Don't Tell Mum: Hair-raising Messages Home from Gap-year Travellers

by Hoggart, Simon

  The thing that gnaws away at most parents is the knowledge that their gap-year students are not always, perhaps, quite as alert as they should be. Even at home, they tend to miss the last bus then realize they have no money for a taxi back. Or they forget to set the alarm the night before a crucial interview. How much worse it must be, we fear, when they are in a foreign land without us to rescue them from their own muddle-headedness. This is from a young woman visiting South Africa with friends.

  Cape Town is amazing. Had an incredibly exciting (in hindsight) night yesterday. Picture this: we’re walking out of a club at about 3 a.m. All slightly the worse for wear (i.e. all had been violently sick, spent much of the evening table-dancing, and think I swapped my, albeit rank, watch for a plastic cowboy hat). Get into nearest taxi. Ed passes over a card with the address of our hostel on, and taxi heads up the hills. Five minutes later we are all fast asleep. Two hours later, we are still asleep and still in the taxi and it is still moving. Finally, 5.20 a.m., and it suddenly dawns on me that we are in a strange place, the meter is something ridiculous like 1,000 rand (about £100) and the driver is still driving, so I start screaming abuse at Mr Taximan. Images from The Bone Collector induce further panic and more yelling. Ed and Soph drunkenly awaken and become equally psychotic. The Taximan eventually pulls up, flashes us a beaming, yet confused smile to reveal an array of gold teeth and only one eye – not perfect for a taxi driver. We frantically try to open the doors, but is it really a good idea to be stranded on an abandoned road on the outskirts of one of the most dangerous cities in the world? He leaned back and pointed at the card we had given him. Upon further inspection, still petrified of our one-eyed, golden-toothed, murderer / kidnapper / rapist / thief taxi-driver, we realized that Ed had handed over the card of our next hostel – only 200 miles down the coast.

  But even airports have their hazards, as this young man discovered.

  Well guys, I’m stuck at bloody Bangkok airport waiting for a flight that leaves in 9 hours. No one speaks English, have just been sick three times courtesy of breakfast, and I’m being stalked by a very weird woman with one arm, and one leg (yup, so I am able to run away). In addition to this I spent the whole of last night and day before in Bombay airport, I have had an hour’s sleep in the last 48, and I want my mummy.

  As Paul Theroux will tell you, trains can provide some of the most exciting of all travel adventures. This is from a young woman who’s been travelling south through Russia, trying to reach Mongolia.

  Dear Mum, well, I hardly know where to begin this time. I’m in Ulan Bator now after a bit of a fiasco. We had left Irkutsk and bought ticket to Mongolia, we had been on the train for a day already and we pulled into Naushki, a small town that’s on the border with Mongolia, we were told that the train would stop there for at least two hours, which turned out to be more like five hours, we were waiting in the heat because everyone had to get off the train as only two of the ten carriages would proceed to Mongolia, after about four hours the border officials arrived, after taking the usual Russian attitude of prolonging affairs for as long as possible … so we finally re-boarded the train and handed over our visas and passports. Another hour passed, as we waited in the sweltering heat, we were asked to fill out declaration forms, the usual sort, ‘are you carrying any nuclear materials, do you have any illegal Russian orphans smuggled in your baggage?’ type thing, there was also a section where you had to declare any valuables and notes in foreign currency or travellers’ cheques. So I wrote down $250 and thought nothing of it. Five minutes before we have to leave, they come back and say there is a ‘big problem’, two words we had heard before in Belarus and which did not sound very promising …

  It is the start of a horrible nightmare. The officials won’t let her return to the train without changing her money into Russian roubles, even though she is leaving Russia and the bank in the station is closed. A crooked money-lender offers her a ridiculous exchange rate which, in desperation, she accepts. Meanwhile her friend is still on the train. Horribly, unbelievably, this now starts to pull away.

