understanding how I travel

For some time I’ve reflected on needs I’ve already identified to travel more slowly and with less baggage.  But having spent a great deal of time over the past few weeks trying to devise an itinerary for 30 days in the Philippines I’ve learnt a lot more.  I’ll be spending the month with a friend, who asked if she could join me there but then said she did not have the energy at that time to do any of the planning (the Philippines being made up of some 7,000 islands and thus not a place where you can casually just get on buses to travel around but rather one where you have to book seats on flights, ferries, etc).

So I got to work, spending many days researching places to go and how to get to them, and came up with a whole list of ideas to fit into an itinerary.  I shared this with my friend, who responded that she

• doesn’t do early morning starts
• doesn’t do hostel dorms but needs her own room
• doesn’t do long distance bus trips (by which she seems to mean anything more than three hours) but would happily take taxis
• doesn’t do overnight ferries unless she can have her own private room
• doesn’t do consecutive days travelling but needs ‘down time’ between
• doesn’t take flights where she has to check in luggage
• doesn’t drink anything containing milk powder/creamer

& I know from previous conversations that she is very particular about the provenance of her drinking water and food.

Now it’s not for me to judge other peoples’ preferences – in fact, thank goodness we are not all the same.  But having already agreed to stay in different accommodation, and to compromise on a few parts of the itinerary (a flight instead of 22 hours on a ferry, taxis instead of a couple of long bus rides) – at personal expense – I was reflecting once again on how happy I am to be me.  How lucky I am that I don’t mind sharing a dorm room with a dozen strangers, that I enjoy looking out of a bus window in a new country for hours on end, that I can happily subsist on fruit, instant porridge and tea/coffee mixes, and drink tap water after boiling it and waiting for it to cool…  OK, I switched hostels the other day when I found out that mine was a ‘party hostel’ with dorm-mates returning noisily at 5am and near fights outside the window from drunken men who’d spent all night at the bar – but I didn’t complain that there were leaves and the odd insect floating on the surface of the hostel swimming pool, nor that there were only cold water showers.

My travelling life could work out pretty expensive if I had the kind of needs of my friend – probably too expensive to enable me to slot in the odd organised tour to Papua New Guinea or Afghanistan as I can now – not to mention that it would be far more complicated.

Once again, I reflect on how much I love my life, and how grateful I am that I am able (in all senses of that word) to live like this!