Don't Tell Mum

Hair-raising Messages Home from Gap-year Travellers

Emily Monk, Simon Hoggart

• Publisher: Atlantic Books
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN:
  9781782393719
• eBook ISBN:
  9781782394808
• Topic: Personal Development
• Subtopic: Travel

The email home is an essential part of every gap-year traveler's journey. Where once the news of narrowly surviving a bus crash on the dirt-roads of India, waking up to gunfire in Honduras, or fending off marriage proposals from complete strangers would have made it home only on the back of a slow-moving battered postcard, these days those tantalizing details and terrible mistakes are now recorded immediately and distributed liberally for every friend and family member to wince at. In Don't Tell Mum, Simon Hoggart and Emily Monk have collected together the funniest, most surreal, most alarming gap-year emails into a treasure-trove of correspondence. Accompanied by their wicked commentary, Don't Tell Mum gives the aspiring traveler the low-down on what not to do when trotting the globe.

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 expe...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Contents