The very fact that you are reading this, if indeed anyone is, should be regarded as nothing short of a miracle. Allow me to explain briefly as I am well aware that verbosity is one of my many failings, most of which I have only recognised relatively recently. Isn’t it funny how the passage of time gives you a much clearer picture of yourself?
I came to the fascinating mysteries of the world wide interwebnet.com or whatever it is called somewhat late in life and, after being shown the basics by a then 15 year old “stepdaughter” (I was not married to her Mother) along the lines of how to answer an e-mail and other such mysteries which she took for granted, I set off on a journey of exploration into the ether. Yes, I did get numerous withering looks of the kind that only a teenage girl can muster and which suggested, all too obviously if unstated, that I should just crawl back under my rock and await the Grim Reaper in due course. No doubt some of you will have fallen foul of it and I was still only in my 30’s at the time so hardly geriatric.
I have always loved travelling since my first “solo” holiday i.e. without parents aged 15 when myself, my younger brother and two friends cycled round the Antrim coast road in Northern Ireland, my home country. In the days before computers and in the prevailing circumstances at the time everything was planned to the last detail by “snail mail” and a visit to the Youth Hostel Association office in Belfast. A call on a public payphone (remember those?) had to be made to our parents every night but it was a start and I loved it. We were never more than an hour’s drive from home but it was an adventure and I was hooked. Everything was so much more innocent then even in the awful situation of my homeland in the 1970’s.
I promised to try to curb my verbosity so I shall precis this as best I can now. Armed with my newfound wanderlust, I took off to travel when I could and had left home. Nothing dramatic but some decent trips which were all organised (think package holidays) which merely served to inflame my passion for more adventurous travelling. Like the internet, I was a late starter to independent travel for various reasons too boring to go into here.
My first trip outside Europe was when I was 28 and went to New Zealand for a friend’s wedding which I turned into a month long trip as that was the longest period I could take off work. I had a stopover in Bangkok on the way which was the absolute definition of culture shock, a few weeks hitchhiking round Australia which regrettably is too dangerous to do now (hitchhiking, not Austtralia which is relatively safe) and undoubtedly illegal, a week in NZ for the nuptials with a 20 person honeymoon afterwards if you can believe that and then home. I enjoyed it immensely, the freedom, the new sights, sounds and especially smells which was the first thing I noticed when I got to Asia. I still never get tired of the smell of a Southeast Asian night market although I have been to literally hundreds.
I never had the opportunity to do the full-time “going on the road gig” as I had a steady job when I left the Forces in 1988. OK, I could have done that but I had a plan which has now fortunately come to fruition and that was to work very hard, manage my finances as best I could and hopefully retire relatively early to do my travelling then.
In the interim I contented myself with working a lot of overtime and saving it for time off rather than payment which gave me the opportunity for one decent long haul trip per year. I was greatly assisted in this by a succession of very decent bosses and the fact that my workmates were nearly all married with families which meant that they wanted time off based on UK school holidays (July and August plus Easter sometimes). My preferred travel destinations are mostly in Asia so I could work like mad all summer to let the guys get time off for the two weeks break with the family and then I could take a month or slightly more off in January / February when nobody else wanted leave.
I worked hard and managed to get early retirement on a modest pension plus the werewithal to pay off my mortgage a few months shy of my 50th birthday which I thought wasn’t bad for one like me who is so totally useless at matters financial. It sounds like an ideal situation and so it has worked out but at the time I don’t mind admitting that I was utterly petrified. I had literally worked every day of my life and was really unsure what I would find to do with myself every day for the rest of my time on this planet. There was always the danger of just sitting about moping and I really didn’t want to go that way.
My entire retirement plan was predicated on travelling a lot and, almost as importantly, writing about it. I was fortunate in that I had been a member of a superb travel website called Virtual Tourist for a number of years where I had developed a love for travel writing hitherto undiscovered. I had literally thousands of entries and about 10K images there. I had travelled all over the world to “VT meets” and formed many firm friendships which endure to this day as well as discovering that I really did enjoy the writing almost to the point of obsession. I was active on an almost daily basis and it really did give me a purpose. I know this sounds a bit overblown but it is the truth and I used to set up little projects like walking several long distance paths primarily for the purpose of writing about them although I enjoy walking and exploring for it’s own sake. Then the sky fell in.
VT had been bought out some years previously by TripAdvisor and they announced at the beginning of 2017 that they were shutting it down. No provision was made for us to save our work although fortunately some of the wonderful members (including the former CEO and the original programmer) managed to get us some sort of a rapidly thrown together system without which I would have lost 12 years and literally thousands of manhours of writing, researching, cross-checking and a lot more. As and when I get this site up and running I shall attempt to transfer some of that content here from the disorganised shambles that constitutes my computer “filing system” although I do realise that it is unrealistic to try to move it all, there is just not enough time.
At time of writing in April 2018 I am not long returned from three months in Sri Lanka and I have a few other little half-formed travel plans albeit that my travel is usually arranged, booked and undertaken on a last-minute whim which is just the way I like it. Being a single man with no dependents I can literally just get up and go at a moment’s notice and regularly do.
Approaching 60 I am glad to say that I am in perplexingly rude health given my somewhat dissolute lifestyle with the one slight problem being a bad back which I ruined by playing too much rugby in my youth. I compounded the problem by not retiring when my excellent physiotherapist told me to (you were right, Roisin) and then ludicrously coming out of retirement which finally did for it and I was forced to quit for good at the relatively young age of 31. I have not even been registered with a Doctor for over 20 years which must tell you something! The spinal problem precludes proper backpacking but I do manage to undertake fairly extensive trips with a small rollalong case which is the next best thing.
I am hoping against hope that this will be the first of many entries on a blog that I am not going to shut myself down on!
Stay tuned.
Fergy's Rambles. 