When the Road Hits Back
By Tracey Stark
Originally published in The Groove Magazine, Seoul, South Korea, January 2007
www.mygrooveonline.com
Reasons to travel beyond our borders and comfort zones are numerous, but not as numerous as the reasons we would be better off locking the door and staying in bed.
We do not travel so we can sit on an airport shuttle bus for two hours in downtown traffic on a Friday evening. We do not travel so we can watch, horrified, as the man across the aisle on the plane empties half his lung into a piece of tinfoil from the dinner. And we do not travel so we can be jostled by short people while trying to remove luggage from overhead. Yet, these are only a few of the hardships we are willing to suffer just to get there. And we repeatedly suffer them as though we have some sort of jet lag-induced amnesia.
When we can finally take off our shoes and dig our feet into the sand or look down into the misty jungle or snow-covered slopes, we must consider all we were willing to endure to get to that moment. It is the sum of all of that hardship – spitters, pushers, crying babies, smelly buses and more – that makes up a trip.
Those reasons not to travel do not stop upon arrival, however. From here we can experience the joy of malaria, the pleasure of the runs after deciding to eat meat pies at a truck stop, the ecstasy of breaking a tooth on an unseen rock in our rice, or the bliss of finding a snake in the toilet. The list goes on and we have heard or experienced it all.
If it wasn’t for the flies, stray dogs, stiflingly-hot buses and endless rubbish tips along the highway, the clear waters of the Gulf of Wherever would not be worth the 24-hours and $800 it took to get there. Those waters may as well be the local swimming pool.
While we are traveling/suffering, however, we say things like “somebody please kill me” or a fever-induced “why?” and still we push on. Traveling does not build character because we see exotic animals or dirty people in funny hats. It builds character because we are out of our comfort zone and can not get back until we disembark in a familiar airport or train station.
It is easy when recounting a trip to friends to find yourself suddenly blind to the misfortunes you have survived. It is because those you wish to share your “magical” experience with would find it so much less magical if you told them you spent the entire month fighting mosquitoes or frantically searching for the next public toilet.
For your friends, malaria and amoebic dysentery are but a footnote, an unfortunate problem that, were they to take a trip of their own, would not affect them.
And therein lay the rub. If you describe in the most minute details the trouble with travel, you will never fully prepare someone else for it. Your friend will see you as either a complainer or an amateur when it comes to the pursuit of being worldly.
When friends return from their trip, they will regale you with tales of the exotic and leave emergency room visits as a footnote. Pressed to explain their miraculous weight loss, however, they will give you details about fevers and hallucinations and IV tubes and say, “I wish I had known in advance.”
But knowing would not have made the trip less troublesome. It is possible that malaria would have been traded for a head wound or an armed robbery. Who can say? The important thing is that the trials and tribulations were uniquely theirs in the sense that everything happened under exacting circumstances that can never again be repeated to the letter by anyone else.
I enjoy travel immensely. I have broken a tooth, suffered innumerable stomach maladies, caught pneumonia, suffered heatstroke, been attacked by swarming black flies, and more. Still, I can honestly say that it is because of these problems rather than in spite of them that I continue to hit the road every chance I get.
And the road, needless to say, continues to hit back.
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