Cycling to India
When I was 11, during a junior school leavers' assembly in front of all the mums and dads, my headmistress asked my class what they wanted to do when they left school. Footballer, doctor, film star, politician, came the replies. My answer? "I want to cycle round the world and raise money for charity." A big "ahhhhh" resounded around the school hall. "So sweet."
Little did they know that 20 years later I would be setting off on a 9,000-mile journey to India. On my own. Carrying everything I needed on my steel-framed bicycle, affectionately known as "Shirley".
I would like to say it was planned to the nth degree and that everything ran like clockwork. In reality, I was arrested twice, chased by wild dogs, beaten (and wined and dined) by the mafia, attacked by bandits …
On my last day I was cycling through the Bandipur wildlife park in southern India. My flowery bike wasn't great camouflage and startled a number of elephants as I passed. They decided to charge.
The advice is "if an elephant charges you, stand your ground, and bow your head to show respect". What tosh! With 30 tonnes of muscle and bone crashing towards me, destroying small trees and making the ground vibrate under my feet, there was no way I was standing firm. I dropped my bike into third gear and floored it.
Another time I ran out of food and water in the desert and was woken one morning to find maggots in my hair and beard.
Yet the greatest memories are of so many wonderful people I met in every country, who invited me into their homes to celebrate local festivals, play music, dance, sing, eat, and share each other's cultures, beliefs, history and way of life.
After six months' cycling, I rolled into Chembakolli, a tiny village, my final destination. It was my 31st birthday – 20 years since I had first dreamed up the idea. I was greeted by a carnival of people playing drums, singing, cheering, and waving banners saying "Happy birthday". All I could do was crouch down and cry tears of joy. I'd cycled 9,000 miles from England to India. I'd lived my dream.
Conservation protest camp in Tasmania
I was on a year out in Australia, and after a few months in the red centre I decided to go to Tasmania to escape the heat, and to see big trees. The island is home to a vast forest of Eucalyptus regnans, the largest flowering plants in the world.
Within a few days of arriving I heard word of protest activity in the Upper Florentine Valley, a pristine corner of virgin forest under threat from various logging projects.
I decided to hitch there, and for the last part of the journey I rode with TK, a Canadian biologist who had been living at the Florentine camp for two years. He gave me a brief history of the area as we entered the forest. These Eucalyptus regnans, at 60m tall, may not be the biggest trees in the world – one California redwood is 98m, for example – but never, TK assured me, would I feel as dwarfed by nature as when among the giants of the Florentine Valley.
The protest has been going on since 2006, when Forestry Tasmania began extending the road into the forest. Protesters live in the trees so that they won't be cut down, though there has been much confrontation and some arrests. "Don't ever go in there," TK said as we passed a lonely, redbrick pub. "If they think you look like one of us – a week or so at the camp should do it – they'll kick the shit out of you."
The local climate is incredibly wet, adding a ghostly white cover to the giant trees. Rain-soaked banners high up in the branches – "Toot for Tassy's Forests", "Still Wild, Still Threatened" – were visible from the roadside. But no amount of neck-craning can quantify the trees' size.
For an eco-friendly backpacker, the Florentine camp provided a cheap and exciting alternative to a volunteer project. Bring food donations, good conversation and a useful pair of hands and the vast Tasmanian wilderness is yours to explore. Camp life was centred on communal meals, firewood runs, clean-ups and lookout reports. Each night, wet hair and cloth steamed by a campfire under a blue tarpaulin. Plates of food were passed around – curried baked beans topped with fresh parsley.
A camp veteran of six months told me how she was humbled by a spectacular light display from the aurora australis. Another veteran had a doctorate in zoology, and used the camp as a base for a statistical project on the Tasmanian devil population. I spent a couple of days on the west coast's Bay of Fires – a wild, windswept clash of white-sand beaches, turquoise water, brooding skies and red-stained granite rocks.
As well as being a good place to become actively involved in forest conservation, the camp was where people shared travellers' tips – a valuable resource that is often ignored in favour of a guidebook.
A year in Saudi Arabia
Yearnings for the bamboo forests of China, the ski slopes of Switzerland and the karaoke booths of Japan – highlights of my previous gap years – don't surprise me, but I never imagined the minarets of Saudi Arabia would call me back.
It is two years since I returned from Jeddah, but when I close my eyes on a grey English day I'm walking the city's ancient streets again, seeking out Bukhari chicken or Egyptian flat bread.
Money was my motivation for going to a country famous for exporting oil and terrorism; it has some of the best paid English teaching jobs in the world, and I managed to save £8,500 in just six months working at a boys' school there. I chose my new home city carefully. As the gateway to Mecca, through which the Muslim world passes on the hajj, the port of Jeddah is Saudi Arabia's most cosmopolitan and liberal city.
