Travel, Tourism and Culture Shock

Story · all 20 words

The Year I Stopped Going to the Same Hotel

For nine consecutive years my family took the same package holiday to the same resort on the same stretch of Spanish coast, in the last week of July, which is the most expensive week of the entire year.

I want to be careful how I say this, because it is easy to be snobbish about it and I was, for about a decade, insufferably so.

It was all-inclusive. My parents worked jobs that were physically hard and mentally dull, and for one week a year they went somewhere warm where nobody asked them to decide anything. No cooking. No budget arithmetic. A pool. That is not a failure of imagination – that is exactly the correct use of a week off.

We flew in peak season because that was when the school holidays were. We always had a delay, because everybody does in the last week of July, and my father built it into the plan and treated it as weather.

He kept an itinerary in a plastic wallet. Flight times, hotel address, the number of the transfer company, everything printed twice. I mocked this for years and I now do the same thing on my phone.

We did almost no sightseeing. We went into the old town twice in nine years, both times to a restaurant on the main square that was unquestionably a tourist trap, and both times my mother said it was lovely and meant it.

Then in 2009 I went to Vietnam on my own with eleven hundred pounds and no itinerary at all, and I discovered that I was not nearly as sophisticated a traveller as I had spent nine years implying.

I set off from Heathrow at some hostile hour, with everything in hand luggage, feeling extremely pleased with myself.

The first thing that went wrong was the connection in Hong Kong, which I missed, because I had allowed fifty-five minutes and had never in my life had to board a second aircraft in a building I could not read the signs in. I slept on a bench.

The second thing was jet lag, which I had heard of and assumed was mild. It is not mild going east. For three days I was awake at 3am and useless at 3pm.

And the third thing was culture shock, which I had genuinely believed did not apply to me. It arrived on day four, in a market in Hanoi, as a sudden and completely irrational wish to be somewhere where I understood the rules. Not homesickness. Something closer to exhaustion – the tiredness of a brain that cannot switch anything to automatic.

I sat in an air-conditioned café that afternoon and drank a Coke and felt like a fraud.

What actually helped was lowering my ambitions. I stopped trying to get off the beaten track every single day and stayed in one town for a week, in the same hostel, and learned six words, and used the same food stall every morning until the woman who ran it stopped asking what I wanted.

That week was the best of the trip and it was, in structure, exactly what my parents had been doing in Spain for nine years.

The rest was fine. I got the currency arithmetic wrong constantly and was overcharged in a way I have decided to find funny. I went through customs at Heathrow on the way home with a conical hat that did not survive the year. I learned that you check in earlier than you think and that the destination matters much less than who you are with and how tired you are.

I still travel. I also, twice, have booked a package holiday, and both times I lay by a pool for a week and read four books and came back a different shape of person.

My father is seventy-nine and no longer flies. The last time we all went to that resort was 2011. If you had told me at twenty-two that I would one day be nostalgic about a buffet in Salou I would have been offended, and I would have been wrong, and I am.

Sometimes you do not need to broaden anything. Sometimes you just need to get away.