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

by Hoggart, Simon

  When I walked this trail in the summer I remember thinking that it was a little on the dangerous side, but doing it in hard snow, with the thickest fog I’ve ever seen, was sick and to be honest pretty fucking pointless as the beautiful views were hidden by the bloody cloud. So it ended up being a grim 4-hour survival trek, constantly concentrating on not falling, it was so tough that at one point we were eating snow just to sustain ourselves. Anyway, what the hell, I’m still alive.

  Right now I’m in Zhengzhou, the worst place in the world. It’s a depressing heap of a city, imagine Milton Keynes left to rot for 100 years, and then inhabited by 8 million disgustingly ugly people who keep shouting ‘HULLO! HULLO!’ and muttering things under their breath about foreigners.

  But relief is at hand.

  We couldn’t get a train straight away, we had to spend the night, and this pissed us off so much that it drove us to going through with something we’d been joking about – the McHut. The McHut is very simple. First you go to McDonald’s and eat loads there, and then you go to Pizza Hut and pig out on pizza. I can honestly say that I’ve never been so full in my life, and it had the right effect too, because for some reason Zhengzhou didn’t look so bad with a bellyful of burgers and pizza.

  This young woman writes from Latin America, having learned the most important lesson of all for any middle-class person from the wealthy West: however badly off you think you are, there are plenty of people worse off than yourself – infinitely worse.

  A very humbled Nessa is writing to you after experiencing a women’s prison here in Ecuador where eight of us went to visit an English lady who is in there for drug-smuggling. We arrived and were straight away greeted with massive guns and were quite literally groped before being allowed through the gates. The smell was horrendous, the women were dressed in normal clothes, but if looks could kill none of us gringos would have come out alive. We had to bribe the head woman prisoner to let us see Terri, who is from Gloucestershire. Chatting to her was a surreal experience. She told us stories of the guards selling drugs to the prisoners, beating them to within an inch of their lives and other such pleasantries. What shocked us most was that the children of the mothers live in the prison with them, some were born in there and haven’t experienced life outside ...

  But once again consolation may be found around even the gloomiest corner.

  One of the women that we met was in there for murdering four of her children. She was a psycho and walked around with a dolly attached to her back as if it were her baby. As it was a visiting day, a lot of the prisoners had visitors, mainly old men who couldn’t get action in the real world, so go there to visit the young women who are desperate for a bit of action. They bribe the guard who lets them go into a cell and do their stuff, so not only is it a prison, a drug dealers’ heaven, but a brothel!

  Anyway, enough of the depressing prison chat. On a happy note I am off to the beach tomorrow to work on my tan!

  Ecuadorean prisons do seem to fascinate some student travellers. This young woman also went to a prison in Quito, though one for men.

  Yes, it’s actually true, we went to visit a couple of British prisoners doing 8 years for drug-smuggling. Jim took us around cell blocks B and C where most of the small-time dealers, thieves and murderers hang out. Fascinating, and quite amazing because they let all the prisoners out at visiting time. Mummy, I can actually hear you hyperventilating … what’s really amazing is that on of the Brits admits he will continue dealing when he gets out. Apparently his friend is saving 4 kilos for him!! Everything inside the prison is so unbelievably corrupt that you can actually buy your way out for $60,000 with a handshake from the governors – good news for prisoners and innocent backpackers alike!

  Impossible to be sure, but it sounds as if this chap went to the same prison. Possibly it features in a Rough Guide, or Lonely Planet, or is even recommended by the local tourist board.

  Went to visit a prison in Quito which was pretty scary shit, but interesting. Was talking to one inmate in his cell (bit of an anti-climax that I wasn’t raped) and he said that you get 12 years for drug-trafficking and only 2 for murder! So if I feel the urge to be naughty here I’m going to kill someone. Stay well, Ollie.

  The same young man rapidly gets over this experience.