My new Saudi friends warned me against even visiting the capital Riyadh, home of Wahhabism. In Jeddah I knew Saudis, as well as western women, who walked the streets unaccompanied by a man and with their heads uncovered, something they could never do in Riyadh.
Jeddah also boasts some of the world's best coral reefs. Diving on the Saudi side of the Red Sea offers the same underwater riches as the Egyptian Sinai, but without the crowds.
On the downside, I didn't speak to a woman for my first two months there, but I eventually found a private beach where the sexes could mix.
My first lesson on a jetski was fleeing the coastguard. A Palestinian girl had taken me for a ride when we saw their ship approaching. For fear of being caught together we hid in a cove. Women are barred from driving any kind of motorised vehicles so I had to take the controls and when they passed we sped out of the cove and back to the beach James-Bond style.
Bizarre experiences inform my anecdotes about Saudi Arabia – gate-crashing a wedding and ending up on stage in front of 2,000 guests, my Saudi girlfriend's mother catching us at my apartment together … But what I long for is visiting the crumbling, centuries-old buildings of Old Jeddah, smoking shisha in coffeshops and sipping sweet Adeni tea with a friend.
The kingdom is a harsh place, but the people who live there are the most hospitable I've ever met. I went for the riyals but came back richer in so many other ways.
Finding my own volunteer work and inspiration in Asia
In October 2008 two friends and I started our gap year in Thailand. We began in Bangkok, where we shopped non-stop on Khao San Road, then moved to Koh Samui to learn Muay Thai kickboxing, and up to Pai for yoga and massage courses. We went across to Laos for cooking lessons, and it was here that I went into a school and helped with English lessons. I'd always been put off volunteering by the idea of having to pay a company to work for nothing, but this was free.
We moved onto Vietnam, and back to marathon shopping, but I just wasn't feeling it. I'd got a taste for doing something "better" and I wanted to do more of it. So I left my mates and went ahead to Cambodia.
The day I arrived I found an HIV orphanage called House of Family, where I volunteered. I asked the doctor what happened to all the other orphans – there were only 30 kids at the orphanage but the prevalence of HIV/AIDS in Cambodia is among the highest in Asia. She explained that they were living at the rubbish dumps, so that is where I went.
I discovered children eating dirt, sleeping on dirt and walking barefoot on burning toxic waste. It was inhumane and unacceptable. So I came back to England, borrowed a video camera, raised £1,000 on Facebook and returned two weeks later to do the first Small Steps project. I gave wellington boots, clothes aid, food and water to the children. Then I came home, edited the film, screened it and got an amazing reaction from the public. I registered Small Steps as a charity and intend to repeat the project – called Around The World in 80 Dumps – on inhabited dumps around the world, to create awareness and help people. I am now the director of Small Steps, the next project is in Nicaragua.
Hitchhiking to Israel
After spending 32 tedious hours on a coach last summer, I was considering giving up overlanding. But as I sat in front of the easyJet website this summer I couldn't quite bring myself to double the size of my carbon footprint for the year with just one click. Instead, I decided I'd rely on my thumb and the kindness of strangers and take a risk on that most controversial form of transport, particularly for women: the hitchhike.
A friend would accompany me as far as Zagreb, then I'd go on alone to Israel, through Turkey, Syria and Jordan. Three hours after posting a request on the website Gumtree (gumtree.com) we had a lift from Hounslow East in London to Mannheim in southern Germany. A week and three lifts later, we were couchsurfing (couchsurfing.org) in Berlin.
We became pros at working service stations, asking every car that pulled in whether they had space for two travellers: "You go?" … point at map, smile, get in. There were BMWs, a limousine and a Slovenian rocking out to Pink Floyd.
In some cars, especially after a night spent camping just off the hard-shoulder, my head would droop and 12 hours later I'd wake to realise I'd missed an entire country (sorry Slovakia, Bulgaria and northern Israel), but the further east I went, the more unfamiliar the scenery became and the more often my eyes would stay open.
Even the worst experience could turn into a high point. We were dropped just north of Munich in the rain as it was getting dark, and were stuck for two hours, soaking wet, our spirits low.
A couple in a people-wagon finally saved the day. They planned to drop us at a service station where we could hitch a lift into Austria. We talked and joked about small things – the scenery, the baptism that they'd been to. I told them about my year as a parish administrator and the reverence that the baptism register commanded. By the end of that conversation they had decided I was a girl with an unambiguous calling who had put faith on hold to struggle against climate change. It turned out the man was a Protestant priest, and rather than drop us at a service station to pitch our tent in the rain, they offered us a night in their spare flat in the Bavarian mountains – hot water, fresh towels, beds all to ourselves, and for free – bliss.
