Adventure

What bores whom? The threshold for boredom must be like the threshold for pain, different in all of us.
~ Martha Gellhorn 

There’s a difference between a holiday and adventure travel. I learned this after my solo trip through Vienna, Slovakia, Poland and Berlin that, while I don’t have any interest in cruise ships or guided tour type holidays (zzzzzzzzz), neither do I care for daring, scary trips. Traveling alone, without tour guides, to countries where English isn’t generally spoken, is about as wild as I’ve gotten. Yeah, I’m no Martha Gellhorn.

The book Bad Trips is a selection of essays of WORST TRIPS EVAH, by both pro and amateur travelers. It came out in ‘91. My copy is a bit beat and brown with age. I kept it, knowing I’d read it again and again.

So, here am, 30 years on from first publication, not able to travel due to my own ill health and the global pandemic, reading tales of other people’s adventures.

There are still places that I want to see, experience. The country-side of Columbia, Peru, Brazil and then Mexico City. I want to go to Barcelona, visit the Lascaux caves in France and, then, Japan – all of it. That'll do...for starters. As for repeats, I’d like to go back to Hoy – an island in the Orkney chain, off the northern tip of Scotland. This time I’d climb the hill up to the Old Man in boots, not kitten heeled cowboy mules. And I wouldn’t try to keep up with a pair of ultra fit young Australian women either!

For now, as I’m sure I mentioned already, as soon as I can, I'll be headed back to Iceland.

One person’s relaxing, meditative getaway is anothers snooze-fest. One person’s OMG-we’re-all-gonna-die is anothers oh-cool-this-is-fun. One person’s claustrophobia inducing, KEE-CHRIST-this-is-a-boring-vacay, is anothers dream holiday.

Gellhorn was, famously and briefly, married to Ernest Hemingway, another war correspondent and novelist. Of him, amongst other bits, she wrote:

My whole memory of sex with Ernest is the invention of excuses, and failing that, the hope that it would soon be over. (source)

Huh, waddya know, Hemingway was a crap lay.