I've 'Gone on Holiday by Mistake'

On being a chaotic travel writer with bipolar

‘Wherever you go, there you are.’

An oft used quote meaning that you cannot escape your past, no matter how much you try or how far you travel.

I have a confession to make. I’m a bad traveller. Quite unfortunate really, since I write about travel for a living and have done for some 22 years now.

I get lost quite easily for one. And I don’t just mean when I'm travelling. I get lost at home too.

Like Marcus Brody from the Indiana Jones films, I could get lost in my own museum.

(Now I don’t actually have my own museum of course. Not yet anyway, though I did used to work for one. But I digress.)

Lost in Horley

I got lost on the way back from Horley the other day, the nearest town to where I live, a mere 35 minute walk away.

My phone battery had died and I couldn’t remember the route from the train station, even though it’s a straight road. Had to stop and ask a man walking the opposite way for directions.

That helped to an extent. I think I ended up at the Kings Head pub where I called a taxi home because I was so exhausted from my meandering.

I know the way from the pub, just not from the station, if you follow me. (Don’t follow me, by the way, that would be a very bad idea! For the reasons I’ve already outlined. Except on social media of course. Do follow me there please. I need all the friends I can get.)

Tech Help

These days I rely on Google Maps to keep me right you see. But if my phone battery dies, I’m relying on my wits, which are are often in short supply. What can I say, I’m a bear of little brain in some respects.

Even when I’ve got Google Maps to hand, I still get lost and confuzzled.

Here’s an example from my latest foreign trip to Valencia. I arrived back from there only this afternoon, so it should be relatively easy to recall.

I wanted to go to the ‘Fallas Museum.’

I’d tweeted early that morning asking for recommendations of where to go in Valencia. I’d already covered most of the prime tourist sites you see and my tweet detailed these.

Someone who I don’t know suggested the ‘Fallas Museum.’ I’d heard about the Fallas Festival only the other night from a friendly Serbian bar owner in Rusafa, a hipsterfied, if quiet, district. Valencia’s answer to Shoreditch basically.

If all else Fallas

Fallas is an annual celebratory fire festival, usually held in March, and it sounds incredible. So since I couldn’t make it to the festival proper, a museum about it was the next best thing. It was top on my list of must-sees.

Anyway there I was sitting outside Cafe Suizo, just off the main square Plaza del Ayuntamiento, nursing a sangria and some monkey nuts with the ever-patient Mrs Jools, trying to salvage an unfortunate afternoon of unmitigated travel failures.

These included going to the ‘wrong beaches’ (ones by the former fishing village of Cabanyal, which actually turned out to be far nicer than the one I meant to go to and visited only last summer, so that was fine really), an aborted attempt to enjoy a sundowner on the rooftop bar of the Atenea Hotel which was closed on the day we visited, a wasted trip to El Corte Ingles department store to redeem a food and drink voucher (turns out we went to the wrong branch of said chain store) plus various language-based cock ups.

Pretty much everything I had planned for the last half day of our otherwise excellent holiday went a bit Pete Tong for some reason or other.

So anyway I knew I had to check out this museum. I typed the words ‘Fallas Museum’ into Google Maps. The app sent me to a museum of the same name in another city, at least an hour away.

(At least I think it did. When I searched here at home in Surrey just now, only one comes up and it’s in Valencia, near Xativa Metro station to be precise.)

By the time I’d worked out that there actually was a Fallas Museum in Valencia itself, and it was within easy walking distance, it was too late.

The museum was shut for the day and we were headed home the next morning. Great.

I later learned that it’s technically called the ‘Museu Faller de Valencia.’ But at the time I only had the words ‘Fallas Museum Valencia’ to go on.

I still don’t understand how I screwed it up. I expect I was simply doing too much stuff far too quickly while my hypomania was peaking, my eyes and mind playing tricks on me.

Why I Love Organised Press Trips

The fact is stuff simply goes wrong when you travel, especially under your own steam. That’s true for most people, let alone bipolar folks.

Shit happens, no matter what. It’s arguably part of the experience, part of the fun, but it can also create problems and cause frustration.

That’s why I actually enjoy group press trips, despite their bad rep among some travel journos.

Yes they sometimes have punishing schedules, with long days and early starts, leaving little scope to explore independently or simply relax in the hotel, but they’re a convenient enough ‘one-size-fits-all’ solution too.