I spent over a month in the Middle East and saw sights that the guidebooks are yet to discover. Relying on the famed Syrian kindness, I was taken in, fed and cared for by a family for four days. They then drove me most of the three hours to Mar Musa monastery, enjoyed by few travellers.
In Israel I lost myself in the carefree parties of Tel Aviv, making friends with kids who'd just finished military service ("Who cares about peace? We just want peace of mind"). The next day I went to Jerusalem to yell in protest with the activists in the West Bank. I was given access to both worlds, the only condition that I would listen to the stories that they told about the other side.
And it was this necessity to listen that made my decision to hitchhike so much more than just a cheap way to travel. Each was an invitation to get close to someone.
Hitchhiking is the start of a story where anything might happen. You escape the check-in queue and have faith in the moment, in people and yourself. You begin a story with each person you meet. Living another person's life, if only for one journey, will teach you more about their culture than any guidebook.
Working on a farm in Scotland
For many of my generation, the gap year between school and university was spent volunteering in orphanages or sunning on an Aussie beach. Being pretentious but poor I decided instead that my fate lay on a Scottish island. I had been to Mull on holiday and figured I would spend my days wandering the beach, reading epic novels and having flings with strapping farmers.
I was a troubled teenager, desperate to escape the woes of life in a remote Kentish village, terrifyingly clueless about my career path.
When I told her my plans, my mother, somewhat spitefully, said, "How on earth are you going to do that?", which galvanized me into asking the tourist office if there were any friendly farmers. Fortune had it that I managed to speak to a girl called Claire, a conversation that changed my life. Claire knew of just the man, a farmer in the south of Mull who periodically "took in" young folk like me to help out on his 22,000 acres. Our brief phone call (he had an impossibly posh accent) went something like this:
"Have you ever worked on a farm?"
"Erm, nope."
"Know anything about farming?"
"Nope"
"Are you fit?"
"Not particularly"
"I like your chutzpah. I'll pay your coach fare. If we like you, you can stay."
I stepped off the ferry in cropped, dyed red hair, round glasses, ripped jeans and Dr. Marten boots, prompting the farmer to squint at me in disbelief and ask if I was a punk.
Lochbuie – where I lived – is a 17-house village, beautiful and appealing to holidaying wildlife lovers, archaeologists and photographers. Sites include the uninhabited 15th-century Moy Castle and the impressive (inhabited) 18th-century Lochbuie House, overlooking the loch. Mull remains one of the most beautiful, unspoilt places in the UK. I returned recently and nothing had changed.
I hated it for the first few weeks. But the farmer and his wife persevered through my astonishing ignorance about the world and I went from self-obsessed teenager who'd never done a day's work in her life (bar the sort that you could give up if you didn't like it) to a useful (ish) member of the community.
I emerged at the end of the experience fitter, fatter, better-read and able to sleep.
Hazel Davis, 33, copywriter, Huddersfield
Family gap year
We lived in Cornwall in a beautiful barn conversion with stunning valley views and only a short drive to the glorious Atlantic coast: my wife Nicki, with a beauticians business in Wadebridge, 15-year-old Michael, addicted to Xbox games, Emmaline, 13 going on 19, and me, John, full-time artist.
Wanting to see the world had been nagging at me for years. In the end we decided to just do it. The kids could be schooled as we travelled and the experiences they'd get would be possibly life-changing – hell, we might even find somewhere better to live than Cornwall.
Having sold everything to fund the trip we had just three weeks to prepare, decide where to go and buy our round-the-world tickets: we opted for Japan, south-east Asia, Australia, New Zealand, a stop in the Cook islands and finally the United States. The furthest we'd ever been prior to this was Bulgaria.
We flew to Tokyo the day after Boxing Day, and stayed with a family in rural Japan, eating sushi with them each day and trying to communicate with gesticulations and props – sake seemed to help the conversations somewhat. Dressed in traditional kimono and samurai we visited Buddhist and Shinto temples on New Year's Day.
We went on to learn to dive in Thailand, helped out at a charitable school in Cambodia, camped in the Australian outback and skied in August in New Zealand. But constantly moving on every few days can be exhausting, especially for kids, so sometimes we'd just slob and watch DVDs in a rented apartment. The experiences have been so many and varied, and has been highly rewarding for the whole family. We'll have plenty of stories to "entertain" our friends and relatives at Christmas when we return in December.