  The train has gone, and so has the dodgy money-lender with my money. My head was completely scrambled, I’m just in a state of shock that the train has gone, I wander back into the station waiting hall and realize that Sally has all our Russian money, all our food, and half my possessions. The Russian official with incredibly cold eyes comes back and hands me back my passport with a stamp over my visa which says that I have been unable to cross the border. I try to plead and tell him I don’t even have a ticket to Ulan Bator because the carriage attendant never gave it back, he just stares at me blankly and walks off with a smirk on his face.

  At least she is not alone. Four Czech travellers are in the same situation. They all decide to get away from the corrupt officials (who know how much money they have on them). That night they stay in a boarding house, and figure the best plan is to get a car to the border the next day. The plan seems to be working, but next morning their driver is stopped by the police who tell him he can’t go any further. Luckily a bus turns up, they reach the border crossing and by the kind of miracle that occasionally happens to gap-year students, another bus, full of Korean tourists and with a few spare seats, lets them on to travel free. But they do have to get past a new set of officials.

  This time it was two friendly peroxide women. I lied and said I had no currency, which they accepted quite gladly. Now it was my turn to confront the guard, the passport control guy. I presented my passport, with my horrible stamped visa. I smiled politely and tried to look composed, he took absolutely ages, staring at my passport, staring at me, typing things into the computer, re-typing them, so there I was, growing increasingly nervous, longing to hear that noise when the stamp finally goes on the visa – talk about a test of nerves. Finally he felt he had tortured me long enough and I was able to pass through into Mongolia, the promised land! The relief of climbing on to that bus was indescribable … the journey through that vast deserted land was quite surreal, as the Koreans had purchased a bottle of cheap Russian vodka and got very tipsy – picture rolling plains and a vast blue sky, while beside you two middle-aged Korean men are Hawaiian-dancing up the aisle while singing ‘Auld Lang Syne’ in their best Scottish accents …

  Could you tell me what marks I got in my individual units, because in London I could only discover whether I had passed or not?

  Finally she reaches Ulan Bator, and is reunited with her friend.

  This young woman has been spending a year in northern Russia which included the appallingly cold winter of 2005–6.

  The trip to Moscow for my parcel turned out really well, though at first it seems like a real chore because I had to get there and back on the Sunday, which meant 11 hours on the train. In the end my friends Lo and Tasha came with me, and because everything was closed on Sunday, we abandoned our vague plans to do with culture, and ended up consuming 3 times our combined body weight in steak and wine. This was fine until we decided it was time to head back to Yaroslav and by mistake got on the train to Chita – a small town 8 time zones away, on the border with China. Luckily we realised our mistake in time to get off at the next stop, but if we hadn’t the train wasn’t going to stop for another four days and this email would have been from Siberia.

  Anyway, we finally got on the right train, but ended up sharing a carriage full of drunk ‘businessmen’. One of them had passed out in the loo, so to punish him the scary, scary conductor-woman had locked him in for the duration of the journey. Unfortunately this meant that we had to pee in between the carriages on to the tracks while the train was still moving. This required us to be agile, firm-footed and resistant to the outside temperature (minus 25). I was none of the above, but my pea-sized bladder forced me to try my luck. Sadly the train lurched while I was pulling up my trousers, and my bottom froze to the metal outside of the train. I have never been in such a quandary. The idea of tearing myself off and leaving the best part of my bottom stuck to the Yaroslav express was h
orrifying, but the alternative, staying there until spring, was equally unattractive. Eventually I wrenched myself free, but I fear my poor buttocks will never be the same again.

  Because of all the drunken shenanigans around us, we decided to lie low in our compartment, nursing my bottom and a bottle of vodka. The man sharing our compartment was the only one not part of the group of plastered mafiosi. Unluckily for him, the other men discovered that there were English girls in the neighbouring compartment and tried to come in. Sergei (the nice man) tried feebly to stop them coming in and started arguing with them in Russian. They told him to come out and have a cigarette with them, and he went, albeit v. reluctantly. A few minutes later, they all came back and sat down with us. Sergei had a black eye and a cut lip. He didn’t complain any more on our behalf, thank goodness.

