The Conclusion

147 days: 14 countries over 4 continents

It is now one week since I returned and I’ve fully begun my readjustment to London life. In the last week I’ve met up with much-loved friends, eaten in some glitzy restaurants, seen some thought-provoking plays and spent innumerable hours squished against the windows of rush-hour trains. My days are bookended again by a Metro and Evening Standard, I debate once more whether the Sainbury’s self-service aisle really will be any quicker and I scour the streets looking for that one magical spot where my phone can get 3G internet access and hence actually work. However, before I fully release myself back into the Big Smoke, I feel I should take some time for reflection over the last five months. 

In her introduction to her anthology of travel stories, Patricia Craig identifies certain categories of traveller. Beginning with the traveller as pilgrim, she discusses the Grand Tour undertaken in a spirit of aloofness by fashionable young men, the colonial journey of adventure and danger, the anthropologist travelling to fathom foreign ways, the Romantic following the allure of the abroad and the plain old holiday-maker in search of rest and relaxation. Perhaps the only one missing from this list is the ‘Gap Yah’ student in small-minded pursuit of alcohol and anecdotes, chundering their way across the continents.  At times, I fear I’ve fulfilled all these roles.

Since that frosty February morning when I set-off by foot to Gants Hill train station, beginning a journey of something like 60,000 kilometres (40,000 miles), I’ve knelt before a living goddess in Kathmandu, escaped a man-eating Anaconda deep in the Amazon rainforest, partied with multi-millionaires in Peru, witnessed a live goat being decapitated in the Himalayas and acted in a Bollywood movie. I’ve trekked to the lost city of the Incas, got stranded solo at the top of a volcano, scuba-dived at night in a green cloud of phosphorescing phytoplankton, watched a human body be cremated on a funeral pyre and visited a lake of pure arsenic.

And it’s not just the sights. I’ve experienced accommodation ranging from a private five-star hotel where I was tended by twenty staff to a soviet-prison-style hostel infested with rats and raw sewage. I’ve pulled leeches off my foot in Nepal, been bitten to within an inch of hospitalisation in Ecuador and been tear-gassed by the Bolivian police. I’ve had my hair cut by a political dissident in Peru, a barber in Australia, a friend on a toilet in Thailand and India’s jolliest man in Agra. I’ve partied at Carnival in Buenos Aires, raved at the Full Moon Party, salsa-danced along the Equator, starred in a transvestite cabaret show and MC-ed the Wedding Of The Year. I’ve even indulged in some self-improvement, having taken classes in Thai boxing, meditation, Indian cookery, Peruvian Spanish, surfing, scuba diving and the indigenous dances of Lake Titicaca. Like Benjamin Disraeli, “I have seen more than I remember, and remember more than I have seen”.

Perhaps more important than the physical journey though is the personal journey that such a trip entails. Those long train and bus rides with no company but the landscape give ample time for self-reflection, while the process of constantly meeting new people allows for your personality to emerge unhindered by the past (“there are no yesterdays on the road” - William Least Heat Moon). Don’t worry though, I’m not about to launch into some long embarrassing piece about how I ‘found myself’ milking yaks in the Himalayas. However, needless to say, I’m a different man now and, I hope, a better one.

I return feeling intellectually refreshed with a new-found love for this city and, crucially for one about to start a career as a City lawyer, I find myself more calm and unstressed than at any point since infancy. I guess the main benefit of all this travel is perspective. In comparison to the grinding poverty in India, the prehistoric beauty of the Bolivian Altiplano or the endless solitude of the crazy-men I met in the Amazon rainforest, life’s little woes and cares seem, well, a bit petty.

 

So, will this idyllic outlook last? Or will corporate law prove a foe hardier than the transvestite thieves of Uttar Pradesh or the venomous ants of Eastern Ecuador? We’ll just have to wait and see ...

The Awards

Favourite Country: Peru (the perfect combination of great food, sights and people)

Most fun: Thailand (beach partying every night)

Single best dish: The ginger and lemongrass crème brûlée I had at Métis in Bali, followed closely by the Kobe beef steak at La Cabrera in Buenos Aires  

Best local dishes: Ceviche (marinated raw fish - Peru), Momos (steamed Tibetan dumplings - Nepal), Mangoes (so different from those back home - Bali), Picarones (pumpkin and sweet potato doughnuts in a cinnamon honey - Peru), Pan de Yuca (melt-in-your mouth warm breads made from cheese and yuca flour - Ecuador), Lúcuma milkshakes (a sub-tropical Andean fruit tasting a bit like a date - Peru) and Frutigran biscuits (one packet a day - Argentina).