Getting your hair cut in foreign countries where you don’t know the local way to say “short on the sides, long on top” can be a pretty harrowing experience. Incorrect pronunciation or insufficiently illustrative hand-gestures could lead to a long night of searching for MC Hammer pants to go with your new Kid ‘n Play do.

I love getting my hair cut on the road. Not only is it necessary—to avoid looking too hippie-ish (important when you’re living the life of one by backpacking for months on end)—but it can be the start of all kinds of wacky adventures. We were in Đà Lạt, Vietnam, drowning my sorrows after a disastrous clearcutting, when the owner came and took us on a tour of the other, closed-off floors in his bar. He’d turned them into an enormous Gaudi-esque indoor concrete cave complex—complete with rivers and secret passageways. At one point we lit candles and clambered down into a cavern below street level, where he was working on installing a lake. Why he was doing all this we couldn’t divine from him, but who cares—it was a fantastical experience and it all started with a botched crop.

* The Cuban government apparently gets somewhat nervous about locals interacting with foreigners outside of hotels, giftshops, and other touristy venues. By “nervous”, I mean one day you might realise “Hey, where did JC go? Haven’t seen him or his family in a while”. So I’m changing the names of any Cubans we met. In this case though, I’ve conveniently forgotten his name anyway.In Cuba, in the old Havana slum, JC* runs a tatty but proud shop, with his bare-fluorescent lighting and torn Chevy benchseat-cum-waiting-lounge. He was a hoot, an astute political commentator, and a magician with the scissors to boot. In a country where you make do with what you have, JC crops your chops with the creakiest pair of shears you’ve ever seen. And he had more than a few cutting remarks about Castro. Not just Fidel (”Liar!”) but his heir-apparent too (”He’s worse. Fidel, at least he talks. But Raul, he doesn’t talk: he just does!” Ominous.). An enlightening chat while the scissors whizzed away: he’s learning English at night-school, for the day Cuba finally opens up, and he has to pay for his textbooks in pesos convertibles—that pesky double-currency that keeps the people poor and the tourist-dollars flowing straight to the government. Even though we were probably paying 10 times the going rate, what’s CAD$4 to us? “I can buy books now. Because you come to my shop, I can live.” Yikes.

In Luxor, wheel-and-deal-capital of Egypt, I was getting a bit shaggy, so off we pop to the local barber. Borat-lookalike but a meek fellow, not a word of English, and our Arabic wasn’t up to snuff, but the customer he’s working on obligingly chimes in, and so the negotiations begin. I don’t even remember how much we finally paid (something like CAD$4 again), but we knew we’d been E-gypped when he finished up and gave Borat a fraction of what we’d just agreed to. Whatever: he looked like he’d been working for 16 hours straight (I mean, we wandered in around 1030 at night) and he seemed like he appreciated the money. As a result, he took his time getting it right: I’ve never had someone take so much effort before. Kept asking if it was okay and would adjust on the fly as requested. Another pruning pro. Snipping away as the old black-and-white tv blared its song out of our well-lighted chopshop and into the night. Great success!

If you know me, you know that all good things must come to an end. Uganda was my follicular Waterloo. On the advice of Nazma’s mom I head out to their barberman a block from the house. Recall that myopia means when the glasses come off, I’m effectively relinquishing all control. He was an earnest sort: brimming with enthusiasm, he makes like he knows exactly what I want. I couldn’t see a damned thing but I knew something was up when the scissors never once made an appearance. No trace of a comb either. Just a succession of increasingly smaller clipper guards. Now to be fair, I’m probably the first Chinese customer he’s ever had, so granted he doesn’t know what to do with my hair. This is Uganda, and without a trace of racism, everybody—I mean everybody— has the same close-cropped do. And so after a half-hour of old-growth littering the floor and an icing-on-the-cake application of Jerri-Curl oil (no kidding), I was sporting my own Asian mini-fro. You may think this helped me blend in with the locals more, but astonishingly, it didn’t. Nazma’s mother was very proud: a cut that short means longer till the next visit, which makes it good value for my (strangely again) CAD$4.

In the end, no Samson-like rampage ensued; no bitter tears; just the usual histrionics-via-blog-entry. You take the good with the bad and something as mundane as a haircut becomes a great way to meet the locals, and it may make for a good story. In this case, now we’re several weeks on: I’m sporting a hastily bought Fidel-style hat these days (funnily enough), hiding the remnants of what I’ve come to call the Changing-of the-Guards haircut, and waiting for that day when it finally grows out and I can run the Barbicide gauntlet once again.