When you’re out on tour, wherever you may be, the native with whom you come in contact most is the man whose job it is to drive you to and from the airport, hotel, hall an restaurants, the man who also tends to be your guide on sight-seeing junkets and shopping sprees. In other words, your chauffeur. For a chauffeur, enthusiasm, patience and a keen sense of the ridiculous are very important, especially when driving folks who are longing to see the sights but haven’t the vaguest notion what the sights are, or why, indeed, they are sights at all. Couple this ignorance with the fact that such grimly uninformed travelers are invariably in a hurry, and you can readily understand why the life expectancy of chauffeur, especially in the non—English–speaking countries, is much shorter than that of almost any other worker involved in a service industry. In fact, one of my chauffeurs explained to me that many of the stone markers one sees along the highway are not kilometer signposts, as one might think, but rather dainty gravestones marking the spot where various chauffeurs have dropped by the wayside.
