Positive Sides of Neurodivergent Travel

Walking it, talking it and snapping it

So recently I talked about being a fairly chaotic traveller. Today I thought it would be fun to explore some of the more positive aspects of travelling with a more unconventional brain.

Talking the Lingo

I still like to have a crack at language learning, even though it does not come so naturally to me. I’ve been ‘learning’ Italian on and off for some 36 years now, starting with GCSE lessons at school.

My very sweet and kindly teacher Mrs Thomas would make lessons fun by bringing in tortelloni and pesto from Sainsbury’s when such foods felt incredibly glamorous and exotic. She’d even try to help me in Italian oral exams by using an eccentric set of hand signs to remind me of certain words and key phrases.

Later I also attended Italian classes in Edinburgh and Brighton, though I always seemed to reach a plateau with those. I’ve completed my Duolingo tree twice, yet it still hasn’t quite stuck. Oh well.

Nothing beats proper immersion in the native country I suppose and these days I generally err towards apps and their dopamine-fueled gamification, rather than online video lessons or real world lessons, which would possibly be more useful in the longer run.

Recently I’ve started trying to learn a little Spanish too. I can’t hold much of a conversation yet of course, but still I surprised myself on my recent Valencia jaunt.

I was able to get by with enough ‘Spanglish’ to buy a pair of walking shoes in a shoe store, order in cafes, bars and restaurants, buy a transport pass and yes some vapes.

I learnt a few new key words and phrases in the process. Yes I make mistakes of course, but I’m slowly learning that it’s fine to do so, that it’s all part of the learning process.

And it’s simply good fun having a go. You can laugh at your own mistakes too, that’s just part of the fun.

It was a spirited enough attempt all told and I’m persevering with Duo now I’m back home in Blighty, as I plan to visit again later this year.

Being a wannabe ‘flaneur’

More than anything I love to walk around a city and get a bit lost, which comes fairly naturally to me anyway.

I’m not much of a hiker though. Even easy hiking can feel a bit strenuous for me sometimes!

I still prefer to experience mountains from the safe, lazy distance of a train’s picture window. A gentle meander through some woods or a meadow is perfectly fine by me. I even go rambling around my local area sometimes. Hayward’s Heath has some lovely rambles full of interesting architecture, railway lines, woods, paths and byways.

More than anything though I love to pound the pavements of a new town or city. Even on my very first solo foreign trip to Paris in 2008 I wore the shoe leather down prowling through those Parisian parks, streets and boulevards.

Does this make me something of a flaneur or is that a shade pompous? Well I don’t care, I happen to like the label!

My Camera Never Lies

Ok, that’s a truly dreadful 80s pop song, but it just popped into my head right now.

I’m under no allusions when it comes to travel photography. I’m strictly amateur, but I take snaps copiously and obsessively some might say, especially when I travel.

I know I have a pretty good eye for detail, I’m especially drawn to anything a bit random, offbeat and quirky.

Sometimes that might be something seemingly silly like a discarded glove on the pavement, an elaborate manhole cover or a maple leaf on the ground. I just notice these things.

More Murals Muriel

I love a bit of street art as much as the next man. I’m always on the look out for interesting statues, murals, graffiti and bold public art pieces.

I quite like elaborate tiles and geometric building details too. Even a dash of brutalism these days.

‘Every day beauty’ may sound like a rather trite, hashtag-friendly phrase, but there’s much to be said for it. You have to appreciate the little sprinklings of joy you encounter in your immediate environment and that gets amplified when travelling.

I rarely post food and drink pics, nor selfies, sunrises or even landscapes these days. All the things that still tend to work well as ‘thirst traps’ on the likes of Instagram or Facebook, which given my need for approval is a tad unfortunate. Hmm.

I like architectural details especially. My eye is just drawn to gargoyles, ornate doorways, lintels, columns, shop windows, street signs, adverts and even interesting bits of typography.

But you can’t be a perfectionist at everything, so even though I tend to snap some apparently random stuff quite copiously, I tend not to fanny about too much.

I just frame my shot, maybe zoom in a bit, click and hope for the best. I don’t bother with filters anymore. Nor do I much care for image editing apps these days.

I used to use flickr and even Picfair a little. And one of the neat features of Substack is that you can easily insert high quality pics from Unsplash, so why not make the most of that handy service? Just like this one in fact.

Photo by Mrugesh Shah on Unsplash

Of course your own original photography is still the ideal solution, but equally I rease that mine may not always be the best for article purposes.

But ultimately the older I get, the more I know my limits. I’m a writer and social media type mostly. I am not a pro photographer.

