“So tell me all about it. What was the best thing that happened? Did the way you think about things change? What kind of major realisations did you have while you were away?”
Pause.
I maintain eye contact, because I’ve read a lot of pamphlets about positive interaction, but one of my eyebrows starts to raise of its own accord. Enough time passes that someone two tables over nods encouragingly. Then I say, “Yeah, look, it was great, we met a Frenchman whose lasting memories of a year spent in New Zealand were of our countrymen’s fondness for fake weed.”
I tend to make a joke about being a Kronically bad storyteller, and reel off some lines about having needed to get out of here, a change being as good as a rest, having a bit more energy now, et cetera. Standard stuff.
I was bemused by this implied insistence that leaving New Zealand for more than a couple of weeks meant that of course I’d come back with a tidy story that flowed nicely from beginning to end, and culminated in me being a generally better person than I was before
After far too many of the above exchanges, I stopped thinking I was a crap conversationalist and wondered why everyone – not just my close friends, with whom I was obliged to give it a decent stab, but peripheral acquaintances, my parents’ friends, colleagues at work –expected me to have answers to these questions. The only people who didn’t ask whether I’d “found myself” were Customs officials.
I was bemused by this sort of implied insistence that leaving New Zealand for more than a couple of weeks meant that of course I’d come back with a tidy story that flowed nicely from beginning to middle to end, and culminated in me being a more well-rounded and generally better person than I was before.
Was it for the same reason I get given journals for Christmas, because “you just look like you have a lot of feelings”? Was it so that we could both play our parts in a social nicety, or politely acknowledge that it had been worth me paying all that money? Was it because of the series of hot-water bottle burns I got (true story) before I left, which no doubt led people to think there was nowhere for me to go but up?
Presumably, everyone’s wild hope for a Grand Upswing only gets wilder the longer you’ve been away, but I spent only four weeks in Central America, at the end of last year. I’d never really travelled before. I would describe my decision to go as “the knowledge that even after four years at university, I had two more left, and that in the absence of a break I would descend into a realm of batshit that HR might term ‘take this handout on depressive thoughts and for God’s sake brush your hair’.” I went with a friend who was looking to flaunt her lucrative transition from student to yopro somewhere “less mainstream” than South-East Asia, and hopefully get a picture of a sloth in a Santa hat. Neither of us were soul-searching – which, if you’re to believe Eat, Pray, Love and others in the same Oprah-endorsed, strangely irritating mold of spirit rejuvenation, meant the whole trip was a Massive Waste of Time.
Hilary Beattie in Costa Rica: Drinking is eating, right? Photo: Supplied
Is Eat, Pray, Love the reason why I had to come back with a story? Because that’s balls. I didn’t go away, as did its author Elizabeth Gilbert, explicitly seeking “pleasure, devotion and the art of balancing the two” after the horrendous end to a couple of relationships. I just wanted to hoon some cheap rum with my mate, and perhaps come back less tired and not resenting my friends’ success so much. Clearly an achievable and healthy goal.
But if I’m going to ape some self-discovery after the fact, food’s an easy enough place to start for my ‘sensual awakening’. Rationing in Cuba means all restaurants will serve you pretty much the same thing, so your decisions of where to go hinge on issues like whether the proprietor looks like Alec Baldwin. (Unfortunately my Spanish did not extend to asking him to please let himself be filmed rasping “Good God, Lemon”.) My memories of individual meals are less strong than my memories of the people I shared them with, like this incredibly beautiful Norwegian girl with whom we ate lobster at our casa in Havana. She was a human geographer who had recently “fallen in love with Cuba” and discovered she was “extremely naturally talented” at salsa. My only moment of self-discovery there was that I’m just as susceptible to jealousy of clear-skinned, upwardly mobile civil servants in Cuba as in New Zealand.
Talking about food is also hamstrung (whey hey!) by your constant awareness, like the social justice maverick that you are, that so many of the locals can afford very little of it. My travel companion and I were cheerily accosted one evening by a local couple walking down the street in Havana. Ten minutes into a round of $2 mojitos, they got down to (what may have been their) business: asking us matter-of-factly for money to buy food for their son, whose name was ostensibly “Jasmine spelled backwards”. We got the round, but that didn’t stop us being assholes. I was reminded of our awkward refusal to shell out some pesos on a plane a week later, when I read in the Economist (everyone’s favourite tragicomedy) that the average salary in Cuba is $20 USD a month.
