Sabotage Times, We can't Concentrate so Why Should You?Sabotage Times, We can't Concentrate so Why Should You?


Been 'Travelling'? Stop Telling Me About It. You're Boring.

by Tim Relf
30 January 2014 19 Comments

The only thing more annoying than pillocks heading off on a Gap Year are the inevitable stories of eating snake heart in Hanoi and connecting with 'something primal'. Look, I just don't want to bloody hear it, ok?

Gap Year sums up the space between their ears

There’s nothing that makes my heart sink more than someone starting a sentence with: “When I was travelling in…”

What follows will inevitably be a long and rambling monologue about backpacking, hitchhiking or bungee jumping. It’s usually followed by an earnest explanation for embarking on said trip involving the need to escape the rat race and a desire to find oneself. Then, finally, comes the justification of how beneficial the process was: how it opened their mind, made them more tolerant, more rounded, helped them discover who they are.

I’ve usually dozed off by the time they reach the obligatory stories about parties on Bondi Beach, prostitutes in Bangkok and dog dinners in Hanoi. Let’s be honest: there are lots of good reasons to go travelling, but the people who tend to do it give the whole endeavour a bad name. Most of them are school or university-leavers who only do it because of peer pressure, because they can’t get a job or because they’re in emotional tatters after being dumped.

They set off from Gatwick or Heathrow with their rucksacks and Rough Guides and fresh inoculations, convinced they’re breaking new ground, only to spend the next few months exclusively in the company of similar people from the Home Counties.

All the genuine reasons to spend time abroad – a desire to immerse yourself in a new culture, see amazing sights, help those less fortunate than yourself, learn a new language – get overlooked as they tread a clichéd path, ticking off the countries, sights and locals as if they’re playing a giant game of join the dots.

It’s as if a “gap year” before or after University has become obligatory (the term is, of course, a misnomer because university is itself a gap from real life).It doesn’t give people a new perspective, like travel should. All it gives them is a seemingly inexhaustible supply of dull stories to bore people with at dinner parties.

You know the sort: they’ll rattle on about having “caught the travel bug” before launching into yet another anodyne anecdote about a broken lock on a youth hostel door in Bali, a lost wallet in Peru or a badly bruised toe in Kuala Lumpur.

They’ll show you the tattoo they got in Johannesburg (sorry, Jo-Ho), the picture on their phone of them with a greasy goatee in Tanzania or that item of jewellery they bartered for in Papua New Guinea.

But too many approach it without any imagination. Too many are blissfully unaware that you don’t necessarily need to jet off to Mongolia to find out about the human condition: you do it by learning to listen and watch the people around you.

Ultimately, travel’s like being drunk. However great it makes you feel at the time, no one wants to listen to you bang on about it afterwards.

To compound the situation, having “done the whole travelling thing”, these so-called gappies assume an air of superiority. Instead of coming home and counting their Berkshire or Buckinghamshire blessings, they’ll be more dissatisfied than ever. They’ll be doubly condescending, as well, about how the poverty they saw really brought, like, material things into perspective, and how, like, they’ve changed so much – the homelessness was on a completely different scale over there, it really, like, did their head in. And then they’ll show you footage of said slum children on their handheld HD video recorder, a present for finishing their A levels.

Does a spell abroad make them any more likely to secure gainful employment? Hardly.

We’re facing the spectre of a double-dip recession, for Christ’s sake, we need people with skills and motivation, not a generation fit for nothing more than singing karaoke in Hong Kong, winning a food fight in the Alps or getting stoned watching the sun come up/go down (delete as appropriate) on some African beach.

Forget their minds, the only part of these people’s bodies a trip abroad opens is their bowels. And it’s not just the Dehli belly incident they’ll recount in detail, you’ll also be told about how they became host to a three-foot worm and had a fish swim up their penis.

To be fair, they probably weren’t to know when they bought the tickets and sunglasses that it was such a predictable path that they were setting off on.

It was the same with their parents, drawn a generation ago by the apparent mystique of inter-railing. Young men, then, were lured abroad by dreams of the Orient Express, azure seas, olive-skinned locals and the prospect of intellectual conversation (not to mention a hand job) with a European woman whose eye they’d caught in a charmingly unspoilt spot before leaning over gallantly to light her Gitanes.

The reality was rather different. Inter-railing typically involved miserably long journeys across Eastern Europe with no sleep and a raging hangover from some filthy local spirit, splinters in your arse from the wooden seats, wedged next to an old hag in a headscarf smelling of cabbage who’d offer you a slice of her raw parsnip.

Travel has its benefits. Course it does. It can be good for the soul, it can be uplifting, it can help you grow as a person. And the weather can’t be any shitter than it is in Britain.

But too many approach it without any imagination. Too many are blissfully unaware that you don’t necessarily need to jet off to Mongolia to find out about the human condition: you do it by learning to listen and watch the people around you.

The sometimes unpalatable, but inescapable, truth is that the couple you’re sitting behind on a bus in your hometown are probably every bit as interesting as a couple on a Greyhound bus in America.

And we shouldn’t, of course, forget the fact that if you do feel compelled to travel, there’s always the possibility that you’ll get robbed, shot, kidnapped, bombed or end up doing a 20-stretch in a filthy third-world jail on some trumped-up (or perhaps not-so-trumped-up) drugs charge.