And of course you usually get treated like a king, so there is that.

And why they sometimes suck

Now don’t get me wrong, there are obvious downsides to group trips too.

On one trip to Japan we didn’t even get time to change after our nine hour flight from Helsinki to Osaka. We were bundled off on our itinerary, pretty much straight from the runway.

This meant that we all had to sit on the floor and eat lunch together with our shoes off, as Japanese tradition dictates, having only just met, worrying about our stinky feet. First world problems I know, but still, it was embarrassing and awkward.

And spending a mere four nights in a country as fascinating and compelling as Japan is frankly ludicrous anyway, but that’s just how press trips roll sometimes. They’re a compromise, but you can still enjoy them.

Kampai!

Don’t get me wrong, it was a fabulous trip. I came home from that jaunt laden down with various sugary, kawaii Japanese supermarket treats, salvaged from a surreal supermarket sweep conducted in the blissful beach town of Shirahama wearing only my Yukata. Another Japanese tradition in onsen resorts.

On the same trip I had to bathe naked with the rest of the male press group and cleanse my feet in a foot onsen after a long mountain trek. I enjoyed it more than I imagined. So it really was a fairly bizarre and discombobulating introduction to Asia all told.

Still it was obviously an amazing experience I’ll simply never forget.

Why Group Trips Rule

For one thing, they hold your hand on group trips, making it virtually impossible to get lost. Works for me.

You simply have to turn up at the specified time in the morning, try not to get too drunk and basically do as you’re told. It also helps if you smile and nod, try to pay attention and take a genuine interest in the people and stuff you’re shown.

Not too easy when you’re manic of course, especially when travel seems to trigger you sometimes.

No you might not enjoy every activity or appointment on the trip, but seriously, quit whining already, they’re a perfectly fine introduction to any destination.

Having your Cake and Eating it

You might even get to duck out of an activity if you’re lucky, polite and assertive enough about it. I’ve done that before.

I’m not good with heights so I have politely demurred the offer of an open chairlift ride a few times in ski resorts.

Once I simply stayed put at the foot of the mountain and had a nice chat over an Aperol Spritz with a fellow journo who’d also ducked out. Another time in Banff, Canada, I managed to get into an enclosed gondola instead.

And as you already know, I cannot ride a bike, so I once had to cajole the PR into finding a good workaround, which they duly did.

So yes, you can have your press trip plum duff cake and eat it. Just don’t be a dick about it. Ain’t nobody got time for that.

Losing the Thread

Where was I? Ah yes, getting lost while abroad. Being a bad traveller. That’s the fella.

I have actually lost my passport twice while abroad. Once on a lads’ package holiday to Ibiza circa 2000 and once in Canada on a truly epic press trip in 2011.

He’s Losing It

In Ibiza I only realised I’d lost it when I got to the check-in desk at the airport. A frantic fumble through the pockets of the overlong denim shorts my compadres affectionately dubbed ‘grand pantalons’ revealed it was nowhere to be found. (I also lost my cherished Reiss Summer 2000 t-shirt on that trip, but that’s another story.)

This was rather ironic as the strapline to a telly advert for an Ibizan nightclub around the time was ‘remember where you lost it.’ I think it was for the Ministry of Sound. The ad’s soundtrack was Darude’s Sandstorm, I know that. Still a belter if you ask me:

Anyway the point is I can’t remember where I lost my bloody passport. And I don’t think I was high at the time either, or at least not illegally so. High on my own supply maybe. I’m talking about basic bipolar brain chemistry folks, nothing stronger.

Sleepless in Vancouver

Flash forward to Canada in Autumn 2011. It’s my last night on an incredible two-week trans-continental rail trip across Canada, taking in two overnight trains - one of them a fancy luxury number called the Rocky Mountaineer which trundles its way through the Canadian Rockies - and six towns and cities.

My trip started in Toronto on board the Canadian Train, which takes four nights to cross the country, stopping for an afternoon to explore Winnipeg, dropping me off in Edmonton for a few days at the Go Media Conference.

From there I boarded the Rocky Mountaineer which stopped overnight in the quirky town of Kamloops before terminating in Vancouver. All meals, journeys and hotels included. Them were the days alright.