  ’Rent Control

  It is difficult for gappers to know what approach to use with their parents. They are, of course, ridiculously anxious. This is in spite of the fact that their children know themselves to be immortal. Crime? Drugs? Booze? Dangerous sports? You can get all those in Pinner. Why should it make any difference if it is happening on the other side of the earth? The kids know they are – for the moment – safe. So there is nothing to worry about. Right?

  On the other hand, the parents are an invaluable source of money and so must be kept sweet, at least to some extent. A stroppy ’rent who can’t be bothered to get down to the post office and wire urgently needed funds can be the source of much fury.

  And it has to be said that some gappers clearly enjoy terrifying their parents. This young woman emailed her parents from Quito, Ecuador, after a bout of illness.

  Hi Mum. Sorry I haven’t been in contact but this is my first time out of the house for days. I’ve been really, really sick. I don’t know what happened. It must have been something I ate, because on Tuesday night I woke up at 3.30 in the morning and started throwing up, and didn’t stop till 12 hours later (that’s being sick 20 times!!!). I felt so ill after, and I could only stay in bed. I was so weak I lost all fluid in my body. Today I managed to get to the doctor, and she told me I probably have gastritis, and gave me some pills, but it was expensive. She took a lot of blood tests and my stomach was all inflamed and I couldn’t eat. I get the results on Monday, and so I hope everything is okay, because she told me I might have a nasty infection. But I can’t lose any more weight otherwise they are going to try to put me in hospital on one of those funny drip things. I know this sounds a bit bad, but please don’t worry, Mum.

  Don’t worry? Is she mad? Forwarding that email, her mother writes: ‘This was from our eighteen-year-old daughter. She was working in Quito and the only way we could get hold of her was by email. We had no address or phone number for her. After this email, there was no news for nearly three weeks, by which time I was frantic with worry.’

  A mum in West London received an email from her son, who was in Sydney. It consisted in its entirety of this:

  Guess what happened to me last night? We went out and were walking back to the hostel and some guy jumped out of his car and whacked me across the head with a hammer – the bit you take nails out with. Then he punched George in the face and drove off for no reason.

  As his mother says, ‘I guess the fact that he could email me meant he had to be okay, but it would have been nice to have been told that.’ In the event, he was.

  Others just rattle merrily on, oblivious to the effect they must be having back at home. This young man is in Peru and leaves his parents with, literally, a cliff-hanger.

  The mine tour was very eye-opening, the average life expectancy of a miner is about 40, and we met miners of 12 who are shifting 5 tons of stone per hour in awful conditions. I found it hard to breathe in there! Fact for the day – you could build a road from Potosi to Madrid with the silver that has been mined, and alongside it build a bridge with the bones of the people who have died mining it! That’s nice and cheerful for you! In La Paz now, done loads of shopping because everything is so cheap, tomorrow I’m cycling the most dangerous road in the world, we start at 4,750 metres and finish at 1,500 metres over 60k, with 1,000m drops over the side of the road most of the way. Anyway, hope that has kinda filled you in on where I am and what I’ve been doing.

  Some gappers tell their parents too much. Others tell them too little. Either can be alarming. Take this young man, who is going around the world, and downloads as little information in as short a space as he can. He begins in Brazil.

  Day 2, it’s raining. Can you believe it, I fly halfway around the world to escape from British weather and the second day it rains. But, it is still 25 degrees and we’re hardcore, so we decided to take an organized trip that takes you to the biggest ‘favella’ (slum) in Rio. We caned it up the mountainside on the back of some locals’ motorbikes, in the pouring rain, swerving between the cars, etc., till we reached the top, then proceeded to walk down through the heart of the favella! You can really see the vast difference in wealth in Rio, we walked down narrow paths with water literally flying past our feet, as they don’t have any decent drains, water was gushing down the paths, through some people’s houses, yet the locals still remained friendly, happy to have their photo taken, apart from the drug dealers, when we had to put the cameras away (we were perfectly safe, Mum, I promise).

