Confession: I’m a Rubbish Traveller

Meeting up with a couple of travelers t’other day, it dawned on me that, actually, I’m quite a rubbish traveller.

Not, so much, when it comes to adventure travel: I take a warped pleasure in finding the only boat to a remote island and a bunch of crazy stuff to do there.

Blessed with an iron constitution, I’ll eat almost anything the local cuisine has to offer, though I am averse to sago and sandy goat (long story). Long walks, bush toilets and wooden beds faze me not a jot.

All the same, I’m lacking some very basic character traits that most people would think you need to travel at all. For example? I have absolutely zilch sense of direction.

Never have done. Never will do.

To tell my left from my right I need to hold up the thumb and forefinger on both hands and see which side makes an ‘L’. I know, or have known, the phrase for “Excuse me, where is…” in at least twelve languages.

A London child, I mistook Bush House for Marble Arch. In my teens and twenties, I routinely got lost when meeting friends in Soho. And that’s not because I didn’t spend a lot of time in Soho…

Walking in a group, I will follow sheep style, wandering in a daze with absolutely zero comprehension of the route. Z, aged ten, can tell a jungle trail from a patch of bare ground infinitely more accurately than I can.

Among other vehicle-related inadequacies, I am more than capable of completely forgetting where I have parked a bike or car. I miss so many turnings that my 3-point turn skills would put a stunt driver to shame…

Over the last year, I’ve got a little better with directions. I can case a town or city for landmarks, geographical features, road name patterns or public transport routes by which to orient myself.

River? Check. Coastline? Excellent! Chick street or dude street? Yep, I can do this.

But it’s still a struggle. And an oddity. Most travelers I meet seem to, well, know where they are going rather more effortlessly than I do.

Another flaw, especially in someone who’s traveled Asia extensively? I am rubbish at riding motorbikes. And they scare me sh*tless anywhere where there is any traffic at all.

I’m not talking about some 1500cc behemoth of a Harley, or a Triumph. Just the little 50-100cc twist-and-go Hondas which strain on hills and max out – well, I don’t know where they max out, because I’m too darn scared to try.

IMHO, riding a motorbike, like playing pool and surfing, is a skill best acquired early in life. It’s a hell of a lot harder to pick up once you’re past the midpoint of three score years and ten. Not to mention with a mobile, critical passenger on the back.

We have been tooling around Ubud on a motorbike this last week. Ahead of every single journey my pulse rate rises measurably. Not with excitement, but with plain, old-fashioned terror.

I ride with a rictus grimace of terror, dead centre to my lane, rarely, if ever, exceeding my personal comfort zone: a dazzling, ooh, 20kph?!

I will sit behind cars in traffic rather than join the steady queue of scooters whizzing up the inside. I obey the rules for one-way streets as though I were driving a car, even though bikes are allowed to go both ways.

Right turns, roundabouts and pulling out into traffic scare me shitless. I spend a lot of time sat in the middle of an ever-changing permutation of scooters, indicator ticking, looking tensely from side to side as larger vehicles barge past me and scooters zoom around me.

The school which Z will be attending for two days a week while we’re in Ubud lies down (and up) a steep, chewed up, unmade road. Which I descend and ascend very, very slowly, with plenty of assistance from my feet.

For some people, the first “off” on a bike is a liberating moment. Our first (and I do hope our only) off, back in Thailand, was anything but.

Descending a steep, chewed up dirt road on a manual, I hit the back brake, not the front brake. Locked the wheel, slewed the bike, landed on the ground in a tangle with the boy.

Who was, thank god, unhurt but for a scrape on his hand, and not even tearful. Though he did have some unkind things to say about my driving…

Me? I bled a lot. Should probably have had stitches, but didn’t want the scarring you get with cheap stitching, or the embarrassment of a trip to the only clinic on the island with child in tow…

I’ve written uncharitably about the way a certain type of Western gentleman drives with his younger, Asian ladyfriend.

But I strongly suspect I look like a complete twat on a bike too. Even before I’m grabbing passing Balinese in the street to get them to explain why the thing won’t start (the kickstand’s down, duh!), or how to get the key into the ignition (unlock the metal plate using the back of the key), or they’re grabbing me to show me which side to push the bike from to get it out…

So when I come across the kind of gung-ho traveller who’ll jump on a bike, having never ridden before, practice in a side street, then cruise effortlessly around Saigon, I envy them.

Other inadequacies? I hate flying. Not because I’m scared of it. I know the statistics on air deaths versus road deaths. I just find flying a tedious, tiring way to travel compared to the continuity and drama of overland travel.

Because of our family and work commitments in Australia, we did around ten flights in two months. That’s ten lots of check-in. Ten lots of security. Endless explosive sweeps. Three patdowns. Ten lots of boarding rigmarole. Ten lots of waiting for bags. Loads of fannying around at airports. Aeons of waiting around, sitting fastened in a seatbelt.

Oh, and one alarming landing. As a general rule, when travelling in a plane that’s fewer than six seats wide or carrying any form of livestock in the cabin, you expect landings to be hairy.

But you don’t expect the pilot to take three goes to find the runway coming into Melbourne Avalon. (Thanks for that one, Tiger Airways!)

Compared to driving, trains or boats, flying is such a disconnective mode of travel. It’s just, well, tiring. Dehydrating. Rubbish…

We are probably going to have to fly to Papua. But that doesn’t mean I’m going to like it.

And, finally, in the rollcall of travel crapness, I have vertigo. Or, as Z would have it, “You don’t have vertigo. You’re scared of heights. It’s like being fat and calling yourself obese to make it sound like a medical condition rather than something you can change.”

Does this stop me going up things? Erm, nope, not entirely. I’ve scaled rocks from Sigiriya in Sri Lanka to Mount Kinabalu in Borneo in a state of extreme anxiety, less for myself than for Z.

I’ve stood on wobbling platforms up in the trees awaiting a flying fox with my pulse hammering; I’ve made my way anxiously through a rooftop bar, 60-odd stories up in Bangkok; and I’ve only bottled two waterslides in every water park we’ve been to.

So to a degree, it’s getting better. As is my motorbike fear.

Though I need to pick up Z from school on the bike this afternoon, and even typing this is bringing on the old fight or flight response…

But what about you? Do you have any weird travel fears, foibles or incompetencies? Do you try and overcome them? Or do you accept them and avoid them?