A Lesson in How Not to Behave as a Tourist (Learned on My Bus Ride Home)
- Angela Fowler
- Jul 8
- 4 min read
There is a version of me that would have stayed in her seat, headphones in, scrolling past the whole thing with the mild, practised detachment of someone who has commuted long enough to develop a resting bus face. That version of me did not show up today. Today, apparently, I decided the bus route home needed a mediator, and that mediator would be an increasingly furious Australian woman with limited patience and, in hindsight, questionable self-preservation instincts.
Let me set the scene, because it deserves one. They check tickets on the buses here regularly, and they do it without fear or favour, tourists and locals alike get the same clipped request to produce proof of payment, which I have always quietly respected as one of the more refreshingly fair things about this city. I had already clocked this particular family at the bus stop beforehand, mostly because of their son. A boy of about six was busy ripping branches off a nearby tree with the focus of someone deciphering a Rubix cube, before moving on to picking his nose with the sort of commitment and depth usually reserved for deep sea divers. So when a female inspector approached this family of three Chinese tourists, mother, father and small nose-mining son, and asked to see their tickets, there was nothing unusual happening yet. The father, dealt with by the male inspector, held his card over the little machine, it read fine, and all was well. The mother, however, had paid via her phone, which is entirely valid, the same as the card, except that proving it means holding the phone over that same machine so it can read the payment, and this she flatly refused to do.
Instead, she wanted to show a video. A video, filmed on her own phone, of herself making the purchase, presented as though this constituted the same thing as the machine actually verifying it had happened. It does not. It is, if anything, the transport equivalent of showing someone a photo of your homework instead of handing it in. The inspector, whose English was limited, tried to explain this. The mother, whose grasp of the actual point being made was even more limited, decided the correct response was to argue, loudly, in English, about a video that nobody with any authority to check had any way of verifying.
By the time the male inspector had reached his stop and disembarked, presumably relieved to be somebody else's problem now, his colleague was left alone on a moving bus being shouted at by two adults while the rest of us sat there doing what humans apparently do best in a crisis, which is nothing. The driver eventually stopped the bus in the middle of the street. The police were called. And it was somewhere around the point where the father was standing over this woman, pointing and yelling while she was mid-call to the police, that I discovered I have a limit, and that limit is watching someone get bullied for doing their job properly.
So I got up.
I will not pretend I said anything particularly eloquent, because I did not, I said it a little louder than strictly necessary, which felt appropriate given the volume everyone else had already committed to. I told them, more or less, that you do not speak to someone doing their job like that, here or anywhere, and that if they had simply spoken to her with basic courtesy in the first place none of this would be happening, and that the phone was three seconds from being tapped over a scanner the whole time. I pointed out that they were guests in this country and that being a tourist does not exempt you from following its laws, and I asked, somewhat pointedly, what would happen to us if we spoke to a transport official in China the way they were speaking to her, knowing full well the answer involved a swift fine on the spot, a firm escort off whatever bus or train we were disgracing, and very possibly a night spent explaining ourselves to the police rather than a passing shrug. That was rather the point I was making, that naming where you are from is not the insult here, behaving as though the rules of the place you are visiting do not apply to you is. The mother, unmoved by any of this, informed me she would be calling the police herself. I told her please do, the number is 112, and possibly enjoyed that moment slightly more than I am willing to admit.
Here is the part I keep turning over since I got off that bus. It was never really about the ticket. Nobody gets that combative over a fare dodge accusation unless something else is running underneath it, some belief that the usual rules do not quite apply once you have left your own postcode, that indignation travels well and authority is something other people have to answer to. I have lived on both sides of that particular delusion. I have been the wide-eyed newcomer assuming charm alone would smooth over any bureaucratic hiccup, and I have learned, slowly and sometimes expensively, that it will not, that the woman doing her job in front of you is not an obstacle to your holiday, she is simply a person, entitled to the same basic decency you would want extended to yourself.
Being somewhere new does not suspend the rules that governed you at home, it just changes who is watching you break them, and generally, someone always is. My mother, when she reads this upon waking in Australia, will be less interested in the moral of the story and more interested in reminding me that this is precisely how people end up stabbed on public transport, a maternal concern I understand and will no doubt go on ignoring, because sometimes you have to say something, and today, apparently, that someone had to be me, standing on a bus, mid-commute, invoking emergency services numbers at strangers like it was the most normal Tuesday in the world.
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