How did you feel when you got back from India? When someone asks you about Vietnam? What “emotional shift” did you feel when you were teaching English and eating balls of fat in Nepal ?
Unless you are that breed of highly organised socially networked 21-year-old who feels forced rather than inspired to travel because of the Gap Year legacy passed down by those of us approaching 30 – you will have felt a lot of important things.
My 21-year-old sister, however, does not see any life changing significance in “leaving for ages” as she puts it.
One of her anecdotes from a summer ploughing through European hostels involves a map, wind and falling into a canal. It is infused with none of the romanticism of my own travelling anecdotes.
She said recently: “When the map fell in and I fell in as I tried to fish it out, I suddenly realised that you should never travel without global roaming activated on your phone. If I had been using my Blackberry the wind wouldn’t have been an issue and I wouldn’t have fallen in.”
This seemed a brutal.
“No!” My heart cries. You’re supposed to say: “And I didn’t get rabies from the water rats or die of hypothermia, and then a beautiful man helped me out and his friend was an Egyptian tree-grower and we all got drunk in the local restaurant and spoke about the sound of waves in the morning.”
In the Daily Mail today Gill Morgan writes about a Micro Gap Year in India, of “the creeping desire for adventure” that “besets women in their mid-40s”. A quote in large font says: “Something changed for me in India. I felt an opening up of energy and possibilities; my horizons altered.”
It made me want to – I’ll say it – get sick in my hand.
I went to India for a year, 10 years ago and have been a few times since. I spoke a lot about my feelings about things when I got back.
I wanted to let people know that I understood something new. I thought my friends who hadn’t travelled didn’t “get it”. I had seen how to be generous and disciplined, I’d been hungry, lost and still OK, I’d had some very strange encounters and no one knew what I knew.
My brother went to Nepal for a similar period of time and came back nurturing a desire to be a Buddhist monk, which he pursued for nearly 6 years.
In fact I still have a box of photos and writing that I take everywhere with me – to every new room for the last 10 years, all the various incarnations of student shit-hole – aspiring YoPro box room – everywhere. I have to have it because – so my theory goes – one day I will open it and start changing things as I meant to do when I got back – 10 years ago.
Only I didn’t – most of the lessons I learnt during that year were anecdote fodder, then swiftly misunderstood, then somehow unlearnt, then put in that box, which is now sacred, even though I have to hide it in whatever room I’m in because I feel weird every time I look at it.
And 10 years on Gill Morgan’s large font quote really hits the wrong button. A lot of people who have never travelled learn fast and are open and can shift horizons – and they are doing it all the time. Those of us who bomb off to India for 3 weeks – 3 months – even a year – have a wonderful experience – whatever that is.
But the pride I felt on my return is worth very little unless the smaller lessons can have some affect on day-to-day life rather than just prompting me to bollock on about how different I had become.
What is wrong with my sister realising that she likes to travel where there’s wi-fi? Is it useful for a middle class, upwardly aspirational 18-year-old to suddenly want to cast off all shackles of materialism and live like hermit (as I did)? I spent my early twenties coming to terms with the fact that spending money on travel and not bags is an easier way of dealing with my feelings than trying find the Varanasi sadu in every 21-year-old buying me a WKD in the student union.
So I am bored of Gap Year, micro Gap year, “I took the redundancy money, travelled and found myslef” stories. I call on my eclectic, pan-continental readers to ignore the traveller bullshit, do it yourself, come back and turn your wi-fi on sharpish.
For the romantics – here is the sound of the waves. Or something special anyway..
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