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. 

One year later…..

I’m back now from what I called The Last Gallivant and am already rethinking that ‘last’ bit.  I added three new countries – Albania, Luxembourg and Liechtenstein – to the list of those already visited but on doing a careful recount I find my arithmetic was wrong and the total is still only 98, not the nice round figure of 100 at which I was going to call it a day.

Why stop there?  Well, apart from the discomforts of travel – the crowds and noise of airports, the dead time of queueing for check-in and waiting for baggage, the misery of flight delays, the tedium of living out of suitcases not to mention the fact that they get heavier as one gets older – there’s the safety issue.  

That ghastly crash of the Air India plane the other day put the wind up me.  We all know that on paper air travel is way safer than road travel, but the trouble is in the numbers.  Surely, the more time you spend in the air, the higher the chances are of your number coming up.  

This thought often occurs to me as the impossibly heavy big airliner rumbles along the runway building up speed for take-off.  It never feels like enough.  And when it does eventually lift off, there is that momentary sinking sensation – we’re going down! – before you feel that reassuring upwards push of air beneath you and the plane stays airborne.

I know that after every air disaster there is minute investigation and a shoring-up of the safety systems.  But while you can fine-tune the engineering, there’s still the human factor, which nowadays accounts for 60-80% of crashes.  Most of the rest is down to weather and bird strike, which gives you even more to worry about.   

And there are so many planes in the air at any one time!  12000 to 14000, they say.  

During the Covid lockdowns I often used to look up at the sky and fancy it was bluer and brighter than when it was full of pollution-emitting aeroplanes.  It was certainly cleaner.  

But ever since Covid the rate of international travel has soared, as if the human race collectively thinks it had better get going right now before planes start colliding in mid-air or the oil runs out or flight-shaming returns with a vengeance and recreational flying is banned.  

Then there are the cultural factors against travel.  All the pretty, warm places like Italy, France and Spain are swamped with tourists, who drive up the cost of housing and annoy the locals by noisily trundling suitcases down cobbled streets at night.   And increasingly the locals don’t like it.  

Some of them are fighting back, and it’s not just anti-tourism activists in Barcelona spraying tourists with water-pistols.  In Paris just last week hundreds of tourists were left standing with their admission tickets outside an inexplicably closed Louvre museum.  Turns out the staff were on strike as an anti-tourism protest.  

Fortunately the Greeks are still friendly.  During my week there I went to Crete, by (Incat-built!) ferry via Syros, Tinos, Naxos, Mykonos, Paros and Santorini, dropping off and picking up hundreds of people at each stop ‘doing’ the islands.  I had a new set of fellow passengers to talk to every leg of the journey.  They reported similar activities and experiences at each island, and sometimes had difficulty remembering which island was yesterday and which was next.  It wasn’t quite a case of seen one Greek island, seen them all, but almost.  

It was almost a joy to experience small inconveniences of cultural difference, such as not being able to get cow’s milk yogurt in Rethymno, where they use sheep’s milk.  

At least the Greek islands haven’t yet been blighted by high-rise tourism development, as my friend and I sadly observed in Budva, an old city on the Mediterranean coast of Montenegro, which is obviously hoping to attract the same tourist hordes causing second thoughts elsewhere in Europe.

We did make a few forays into the wilds of rural Albania and found some vestiges of unspoilt landscape and culture.  But in a beautiful steep gorge at the head of the Shala River, you had to pay 20 euros – nearly $40! – to lie on a sunlounge by the river.  And be oppressed by amplified head-banging music while you were at it.

I was almost relieved to be calling time on my travels, but now I’m going to have to find two more destinations.  I’m looking for peace, quiet, nature, history and nice food.  No party towns need apply.  

Two more were found, and visited. See Vanuatu, Timor Leste, and Qantas I’m Looking At You!