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I love travel blogs, travel magazines, travel this and travel that. The idea of travel and breaking away from the chains of the desk fascinated me enough for me to quit my job and take up travel full time for a year (or maybe more, still not sure). I thought it would be cool to click beautiful sunsets on lakes and mountains, to get signature shots of me clicked in front of world famed sites flaunting now here and now there status on social sites telling people how cool Angkor Wat really is, how tasting rat meat in Laos feels and just how relaxing hanging in the hammock can feel but while I did all this, I realised five hard facts (if I may call them facts) about travelling that bloggers, travel writers and travel documentaries don’t mention:
- Travel fatigue – You get sick a lot when you travel continuously. I am writing this after having been popping in antibiotics like skittles for a month now and still nowhere close to recovery. If I look back at the past one year, I have been sick at least half the time. Most of the time I am exhausted, tired and fatigued. I thought it’s just me. But I have met more than few people who were just ready to get on the plane go back home after a year of travel. And by the way when I write “I”, it’s two of us anyways.
- Local foods misadventure– Oh! I know how we envy people travelling to different parts of the world and trying local cuisine and making documentaries about it. Phad thai with lemon and spring onions sprinkled with crushed peanuts, the wonderful red curry, the fried maggots, the frog meat. You thought you could live on coconut curries forever – try a different thing for every meal and love it. Didn’t you? Well I did. But I sadly realised that I could not. That is why people after a point end up looking for their home food as they travel. Just the reason why you can find banana pancakes, burgers and even pizzas everywhere you go no matter how remote. The experience of trying local foods looks better than it really is. You get bored of it after a point and look for known food more than once in a while.
- Homesickness – I have been unbelievably homesick all this time – why? I have no clue. While I couldn’t wait to be away from all things known and unfamiliar and arrive in strange places and find my way around them, I now crave for the known and familiar. All in all, I miss home more than I thought I could. The things that I hated are the ones that I miss the most. I miss home food (something I thought I had had enough of), being nagged by mother to take a shower (being sick has taught why I must shower everyday), and sitting around and watching bollywood movies from the 90s (someone deleted Andaz apna apna from my hard disk).
- Sightseeing not always fun – Sightseeing is not always fun, a lot of times you will just want to sit back with a coffee. In fact more often than not you will find yourself doing just that, sitting back and relaxing with a cup of coffee (or a bottle of beer. personally after months in south east Asia, I still don’t drink). The checklist will tire you. One great thing will not seem different from another great thing and all things will ultimately not seem that great after all.
- Stuck in the bubble – You stay in a tourist bubble where the real local experience is remote and away. You cannot speak to the locals anyways because you don’t know there local language. You will always interact with people in tourism and hospitality who sometime may be genuine people, but a lot of times will just not care enough to interact with you or be clearly putting up fake smiles. You will be wary of local people who approach you out of curiosity anyways – they might want to cheat you, you will think. Even if you do interact with local, it will not be often. It will be that one rare incident when someone showed kindness telling you the directions or that one time you spoke with hand movements to an old man smoking tobacco on a charpoy. Our friends who engaged in volunteering work in non tourist areas have more genuine experiences to take back home.
Maybe I am travel fatigued right now to be writing all this. Maybe you will agree with me to a certain extent and disagree to a large. But I will not believe it if you tell me that on your yearlong round the world trip you woke up each morning wanting to do every ‘must do’ they list, liking every ‘must see’ you saw and loving all the ‘must eat’ you ate. But despite all this, do I still want to continue travelling. Like hell I do. There is nothing I want to do more right now than this. If you haven’t gone traveling full time yet, I wish you that lucky bite of the travel bug.
Some of those I have found for myself even in my limited travel experience. My stomach rebels against unfamiliar food; I sweat too much in hot places to enjoy the loveliest of sights; back to the regular routine seems soothing. So, my travel is always for limited periods. One can enjoy beauty when one has aches and pains but it is impossible with nausea – so back to good old home food frequently for me 🙂
Oh good old home food! Its so good! I would give anything for home food and a cuddle from my mother right now but this travel lust…
It’s good to see a post that talks about the “real” aspects of travel. Even the idyllic bubble of wanderlust bursts sometimes. It’s good to take a break from sightseeing & itinerarys to just go with the flow. At the end of the day, you really won’t remember everything you saw at the Lourve but you will remember the time you got lost and ended up eating the best chocolate croissant.
