Gap year travels with my daughter
Waving your child off on a trip to the other side of the world can be a nerve wracking experience. But the modern necessities of email and mobile phone make it a bit more bearable
A gap year abroad used to be restricted to the privileged few, either the very wealthy or ‘drop-outs’ with nothing better to do. Or so it is thought. Now everyone can do it (you can work, volunteer or just travel on a budget) and in some parts of the world it is almost a rite of passage. It can be a life-changing experience for the better and a good opportunity for parents to bond with their stroppy teenage offspring, whose stroppiness decreases with every month away. What self-respecting, utterly self-indulgent teenager knows how to live on a budget or wash their own clothes? This is their chance to learn.
My 18-year-old daughter’s two month trip round Australia was not cheap but worth every penny given my new found status of sainthood, courtesy of a combination of homesickness and a gradual realisation of all that we do as parents to make this kind of thing possible.
About 130,000 British school leavers take a gap year to travel each year. Many of them sign up for volunteer projects in far flung and often dangerous parts of the globe, mindful no doubt of impressing future employers reading their CVs. The pressure is on these days: the minimum requirement is a good degree and work experience but employers also want to see young people with a bit of get up and go and a few more life skills learnt from traveling the world and experiencing different cultures. The fact that my daughter didn’t meet an Australian until about six weeks into the trip is neither here nor there; the whole of the East Coast is full of young British gappers, other Europeans, Canadians and Americans. You can learn a lot living out of a suitcase, on your own, 10,000 miles away from home.
I decided that after six months of sitting around in Cyprus proclaiming how bored she was, watching DVDs and occasionally working for a pittance, demanding taxi fares or lifts downtown at unreasonable hours, it was time for the good life to come to an end. I was not unreasonable as a parent, I sympathised with the argument that she would have to work for two hours to earn enough money to buy one packet of cigarettes, so what was the point? And how could she be independent without a driving licence and a brand new car? I agreed that life was tough and suggested a working holiday in Australia for a few months. We finally agreed on a tourist visa for two months, as in an all expenses paid holiday, just not five-star. If your child, like mine, is not interested in saving the planet, at least not if it involves roughing it in any way, then a long holiday in Australia is a pretty safe option (ignoring a few spiders, crocodiles, dangerous jellyfish and the odd man-eating shark!).
We signed up with one of the many organisations in the UK that help arrange gap year travel experiences, Real Gap. They gave us a list of dates and flights. I booked the flight and then Real Gap put my daughter in touch with 15 or so other young people who would be on the same flight and participating in a week of activities arranged for them when they got to Sydney. I kissed her goodbye at Heahtrow’s Terminal 4 for a 23-hour flight along with the other young travellers and their parents. I felt a twinge of anxiety recalling the less than helpful conversations with (not so close anymore) friends about drug smugglers in Thailand and backpackers being murdered in the outback. Recalling the film Bangkok Hilton, I had advised against travelling via Thailand (even though she assured me she really wasn’t stupid enough to carry anything for anyone else through any airport in the world!). Better safe than sorry though and there was still the odd backpacker-in-the-outback incident to worry about. Of more immediate concern was the size of her large pink suitcase and her refusal to take any sun screen with a factor higher than five. As a point of principle, a fashion principle that is, she wouldn’t be seen dead with a backpack. And her only real concern at the airport was the fact that all the other girls on the flight were in her view, ‘spotty back-packer types,’ who had obviously airbrushed their pictures on Facebook to make them look a lot more attractive than they were in reality. How was she going to cope and would there be enough room in her suitcase for all the shopping she intended to do?
Almost three months later, she is a changed person. She has survived trekking up the Blue Mountains in the rain wearing a very unfashionable plastic rain cover; ridden on the world’s steepest railway; roughed it at surf school for three days in the middle of nowhere without the luxury of either hair-straighteners or a signal on her mobile; learnt how to cook and use a washing machine. She also learnt two very valuable lessons while living in a flat in Sydney with three boys: never put washing up liquid in a dishwasher unless you are planning to have a foam party in the kitchen and don’t move into a flat with all boys; they never clean and they won’t buy toilet rolls, although they might be prepared to nick them from Burger King. She found Nemo at the Barrier Reef and snorkelled with sharks (she had it on good authority that they were friendly). All great life training. She enjoyed a trip to Nimbin, a hippy colony in New South Wales apparently populated by cheese-cloth wearing dope-smokers and under-cover police officers. She even bumped into a school friend from London while staying on a cattle ranch somewhere in the Queensland outback.
