‘Is there ever a holiday so heavenly that one is not counting down the days?’ a friend texted me last summer, homesick in the Loire valley. Another French friend messaged me last week from Montreal on day five of a holiday which, she was now regretting, she’d booked to last for nine days. She too was counting down. Having recently returned from a fortnight in Cambodia with four extra days in Hanoi tacked on at the end, I counted down in sympathy. Those final four days, from Saturday morning till her flight back home on Tuesday night, seemed to drag on for ever, over a desolate weekend – and I wasn’t even there in the characterless Airbnb flat among the skyscrapers and crack addicts.
‘I’m longing to see that tray of food in the plane,’ she texted. ‘The plastic tray I’d usually despise takes on a glow of light.’ With its refrigerated bread roll and rock-hard butter-pat, that tray symbolised the homeward journey.
For those of us of a home-loving persuasion, I don’t think there are any foreign holidays when we’re not secretly counting down. However beautiful the castles, delicious the breakfast pastries and cloudless the sky, by day four we’re secretly working out how many days there are still to go and being grateful that we’re 24 hours further on than we were this time yesterday. After my return from South-East Asia, it was pure schadenfreude to watch the BBC’s new vapid eight-parter Two Weeks in August, in which a group of self-obsessed millennials on a villa holiday in Greece neglect their children and crash their lives in search of self-fulfilment over a very long fortnight.
Every day spent abroad seems to go on for a very long time. All the activities of home life that magically soak up the hours – working, running a household, walking the dog, gardening, throwing away the junk mail and so on – are no longer there to prop you up. Each day, you must create from scratch 16 waking hours of holiday pleasure. It wears you down, especially once you’ve ‘done’ the main museum, cathedral and famous view by the end of the first day, and sampled the local café, taverna, trattoria or street-food.
Why do we book foreign holidays that go on for too long? I think we fall for three fallacies. First, we think that because a place is far away, we must stay there for a proportionately long time: a minimum of five days if it’s a two-hour flight across Europe, nine days if it’s an eight-hour flight across the Atlantic, three weeks if it’s a ten-hour flight to Asia and six weeks if it’s a 30-hour flight to the Antipodes.
This ‘holiday length in proportion to flight length’ theory is misguided. Just because a flight lasts a few hours longer does not mean that you need to spend days longer at the destination in proportion. You wouldn’t say: ‘I’m only doing the five-hour return journey to Stratford-upon-Avon if the Shakespeare play is five days long.’ It’s quality not quantity that we should travel for.
Second fallacy: that if a journey is expensive, we’ll get better value for the money spent on the flight if we stay at the destination for longer. But the question we should be asking is: ‘Will the pleasure I get from the whole holiday be worth the total amount I spend on it?’ And you’ll be spending quite a lot more over those extra days tacked on at the end, during which you’ll continue to haemorrhage money on hotels, restaurants, tips, drinks and entry fees.
Third fallacy: that you’ll need ‘well over a week’ to ‘recover from the journey’ and ‘immerse yourself’ in the culture of the place, in order fully to understand it and get a feel for the people and their history. In truth, you’ll recover from the journey in a couple of hours, and you’re not going to understand a foreign country unless you live there for at least a year and speak the language fluently.
Of course you want to get a flavour of the place. But you can glean a great deal on the first afternoon. Is it a ‘young’ or an ‘old’ country? Happy or miserable? Strict or laissez-faire? Run by bureaucrats or a mafia? Are the dogs pets or strays? Local fabrics or Arsenal shirts on the washing lines? Balconies or suffocating flats? Family businesses or chain stores? Obsessed with Catholicism or communism? Wrecked architecture or charming local styles? Food not what you expected, or exactly what you expected?
You’ll have a good sense of the answer to these fundamental questions within a very short time, and they probably won’t deepen or change much over the next five or seven days. (It’s a similar syndrome to interviewing for a job, or dating: within minutes you get most of what you need to know.)
However beautiful the castles and cloudless the sky, we’re working out how many days there are still to go
Opinions vary, when it comes to the new craze among Gen Z for ‘extreme day trips’, which entail taking a cheap flight to a foreign city for just one day and being back in your own bed that same night. An even more extreme version is flying out in the evening, staying up all night and taking the dawn flight home.
Some oldies may see this trend as typical of young people’s short attention spans, but I see why they’re doing it, and may well follow suit. No luggage, no hotel or Airbnb bill, no pressure to pay for museums or any of the sights, as there isn’t time. As an extreme traveller, you can just wander around for a few hours, ‘get the vibe’, watch the world go by, have a few beers in the square, maybe take a metro to a random suburb to have a look, ‘get some food’ (it’s never ‘have supper’), and then it’s nearly time to go back to the airport.
It sounds utterly draining; but so, in its way, is a too-long holiday. The first glimpse of the M&S Simply Food outlet in the arrivals hall is always a relief.
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