every traveller is a photographer these days and while the dreaded slide night with bedsheet screen and themed finger food has gone the way of swizzle sticks and cocktail frankfurts, genus Megaboastus just can't help but send bulk emails with huge picture attachments of everything they have seen (and eaten) on their most recent holiday. There they are, sitting on the so-called Princess Diana bench at the Taj Mahal, pointing at the Leaning Tower of Pisa, matching their feet to the cement prints of Clark Gable or Marilyn Monroe at Grauman's Chinese Theatre on Hollywood Boulevard. Delete, delete, delete.

In India, Lounge desperately wanted to be boastful, too, and to report to genus Megaboastus that she had had a very nice high tea with tigers in Pench National Park, right at the actual spot where Rudyard Kipling's Mowgli, the boy adopted by wolves in The Jungle Book, first came face to face with the cranky old beast Shere Khan. Tigers are good listeners and have surprisingly evolved tea-party manners, as it happens, and know how to cock their pinkies while holding bone-china cups and everything, but such a pity they admired Lounge's state-of-the-art camera with NASA-enabled satellite dish attachment so enthusiastically that it would have been rude not to make a gift of it.

But to enter into such deception Lounge would have had to turn into a traveller of an entirely different stripe.

Next week: The Indian game plan: Susan Kurosawa on safari in Madhya Pradesh.

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