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

  First Published in hardback in Great Britain in 2006

  by Atlantic Books. Atlantic Books is an imprint of Grove Atlantic Ltd.

  This paperback edition published in Great Britain in 2014 by Atlantic Books.

  Copyright © Simon Hoggart and Emily Monk, 2006 and 2014

  The moral right of Simon Hoggart and Emily Monk to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  Every effort has been made to trace or contact all copyright holders.

  The publishers will be pleased to make good any omissions or rectify any mistakes brought to their attention at the earliest opportunity.

  Illustrated by Scott Garrett/Heart

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  Paperback ISBN: 978 1 78239 371 9

  E-book ISBN: 978 1 78239 480 8

  Printed in Great Britain

  Atlantic Books

  An Imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd

  Ormond House

  26–27 Boswell Street

  London

  WC1N 3JZ

  www.atlantic-books.co.uk

  Contents

  Foreword

  Introduction

  The Call of the Weird

  With Friends Like These

  Drink, Drugs and Rock ’n’ Roll

  Love, Romance and Just Plain Shagging

  Take This Job and Shove It

  I’m on a Gap Year – Get Me Out of Here!

  The Hairy and The Scary

  Better to Travel Hopefully

  ’Rent Control

  Foreword

  The original edition of Don’t Tell Mum came about via a series of coincidences that brought Simon Hoggart and me together. My mother, a seasoned recipient of alarming gap-year emails, helped me to collate and self-publish a small collection of travellers’ emails a year or so before I met Simon. He was given the booklet and had been thinking of doing something similar and somehow, attesting the theories of separation, we were put in touch. Essentially, we were party to the same act – he a parent and myself an intrepid, naïve, thoughtless but enthusiastic teenager embarking on a gap year. For different reasons we considered the same material amusing. I could provide tales from fellow travellers, ready for exposition, and Simon’s wonderful gift for observation could unite the stream of stories with humorous surveillance.

  Eight years have passed since the first edition of this anthology and despite the social-media revolution that has since taken place and the now multiple number of reliable methods of communication, the essence of our (the audacious travellers) messages to them (the anxious parents) remains largely the same. Mums today will no doubt find it equally as hilarious that there are snakes in our compound and we have been enjoying homemade hallucinogenic healing tea from new tribal friends as they did eight years ago. I clearly remember breathlessly emailing home in barely punctuated discourse during my own gap year nearly a decade ago, illustrating a complete disregard for how my messages may be received and interpreted. Surely, I reasoned, some communication was better than none. Emails lately received from my younger brother would suggest this logic hasn’t changed.

  Technology today, however, is even more dangerous for the undiscerning adventurer. Instant photographic evidence to accompany tales can be far more worrying for the parents, quashing hopes that email accounts of bungee jumps and motorbike rides were wildly exaggerated. Having been the victim of a mother who once tracked down and called the hostel I was staying at in Thailand to try to lure me home for no particular reason, I am grateful that means of communication were relatively limited. These days I dread to think what a Facebook check-in might lead to.

  What is also noticeable about gap years today is the seemingly broader choice of things to do. I suspect all of the adventures I have recently heard about for the first time were available when I was travelling, but somehow, likely a result of blogs and greater information sharing, the variety of things people seem to be doing on their travels has widened. Nowhere is too far, too wild, too political or too difficult. The same dedicated gap-year organizations have largely survived, and new ones have undoubtedly emerged, but it is no longer the norm to sign up to an often overpriced specific package. Mainstream trips used to take in full-moon parties in South East Asia, teaching English in India, touring Australasia or building things in Africa. All eminently worthy and adventurous enough for most, but more recently I have heard descriptions of questionably legal trips to Burma, ice tours in the Antarctic, trekking to remote parts of China, hitchhikers and cyclists in Russia, and a writer’s journey through Palestine.

  It is incredibly sad that Simon will not see this new edition in print, though his own amusement and remarkable wit is evident in his lucid commentary. The documentation of gap-year experiences through multimedia is now simply astonishing, however the stories that are assembled here are still genuine and still relevant and we hope they will entertain a new generation of travellers. If you are able, I urge you to pack your bags and take off, whether you go before or after university, for a few weeks or more than a year. Above all, it is great to finally have something to write home about.

  Emily Monk

  May 2014

  Introduction

  It is one of the milestone events in a modern parent’s life. You get to the airport with your child. It is possibly the first time they have left home for more than a few days. Even if they have been away to school, they have always been near helpful, protective adults who make sure they are fed, watered, clean and safe. What’s more, it seems only a few months ago that they were toddlers, taking their first steps, saying their first words.

  Now they are going alone into a wider, more frightening world. They are probably less anxious than you, which is important, because you are very anxious indeed. Every article you read describing backpackers being murdered by drug smugglers in Thailand, or falling off South American mountains, is about your child. Never mind that dozens of your friends have got their offspring back safely after many adventures – some of which were, admittedly, terrifying, bizarre, or merely the result of their own stupidity. Never mind that at the school’s gap-year briefing session, the teacher smiled comfortingly and said, ‘Well, we haven’t lost anyone yet!’ They are going thousands of miles away, into the unknown, and you won’t be there to help.

