The traveller is not just fulfilling his own dream, he’s fulfilling other people’s. People are constantly telling me how lucky I am – which is true, I fully admit it, though it’s ironic that what I am doing really is driven as much by necessity as choice – but some of those people, if not most of them, are in a position where they could do what I am doing if they wanted to, which makes me think that actually they don’t really want to.
Travelling, freedom, not working – all these things sound like paradise. And they are. But there are other aspects to doing what I am doing, some of which I did not anticipate.
Friends: You don’t make friends when you travel. Or rather, I don’t. I am not the sort of person who meets someone in passing who becomes a lifelong friend. Almost all of my friends – here and back home – go back several years, and almost all of them I met through work. If you are not working, or you’re not staying somewhere long enough to become part of the local scenery, making new friends isn’t that easy.
I harboured the fantasy where I’d jump into my (hired) SUV and go driving around the New South Wales countryside dropping into pubs and chatting to the regulars. Ho hum. I’m not the sort of person who can do that, never was. In times past when I lived here I spent days, weeks, months on occasion driving up the coast and through the outback, and the one thing I dreaded was not breaking down in the middle of nowhere and dying slowly and painfully of dehydration; my biggest fear was that I’d have to speak to – or worse, have to ask for help from – strangers. Weird maybe, but that’s the way I was. Am.
New people: The new people you do meet – usually friends of friends or friends of rellies – are not really interested in you and what you are doing. Most people are really only interested in their own lives, their own family, friends, and what’s happening to and around them. I’m not saying people are generally self-absorbed – though they are of course, we all are – I think it’s that they cannot relate to someone so far outside their own frame of reference. It’s not surprising that many people who travel the world – gap-year backpackers in particular – find they make more friends among people like themselves than they do among locals. I am generalising of course, but I think it’s fair to say we are by and large drawn to people who are a bit like us, or doing what we are doing,. And not many people I meet as I travel are doing what I am doing.
Or maybe it’s just that I am not as interesting as I thought I was.
Adventures: There’s a pressure to be doing more than I am doing (such as driving around the countryside in a SUV etc.). After all this is meant to be an adventure, and adventures mean doing adventurous things, not going shopping in the local mall with cuz. Waking up in the morning to no fixed plans is exhilarating, and terrifying. You are constantly having to invent, to find new things to do every day. After all you have that precious thing, freedom, and if you don’t fill your days with wall-to-wall excitement you are abusing not just your freedom but the proxy freedom of all those people who’ve been telling you how lucky you are.
I am in fact a really bad traveller. I am scared of things going wrong, and it’s really when things go wrong that a) you make friends and b) you discover what you’re made of, and most of all c) you have adventures.
So there are inevitably moments of crashing loneliness. There are moments, many of them, when I wonder what on earth I’m doing, where all this is leading; times when I miss my kids so badly it hurts, and my friends back home. On the other hand there’s nothing like being away from people and places to make you value them.