My photography is mostly driven by the little jolts of joy it brings me, alongside a kind of visual note taking and yes, I’ll admit it, a dopamine-fueled social media and phone addiction too.

Travel Companions

Let’s talk about the important role other people can play in having a successful trip.

Who you rub along with in life really matters. That’s very much the case for travelling companions. It pays to choose them wisely if you can.

Things inevitably go wrong when you travel and the best laid plans fall through, so it really pays to travel with someone who can see the funny side of such mishaps, dust themselves off and gamely plod on.

I recently took my lovely partner on a simple trip to Valencia. We generally had a great time travelling together, and against medical advice too, but things started to go a little pear-shaped on the last afternoon of the trip.

As usual I had been a tad over-ambitious and tried to pack too much into our itinerary. I didn’t even have much of a plan threaded together, just a vague wishlist of places to visit and experiences to tick off.

Turns out this wasn’t a problem for her. She saw the funny side of it, while also feeling confident enough to take the reins when needed in a city she’d never been to before. And this was after having not been abroad for at least 8 years.

Before our trip she wasn’t even sure where Valencia was, would probably struggle to point to it on a map and had no idea that the city had its own Metro system. Yet she was an absolute joy to travel with. Curious, confident and consistently good humoured.

She trusted my sightseeing recommendations (it probably helped that I’d visited the previous summer and we stayed with a local expat friend) had some ideas of her own - she seemed especially drawn to the many beautiful churches we found in the Old Town - and had a much better innate compass than me.

She was happy to walk the streets for most of the day, wander a bit, jump on trams and buses, and even get a little lost, despite having a gammy knee.

I would tease her about her faltering attempts to have a crack at some basic lingo, constantly asking her to request the bill in Spanish. To be fair to her, she managed the odd si, por favor and gracias, but she could never quite master ‘la cuenta.’

Going Slow & Travel Planning

I love ‘slow travel'.’ At least I love the idea of it. For those of you who might not know, slow or sustainable travel generally entails trains, boats and buses, instead of planes. It generally costs more and can take much longer, but there are many benefits to it, both environmental and personal.

I have had the great pleasure and fortune to travel slowly over the years.

But I’m just going to be honest here. I find travelling slowly, or doing anything slowly for that matter, REALLY HARD, especially when I’m not my ‘usual self’, particularly when in a manic state. And overseas travel often seems to trigger bouts of hypomania for me, so there’s that.

Yet I love trip planning and can get pretty damn grandiose and obsessive about it. I’m an inveterate armchair traveller, and I love using nifty apps and sites to plan extravagant multi-destination journeys, few of which actually materialise of course, but that’s another story.

My Kinda Slow Travel

But anyway, slow travel is a fine notion indeed, especially if you do it your way.

I have enjoyed some truly epic train trips. Crossing entire continents. I have travelled in one big loop around America, a generous birthday present for my 40th.

Myself and my partner of the time started out in New York and boarded an Amtrak Superliner train. This took us to New Orleans, possibly my favourite city in the world. The friendly cabin attendant even let me vape in our private roomette on this overnight service, which earned him a handsome tip.

From there we boarded the Sunset Ltd train which travelled across seemingly endless stretches of Texan desert, noting all manner of diverse cacti and sagebrush terrain, flirting with the Mexican border crossing the Rio Grande, to reach Los Angeles for a whirlwind stay in the downtown area and then onto another train, the Coast Starlight.

This train hugs the pristine, opalescent Californian coast with a lounge car dishing out feelgood sixties tunes and mimosas en route to another 24-hour stay, this time in San Francisco.

Having done an intense round up of the tourist sites and a few quirkier side missions, we headed back eastwards cross country on the California Zephyr train through some truly spectacular scenery to reach a more autumnal Chicago and then back to the Big Apple and Lower Manhattan just in time for the elaborate Halloween decorations to be in full swing on the brownstone porches.

We did all that in under a month, so I don’t know if it even counts as ‘proper slow travel’, plus we boarded planes to cross the Atlantic both times, so we definitely ‘cheated’ a bit.

I have also done several cruises, one on a dinky little fishing boat around some Croatian islands for a glossy travel book that never happened, and a far more commercial one for a cruising magazine with NCL encompassing some fine Baltic cities.

Even on the latter big ship cruise we sought out local travel options and stayed put in the perfectly charming German and Swedish port towns, rather than shuttling onto Berlin and Stockholm respectively, as many travellers on board did.

I don’t much enjoy flying really. Especially taking budget flights in the post-9/11 era, yet I still do so fairly regularly. Anyway, the complicated relationship I have re slow travel is perhaps a topic best left for another day. But if you can afford it and you have time on your side, it’s not a bad way to go.