Making friends while travelling

When you are a traveller, being on the road you say Goodbye a lot. You get used to it. You make these amazing connections; you break down the social barriers of ‘normal life’ and learn to relish in the company of those new souls that you met just hours ago. It really brings to light just how similar we are as a species.

A quote from Mark Twain, to me, could not be truer. “Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one’s lifetime.”

You become comfortable living in conditions that you might never have dreamed of living in, participating in activities you only thought you would see in photo’s or on the television. But that is the beauty of getting out in the World, seeing and feeling something that is so Alien to you. I have lived in many hostels whilst moving around this Earth, you meet people that become kin. You eat, play, laugh and cry together, and then you say Goodbye. Normally it is only in hindsight how much those moments meant to you, it is so rare that in the moment, collectively, you all know just how special that moment in time is.

I spent a couple of months in a working hostel in Blenheim, which is situated in the North of New Zealand’s South Island. I had an abhorrent job working in a muscle factory. The whole place smelled of fish and that awful smell seeped into your pores; you could not get away from it. Stood at a conveyer belt for hours on end, sorting the broken muscles and throwing them to the bin as they speed past you. Every morning I would be up at 4:15, drink a coffee and then drive to the factory ready to start at 5am. I didn’t mind the early mornings so much, as we were always finished by 2pm. This meant I could get back to the hostel and shower early — before all the hot water for the day had been used up.
However, this isn’t a tale of my muscle factory exploits. This is a love story, about a group of likeminded people from all over the World. Ok, so we all had different expectations, different backgrounds and different aspirations, but once you start to live with a group of people, those walls come down very quickly. In the evenings we would break out guitars and drums and sing and laugh together. Some people would be drinking, others would be smoking. But there was no judgement, no bad feeling. We were a group of vagrants out to change the World in our own unique ways. Weekends would be different, wilder, more boisterous, louder!
The owner of the hostel had bought a ping pong table and a giant speaker that connected to our phones via Bluetooth; we partied hard! Travelers from other hostels in the area would sometimes sneak in to join our party. There were drinking games — Beer pong was a favourite of mine and Katie Perry’s Teenage dreams blasting through that speaker. It wasn’t my song of choice, but these days I can’t hear it without being transported back in time to those moments. It was nothing but love.

Do not let me lead you to believe that what was happening here was unique, I understand, and you should too, that when we really listen to each other, we are so very similar. These types of party and good times happen everywhere. However this was the only time in my life where collectively, we were so aware that we had something special, that it would end soon, and we would all remember it forever.
Maybe that’s why we partied hard, lived hard and loved hard. It was crazy, but in the best way. Our collective consciousness knew it would end, but none of us wanted it to. This was the first time on my travels that saying Goodbye was so hard. It hurt.

In these situations, it’s not really a ‘See you later’, or ‘Lets meet down the road’ moment that life sometimes allows us. We knew that this time would never, ever come again. This same group of people, in the same mind frame, with the same intentions back in the same room. Even if some of us were lucky enough to meet up again, it just wouldn’t be the same.

I wrote this following poem in honour of that group. The sentiment may not be the same for you while reading it, in fact I know it won’t, but I hope you can connect to it on some level.

As we again say Goodbye
Each of us hoping we can hold onto this life we knew.
Deep down we know it’s gone.

That time was a fire.
It was intense, but it had to burn out.

We will all claim that we can get it back.
We won’t.

It’s unlikely
But maybe we can all be in the same room again one day.
It won’t be the same though.
We’ll be older.
Time is cruel to us like that.

If only we could all realize when then these moments are happening for us. Hindsight, the mistress we occasion ourselves with.