Toxic travel traits

Everyone has them

The canal in which I lost all my money, a third of the way through the holiday

A few weeks ago, I told someone I’d just met that I had a travel newsletter, and he asked if I had any travel tips. I realised that I did not. Much as I love visiting new places, I am not actually a very good traveller.

In Eat Pray Love, Elizabeth Gilbert writes, ‘I feel about travel the way a happy new mother feels about her impossible, colicky, restless newborn baby - I just don’t care what it puts me through.’ I feel a similar way.

When the ferry got stranded in choppy waters on the way back from the Year Eight school trip to Germany, I was the only one in my cohort of 120 who found it distressing enough to be sick, not just on the ferry but also on the coach back. Over the past ten years of independent travel, I have missed trains and buses because I forgot to check the departure times beforehand, lost all my money in a canal, and infected an entire hostel with a sickness bug. Only last year, I took a pill in an attempt to counter my motion sickness, drank wine later that evening, and found myself unable to keep my eyes open or control the muscles in my face.

And I have many other travel-related deficiencies, including but not limited to: