What I learnt on my grown-up gap year

Earlier this year, quite unexpectedly (and for personal reasons too tedious to share), I was forced to be outside the UK for ‘a while’. At the outset, I had no idea how long my exile might be: maybe weeks, maybe months. To add to the ambiguity, I had no particular place to go, except two already arranged travel writing trips of a week each (in the USA and Greece).

So I decided: why not make a pleasing virtue of necessity? Why not, at the age of 58, do a geriatric version of a gap year, wandering freely about the globe? And that is exactly what I did. I packed my suitcase, headed out, and let whimsy and the weather dictate where I went next. Some days on my odyssey I would wake up, decide to go to a different country, and get on a plane, train or boat that same afternoon.

First I flew from London to Nashville, where I hired a car and drove down the Deep South’s magnificently linear national park, the Natchez Trace, which winds through the drowsy greenery of Tennessee, Alabama and Mississippi – via vast hickory forests, immensely lush riverscapes and sobering slave markets. Two million slaves were forcibly walked down the Trace in the mid 19th century, a fact almost everyone around the Trace wants to forget.

I visited some phenomenal burger and barbecue joints. I got tipsy with hilarious Rhode Islanders running quaint hotels in Linden, Tennessee; I got squiffy with the good PR ladies of Jackson, Ridgeland and Tupelo, Mississippi, where I saw Elvis’s shack of a birthplace, plus his church, school, bathing spot and outhouse.

The US leg of my jaunt finished in New Orleans, the most pleasurable city in the Americas. Until then I’d been worried about what travelling would be like, post-Covid – but the evening I arrived I walked into a shop on my way to a Bourbon Street oyster bar and saw a phenomenally tall sixty-something man buying prosecco in lilac shorts, knee-high black socks and a ‘Don’t blame me, I voted for Trump’ T-shirt, while yanking two impossibly cute rescue dogs to his heels. After that, I relaxed. The world, I decided, was doing OK.

So off I went to see more of it. From New Orleans I flew to Munich, then went on to Izmir in Turkey (ancient Smyrna: totally neglected by visitors; splendid tradition of eating stuffed mussels in the unspoiled old town). A cab took me from there to the agreeable resort of Kusadasi; a week later a ferry took me from Kusadasi to the verdant Greek island of Samos (home to the world’s most disappointing Unesco World Heritage site: the Temple of Hera, literally just two pillars).

A plane carried me from Samos to Athens; a bus took me from Athens to Preveza; then a hire car took me all around north-west Greece: luscious but touristy Parga, yachty little Sivota, the wild, noble, strangely overlooked, soul-enriching beauty of the Zagori mountains.

After zipping around the dizzying pinnacle-top monasteries of Meteora, where the people look up at the monks, and the monks look up only at God, I got another bus from Preveza to Athens, a long cross-country journey which was enlivened by a woman who was so paranoid about Covid that she wore a clear plastic bag over her head the entire trip. I was suffused with anxiety that she would fall asleep, asphyxiate and die. (She didn’t.)

From Athens, at 2 a.m., I flew to Tbilisi, Georgia. Tbilisi, it turns out, is like a steampunk Paris from the 19th century designed by a Shoreditch hipster on really good acid. It is wondrous. They have bars where everyone plays piano outdoors, sings yearning Georgian folk songs, slurps lovely amber wine and eats deliciously hot juicy meat dumplings (khinkali: sprinkle them with white pepper). Then they do it all again.

In Georgia I got drunk next to 10th century monasteries with a new friend, my Megrelian landlord (who rented me his characterful apartment where I would often just sit on the ramshackle Persian balcony and watch the stars or storms over the cathedral). I also befriended a cat, who came to visit on the hot afternoons on my balcony, hoping I would feed him. I fed him. I liked his undemanding yet thoughtful company. We would just sit there for hours, me and the stray Georgian cat, on the sunny balcony. In fact, entire weeks passed like this. There should be a word for the lovely, random animals you befriend while travelling.

Tbilisi is a great place to do not very much – except sit, yawn, drink, snooze and eat the marvellous sour-plum, lamb and tarragon broth called chakapuli. I did go to Gori, where I saw Stalin’s birthplace shack (which was notably similar to Elvis’s birthplace shack back in Tupelo). I also checked out Stalin’s secret underground printing lair in out in the suburbs, where I saw his to-do list.

Next I went to Armenia. I rented a car in Yerevan and drove all around the country – to the great surprise of the car rental guy in Yerevan airport. I don’t think many people do this. I downed vodka with Russians in Gnishik; I ate brilliant mushrooms with herbs and lemon in temperate-rainforesty Dilijan; I had luscious lake-fish next to eerie Lake Sevan; I bought an obsidian and deer-jaw dagger fashioned by artisanal knife-maker Armen Harutyunyan, who sells his wares next to the 12th century Silk Road Orbelian Caravanserai, high up on the Caucasus plateau.

To be honest, much of urban Armenia is hideous – but the people are witty, pretty and generous, Yerevan looks amazing at night, they have the oldest wine in the world, and the Caucasus mountains get grander and grander the higher you go. There are actual leopards up there. And bears.

Sometime in Armenia I realised my travels might be ending, as things back home were changing. So I tied up my odyssey by zipping back to Georgia, getting a plane to Istanbul, then flying on to Montenegro because I’d heard it was nice and it seemed a good place to end. It is indeed nice. The coast is as pleasing as everyone says, but the interior is even better and largely tourist-free. By my hilltop chalet near Lake Skadar I drank illegal moonshine with the owner who was an ex-soldier and told me about the terrible days he spent shelling Sarajevo, and as he finished his story he looked wistfully at the moon and said: ‘You know, Yugoslavia was the most beautiful country on earth.’

That’s probably an exaggeration, but you can see why a resident of Montenegro might praise the natural beauty. The day I took this next photo – from the terrace of my £20-a-night chalet – I walked down to that river and swam in the warm water and I was the only person there for an hour. I saw terns and ospreys. The sun glittered on the ripples and the lilies. Later on I ate an eel.

After Montenegro, I went home – three months after leaving. So what has it taught me, my grown-up quarter-of-a-gap-year? Doing the things an 18-year-old might do, but with the wisdom (I hope) and weariness (sometimes) of a 58-year-old?

What I learnt is that the world is much freer and more open than we think, in these post-Covid times. That people are nice everywhere (it's good to be reminded). That doing what I did doesn't break the bank (£7,000 for three months – it sounds a lot, but I'm not sure I'd have spent less in London). I also learnt that, to get the most from the endeavour, you have to travel alone. Yes, alone. Of course that can sometimes seem lonely and isolating. But if you are alone you go out and meet people – and people mean experiences, and experiences are the treasure you store in heaven.