  Yeah, right, as a gapper would respond to that assurance. Two months later, he gets himself from Peru to New Zealand in just over 200 crisply chosen words. Careful readers will notice a certain theme, alcohol-based.

  Machu Picchu, amazing sight, hard but good 4-day trek, Cuzco, gr8 party town, on the piss a lot, Arequipa, saw an old mummy and got drunk again, Colco Canyon, deep canyon with lots of massive condors, Pisco, home of the national drink, pisco sours, therefore got drunk again, Ballestas Island, saw penguins and seals chillin’ on the rocks, Lima, bit rubbish to be honest, flew back to Chile, Santiago, the ice cream capital of the world. NEW ZEALAND, part two of the journey, arrived in Christchurch, like England, nice but a bit boring, met Dezz and Ollie, not rich cos he’s a knob and managed to lose his passport, Fox Glacier, big block of ice, cool though, Queenstown, good shit, went body-boarding down a grade 3–4 river, cold but amazing, went to Milford Sounds, got a bad day, bit rainy, back to Queenstown for the bungee, this time, The Nevis, 134 metres high, amazing again, some random place overlooking Mt Cook, gr8 hotel, heated floors and spa etc. That’s just about up to where I am, going swimming with dolphins tomorrow in Kaikoura, should be good, probably missed loads out, but you’ll get over it …

  Of course, to the anxious parents, large chunks of that brief missive might have been written in letters of fire: their son is constantly drunk, is travelling with the kind of people who lose their passport, travels down rapids without even a boat underneath him, and goes bungee jumping from 450 feet. But at least he described these adventures after he had survived them. This is not always the case.

  Birthday plans! I was planning on doing the sunset cruise and gorge swing, but I think we are doing a bungee jump from the highest bridge in the world (!!!). I am going to dress very silly in a big dress so people don’t forget me! Love you all …

  The sender elicits this reply from her anguished father.

  For God’s sake, Tess, that is NOT the sort of thing you tell your parents BEFORE you do it. Fine if you have to do it, then go ahead, but tell us afterwards, not before.

  She sends a not particularly contrite reply.

  Don’t worry Dad!

  Bungee complete.

  Wow!

  111 metres!

  Amazing, but so scary, you really don’t think you are going to do it, but you just do! It was incredible!! Freya and I are going to do again in tandem on Wed!! Love you lots, Tess.

  Some offspring have at least a degree of sympathy with their parents and try to keep them happy. This is not hard to do, but not always easy to maintain.

  Hey Mum and Dad, Don’t fret,

  cos I am still alive, and you always said that was
the main thing. I should probably mention that I am not pregnant. I am also not yet a heroin /coke /ecstasy /morphine addict. Neither have I killed anyone. Yesterday I saved a little boy when I thought he was drowning. I have definitely ‘found myself’ and also made a huge difference to the village where I am staying. I have lots of good intentions, like building wells and libraries. I have given up smoking. I have started writing poetry. I have found God. I miss you and love you all so so so much and can’t wait to see you. Love Tasha.

  She adds a P.S. in tiny letters, perhaps so that she can claim she gave them due warning, but hopes it might not be spotted.

  I may or may not have been shopping, courtesy of Daddy’s magic MasterCard.

  It’s touching how often, 8,000 miles away, our youthful travellers can remember important events in the calendar, such as this young woman writing from northern India.

  Yeah, sorry for lack of contact recently, but I can explain! I was planning on ringing on Mother’s Day, but our train was an unbelievable 8 HOURS late, which meant we were stuck on it for 24 hours instead of 16. And so couldn’t get to a phone. Today is the first chance I’ve had to email. Sorry! So, yeah, Happy Mother’s Day, hope you had a nice day (nicer than mine, anyway, woken up by transvestites. And then men with guns – I’m not sure which is worse!). Did you get brekkie in bed?