The Other Side of It All

Everywhere you look, on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, blogs, everywhere, people are telling you that you should quit your job and travel the world. 

I have met so many people who have told me this is the dream. So many people who have left their jobs to come out here, and have no intention of going back. 

I follow at least three blogs that are dedicated to travel, and they all have one major thing in common: travelling is their job. That’s what they do. They travel, they write, and if you go by what everyone is saying, they are living the dream. 

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We were sat outside at a table, running through the standard questions: Where are you from? How long have you been in New Zealand for? Are you here on a Work/Holiday Visa? We inevitably got to talking about how much we hated Auckland (another standard conversation topic). The conversation lasted long enough for us to move to the final rote enquiry: what you were doing before you came here, and what you’ll be doing when you go home. 

He talked about quitting his job to come here. 

“This is the dream.” he said determinedly, with a broad smile on his face. 

“It is. It’s not my dream, but I mean, it's someone’s dream, definitely,” I replied, once again feeling like I didn't quite belong with this stereotype. 

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I am 11,790 miles away from home. It will take me 22 and a half hours of flying to reach London, a flight I won’t be boarding for another 80 days. 

I miss my Mum. I miss my Dad, and my sister, and our home. I miss Soph, Leigh, Bryony, Charlie. 

I miss familiarity. I miss knowing where things are, what brands to trust, where to go if I need something, how to get from place to place easily. 

My heart aches. Everyday. 

Why does no one ever talk about this side of it all?

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My dream is to have an apartment filled with light, and the smells of homemade cooking. I have a job I love (Occupational Psychology!) and hopefully, I have a little dog running around as well. Tom lives there too (of course) and together, we’ve built a life that we love. When we travel, it is for long weekends, short trips, little escapes away from the UK. We always come home. 

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People don’t realise that travel doesn’t have to happen with a backpack, and a year or more spent away from home. 

The only prerequisite for travel is that you actually go somewhere. Anywhere. For as long or as short as you like. 

And nobody ever talks about the other side of this one-size-fits-all dream.

~ 

Do you know one of the hardest things I’ve found so far? 

We didn’t buy a car when we arrived (massive regret, but it just wouldn’t have worked when we were travelling as a three) and so we’ve been travelling the country by bus. 

Every time the bus stops at each bus stop, I watch the people get off and greet their families. I watch the smiles and the hugs, and watch as they all wander back to their cars, ready to go home. 

Each time I sit there and know that when we arrive at our bus stop, the only person greeting us will be the bus driver as he hands us over our bags. 

It’s an erosive kind of loneliness, having no one to meet you at the end of your journey. 

~

We walked for an hour in the rain when we arrived in Wellington, dragging our bags and ourselves, before we checked in to our hostel. We were there for less than 24 hours before we were back outside, walking for 2 and a half hours in the heat to where we were staying for Christmas. 

It rained when we walked back as well. Cold, tired, and wet, with aches and pains all over our bodies, we dumped our stuff in a room full of strangers, before going to cook tea in a kitchen with barely enough room to stir in. 

Our hostel in Auckland was damp. The window in our room wouldn’t close, and the bathroom was covered in mould. The kitchen gave our second year house a run for it’s money, and that’s saying something. 

We walked into the bathroom of our hostel in Nelson to discover the floor yellow with piss, the toilet hadn’t been flushed, and there were pooey tissues on the floor. We had to use it anyway. 

You only get privacy in hostels by being antisocial. No eye contact, no smiling, and you have to look busy to stop people making conversation with you. “The whole point of travel is to meet people, make new friends!” Easier said than done when you are having the same conversation day in and day out at the times when all you want to do is have some rest: at breakfast when you’ve just woken up, and dinner after a long and tiring day. Sometimes you just want to be quiet. 

You feel bad if you do nothing for longer than a couple of hours because oh my god I’m missing out so you spend so much time out and about you’re in danger of having everything blur into one big “yeah I’ve been there but I was too tired to really appreciate anything.”

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It feels wrong to complain. 

That’s hard as well. You feel as though you shouldn’t be having a hard time; you keep thinking that you should love every second of it, that you shouldn’t want to go home. 

If everyone wants to do this, shouldn’t you too? 

~ 

"Have you had the home dream yet?" he asked with his strong Liverpudlian accent.  

We looked at him blankly. He explained it's when you dream you're back at home and it's so real that when you wake up, it's a few seconds before you realise where you actually are. 

“It’s crushing”, he sighed. 

~

No one ever talks about this side of it. No one ever says “travel is really fucking hard.” And it is. It’s hard and it’s lonely, and it’s relentless. You are always away from home, always living out of a backpack, always with strangers, always on a budget, always moving. 

It is not a one-size-fits-all dream, and it is definitely not something that can only be done a certain way. You meet so many people who spout that romanticised “this is the only way to do it” crap, who have somehow seen all these countries and met all these people and still not learnt that people do not want the same things. That 7 billion people view happiness 7 billion ways. 

And while happiness is apparently this for what seems like the whole of the internet, for me it’s sitting on the sofa watching bad TV with my Mum and Tom, on the same side of the world as everyone that I love.