I come to bury the overseas holiday, not to praise it. Henceforth, our passports will be used strictly for business purposes and our recreational hours spent vegetating on the couch in front of the TV, or in the hammock, weather permitting.
Let’s be clear on something — our move has not been influenced by terrorism, tsunamis or the conga lines at airport check-ins. No, all of this and more we can endure and, indeed, overcome.
When asked, we might say that we travel abroad to encounter new places and people, to explore different cultures and cuisines, or maybe just to find some light, bright entertainment and work on our tan, but it simply isn’t so.
Let’s consider the facts. Columbus did not leave sunny Spain and cross the frigid Atlantic in search of amusing diversion or in the hope of bumping into the odd new culture.
It’s a fact that for years afterwards he terrorized guests at fashionable Madrid dinner parties with his endless anecdotes about, as he called it, “my recent overseas trip”. While the best that anyone else could muster was the time they were gored while out walking in Pamplona or the dreadful state of the rutted, bone-jarring road to Barcelona, Columbus lived off his Big Trip for years. Naturally, it won him respect, nay envy, all round.
And the same goes for that renowned English sailor and explorer, Captain James Cook, who amongst other things discovered Australia and made a brief and fatal trip to Hawaii. Leaning against the bar at the Goat and Mainbrace in his hometown, Whitby, in a clear, crisp voice James would recount tales of his “travails and adventures in the southern climes” to the reverent silence of the Sunday afternoon patrons. Needless to say, he never spent his own money on a pint of beer in years and could sleep peacefully knowing that, bar an unexpected visit to the pub by some trailblazing, New World Spanish explorer, blown off course and straight into Whitby harbor, there wasn’t a soul alive who could gazump his overseas travel monologue.
Which brings us to the whole point of why we endure the indignities and abominable hardships of tumbledown hotels, bizarre foreign food, and nasty locals who, when asked for simple directions to the train station take curious pleasure in sending you down a dusty track to the nearby waste-water treatment plant. Always nice to know they have sewerage, but much nicer still to catch the train.
No, the reason we take overseas holidays is simple. It gives us a precious, all-too-rare chance to lord it over our fellow man. A simple comment by a work colleague about the shocking price of bananas at the local supermarket can open the door to an amusing anecdote by you about the armloads of exotic produce you bought for the price of a Costco apple on your recent trip to Madagascar. And if the cabs are late on a soggy Friday night after work, then your views on the punctuality of Shanghai’s cabs will provides a helpful comparison and certainly fill a void in the conversation.
He says Rochester, you say Rome, she says Albany, you say Antarctica, they say Portland, you say Patagonia. You get the picture.
So far, so good, but it works best where you have a monopoly on the overseas holiday stories and not at all well where one and all have the same exotic fruit and veg and Shanghai cab anecdotes to tell as you. Even worse where you confidently inject your holiday anecdote into the chatter between desserts and coffee only to find it wildly outdone by some clown who recounts his recent hair-raising, all-night cab ride from Delhi to Mumbai in an ancient Citroen with no seat belts, a missing passenger door and a blind drunk driver who threatened him with a machete when he refused to part with a tip twice the size of the fare. Pity the cabby was too sloshed not to collect him flush across the right ear, but fat lot of good that does you as you sit there and see your audience’s wide-eyed amazement riveted to the other end of the table.
Predictably, this has led to disaster. Sensing they were losing their party edge, plenty of people who wouldn’t dream of putting the milk in their coffee first because it would upset a lifetime of comfortable routine have been forced to up the ante and go on so-called “adventure holidays”.
Now they grimly face the tormented white water of the Colorado in full flood or trek snow-covered mountain peaks in far corners of Asia and South America because they figure that only by putting themselves in mortal danger do they have any hope of converting the thousands of dollars spent and weeks of discomfort and inconvenience endured into the sort of social one-upmanship that overseas holidays are supposed to be all about.
But before you rush off to try and book an uncaged swim with a pack of tiger sharks, there’s bad news for the growing ranks of physically and emotionally bruised adventure travelers. Alas, the world doesn’t stand still, so just try mentioning at work your backpacking trip to Malawi and ten bucks says there will be some miserable cadaver who’ll look up from his lunch and chip in with his mountain-biking fortnight in Greenland. And if you think that your brush with Tunisian bandits is a sure-fire winner, the smart money says you’re likely to be cruelly over-shadowed by something along the lines of a marrow-chilling encounter with a boatload of cut-throat pirates in the South China Sea, as recounted by some upmarket 30-something mother whose most terrifying moment seems far more likely to have been the time her little Sarah turned an ankle in the bouncy castle at the school fete.
It’s enough to make you throw away your passport in disgust, and with the money you save on travel you could even buy one of those leather push-button recliners to make the vegetative hours you’ll now be spending in front of the TV as relaxing as a stint in a Singapore Airlines first-class sleeper.
Still, if you’re prepared to bungee-jump off K2 or go hot-air ballooning over Gaza, and don’t mind relating your travel anecdotes from the ‘other side’, then all is not lost. Sure, your friends will need to invest in a Ouija board, but in death you will at least have what was beyond you in life: a riveting travel anecdote that even the most seasoned gad-about traveler will have a darned hard time topping.
And won’t that make it all worthwhile.