It must have been awful for parents who sent their kids off on gap adventures 20 years ago. They never knew what they were up to. I have had almost a running commentary for weeks thanks to the immediacy of email and mobile phones, so I never really had to worry. She phoned up in distress once when she arrived at Airlie Beach to find not a single hostel bed available. She hadn’t slept for three nights because of the Queensland bed bugs, she said, and begged me for the price of a proper hotel room. What could I do?
I knew it wasn’t the end of the world if she had to doss down on a hostel floor for the night but my maternal instincts won out and the price of a hotel room for three nights was immediately sent via internet banking to save her any more distress. How could I sleep at night seeing her poor little tired face, bravely suffering on a hot sweaty uncomfortable bus for days at a time only to end up trekking round the East Coast with the big pink suitcase in tow, looking for a bug-ridden cheap bed to sleep in?
As for Australians, she finally met a group of drunken Australian men in a small town in Queensland on Anzac day, who offered the coach driver a $100 for each of the girls.
Fortunately, she resisted the tempting offer but fell in love with a hunky Australian electrician with bulging biceps a week later. I was seriously worried that she was going to decide to abandon plans for university and I was going to be saving up air miles for ever to visit her. She did extend her stay because of him but fortunately only for four days and then they had an argument! She told me they were a tad sexist, Australian men, that is; a lot in common with Cypriot men, I suggested. I started visualising my worst nightmare: daughter leaves Cyprus to explore the world, travels thousands of miles and falls in love with an Australian Cypriot. It happens. And the verdict on English women from one Australian man, at least, is that they are apparently all shy and retiring, unlike Australian women. She told him he clearly had never been to Leeds on a Saturday night or met any of the girls from the estate in South London near where we used to live.
My sometimes shy, but definitely stroppy and demanding, geographically challenged teenager is now a well-travelled (she covered almost 3,000km on a bus between Sydney and Cairns) confident young woman who set out for Australia knowing no-one and made hundreds of friends while there. She is now so tired of chatting (which is a first) that she commented the other day, “I wish I was ugly so people would stop talking to me!” She also felt confident enough to comment on the fact that none of the Canadians she met (some of whom she claimed were actually Americans denying their nationality for political reasons) knew of the existence of Cyprus. Shocking I agreed, surely Cyprus and its history are common knowledge all over the world? I didn’t want to burst her bubble of high self-esteem but I did have to point out that until recently she was blissfully ignorant of where Istanbul is; a major city in our own region. So it has been a bit of an eye-opener all in all.
Judging by the photos on Facebook, she did have a great time and possibly spent a fair bit of our money on a new wardrobe but it could be worse. What really impressed me was how she managed to organise herself, get back in one piece, not lose her passport or anything else and really seems to have matured. We are now still in the 48-hour honeymoon period of course, that is that precious time between the emotional return and the first row. I am still enjoying the moment when I picked her up from Larnaca airport with her surf board at 5am after a late night watching the Champions League final and she is still enjoying the little luxuries her budget prevented her indulging in while in Australia: smoked salmon and French cheese; watching DVDs in her own bed-bug free double bed and lounging by the pool. I tentatively mention getting a job and saving up some money for university in September. Of course, but she just needs a short break to recover…
For anyone interested in reading about gap year travels I recommend Simon Hoggart and Emily Monk’s book Don’t Tell Mum: Hair-raising Messages Home from Gap-year Travellers. It is full of great emails home from gappers that really made me laugh, like this one: “Hey Mum and Dad, Don’t fret, cos I am still alive, and you always said that was the main thing. I should probably mention that I am not pregnant. I am also not yet a heroin/coke/ecstasy/morphine addict. I have definitely “found myself” and also made a huge difference to the village where I am staying. I have lots of good intentions, like building wells and libraries. I have given up smoking. I have started writing poetry. I have found God. I miss you and love you all so so so much and can’t wait to see you.
Love Tasha. PS: I may or may not have been shopping, courtesy of Daddy’s magic MasterCard.” But I don’t recommend you read it if you have a child away on a gap year, wait until they get back!
See also www.RealGap.co.uk, www.ozeperience.com
