Is it just me or is travel becoming a lot less appealing these days?
Did you see that French family forced to sleep overnight at Edinburgh airport because of the Crowdstrike global computer crash? The father tried 22 hotels but they were all booked out. They just had to sleep on the floor, on piles of their own clothing.
It took me back to the time I was in Hong Kong and a cyclone cancelled all flights the day I was due to fly out. When I tried to book another night at the airport hotel they told me they were full up! I had the devil of a job finding the last scuzzy hotel room in Honkers. It was a train ride away, and then I had to find my way to the hotel from the railway station in driving wind and rain, trailing my sodden baggage behind me. At least I didn’t have to sleep on the airport floor, like the poor Filipina maid I met who couldn’t get home.
It was horrendous, but it didn’t cure my travel bug.
I’ve had the bug since my earliest youth, when my scientist dad, who travelled a lot with his work, would bring back photos and music and exotic gifts from faraway places: Russian dolls, Thai silks, Marimekko dresses from Finland. You never saw such things back then; it was a time before globalisation and mass tourism made them commonplace, and there was a real mystique to foreign travel.
It inspired in me a powerful yearning to go and see the world for myself.
There was none of this gap year lark for me. It was straight into years of study and then work to earn the wherewithal to get up and go. I didn’t make it overseas till my late twenties, when I went to London with my boyfriend and we bought an old Mini van and drove around Europe, sleeping on a foam mattress in the back. I got a bad cold in France, recuperated in sunny Portugal, bathed in rivers on the Dalmatian coast and nearly got turned back from the Swiss border because they didn’t like our beat-up old car.
Our car was broken into in Ravenna and a bag with precious rolls of film stolen, and once, parked up on the Arno River in Florence, we were jolted awake in the middle of the night by heavily armed cops banging on the roof of the car. They were looking for Red Brigade terrorists. When they saw we were innocent Aussie tourists they apologised courteously for scaring the living daylights out of us.
When I look back on it now I remember none of the discomforts or anxieties, only the thrills of discovering new lands.
I ventured to ever more remote and raffish places. I put up with terrible food on the trans-Siberian railway, sticky heat and mozzies in the Galapagos Islands, water and power outages in Cuba, robbery and riots in Bolivia….
Ah, but I was young then.
There came a point, however, when the miseries of travel began to take the shine off its joys. There was the aforesaid Hong Kong nightmare, then the time I nearly got kicked off a Caribbean cruise ship in Florida because I foolishly confessed to having had a tummy upset in Mexico.
Most recently there was the time I landed in Iceland for a bus tour but my luggage didn’t. The airline told me to go out and charge up any essentials to them, except there was nothing open and the tour wouldn’t wait in the morning. Thanks to the kindness of strangers I was roughly kitted out against the icy blast, but there were two whole days of deep anxiety and having to go about with a bare, unmoisturised face – horrors! – while I waited for my suitcase to catch up with me.
Nevertheless, it was once more into the breech and I’m just back from a short trip to Fiji, the Solomon Islands and Papua New Guinea.
There were no major mishaps, just the usual woes of ungodly hour risings, flight delays and cancellations, hotel booking mix-ups and long waits in airports lacking either decent food or even – daddy of all first world problems – wifi!
I’ve had a revelation: it’s not the destinations that are the problem, it’s the hassle of getting there!
I’m vaguely thinking of going to the five Stans next year. The flame may have dimmed to a mere flicker, but it’s still there – only just.