(See how there’s not a graceful way for me to talk about this stuff? Did you really want me to bring this up when you asked me in the supermarket whether I saw the world “through a different filter” now? Bloody oath.)
Hilary Beattie in Costa Rica: "Jesus is going to talk to you today, but not by cell phone – please turn it off" Photo: Supplied
I didn’t spend countless hours meditating or work in an ashram, like my seasoned peer Elizabeth Gilbert, but I’d be lying if I said I didn’t burst a few capillaries trying to clear my mind at times. Like when a supremely unhelpful Costa Rican police officer responded to “My good man, may I please have a lift down this unlit road” with “There are taxis parked around the square, they’re unmarked, have a good night”. And after a week without no fresh clothes, I didn’t thank God so much as baggage personnel.
The only time I looked up at the heavens and thought anything other than “Does the sun go in a different direction here?” was at 1am on New Year’s Day, when I thought, “I really hope none of these people throwing water over their balconies, presumably out of tradition, hit me with it as I make my way down the street”. They did, but at no point did I think, “I am cleansed – new year, new me.”
The neat use of various affaires du cœur to end this type of book never fails to make one of my eyebrows disappear so far into my hairline that I all but send up a search party. So you go off to find yourself and then your newly-opened heart conveniently lets someone in, does it? Various nerve endings are stimulated and you ride into the sunset on a cloud of oxytocin, do you? Blergh.
The closest I got to intimacy overseas was when a dude in Mexico City went in for the hug and stuck his tongue in my ear. (We were later told by our hostelier that he was a self-described date rapist.) Actually, perhaps it was a dead heat between him and the Italian man who fell asleep on my shoulder during a six-hour shuttle ride in Cuba. Seen one hairy buttcrack, seen them all, you know?
To fly yet further in the face of everyone’s expectations, despite the inevitable trying times (see: lost baggage, my laughable lack of natural compass, the non-compliance of sloth) my friend and I have remained close. I think we might even be closer than before we left – which, judging by all the questions about whether we got deathly sick of each other (from which I can only infer you all really wanted us to fall out), no one predicted.
If we must, I guess I was struck more broadly by a renewed interest in other people, though I couldn’t decide if it was a genuine increase so much as a sort of tolerance refresher. “Hey, I noticed you were done with your old train of thought; here’s a new one!”
Hilary Beattie in love: As good as it got Photo: Supplied
There was a great relationship between this 20-year-old Canadian girl and her mother, on holiday in Costa Rica together before the former finished her plant science degree and moved to Israel. Jamie guzzled tequila and hucked back the aforementioned Frenchman’s decidedly non-fake weed before (a) telling us all “Don’t tell my mum” in Spanish to preclude her mother’s understanding and (b) passing out in our hostel lobby. Her mother apologised profusely and offered to pay for the table she broke.
That’s my kind of love. Not that it wasn’t incredibly moving when a Nicolas Cage lookalike, who was the driver for the French Justice Minister, showed me many photos of his young paramour in a bikini, because it was. Just in a different way.
After being asked what I had learned overseas for the nth time, I wondered whether it was typical of New Zealanders to dwell so heavily on whether a change of scene taught us some big lessons. Our geographical isolation makes it harder for us to get out into the world as often as we’d like; does it also mean we feel the need to really wring out the personal development towel when we do?
No. Clearly not. We have even less claim to travel-induced soul-searching than we do to Russell Crowe. I think it’s just that trying too hard to link a bunch of anecdotes and observances and conversations, whose common characteristic is quite clearly “I said or saw or thought these things while I was in a different place”, is a bad idea. It diminishes their ability to fit into anything else other than that particular part of your story. You don’t want to forget the stuff that doesn’t make the cut or isn’t followed by a clear lesson.
Wait. Does this mean I should stop trying to form an inflexible overarching narrative out of everything that happens at home as well? Goddamn. I tried so hard not to learn anything here.
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