Great one you guys. Keep ’em coming!
Ankita recently posted…Offbeat Euro Getaways: Noirmoutier, France
Ankita,
We learnt things the hard way, but like everything else will want to go back and make the same mistakes again. It is so much fun to learn things from your own mistakes.
Remembering what you see never happens, all we end up remembering is what we ate, and some of our best finds have been while we were lost.
-Empty Rucksack
Nice post:) I agree that the flight schedules maybe more hectic than the body can take, however, it can be restored in a day or two if you just relax and sleep wherever you can, preferably in a quiet hostel bed in the best price you can afford or in one of the better international airports like Frankfurt airport. The time zone thing, where you have a flight around 3:00 in the morning and reach your via destination 4 hours from then, and its 10:00 AM out there, means that there is a 3 hour lag. Its best to rest well before any travel and not get too excited before we actually land in the destination of choice. Preparation is the key here, I carry just one backpack that I have used and tested with many times with just the essentials to help me reduce time in checkins and also the carry on weight. I still get asked by airport officials in EU as to how come I have only one bag.
Another things regarding food is I agree that stomach infections can start even on the day you land from airport food + fatigue i.e. reduced immunity. However, as I am from India, the one thing that helps a LOT is to maintain a certain level of hygiene. Even when street foods look tasty (not to me anyways) or have a cultural bent to it, the general hygiene is quite poor especially from the street stalls. I take it maybe once a year if that. That alone has eliminated any stomach rumbles. Another thing that you learn in your travels is that, washing hands after carrying baggage/holding documents/shaking hands with people can look a little strange if you make it look so, however, a hand sanitizer can save the frequent trips and actually kill germs without involving the water supply which itself could be contaminated.
Spending sensibly on food without compromising on the quality/hygiene is the foremost tip from my end. Do enjoy the local cuisine, but only from the ones you have researched properly or really like and that it has a general aura of quality. Another tip is to eat warm or hot foods and try to skip on the cool ones, unless its beer/icecream. That alone keeps the juices flowing and in cold places like in Europe, that really helps.
If you get used to India, I am sure you can thrive anywhere else. Cos the standards of living are in general higher than India elsewhere in most of the EU zone.
The one reason I dont have much interest in Thai culture or South East Asia cos inspite of the movies and music (which I hate for the most part) , the advertisements dont really do much to me. There is just enough of small eyed folk that I can see before I get bored already, its not racial, just not part of my tastes, which are completely European. There are no shortages of places to see in EU, and the languages are nice to hear as well, with beautiful women everywhere, and great choice of food and drink. Even in such circumstances, the stomach bug does happen once in a while and rightly said, it start mysteriously.
There are a few bacteria that we are not exposed to maybe as Indians, and so even being in the environment a food which will not harm an European might do some amount of damage to an Indian. Even though we have iron stomachs.
Btw, a challenge to all Indians – take some stall food or local food from the food stalls in Chennai, especially from areas like Perungudi the IT sector side. The worst infection I had was there, in my opinions the worlds worst state ever. If you are looking for hell that is one place you must visit. Lets see if you like travelling again after that stint 🙂
However, I guess things can be even worse as I read an article online for a guy who had a parasitic infection from the local food in Bolivia.
As a rule, avoid stingy places, wash hands/face before eating. Use clean toilets, change clothing/keep an outside clothing to prevent daily contact with the clothing underneath. I developed this habit of wearing sports waterproof jackets over my cotton clothes underneath. Ones from EcoSpeed Puma, are really good and folds to a fist, with a hoodie as well. That can be washed daily and wore over other apparel and taken off in offices/restaurants. Keeps clothes clean and prevents germs from contact with every body part. I do that a lot especially in India. While travelling in metros or the local green bus in Delhi, I try not to hold the bars or handles while standing. They are fully germ ridden. Not to look like a fanatic or paranoid, just simple awareness and common sense based on medical science.
After meals – keeping you tooth brush dry and never near the toilets is another one I can recommend. Keep the toothbrush clean by a warm wash regularly.
Regarding fatigue I think a good pair of shoes, exercise and basic hygience can do a lot of good damage.