Take the cheapest class

Where there is a choice of class, Harry takes the worst one, and he is explicit that the saving is irrelevant — the difference is usually a dollar or two. The cheap carriage is the venue.

The argument is that comfort and isolation come as a package. Buying up the classes buys you a reserved seat, air conditioning, and a compartment of people travelling the same way you are, most of them foreign. Buying down puts you standing among people going about an ordinary day, at a range where they talk to you, and in the part of the vehicle the vendors and the musicians actually work.

The cost is real and he pays it. Standing for hours, no seat guaranteed, and sometimes a genuinely long day.

How Harry applies it

A packed local bus across Port Moresby, taken to test a claim rather than to get anywhere: that Papua New Guinea’s violence is tribal and not aimed at outsiders. Eighteen minutes of bus is the best part of the video and most of the evidence in it — the bus never fills so much as keeps absorbing people, and he puts his question directly to the passengers around him.

Third class on the hill train out of Kandy, at about 200 rupees — a dollar — while Mac buys second so they can compare. There are no reserved seats, getting one is a scramble, and they stand for over two hours. In exchange: vendors working the aisle, musicians playing to the carriage, a compartment that talks to him the whole way, and a monkey taking a cake through an open window. His line is that you don’t get this in first class.

What buying up actually costs you

Three days after the third-class ride, he takes first class on the same railway system — Nuwara Eliya to Ella, $5 against $1 — specifically to film the comparison, and it settles the argument in an unexpectedly concrete way.

First class is genuinely better in every way it is trying to be: air conditioning, reserved seats, tray tables, footrests, a film playing, a lavatory, and a nearly empty carriage while second class is packed. And the windows do not open.

That is the entire trade in one detail. The carriage is sealed because it is air-conditioned, and the reason to be on the most scenic railway in the world is to be able to lean out of it. Harry spends the journey in the doorway anyway, and one of the others — who did the earlier leg in third — says the third-class carriage had no room to do anything, while this is the most beautiful train ride he has been on.

So the rule survives with a qualification rather than an exception. Buying up buys comfort and takes away contact — with the view here, with the people elsewhere. Whether that is worth $4 depends on which of them you came for.

The tell worth copying

At the platform in Kandy he notices that the locals stand up before the train is in sight and the tourists don’t — because in an unreserved carriage, seats go to whoever is already moving. He copies the locals. It is a small thing and it is the whole difference between a four-hour ride sitting and a four-hour ride standing.

Demonstrated in

• How Dangerous is Papua New Guinea Really? 🇵🇬 — the local bus to Four Mile, taken as the test itself.
• Chaos on $1 Sri Lankan Express 🇱🇰 — third class up into the hills, and the reasons stated on camera.
• Best Train Ride in the World (Only $5)🇱🇰 — first class on the same line, filmed as the comparison, and the sealed windows.