Boredom is the worst. You ever get that special kind of bored feeling, where it's like someone has draped a thick slab of lard across your head and body and then sat on it? There's a tangible weight that sort of makes you feel uncomfortable and itchy and fuzzy and queasy. I hate that feeling When you tell people you spent a month travelling up the East coast of Australia they tend to think of a non-stop whirlwind of kangaroos, pristine beaches, opera houses, and super friendly locals offering you barbecues. The fact is, with any extensive travel period you'll have a lot of down time. For my part that typically involved the odd days stuck on a Greyhound coach travelling the sixty thousand miles between towns, but also occasionally the quiet nondescript periods where we were between adventures in some beach town or other. Weirdly it was the latter of these that affected me the most profoundly. I guess when you're jammed on a coach for the next ten hours you're sort of forced to just... make the best of it? Have a read, have a snooze, play a game etc. Whereas when you're in one of the innumerable little beach locales with a day of not-much before your onward journey there's usually very little to do and an overpowering feeling that you should be doing something. And boy they were usually lovely beaches; all the white sand you could hope to saturate all your clothes and belongings with. But there's only so many you can see and genuinely appreciate—especially when you can't usually swim there. Australian beaches seem to come in two flavours: perfect for swimming if not for the jellyfish, and perfect for getting smeared to mulch by giant waves. So what's left to do? Bum around, or visit another coffee shop. These are two things I could easily do in the UK. The last week has been particularly hard for a different reason. We're in Christchurch at the moment and trying to find work to refill the coffers a bit. My other half succeeded in this much more quickly than me, since I foolishly held out hope for the likes of freelance websites. As a result I've had way too many lonely, wasted days that have basically run food->email jobs->Facebook->food->email->feel lonely and sad->food->bed. Hopefully as of Monday I'll have broken that cycle. Being without a car certainly doesn't help. There are enough cool tourist spots just outside of Christchurch that could make me feel like I was doing something worthwhile with my life, but "public transport" isn't something the Kiwis have really mastered yet, so here I sit, longing for a train or a nearer mountain. I'd like to finish this off with some kind of advice to prospective differently-brained travellers like me. The problem is I really don't know what advice I'd have given myself from two months ago. Buy another videogame? Learn a card trick? Watch (AWFUL) New Zealand TV?
Certainly apply for more jobs more quickly (an agency really helps) but that's pretty niche. I guess the best I can do is point out that no matter what kind of insane continent-hopping country-trekking adventure you have planned you can't just assume that because you're in a new exciting location you'll be able to spend every minute of every day exploring and being gobsmacked. So maybe take a book after all.
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Author28 year old computer scientist/physicist with major depressive disorder, a need to write, and a deep-rooted mistrust of beetroot. Categories
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February 2018
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