I finally got around to watching “A Map for Saturday” a few days ago. A cult movie amongst long term backpackers, it is the documentary story of the highs and lows of one guy‘s year on the road.
I really wish I hadn’t waited so long to see it, because it’s fantastic.
Lying awake for hours after the final credits rolled with wanderlust coursing through my veins, I realised that something remarkable had happened. The excitement, the anxiety, the thrill of the unknown had returned. I felt the same as I did 14 years ago when first boarding the plane. The travel buzz was back.
That movie resonated deeply with me. The joy. The loneliness. The burnout. The instant friendships and the pain of saying goodbye. The despair of heading home.
While the film is ostensibly Brook’s story, it isn’t really. It’s the story of the people he meets as he backpacks around the world. Hell, it’s the story of all of us who live a life like this. No matter where you’re from, what you look like, how old you are, if you travel long term you’ll feel the same things. We all do.
Watching updates filmed with the main characters many months after their trips had finished, I was struck by two things.
Nobody regretted the decision they had made to travel and, in some form or other, everyone wanted to do it again.
Why?
Because travel changes us.
For many of us we find the best versions of ourselves on the road. When we travel solo we leave our inhibitions at the door and end up talking to anyone, just because we have to. We become friends with the most unlikely of strangers – even if sometimes only for a day or two.
We are more open to adventure and new experiences than we are back home. There is nowhere we have to be that can’t be changed, nothing we have to do that can’t be rearranged and nobody to tell us that we can’t do either.
Waking up each morning not knowing how the day will end is a wonderful feeling, and the freedom becomes an addiction. Anything could happen every day. It usually does.
And then at the end of our trip we all say the same thing.
“I am going to keep this feeling alive,” we swear, and for a while we do. We live in someone’s spare room fighting the pull of the nine-to-five. We tell stories of that time on a deserted beach in Goa to our friends at the pub, even though we know they couldn’t care less. We wake up excited to read the emails that have come in overnight from those still out there, and we can almost taste the salt spray or hear the crashing waterfall.
But then one morning in the shower the last of the bracelets we picked up in Cambodia falls apart. The dirty flip-flops get thrown out and the pack that housed our entire life for a year gets stowed in the attic. We stop being the misfit, the wanderer, the one that travelled for months. We get a haircut, we get a real job and we slowly slip back into the routine of twelve hour days and the five dollar coffees to get us through them.
No matter what, though, there is always still something left inside to remind us of our time on the road.
How do I know this?
Because this is my life. Over and over and over again.
I think that once we have travelled like this for months or years something happens to the way our brains are wired. While we can settle back into our old lives almost completely after a year or two, it doesn’t take much to trigger a memory. An old photo, a television show, a status update transports us back to a distant time and place.
More importantly, though, it transports us back to a feeling. Even for those that don’t ever strap the backpack on again, deep down inside the little candle of wanderlust still flickers. It never completely goes out.
Around halfway through A Map for Saturday the camera turns on Will. He is a little different to everyone else in the movie. Will is 73 years old and relies on a cocktail of 13 different pills every morning to keep everything working just right. A cancer survivor and diabetic, he walks into a dorm room in Brussels and shares his story of backpacking around the world staying in hostels because he enjoyed it so much when he was younger.
I have watched that little segment half a dozen times now, and with good reason. Assuming I last the distance, in forty years or so some version of that is almost certainly going to be me. I’ll probably travel even slower and nap even more, but the burning desire to get out there, to meet new people and keep going to places I’ve never been – well, I just can’t see that stopping until I can no longer physically put one foot in front of the other.
Backpacking is a mindset, not an equipment list. As Will and many others show every day, there is no age limit on curiosity.
If you happen to walk into a hostel common room in a few decades time and notice a crusty old guy with a mangled accent sitting there, take a second to have a closer look.
It may well just be me.
[Images via kozumel, garryknight]