  In Quito, after the prison trip, I went on a crazy party bus which was quite an experience. Everyone dances on the roof with a band, but the bus is too tall and you have to duck for bridges and cables. Me being too chilled out forgot to do this. I have since been to a witch doctor, which was scary. She was a complete nutter and made me strip so she could beat me with flowers, and then spat all over my torso. (I was a little freaked out by how much she knew of my fetishes.) Penultimately I visited the Equator, which was just a line.

  It is fair to say that Ecuador gets mixed reviews. This is from a girl.

  Dear Mum and Dad and all, This place is unbelievable! We have been here three days and it is amazing how soon you get used to living somewhere that is at first so utterly rancid! We now barely notice the smell of pee, the routine of bringing water to flush down the loo without a door, the ant armies EVERYWHERE, the gradual darkening of the pool when the children swim, and where there were once cries of revulsion there is now merely indulgent indifference when Dave the (girl) puppy leaves a surprise in the middle of our bedroom floor! However, we have been having great fun dressing up in giant, furry animal costumes to entertain the children …

  Gappers on the whole are amazingly insouciant about their health, at least before they get ill. This is from a young woman in Zambia.

  I’m having back problems, so instead of sleeping in my bed I have been on the concrete floor, really comfy except that without a mozzie net I woke up covered in bites, well two of us out of six have already had malaria, so why not make it a third?

  But when they are ill, they seem to find a certain satisfaction in their condition. This young man emailed his parents from Australia.

  I bring you now to the gruesome topic of my feet. During my time in India, it appears that my feet had become a touch smelly. At the time I was so into the dirty traveller thing that I failed to notice. On arrival in Thailand, I began to notice that even touching my sandals made my hands smell, and after a great many protests from Tom and the like, I decided to get a pair of flip-flops asap. They freshened up. Throughout the rest of Thailand and Vietnam I had no problems. But on arrival in Sydney the odour, which has since become known only as ‘The Rage’, returned in force. Simply by leaving my shoes off, whole rooms, buildings even, would consider evacuation on account of the smell. By the end of the two weeks I had spent AU $120 on remedies and doctors. Nothing has been solved. See you all soon – I’m back in two weeks!

  It’ll be great to have you back in the country, son. Just don’t come home!

  The whole point of being on a gap year is to get things hopelessly wrong. We will all have forty-odd more years to practise getting them boringly right. This girl went to work in Ghana.

  Here are four more mistakes I have made since being here:

  1. Yesterday me and my friend Siobhan fell asleep on the bus and missed our stop. Had cans in hand, so obviously woke up soaking wet, in a place two hours beyond our compound.

  2. Went on a run last week, still suffering.

  3. Ate whole pot of chocolate spread yesterday.

  4. Agreed to marry this local guy, just out of sympathy, thinking would never see him again and he wouldn’t recognize me – that was a big mistake, huge.

  The same lass makes an even bigger mistake when she and a friend decide to visit a wildlife park in Ghana.

  30 hours on a yam transportation ferry (where mice crawled all over our bodies at night), followed by several hours in a city that I would wish upon only the very worst people in the world (think Hitler, Stalin, and possibly this new boy here called Garth), then went on 2 x 7-hour bus journeys, so much sweat, so many flies due to neighbours eating fish for all seven hours and then dropping bones on
my foot, then some goats and kindly chickens decided to join us. Was just about tolerating this, though the smell was so rank I thought about cutting my nose off until I thought about nose, spite, face thing and decided, although not my finest feature, I would look worse without it … until chickens pecked my arse and I promptly burst into tears, much to everyone’s amusement. Eventually arrived, and for the next five days my body was consumed with the most horrendous rash – incidentally, bird flu has reached Ghana in a big way.

  To cap it all, the trip to the national park was not remotely worth the effort.

