As soon as I had finished reading English at Cambridge, I knew I wanted to do something different. I yearned for travel, for new experiences, for the sun, for adventure, diversity and colour, which were so at odds with the sombre green, grey and white I had got used to. My fellow students all laughed at me – they preferred the safety of London to the experiences the world had to offer. So while they scoured the pages of The Guardian and The Observer to put their various degrees to use, I hunted for a journey – for the road less travelled, and for inspiration for my first book.
Romantic as it may seem, taking off without a destination in mind, and just a few possessions stuffed into a haversack is not as easy as it sounds. Another hindrance was that funds were limited, especially after University. I had received a decent camera, a Nikon, for my birthday the year before, and through a friend of mine, I managed to get a job as a photographer on a cruise ship that was headed for the Mediterranean.
When I wasn’t busy taking snapshots of the elderly couples on board, I was out exploring the cities the ship put in at. I wondered the labyrinthine roads of the medinas in Morocco, stopping at each souk to soak up the atmosphere of the place – the shifty merchants, their harried customers desperately haggling over prices, and the carefree tourists wondering around, lost. I couldn’t resist tasting the ubiquitous Chicken Tagine – served steaming in a conical earthenware pan, the succulent chicken having been alive only a few hours before.
When the ship put in at Argos in Greece, I spent the best part of half a day wondering around the hills behind it which were carpeted in little red and yellow flowers, feeling as though I had fallen straight into an impressionist painting. I drank retsina and ate black olives by the bucket for a pittance at a Greek tavern, enchanted by the shimmering path the moonlight made over the Aegean Sea.
Naples and Capri followed, where I gorged myself on the best pizza and pasta I have ever tasted; the pizza thin and simple, the pasta served simply with a dash of pesto, or with tomato, basil and the most delicately flavoured buffalo mozzarella imaginable. I enjoyed many a steaming bowlful of bouillabaisse when we called in at Marseilles, all the while filling my voluminous leather-bound journal with entry after entry of what I had seen and done, hoping it would all come in useful when I finally sat down and put pen to paper to write my first book, which was a childhood ambition I had always dreamed of achieving.
I eagerly snapped pictures of everything – the scenery, the architecture, and the locals – sometimes even the food I ate. I only stopped my wonderings to buy the odd trinket whenever I had saved enough from the tips I got from the people I photographed. Over time I amassed quite a hoard of keepsakes – an engraved silver ring set with a black stone from Morocco, sold to me by a merchant who looked like something out of the Bible, a tiny carved ivory mask from a flea market in Marseilles, and perhaps most interesting, a ceramic figurine of a hunchback from Naples. The shifty middle-aged Italian I bought it from said that the gobbo, as it is called, was supposed to bring me luck, as well as ward off the evil eye. When we put in at Alexandria, in Egypt, I was lucky enough to come across a minuscule turquoise scarab beetle on the black market, most likely pilfered from an ancient tomb. As long as it caught my eye, was light and fit in my now well-worn haversack, I would buy it on the spot.
Looking back on it now, I must admit that although it was an exhausting period in my young life, it was one where I learned a lot, aside from being great fun. My only slight regret is that since I had to juggle work and travel, I didn’t get to see and taste as much of the cities I visited as I would have liked to. However, work also provided a contrast to what I always loved doing – seeing different places – without which life would have become quite boring, since I had no travel partner and was determined to go it alone.
I did make quite a few friends and acquaintances on my travels, some of whom I am still in contact with. However the reason I didn’t want anything more serious, or that required more commitment, was that I didn’t want to settle in a single place for too long – I knew that for some reason, my life would go off at a tangent, and I could wave goodbye to my grand plans of seeing the world. My gut instinct turned out to be dead right, up to a certain extent. In hindsight, if I hadn’t gone with the flow and stuck rigidly to my plans as originally intended, who knows where I would have ended up instead…
Shelving my original plans and globetrotting aspirations came about quite unexpectedly. My mother had just got the hang of using email, and when I had told her that we would be calling in at Malta for a few days, she insisted that I should visit my aunt – her sister, who had married a Gozitan. In her characteristic scatter-brained way, she wrote me a three-page long email telling me what a support my aunt had been to her while she was pregnant with me, until she had gone on holiday once and never come back. It had been a long time since any of us had seen her, and although a letter here and there would find its way up to our house in Billericay, I only vaguely remembered her as a lively, smiling woman with long fair hair and freckles.
In short, I was cornered. I already knew a bit about Malta and the sights I could see, and had already made plans to see Mdina, explore Valletta and maybe fit in a trip to a Neolithic temple or two if I had enough time to spare. I had never even considered crossing over to Gozo, but it looked like paying a visit to the place was now inevitable. I had managed to get a few days off from my job, and decided that I would visit during the first day we were moored at the Grand Harbour after a quick peek at Valletta, which was after all on my doorstep. I would then spend the night at my aunt’s, who I had phoned a few days before.
After a few minutes of greeting me, being surprised I was visiting, and asking for news of my mother and father, she said she could meet me at the market at the foot of the hill leading up to the Citadel, and she would take me to their house in Marsalforn for lunch. I fasted accordingly, because I had found out from my mother’s email that it was likely my aunt would have been hard at work preparing a banquet for my arrival. I had already made up my mind that I would leave after a quick bus tour around Gozo, which I had heard was quite picturesque. I would then catch the ferry back to Malta and try to see as much of it as I could before it was time to get back to the ship. As it turned out, I never got past the middle stages of my plan.
