Anxieties of a Reluctant Traveller
By Jack Harry - Winner of BackTracker Erasmus Competition 2015
For one reason or another I’ve never had ‘that’ trip away. A lack of enthusiasm, money or organisation have always come between me and my seminal exotic getaway. Fortunately this isn’t a sob story; I’ve had my Vodka and 0% beer fuelled post-GCSE coming of age week away and my parents’ generosity meant I got drunk on Las Ramblas and went to clubs where I saw people on hard drugs for the first time after being accepted to university. In years that followed though, most of my spare money was put towards underwhelming scores rather than an Iguazu Falls piggybank, not that I minded, I was happy to watch Sun, Sex and Suspicious Parents and its spin-offs in smoke filled rooms and decide that it wasn’t really for me.
The thing is, I study languages and now find myself in Chile for 5 months. The first part of my Year Abroad was spent in Bordeaux and it was easy enough not to drift too far from my ‘yeah it’s pretty nice, very French, but a bit boring’ line that I’d got in my head from the outset, but here I’m plunged into the world of the gap-year, the wanderlust afflicted and the nomads. I may have stopped smoking weed now (cheers panic attacks), but my opinions on travelling are still laden with some of the pretension and a lot of the cynicism from my wake and bake days. One of the things that has stayed with me is the uncomfortable immediacy of it all, seeing ‘X and two other friends are at Machu Picchu’ pop up on my newsfeed seems hugely mundane and has induced in me a paralysing and restrictive fear of going to any ‘bait places’ so tangible that it led to a Bucharest ’14 mini-break.
I consoled myself with the thought that mine was a ‘nobler’ quest, that of the linguist who wouldn’t submit to any throwaway 21st century tourism and I stressed the importance of my studies to anyone who’d listen. I wasn’t bringing a Go-Pro, I was the second coming of Hemingway. Then came the first geotagged mobile upload swiftly followed by a tweet and an Instagram on the hostel WiFi. I’m not saying I’ll be taking selfies with Mapuche children before my time in Chile is out, but maybe the first inklings that I might have been a bit of a dick when I was denigrating others are starting to appear. I haven’t had a blindingly obvious epiphany that there isn’t just one way to travel, that it’s subjective and everyone gets different things out of their experiences - I knew this already, but living abroad forces you to confront this and accept it as a truth rather than some wafty notion.
Safe to say that my voyage of self-discovery is already well underway, see you at a Full Moon Party soon. The first bucket’s on me.