I was packing for the plane home on the last night of the trip and soon realised that my passport was nowhere to be found. This must’ve been gone midnight after a heavy night on the sauce, so I set about tearing my hotel room apart to find it. Not literally you understand. I’m not that rock ‘n roll. It’s just a figure of speech.

Once I’d unpacked and repacked my suitcase several dozen times and turned over all the furniture and fittings in my hotel room, I went outside in a daze to smoke several anxious fags. This was probably some time around 4.30am.

On re-entering the hotel I asked the man on reception if I could use the phone there. I’m not even sure I explained why I needed to.

Nor why I couldn’t simply use my own mobile phone. I know I had one then. The battery was probably dead I expect, knowing me.

He declined at first, apparently mistaking me for a homeless bum who’d walked in off the street!

Eventually I managed to phone the unflappable PR for the trip. At 5am. All quite embarrassing really. She took it remarkably well.

She explained, very politely of course, that there was little she could do about it now. She told me that I needed to go to the British Embassy the next morning and get myself a new one.

I resolved to pull an all-nighter, lest I fall asleep and miss the Embassy’s opening hours or my flight home.

So I spent the following day shuttling back and forth between the Embassy and downtown Vancouver, getting passport photos done, staggering around in a slightly wondrous, sleep deprived daze, popping into the odd coffee shop for sustenance, taking lots of quirky pictures as I am wont to do.

Reading back my original blog post covering that day in Vancouver today, I was clearly in the grip of a manic bipolar episode. Maybe the whole trip was one, long manic blur?

Of course I did not know that I was bipolar at the time, being completely undiagnosed.

Eventually I discovered that I’d left it in the bedside cabinet of the hotel I was staying in, Lobstick Lodge, in the ski town of Jasper, a good 332 miles away.

The hotel offered to send me the passport ‘for a memento’, stressing that it now had no other practical purpose. I think I accepted the gesture.

I was lucky that I had a late afternoon flight, lest I seriously inconvenience the Canadian tourist board. Phoning my ‘handler’ in the middle of the night was bad enough. God knows how much the last minute flight home would’ve cost them.

I remember my fellow travel scribes gently teasing me for my ineptitude and my ‘school boy error’ of leaving it in the bedside cabinet. That stayed with me.

I even took a real maple leaf home with me as a ‘lucky charm.’ I’d found it on the ground and it just caught my eye somehow. Talk about ‘magical thinking.’

I also recall some rather spirited dancing taking place in a hotel car park on that trip, a few shot-skis in a hip ski bar, lots of fine food and drink.

Me failing to eat sushi properly and being told I wasn’t a ‘proper travel writer’ by the friend of one writer because of it, and sending some anniversary flowers to my fiance back home at the time.

Oh yes, and a white Calgary cowboy hat I had to leave in the hotel room. Oh well, ‘you can’t take it with you.’

At least I slept like a baby on the long flight home, my wallet some 150 Canadian dollars lighter.

Missed Connections

I have missed trains and flights before too. At the end of my Kraftwerk-themed InterRail trip I managed to leave my suitcase on a train back in Blighty. Had to retrieve it from Lost Property at Victoria Station.

And on one blog trip after a sleepless night (I’ve always had serious sleep issues and they often strike when I’m travelling) I missed my train from Rome to Monopoli, Puglia. A truly beautiful, under-the-radar place I will blog about here another time.

(Yes I know it sounds like a made-up place name, but just Google it for now. And no, it has nothing to do with the board game of the same name. According to Wikipedia it is named ‘after the destruction of Gnatia by the Ostrogoth Totila in 545, its inhabitants fled to Monopoli, from whence it derives its name as "only city").

Luckily Trenitalia had a great system where you could simply hop on another, later train that day by paying a 10 Euro supplement, so no great harm was done really.

I missed the e-biking activity which opened the trip, but then I would’ve had to have skipped that anyway, cos I can’t ride one.

Chaotic Traveller?

So yes I suppose I am a fairly chaotic traveller all told. No argument here. But just like good old British Rail of yesteryear, I always ‘get there in the end.’

Bad Traveller?

Does all this make me a ‘bad traveller’ too? A mediocre ‘travel journalist’ even? Maybe. I can live with that. I’ve never had an actual staff job so can I even call myself a ‘journalist’ really?

What is a ‘Travel Writer’ Exactly?

