Only successes

[Erik_G]

Is it so the avery trip is a success?
And trip traveller/adventurec has an fantastic experience ?


Or is it so that there are others.
That found out that it was a misstake to start that long trip/adventure

But they do not publish their story.

[*Touring Ted*]

Every big trip will change you. I think always for the best.

But once your eyes have been opened they can never be closed.

Travel gives you the gift of perspective. But takes away the bliss of ignorance.

[duibhceK]

Originally Posted by *Touring Ted*

Every big trip will change you. I think always for the best.

This!


Also, success depends on how you define it. On our last big trip we totally failed at our plan of riding the Pamir and somehow ended up at Nordkapp. Depending on your point of view that could definitely be called a failure. But if you're travelling for the experience rather than the destination that doesn't matter so much. And we definitely did have a very rich experience on that trip.

[grumpy geezer]

MY goal was Tierra del Fuego, stopped at Southern Bolivia--a failure. Returned to Lima, worked as an illegal alien for one and a half years--unexpected success. Sometimes a loss can be a gain.

[shu...]

My trip in Peru was a fabulous success.

I rode through some amazing places......





saw things I never see at home.....





I also broke my leg, and was misdiagnosed at a local hospital with a sprained ankle. And it did take me a week on crutches, taxis and buses to finally get on an airplane home. And it was painful at times. And I did go through surgery....



................and it did take several months of hard work to get my leg working right again.

Certainly not a failed trip. It wasn't all fun, but it was definitely challenging in many ways. I did perservere through it all and came out feeling competent and ready to go again.

...............shu

[Rapax]

I got known better to the stranger living still inside me.

Sometimes it was pure joy, sometimes I got amazed and sometime it challenged me.

To experience this is a success.

[Alanymarce]

I guess it's likely that those for whom a trip was a "failure" in their own eyes would indeed not publicise this much.

However, as a calibration, on our "big trips" I recall only one pair of travellers who were less than really happy, and even they (lots of problems) would have described their trip as successful. On shorter trips we have less interaction, of obvious reasons, however I don't recall anyone who expressed disappointment.

[duibhceK]

I know one guy who had been traveling for a long time and had shipped to South America to continue his trip. But at some point he wasn't feeling it anymore and simply cut the trip short and returned home.


I highly doubt he would call the trip a "failure" though.

[Erik_G]

Failure was a wrong word to use.


It was not failing to reach the end that I had in mind.

But if some travelers find out that "this is not for me"
Other might like. I gave it a try. But did not enjoy.
So I do something else instead......

[eurasiaoverland]

If you started travelling and decided it was not your thing, you're probably not going to be present on a travel-themed forum afterwards, so I doubt you'll get a first-hand answer from such a person.

What about people who made a big trip, enjoyed it, but then settled down to a mundane life and never did more than short trips of a few weeks? Unless complicated by factors out of their control (e.g. health) after travelling once, it seems they decided that other things (e.g. family, career) are more important than sticking on the road.

As someone who plans to spend the rest of his life travelling in preference to all else (though I'm currently in a career to fund that), I could look at such people (almost certainly a majority), and say that in the long term, 'it wasn't their thing'. But I don't think this is the sort of person you are looking for.

Interesting topic to discuss, but I think you may be looking for a niche person who won't be here. What interests you to ask? Are you on the fence about committing to a long trip, or just raising an interesting topic?

EO

[sushi2831]

Hello

Every trip has ups and downs.
It's different for everybody.

A trip ends when you have reached your time limit or your destination or the money runs out so many other reasons.

If at the end you look at it as a failure is up to you.

A possebility for failure is if someone has never travelled for more than 2-4 weeks and then goes on a RTW with giving up everything at home and then realyse that this insn't his thing and goes home with a bad taste.

If someone doesn't like travelling, he will not do it for 6 month or a year or more.

Finacially every of my trips was a failure, I started with a nice bankaccount and at the end it was gone.


sushi

[backofbeyond]

Originally Posted by Erik_G

Failure was a wrong word to use.


It was not failing to reach the end that I had in mind.

But if some travelers find out that "this is not for me"
Other might like. I gave it a try. But did not enjoy.
So I do something else instead......

I have read a few reports where the people concerned were unusually honest and admitted they gave up because of psychological issues; they found the various stresses of life on the road too difficult to bear. But I agree they're rare. Most of the time we're fed an endless diet of rose tinted, soft focus and eternal sunshine stories about obscure but fascinating landscapes, quaint but bizarre inhabitants and obstacles overcome with a positive attitude. I've written enough of them myself to know how the story goes.

They're all Voyage and Return tales - number four on the 'there's only seven plots' list I have in front of me (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Seven_Basic_Plots ) Failure doesn't fit into that narrative; it's number six on the list - tragedy, and who wants to write that about themselves. I've tried writing a story along those lines as well and, believe me, nobody wants to read it. In fact the usual reaction is to say you need to get professional help As the saying goes 'laugh and the world laughs with you, cry and you cry alone'.

Usually when you go to the extent of upsetting your routine to the point of abandoning it the reason is somewhere on the spectrum between 'finding yourself' and 'losing yourself'. I've set off on trips with each of those as the driving force and 'losing myself' has never worked terribly well. You can run away from everything other than your troubles and when your mind is actually focussed on something else the bumps in the road that come with travel can seem more like mountains than molehills. No wonder people give up.

