I Hate Traveling

A Travelogue

(14-June-2021) UPDATE: A vastly improved, expanded, revised, and re-edited version of this text which includes photos is now available for sale, both paperback and ebook, on Amazon. I have added the first chapter of the new version below.

DAY ONE
MONDAY

Traveling must be one of the most overrated things in the world. Right next to children, marriage, traditions, religion, sports, Hollywood actors, humanity, life, atoms, and the universe.

Why? Because it’s too expensive. It takes too long to get there. It’s too inconvenient. And when you’re finally there you discover that there are endless lines everywhere you go — something that was clearly missing from the pretty brochures. Moreover, most of the destinations have been so over-romanticized and overhyped over time that they couldn’t possibly match reality anymore.

Not to mention the fact that everything’s just so goddamn commercialized, having long been turned into a mere product to be sold and consumed by the masses. Meaning wherever you go there are always endless lines of people consuming the same fucking product that you are, constantly reminding you that your experience is neither unique nor special. And if there are too many people attracted to something, it’s usually for the same reason as why flies are attracted to shit.

However, since I hadn’t had a proper vacation for a while now and was burned out from work, I felt I needed one. A colleague from the office, who had long black hair and listened to heavy metal, had one day randomly recommended Slovenia to me. The only thing I knew about Slovenia at the time was that the US president’s stupid fucking wife was from there, which was not exactly an endorsement.

Yet when I looked up Slovenia online, I saw that it also had beautiful mountains, vibrant green valleys, and ancient castles, which was enough for me and Morrigan to buy the plane tickets.

Our first flight went from Tallinn to Helsinki, where we took a connecting flight to Slovenia, which is nestled between Italy, Austria, and Croatia. Helsinki, by the way, is above Tallinn. Slovenia, on the other hand, is below Tallinn. Thus, to get to Slovenia from Tallinn, the plane first takes you further away from it. Somehow, somebody thought this makes sense.

On the flight to Helsinki, we had these rotten seats where the two passengers in front of us were facing towards us, eyeing our every move, or so it had seemed.

Also, a new experience for me on this particular flight was that I had to learn some additional safety instructions because I was sitting right next to the emergency exit. Well fuck that, I thought, as the stewardess handed me a manual regarding my extra responsibilities. How the shit was this my job?

Besides, if the plane was already going down, I would hope that it went down fast and hard and that there would be no survivors. Cause that’s just the kind of guy I am.

Helsinki airport was a fucking nightmare. There were so many people everywhere that you could hardly move. At least the part we were in. For you see, when Morrigan and I went on an intercontinental flight to China the year before from the very same airport, it was actually quite pleasant. Why? Because intercontinental flights have a much larger and nicer section for travelers than do flights inside Europe.

Morrigan suggested that this was so because you could milk more money out of the people on the intercontinental flights since they were already paying much more and tended to be wealthier. She was probably right. Airports, after all, are known for the psychological tricks they pull on you in order to make you spend more — for instance, forcing you to walk through a store to get to your plane, which makes zero fucking sense.

Anyway, the airport was overcrowded, overloud, overpriced, and the food was godawful, as I soon learned after buying one of the shittiest and most expensive sandwiches that I had ever eaten. The beer I washed it down with had also cost me a small fortune. And don’t even get me started on the fancy restaurant where we didn’t go to because their prices were just fucking insane.

But the main problem I had with the airport wasn’t the prices. It was the people. There were too many of them. And it goes without saying that the more people there are at any given place, the worse that place becomes on all accounts. There is no man who can be by himself alone so contemptible as a body of men, as Chamfort said, and there is no body of men that can be so contemptible as the public at large.

And it’s not only airports but also beaches, shops, cinemas, clubs, tourist attractions, zoos, restaurants, bars, concerts, festivals, museums and gangbangs that suffer from the exact same problem — that there are just too many fucking people everywhere you go, and they often bring their stupid fucking children with them. Well . . . maybe not to the gangbangs, but still.

And flying in an airplane, you get to be cramped up with the fuckers in a small space for hours on end!

Though you were flying through heaven, it often felt like you were in hell.

When we got on the flight to Slovenia, which was to take two and a half hours, I discovered that there was neither any in-flight entertainment onboard nor any free food or alcohol. At first, this realization had made me rather miserable. Until I discovered that I could get free alcohol with the frequent flyer miles I had accrued from the year before, which cheered me the fuck up.

I bought some beer and red wine and began drinking both whilst reading a collection of Bukowski’s short stories called South of No North. There were some pretty good ones in there; for instance, the one where a guy buys a mannequin and tries to fuck it. At the same time, Morrigan was reading the most cheerful book ever written — The Conspiracy Against the Human Race. It’s so cheerful, in fact, that after I read it, I was depressed for two months straight.

Aside from reading and drinking, there was one more activity I enjoyed doing in airplanes, which was farting. And so I tried to let out as many of them as I could — big fat fellows, long windy ones, quick little merry cracks and a lot of tiny little naughty farties ending in a long gush, as James Joyce so poetically put it. For some reason, I took great delight in forcing my stink upon perfect strangers, my fetid molecules traveling up their nostrils, briefly invading their consciousness.