When I first went freelance in 2010 and started my train travel blog, I deliberately avoided using the phrase ‘travel writer’ to describe myself. Ironically, it sounded too grandiose.

I thought that term should be reserved for people like Bill Bryson, Jenny Diski, Rory MacLean, Anthony Bourdain, Tony Hawks and Paul Theroux. All travel writers I admired and aspired to be more like.

Wasn’t it a shade pretentious to describe yourself as such if you have not actually had a travel book published?

Well maybe, but it’s not quite as simple as that, is it?

Self Publishing, Expression and Ego

What about people who self publish travel memoirs and the like? Do they deserve the mantle of ‘travel writer?’

My own father self published several novels later in life, for example. He dusted off stuff he’d written as a younger man in the sixties.

Am I being just as naive and self indulgent as he was by blogging again and ‘dreaming big’ about it?

Or was that act of his a perfectly legitimate one of self expression and self determination?

I remember him crying on the phone when I gently told him that maybe he had been taken advantage of by the vanity publisher he went with.

He thought that his books would make him rich enough to move back to Italy and buy a house there.

He didn’t realise that he would be expected to do all his own marketing. That their responsibility for his book stopped at the the point of publication.

Well he’d never worked in any type of creative industry. He was an accounts clerk after all, who stopped working in his late forties. He was simply out of touch with the industry, assuming he’d ever been in touch with it in the first place. And he wasn’t that web savvy either.

He also said he ‘just wanted me to be proud of him’ but that I shouldn’t actually read the books. Which was slightly ironic because I don’t remember him ever saying he was proud of me during adult life.

Although after he died I went back to the family home where I noticed that he did keep the Scottish policy supplement I’d edited in 2001. My professional editing debut no less.

It sat there on the shelf of the coffee table alongside old, dog-eared copies of the Radio Times and various local newspapers in the cluttered lounge.

So I suppose he must’ve been proud of me after all, in his own funny way.

Good Enough is Good Enough

One of my very first copywriting clients described me as an ‘above average writer.’ I think I can now live with that faint praise, though I blanched at it at the time of course.

Then again someone else in the travel industry who I like, once worked for, have met personally a few times and whose work I greatly admire recently told me that I was ‘a good writer’, so perhaps I’ll take that on board now too.

‘You’re a Genius, you’re a Giant, you’re a Prince, you are the Pope.’

I mean when I’m hypomanic I often think that I’m some kinda undiscovered genius, that my posts will go viral, I’ll be showered with praise by my friends and peers, editors will seek me out and demand I work for them at £1 a word or more.

Maybe I’ll even get my own column or get summoned to go on Radio Four’s Excess Baggage.

But perhaps there’s a reason why many of my favourite songwriters remain relatively obscure. Perhaps I can be ‘famous for fifteen people’ and that’s perfectly fine. As I write this I see I have 41 subscribers. That’ll do me for now.

Reality Checks & Staying Grounded

Deep down I well know the reality of my freelancing. I did OK at times, but I was never successful enough at it to avoid accumulating a tonne of debt, taking on the odd part time marketing job, nor to avoid the dole queue when Covid came a-knocking.

It took me years to recover and eventually I just had to suck it up, do some volunteering and get a regular, full-time job. At least I’m still writing about travel for a living.

I was once asked by my boss in a previous job what I wanted to achieve, what career aspirations I had.

She obviously meant in the marketing role I currently had, but I took it quite literally and spouted some grandiose nonsense about becoming a ‘cultural commentator, like Paul Morley.’

Jesus wept! Who the hell did I think I was?! Well, Paul Morley clearly.

But I know that’s all pretty unlikely by now. I was a late starter after all, hamstrung by self doubt, low self esteem and a difficult upbringing.

That ship has sailed, I know that, especially as I near the big 5-0 this year.

Yes folks, the ‘clock’ is well and truly ‘coming down the stairs’ now, but then again even a stopped clock tells the right time twice a day, right?

So yeah, good enough is good enough I suppose. It’ll have to be, for now anyway.

Meantime I’m still determined to carry on ‘squeezing the lemon.’ To keep writing, keep travelling, keep laughing and generally enjoy life as much as possible.

Until next time then.

Adios. Hasta luego. Lo sciento. Soy Ingles. Soy Jools.

La cuenta por favor! Buen provecho! Salud!