The psychology of travel does seem to be a bit of a desert with very little growing in it. For example there's sections here for all sorts of mundane stuff but discussing what underpins it all - the reasons, motivations, fears etc for travel - is pretty much ignored. At times it all feels a little like some of the high pressure sales conferences I've been to over the years where people are whipped up into a collective frenzy to achieve success but failure is ostracised into your own personal inadequacy. I've got a Zoom meeting shortly that will use some of those techniques - welcome to the warm fuzz of achievement vs stand in the corner of your own failure (not sales, my wife does Slimming World )

Maybe we should have some more stories of trips that didn't go well - not 'Overcoming the Monster' ones (No 1 on the seven stories list) but why I gave up through boredom, fear, anxiety etc. Anyone want to kick it off?

[Surfy]

Originally Posted by eurasiaoverland

If you started travelling and decided it was not your thing, you're probably not going to be present on a travel-themed forum afterwards, so I doubt you'll get a first-hand answer from such a person.

In my eyes this above is a success story. Some one has realiced, that his "dream" is not his dream anymore today.

We dream a lot about stuff who has his own timeframe. Sometimes we are too late with living it. Or we did change.

We dont prove daily / monthly if our list of dreams is still in order.

Example: If we freshly seperated from a partner, to travel solo may be a dream. 3 Years later you maybe feel more comfortable to start with a new partner in crime. How often do we analyze our dreams, if they are still the same dream?

Surfy

[Jay_Benson]

Originally Posted by backofbeyond

Maybe we should have some more stories of trips that didn't go well - not 'Overcoming the Monster' ones (No 1 on the seven stories list) but why I gave up through boredom, fear, anxiety etc. Anyone want to kick it off?

Go on then, I’ll kick it off - a little late given BoB’s post was 7 months ago!

In about 1995 I was stuck in a job that could make me redundant at some point in the near future so I decided that I had to do something to give me options other than find a dead end job somewhere. I had read Jupiter’s Travels and fancied he idea of a long motorcycle trip. I put in place a list of thing I would have to do to make it work so things like ensuring I could work abroad - I searched out Teaching English as a Foreign Language courses, I got some qualifications through work I could travel with and then I did a dry run to Morocco to see how it was going to go.

I realised after about a week when I had got to southern Spain that actually this wasn’t going to work - I wasn’t ready for it. Now I realise that this was the first few weeks blues starting to kick in - I know that I need to get through that to get into the journey. Anyway, to cut to the chase i phoned home “to tell the football scores” - pre internet days - and the excuse to come back was presented to me, my Mum needed someone to look after her for a few days, and I took it even though my brother was lined up to do it. I turned around and came home. In short I was lonely, and wasn’t too comfortable to be exclusively in my own company.

I then proceeded to go for plan B which was to get another degree and drive my career forward - which I did and, in general, I don’t regret. Now I know that I need to do the test trip again, possibly to Morocco, possibly to Norway to see the northern lights but mainly to test me over a few of weeks to see if I could see a way through the initial blues. I have changed as a person over the intervening years and I suspect I am in a better state of mind than I was then to be able to accomplish such a trip - partly because I am more confident in myself and will talk to strangers, but mainly because the trip I want to do has a number of functions rather than just riding a bike somewhere new - it has purposes.

[backofbeyond]

That's the problem with this part of the HUBB, you have to be really bored to visit it! So a reply in a month is probably pretty good going.

I've certainly got a lot of enjoyment out of the 'overland' trips I've done - not just bikes, but cars, vans, trains, backpacking and even, I suppose, long distance running. They've had a significant role in opening up my view of the world and shaping my personality. I've become become more self reliant, more open, more flexible and more aware of what's important and what's not. To some extent I'm always kicking around ideas for what I want to do next, even if some of them are so impractical as to be non starters. But ...

There's more to life than travel. Back when I first started I wanted to go because it was all new. I'd never been to these places, experienced different cultures, even (and anyone from the UK will probably identify with this) known 'decent' weather. So it was all wide eyed and first time. That, to be honest, doesn't last long. So if you keep travelling there has to be something deeper. Travel has to become self justifying. It has to take its place in the other things you (I) find important - work, lifestyle, relationships, family, self fulfilment, self development, health etc (those are not in any particular order). What it isn't is a substitute for any of them.

Any of those can throw up times of stress and dissatisfaction, and frequently do in my experience. Often the root causes may not be in your control - redundancy, relationship breakdown, illness (I've had all three of those + a few others), and I've felt the desire to use travel to recover some sort of mastery of my circumstances - 'gonna ride my bike around the world, taking jobs and women as I need them ... no ties ... no responsibilities' (from a 70's Ogri cartoon dealing with the issue).

The few times I've actually used travel as an escape have been a disaster. One, in the mid 70's, where I 'ran away' from a relationship breakdown was one of the most miserable times I can remember. You think you're leaving the issue behind but it just sits on the handlebars staring you in the face, and, as you end up thousands of miles away, there's no way of dealing with it. You end up stressed from the problems the journey itself throws up but the part of you that should be concentrating on that is preoccupied with whatever it was that drove you away in the first place. I came very close to dying - twice - on that trip as I just didn't care. It was only the intervention of strangers that rescued me.

For years now I've noticed a philosophical element creeping in to whatever travel plans I hatch. I find myself more interested in why I'm doing something rather than just what I'm doing. So if I go off somewhere and don't enjoy it there's a part of me that finds that interesting as well. At the moment I'm reading Paul Theroux's book Last Train to Zona Verde, in which he travels through southern Africa and wonders whether he's up to it any more. The enjoyment factor, the 'it's a challenge and I'll find out about me' element seems to be missing. It's all become hard work, with excitement soon morphing into stress and dissatisfaction. Under those circumstances depression is just round the corner. Depressed and thousands of miles from home is not a good place to be. I certainly learnt that from my 70's trip.