  Then the long-feared moment of parting. I can still see my own eighteen-year-old daughter’s brave smile as she had her boarding pass checked on the way into the departure lounge, a place where there are many retail opportunities but no hugs. You realize that, in a way, your entire life is going to be on hold until the moment a few months later the same child emerges from Customs. And that is another landmark moment, especially when, back at home, they unpack a cascade of presents – souvenirs, packets of strange spices, letter openers, a cufflink box made from the skin of a crocodile, brass candlesticks, a liqueur made from fermented cactuses, leather elephants decorated with coloured beads, recipe books which would be wonderful if you could find any of the ingredients at Sainsbury’s. There are great drifts of photographs: ‘this was our guide through the caves’; ‘these are all the kids in my class’; ‘he was that boy I
told you about’; ‘this was the view from the top, I’m afraid it was a bit misty that day …’ Of course you don’t care that it was misty – you’re just overwhelmed with relief that they are safely back under your roof again.

  Then there is at least forty-eight hours before the first row (‘you’ve only been back two days and already your room is a tip’) and, over the weeks and months, the realization that your child has subtly changed, become a little more assured and self-reliant, a mite less cynical, slightly more aware of the world around them – in other words, more mature. That, too, is an important moment.

  Gap years are not new, though the term itself is recent. It is defined as a period of time between leaving school and going on to higher education, though it’s not uncommon now for people to have a gap year – sometimes their second – after graduating and before starting work. Some people even interrupt their careers in midflow for a gap, and a handful of them appear in this book. I would guess, and there are no supporting figures, that around half of gappers go to a particular place to do a specific job, working voluntarily for board and lodging, though some are paid pocket money. Several companies now offer a placement service, matching the student to the job, and providing a level of supervision, rather like tour reps. These schemes tend to be expensive, and not always worth the money. Other students only want to travel, usually as back-packers, sometimes alone, more often with good friends – who may or may not remain good friends through their travels.

  I did mine a long time ago. The university I went to made it a condition that I spent a year doing something else before starting (they didn’t say ‘get yer knees brown’ but that’s roughly what they meant), so in 1965 I went to teach in western Uganda, at a school in the foothills of the Ruwenzoris, the Mountains of the Moon. The school was a Scottish Presbyterian foundation, and the pupils (quite a few of whom were older than me) wore khaki kilts and goatskin sporrans. I learned a lot of things in my six months, not all pious truths about the relationship between the rich and the Third World, or the burning desire of impoverished young people to be educated. For instance, I discovered that I was a lousy teacher, something that has helped me throughout my life since I have never again taken teaching work. I found out a great deal about people’s priorities, not least from a staff meeting at which we spent five minutes deciding to spend a vast sum on a new chapel, then the next fifty-five minutes on whether boys who broke their garter elastic should be given sixpence for more, on the grounds that it was weak garter elastic, or made to buy their own since they had probably snapped it making catapults. The issue split the school.

  But the main difference with today is communication. Every week I wrote home on one of those flimsy blue aerograms. (‘Went with the athletics team to Kampala. Chaka, the captain, was found with several packets of cigarettes in his kit bag … camped in the Queen Elizabeth game park and chased a hippo – which was really stupid.’) Most weeks a letter arrived from my parents, written at regular intervals but often arriving in bunches. News of the greater world could be obtained from the bound week’s copies of the Daily Mirror, sold at Bimji’s general store long after the events they described. And, of course, from the invaluable BBC World Service. I can still recall the excitement of hearing the Stones’s ‘Satisfaction’ for the first time on the games master’s scratchy radio, tuned to the UK Top Twenty show.

  Now there are internet cafés in the smallest, poorest and most miserable towns in the world, and for some travellers a visit has become part of their daily routine. Usually they are not expensive, though gappers tend to be obsessed by money, walking miles to save a few pence on a bus fare, regarding a visit to KFC as a rare indulgence (though there usually seems to be enough money for drink and, slightly less often, drugs). For anxious parents the internet is a tremendous boon. The relief of opening an email that starts, ‘Hi Mum, Hi Dad, having a great time …’ is like a sugar rush. On the other hand, you can easily take the stream of messages for granted, and come near to panic when it’s interrupted. Close friends of ours had a son who went travelling in north-western India with a companion. The parents knew they’d been heading for a city which had just been struck by a terrible earthquake. For several grim days they heard nothing, the bubble of fear rising and falling inside them. But when the next cheery email arrived it explained that the earthquake had destroyed communications in the area and a tummy bug had prevented them from going to the city in the first place.