Now that’s one story I might enjoy listening to.

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image descriptionCOMMENTS

Mitchell 7:40 am, 13-Mar-2011

Hi Tim. You're a great writer, and enjoyed European perspective. You might enjoy reading about how I was shot a Greyhound bus in Cleveland. http://wheredidmybraingo.com/i-was-shot-on-greyhound-bus-in-cleveland/ Best wishes, Mitchell

Denis 6:14 pm, 13-Mar-2011

Ha! Very funny, Tim, and true! Now, I am off to look up the meaning of "pillock."

Mark Cousens 9:12 pm, 13-Mar-2011

Nice well observed article Tim, you take 'grumpy old man' to a whole new level!

Ben 10:24 pm, 13-Mar-2011

Well said! And you absolutely nailed it with: "Ultimately, travel’s like being drunk. However great it makes you feel at the time, no one wants to listen to you bang on about it afterwards." Amen.

michelle 9:19 pm, 17-Mar-2011

"Most of them are school or university-leavers who only do it because of peer pressure, because they can’t get a job or because they’re in emotional tatters after being dumped." or maybe it genuinely is because they want to experience a whole new world, and perspective on life. Stop sterotyping.

Bob 2:49 pm, 31-Mar-2011

A funny read. There are plenty of idiot travellers out there. These people are vocal so you're going to hear them, be it travelled or not they would still talk boring shit.

James Brennan 11:51 am, 30-Jan-2014

Given that most of them are school or uni leavers, to me it's just another elitist pursuit. The thing that makes it so annoying is the fact that the only ones telling these condescending tales are stuck up little wankers with their lack of regional accents, who are being funded by mum and dad. If I couldnt find a job I'd be worrying about how I was going to pay my mortgage, I certainly wouldn't be looking at my situation as an excuse to go bothering Indonesia.

davidhillier 1:39 pm, 30-Jan-2014

Get what you are saying, but you need to learn to smell the roses mate

Michael Strorm 10:48 pm, 30-Jan-2014

There's an advert on TV whose tagline is "Travel Yourself Interesting". (A quick check reveals it's for Expedia). I saw this, and it immediately struck me as ironic and depressing, since the message underlying that was (a) essentially about the commoditisation of "experience", and (b) turning it from an end in itself into nothing more than a means to having some self-obsessed travel shite to write on their Facebook page... probably by the same people you describe. There's a similar one for a car, "before you can fill your digital toys with memories, you have to have to create the memories. And you can only do these interesting things if you own our overpriced lifestyle vehicle."

Zapa 11:28 am, 31-Jan-2014

Yes Michelle apparently that is always the case when one writes about something like this. That they are 'stereotyping'. Like the writer said, it's getting boring

Friday Night Smoke 2:09 pm, 31-Jan-2014

I had a gap year; it was driving forklifts and doing various bottom-rung temping around Birmingham. I can guarantee it taught me more about the world than any prententious jolly around Goa.

Tricia Goddard 3:37 pm, 2-Feb-2014

You're an idiot

S. Daniels 9:01 am, 3-Feb-2014

I actually became bored of this article halfway through, as I realised it's another person banging on about the same crap of gap years, tourist and travellers. Once started I thought I'd finishing it, incase there was some original perspective, thought or idea. It just ended up another person rapping the same story, much like the travellers his ironically complaining about.

Matt 12:35 pm, 3-Feb-2014

"anyone fancy a cup of tea?" "yeah..although tea aint the same now....when i was riding Donkeys around Sweden with a man from Coventry that i met in Bangkok, we had tea from an old Dunlop Green Flash and it sooooo opened my mind to new things" I went to Tenby when i was 8, it involved travelling in a car..but i don’t need to bring it up every time somebody mentions travelling! i work with someone who has been to Asia about twice and they think anybody going on 'Holiday' is wasting their time unless they plan to shit in a plastic bag or catch up with the 'WHACKY' Guys from Hull they met when stroking Turtles in a backstreet cafe after no sleep and drinking till 4am in the morning! well.........i had nice Bun with my nan in Tenby and I’m sure if my Nan came with me to sit on top of mountain as the sun came up, with IBIZA essential tracks pumped out of somebodies phone my Bun would taste the same! my nan on the other hand would be off her Fucking Head!

Jimbo GY 4:29 pm, 3-Mar-2014

Most of these young divs wouldnt be able to go to certain parts of their own towns and cities

Stan Dalglish 10:50 pm, 4-Mar-2014

This one time.....at band camp ......

Mike 12:21 am, 17-May-2014

What a terrible article, I can't believe someone got paid to write this. It just reads like a bitter old man who's jealous that he never got the chance to experience any of this himself. It's funny reading you criticize others for an air of superiority when the whole article reeks of elitism.

Delia 1:57 pm, 24-Aug-2014

I agree what a pompous Cynical old "acting" twat.He quite obviously doesn't get it.I for one love hearing- telling stories about shitting in plastic bags.(especially in excotic sounding places!) I think this dude suffers from seasonal affective disorder.Pip Pip!

Delia 1:58 pm, 24-Aug-2014

yawn.

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