  After all this travelling, the baboons were ‘away’, the elephants were so far away that Accra, or even London Zoo was a much better option. And that’s all there is. Things got worse, but I am bored of writing now, and I’m sure you’re bored, so I’ll stop this ‘I hate Ghana’ stuff. It is a shit-hole, though. I can’t actually think of a worse day of my life than that one, ever. We met some new people who arrived today, and all were exceptionally dull / ugly / annoying. I hate them too. I have become a really hateful person, by the way.

  Ghana is a destination that seems to bring out strong feelings. This young woman evolved a particular loathing for one profession there.

  Taxi drivers are the bane of my life. I hate them, like REALLY hate them. Like today for example I hailed one and after incessant hooting, over he pulls, and when we offer our usual price to desired destination (work … eurgh), he laughs hysterically. Not just a snigger, but a full-on tummy-holding, jaw-aching, banging-head-on-steering-wheel type laughter. He then calls over a fellow cabby and tells him our price and he too joins in the hysteria. So off we walk, and (evidence for the success of playing hard to get) up he pulls again, saying ‘hop in’. So fine, we get in, arrive at work, and we pay agreed price. But no, he throws a fit, and says he thought we meant dollars. The price was 40,000 cedis, so 40,000 dollars would probably cancel all Ghana’s national debt. So we tell him to bugger off, run into our posh office, and he follows us. I kid you not. Chasing us. He is now waiting outside, security wouldn’t let him through, flailing arms and all, so we can’t escape for a while. Hence I am writing a very long email to all my fellow travellers …

  Visits to national parks can be a let-down. They are not all Yosemite, or the Serengeti, or even the Peak District. This young Canadian was in Argentina and decided to visit the park at the Peninsula Valdes. It was a seventeen-hour bus ride there, but they were promised penguins, huanacos – whatever they might prove to be – huge sealions, ‘and vast expanses of bleak, bleak scrub’.

  The peninsula turned out to be a complete disappointment. After paying $10AR for an early bus from the nearest town, and $35 to get into the park, we discover that we cannot camp anywhere on the peninsula except on a dirt lot off the main road, because getting across the peninsula would cost $90 each for a tour, or $200 in a car, so we managed to get together an intrepid crew and each put in $30 for a local car to take us to the penguins and the sealions. I must say that the welcoming party of half a dozen dirty penguins on the other side of a fence did not exactly lift my spirits after driving for an hour along the bumpiest, dustiest road you can imagine … the highlight of our 3-hour trip may have been catching a fleeting glimpse of a tarantula at the side of the road.

  This female gapper travelled all around the world. She writes in a lively and witty fashion, and is always cheerfully prepared to find the worst everywhere she goes. In Australia, because they didn’t know about time differences, she and her friend missed the bus they needed to catch to reach Adelaide for her friend’s plane. And her bags were already on board. So they were obliged to drive.

  We knew her luggage was on the bus. We knew her passport was on there too. And we knew that she had a plane to catch in less than 24 hours in a city that was over 800 km away. Oh, sh … The thing is, you can’t really drive at night in the outback, unless you’re a big fat bus, because kangaroos have a tendency to position themselves in front of small vehicles and watch them career off the road and burst into flames. So there we were, trundling along at 15 mph, leaning forward and straining our eyes to see anything that might resemble a suicidal kangaroo. After a rabbit tried its luck and scared the living bejasus out of us, we decided to call it quits and find a place to spend the night. That would be on the roadside, miles from anywhere, in the middle of a scary desert …

  They are – terrifyingly – woken by a man hammering on the side of the van. After a heart-stopping moment, it turned out to be a local inhabitant wanting to check that they were all right. And the friend made her plane.

  The same student then goes to Laos.

  That country was completely crackers. I thought eating river slime was a bit on the quirky side, but since then we’ve come across duck embryo salad, deep-fried bat and grilled squirrel. Not to mention the choice of live or dead rat at the most reputable food outlets – just so you know it’s fresh.

  They move on, to India.

