On extended travel one year, I decided to spend some time in Bali and had had enough of spruikers and people selling me everything from massages to surfing lessons to belly button rings. I was sick of the people, the noise and the traffic.
To get away from the marauding tourists I decided to head up to Amed, a tiny fishing village on the east coast of Bali. I checked in to a hut on the beach. I could literally hear the waves washing up on the black lava stones of the volcanic beach. There was an adjacent eating hut where they played one James Blunt song on a loop. I didn’t want to talk to anyone. The only person I needed to talk to was the waitress serving my meals and the boatman when I booked my private snorkelling trip.
Once on the boat, the boatman headed to a wreck he knew. I jumped in wallowing in the warm water. I snorkelled on the surface for a while and then dived down to get a closer look at the wreck. As I was coming up nearing the surface, I was met face to face with a man in a mask and snorkel trying to sell me an underwater camera.
Travel is fun, they say. Travel is to meet people, they say. Travel is to share experiences with as many people as possible, they say. I have to admit that I’m harbouring a nasty little secret. It’s something I’ve never shared with anyone before but I’m going to share it with you today.
I hate people on holiday.
I have been on young people’s holidays like Top Deck tours where hordes of us were all thrown together in a pot, mixed up and spat out at the end of three weeks. It seemed to be different then. There was pressure. You had to be sociable. You had to talk to people. It was expected. You had to remember names and appear to be interested in what the others were saying.
Travelling with strangers in a group is the most stressful thing you can do in the world. Living with people 24 hours a day, waking up to them, and knowing that you’ll see them all day every day for the next three weeks is something close to torture. Alcohol helped.
It’s got worse as I’ve got older.
Some people love a cruise. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. However, I believe this is the worst holiday in the world. I tried it once. It was around the time of the SARS bird flu epidemic — the Chinese ships couldn’t get any customers up near Hong Kong so they cut the cost in half and came down to Australia.
Here’s a recipe for disaster just waiting to happen:
- Take 2,000 passengers mostly of a certain age
- Stick them in tiny cabins with no windows
- Add a huge discount
- Throw in a storm at sea where everyone gets seasick
- Give them no sunbeds because they’ve all been claimed by towels
- Add all that to a floating shopping mall.
You’ve guessed that group tours are not for me. I can avoid those but I can’t avoid plane travel. Here’s another dirty little secret. I hate people who talk to me on planes. After years of travelling, I have some good strategies I’d like to share with you.
Take a large book — dust off War and Peace from your book shelves — and open at the appropriate moment (á la Macon Leary), put as much technology in front of you as you can fit, add headphones, watch movies, sleep — and if all else fails, alcohol helps.