When we touched down in Slovenia, I saw that there were mountains in every direction that I looked. This immediately made me feel good. Mountains had always made me feel good. Perhaps it had something to do with living in a flat country. Perhaps the same applied to living with a flat girlfriend.

Morrigan had scheduled a taxi to pick us up from the airport, so we began searching for it. It took us a while, but eventually we managed to locate it in the parking lot. And then we were on our way to the town called Bled.

“How was your flight?” asked the blonde woman who was driving the taxi.

“Not too bad,” Morrigan answered. “At least there weren’t any crying children.”

To this the driver responded that she, on the other hand, liked having as many children as possible on a flight because she was afraid of flying and thought that if there were lots of children on the airplane then God would think twice before “taking them.”

My God, I thought, listening to her lunacy. Why were religious people always such fucking nutcases?

It took us about half an hour to arrive at the hotel. Unfortunately, since we had waited until the last minute with booking it, it was a few kilometers away from town and it was far from luxurious.

Thus, after settling into the hotel, which was ran by a Chinese family and had a surprisingly decent view of a nearby mountain, we began walking towards the town of Bled.

It was hot as hell and it was a long walk. Also, since there were no sidewalks, we had to walk on the side of the road, cars racing by us. This annoyed me since I was used to walking on sidewalks like a civilized person. After having to suffer this shit after the long and unpleasant flights, I was beginning to get pissed off.

When we finally arrived in Bled, we went to the nearest supermarket to buy some beer. A lot of beer. For I often had the fear of not having a beer nearby when I needed one, which meant that I liked to keep plenty stocked.

What I found interesting in the supermarket was that some of the beer cans on the shelf were upside down, even though their labels were the correct way up. I soon figured out why — since the beer was unfiltered, when you turned it around, the muck sank from the top to the bottom, which was rather clever.

After we had finished loading my backpack full of beer, we started searching for a restaurant where to have dinner. As we walked through the streets of Bled, we constantly saw — or rather heard — British tourists everywhere. Much to my dismay, it seemed that this was one of their holiday destinations.

How did one recognize a British tourist? Well, there was usually the fat balding dad with anger issues, who thinks he’s awfully clever when in fact he’s not. Along with his ugly old cow of a wife with a prolapsed uterus from giving birth too much. As well as their three stupid children who are either all on drugs or soon will be.

And then of course there were the chavellers who you could tell from a mile away by their ugly fucking slang: Oi, I’m knackered! That’s brilliant, innit? Lovely, yeah? Bloody hell, I’m pissed! I’m chuffed to bits! Fancy a fag, mate? Bollocks! Is he taking the piss? Wanker! Bugger! Rubbish! Blimey! Blooming! Blighter! Pish. Posh. Fuck. Off. Sometimes I wish I was born deaf.

And that . . . accent, man. You know, that smug and self-assured way of speaking, even though they sound like fucking peasants. As the saying goes, the stronger the accent, the stupider the person. Or at least it should.

But enough about that. Eventually, we found a pub that looked all right and didn’t seem too pretentious. Not that any of the eating places in Bled did since it seemed that most of them only served pizza or paninis. And the places that served paninis all had the exact same identical stock image of the same fucking panini, which clearly did not match reality.

Anyway, we sat down on the terrace, which had a decent view of the nearby Lake Bled, even though it was rather dark by then. We ordered some Slovenian beer and Slovenian sausages. We loved stuffing big fat sausages in our mouths.

After we were finished with the food, which was mediocre, and the beer, which wasn’t cold enough — even though on the menu it had said that it was supposed to be as cold as my ex’s heart, which is pretty fucking cold — we went inside to pay. There, much to my surprise, on one of the walls hung a large poster of Bukowski with the quote, “Find what you love and let it kill you,” which happened to be my favorite quote at the time. (It was only later that I learned that Bukowski hadn’t actually said that. It had actually been some fucking country singer instead. And yet somehow it had gotten misattributed as one of Bukowski’s most famous quotes . . . May the world fall down on its lies!)

As it was soon too late to take a bus back to the hotel and I sure as shit didn’t want to walk back there, we began searching for a bus station. After we finally found the correct one, having first sat down in the wrong one before realizing our mistake by overhearing the loud blather of some nearby British tourists, Morrigan and I had a bit of an argument since I’d been complaining so much during the trip already and it was only day one.

It was indeed true that I had been complaining a lot, but from my point of view, what the hell could I do about it if I simply couldn’t stand most of the things that most people were constantly doing in this stupid life of ours, such as flying or walking or waiting in lines?

During the peak of the argument, Morrigan had even suggested buying me a ticket for the next flight back home, which I refused, opting to apologize to her instead.

Eventually the bus arrived, and we drove to the bus station near our hotel. As we walked towards the hotel, we saw that the sky was clear and that there was an immense number of stars visible, perhaps more than I had ever seen. It was so clear due to the alpine region and the lack of light pollution.

We admired the stars for a while and then retired for the evening.

Followed by seven more chapters. You can buy it on Amazon and Book Depository.