  Weighed down with bags and lack of sleep, we pick our way through the filth-lined alleys, over piles of rotting food. Vomit lines the cobbled streets, mingling with half-eaten curries, and steaming cow poo. A passer-by spits, red liquid just missing my feet. No, this isn’t Chesterfield on a Saturday night. This is Varanasi, one of the most holy cities on the Indian sub-continent. A good place to die, by all accounts. Which seems a happy coincidence, given the myriad ways you could accidentally get killed.

  Her next stop is in Peru.

  Never eat deep-fried guinea pig and llama kebabs before travelling on a bus for 20 hours, then boarding a light aircraft. It just doesn’t work. Not unless you want to see them again, a little sooner than expected.

  Some gappers, it must be said, adore the horrors they encounter and delight in passing them on. This is from a young man working temporarily as a surgeon in Australia.

  The accommodation is okay, well it’s interesting, a bit sticky on the floor and a few cockroaches but it’s okay. I’m staying in a little place about 40 minutes from Sydney on the train, it’s a small town, loads of crime, drugs etc., etc., a bit like Stoke – only less pottery though.

  Life soon becomes more dramatic, even alarming. But most gap-year persons, this one included, can find the silver lining wherever it lurks.

  Been on and off this week, had a few quiet days, a few minor traumas. Had 2 shootings. One guy was shot in the bum and the bullet missed his major leg nerves by about 3 cm and his knackers by about 2 cm, he was a lucky chap. The other was shot 6 times – head, chest, abdomen. They opened his chest in the emergency department and he had been shot through the heart a couple of times, they tried to do all they could but there was not much hope. That was rather messy, with a nice waterfall of blood all over the floor. I’m not sure I have ever seen so much (and I have seen a lot!!!). It was not good, he was not such a lucky chap, but his knackers were intact. Helped amputate a leg with the vascular fellow, got to tie off all the vessels and suture up the muscle and skin, which was all good. I have managed to have a couple of free lunches too, which was also nice.

  This is from the same temporary surgeon, who manages to find humour amid the horror. Most of us would find that tricky.

  The trauma was interesting and the lady was lucky to survive it. She had broken all her ribs on one side and had about 2 litres of blood in her chest with a fractured pelvis to boot, and a pre-hospital blood pressure of <60 mm HG (rule of thumb: <90 mm HG usually = very sick). She was eventually taken to theatre and they opened her chest there and she had torn one of the major vessels (azygos) in her chest, which they stitched along with a big hole in her lung. She had also torn/dissected her aorta which they fixed with a stent up from her groin and they also stopped her pelvis bleeding with a couple of coils from here too. It was pretty funny as the consultant thought he was going to have to open her tummy as it was really really swollen and he thought she may be bleeding into it big style, but she was really stable at this point, they were doing some imaging of her pelvis and noticed that she had an
absolutely huge bladder and weren’t sure why and they looked at her catheter and someone had clamped it shut about 10 hours previously, so they released that and her tummy went flat and saved her from another couple of hours in surgery … this weekend I am off to the Blue Mountains which are meant to be really nice. Hopefully the weather will pick up and I can enjoy some surf and a few tinnies on the beach!

  The Hairy and The Scary

  In Britain we occasionally spot a squirrel, and – if you live in the city – the foxes often come round and helpfully empty your dustbins. But our wildlife is feeble, milk-toast stuff compared to the beasts that live out there in gap-year land. One of the easiest and most satisfying ways of boasting to your friends and putting the wind up your parents is to describe your encounters – or if you didn’t actually see the fanged and venomous creatures, how you almost did. This email comes from a young woman visiting Queensland.

  Went naked body-surfing in the middle of the night with six boys and had to get rescued because I got dumped by an enormous wave and nearly drowned, then to add to the drama discovered that it is extremely unsafe to go swimming after dark because the sharks come inshore to feed. Not sure I’ll be repeating those little escapades. Took part in a drinking competition and got fully beaten, just made it to the loos …

  A word of advice about going into the sea, anywhere abroad: don’t. As this gapper in Peru discovered.