  On the other hand, an email that does arrive can produce just as much terror. The idea for this book came from a friend of mine whose son was travelling around Thailand. ‘Dear Mum and Dad,’ he wrote, ‘have just been swimming with the sharks – not as dangerous as it sounds! Off to Angkor Wat tomorrow, but none of the guys wants to come, so I’ll be on my own. See you at Heathrow on Thursday!’ My friend described anaesthetizing her brain with wine before going to sleep, then regaining consciousness at one in the morning, knowing she would be awake for the rest of the night. Of course, her boy arrived back at Heathrow right on time, vaguely puzzled that anyone should have been concerned.

  I thought then that the sheer energy and verve in gap-year emails would make a fascinating, funny and occasionally terrifying book, though I couldn’t figure out how to assemble the material. Emails are, after phone calls, the most ephemeral of all communications, and only a handful of parents bother to keep them. Then, in December 2005, I was at one of those charity Christmas ‘fayres’, going through the bookstand, and found a pamphlet called Dear Mum, written by Emily Monk. It was just thirty-two pages, and sold at £3, with profits going to a school for the very poorest children in Ghana. Like all newspaper columnists, I am usually desperate for material, and the emails in the booklet were all I had hoped – witty, crazy, improbable, wildly exaggerated no doubt, full of life and the hectic, tumbling excitement of discovering the world. Several hundred people wrote in to buy the booklet, selling out the print run. Then it turned out that we and Emily’s parents had mutual friends, so it was easy to get together and plan this much longer book. Of the many hundreds of emails from which it is compiled, probably half come from Emily’s friends, and friends of friends of friends, since the magic of electronic mail means that someone sitting in a café in Peru can send a message to New Zealand, which is then passed on to West Africa, and then finally winds up two days later in another café in Vietnam – where, as it happens, Emily spent a chunk of her own gap year in 2006.

  Reading the material has been a constant delight. The verve, the guts, the sheer roistering enjoyment of these kids! Some, of course, had a horrible time at first, unable to adjust, desperately missing home. But in almost all cases it’s possible to track how they came first to tolerate, then to relish, the places they find themselves in and the people and cultures they encounter. Anyone who fears for our future can take encouragement from these emails. This is a generation which appears to know no fear, full of young men and women who dance on the edge of volcanoes, go bungee jumping into canyons, hitch-hike through China, live among cattle with the Masai in Kenya, face down Mongolian immigration officials, saunter insouciantly into jungles, paddle canoes down piranha-infested rivers, cope with Russian mafia types, and generally display magnificent courage, resource and, sometimes, idiocy.

  I have no doubt that some of the stories told here are exaggerated for effect (though none of them strike me as having been made up from nothing). I’m just as sure that some of the events have been toned down, if only for the benefit of fretful parents. We do promise that every single extract here is from a genuine email. We have, of course, had to cut them down, leaving in the highlights, and we have tinkered with both spelling and punctuation, since many of the emails were typed at breakneck speed, and would be incomprehensible without these very adjustments. For most of these kids punctilious spelling and the use of semi-colons would be as great a luxury as a hot bath, or a full English breakfast. That’s not why they are where they are. We have also changed all the names.

  For
the benefit of those who don’t have children aged between seventeen and twenty-two, here is a glossary of some common words which you will find in the following pages and which might cause momentary puzzlement. Few are politically correct:

  action usually refers to sex. ‘No action yet, but I have hopes of this blond boy with a tongue piercing.’

  annoying a very pejorative term. In adult-speak, it might refer to a wasp or a traffic jam. To gappers it means a deeply painful person. Not to be confused with arsey which means deliberately offensive and aggressive, as in ‘this arsey policeman moved us on.’

  fit (adj.), fittie (noun) little to do with physical health; instead, ‘sexually attractive person’.

  gay has lost its specific meaning, and is now just an all-purpose term of abuse. ‘A gay bar’ is merely a bad bar, not one frequented by homosexuals.

  gos (sometimes goss or goz): gossip.

  hardcore serious, committed, over-the-top. ‘He drank 10 pints in an hour, just to show he was hardcore.’

  lame (sometimes noun, lamo) feeble, not up to scratch. ‘Being a complete lamo I didn’t join in the bungee jump.’

  minging once used against any ill-favoured woman. Now a general term of abuse.

  minted wealthy. ‘Tom’s friends are minted, and live in this wicked house overlooking the beach.’

  phat a term of approval. ‘The dive at the reef was phat.’

  quaint strange, unexpected, unusual. Nothing to do with ‘old-fashioned’. ‘We went to this quaint dinner at Ho’s brother’s house…’

  random inexplicable, haphazard. ‘The bus driver read our palms for us. How random is that?’

  randommers strangers encountered along the way. ‘These randommers we met on the train offered to put us up for the night.’

  rank disgusting.

  rents (sometimes ’rents): parents.

  retard usually refers to anyone who annoys the gapper or gets in his way. ‘This bunch of retards took our passports then refused to give them back.’