Breaking up with Travel

You’re having the time of your life. You’re seeing new countries, making new friends, learning new languages. You may have been travelling for six weeks or six months or six years, it matters none.

Because soon it will end.

It happens to all of us, we run out of money, or jobs and university applications are calling and parents and partners are nagging and it’s just Time To Go Home.

We know our travels are finite. They are slithers of bliss to break up the monotony of everyday life. We decide we’re going to remember these feelings of freedom forever; we’re going to tell our grandchildren all about our adventures one day.

Travel can become a lifestyle, one that seems to fit us perfectly, one that no matter how sweet and beautiful, can’t be maintained permanently.

So we come home and we talk and talk and talk, about how beautiful Cambodia is, about that time we ate alpaca in Peru, or learned to weave silk in Laos, about the Opera House and Machu Picchu and Ankor Wat, about sweet Chang beer, and bitter coca leaves, and awful bus rides and food poisoning and scams and still we love it all.

(Inhale)

Eventually most people get sick of hearing about our travels. Well-meaning friends and family listen for a while but without sharing those experiences, we may as well be talking about a good movie they’re never going to see.

So we blog. It becomes therapy, encouraging others to do what we can’t do right now. Because we’re obsessed with Travel but Travel isn’t interested in us right now. Travel is eyeing up the younger guys and girls fresh from High School on gap years. We’re old news.

So how do we deal with it? The same way as other breakups. We throw ourselves into our work and we go out drinking on the weekends, convincing ourselves were still having as much fun on a sticky dance floor in an inner city club as we were lounging on a hammock with a mango smoothie on the Caribbean coast of Colombia.

Eventually, we forget what it feels like to travel for months on end with nowhere to be but right where you are, rising with the sun, bartering with locals, and drinking a beer with a cheers! Or prost! Or salud!

Or maybe we don’t forget.

#story