Why holidays can ruin friendships, and how to make sure yours doesn’t
Understanding yourself, your desires and your shortcomings, and being able to communicate with others about them, is key to a happy holiday.
As of writing this, I’ve travelled to 38 countries, about half of them on my own, the other half with friends or partners. Honestly, I prefer solo travel most of the time as I’m pretty independent (read: stubborn) and like to pave my own way. But sometimes I just want to travel with someone I know and make memories with a dear friend.
I’ve learned a few things along the way – mostly through mistakes I’ve made. Luckily I have amazing friends who challenge but tolerate my stubbornness, and I’ve learned and grown as I’ve travelled. Here, I’ve compiled my six top tips for an inspiring, fun-filled, memorable (for all the right reasons) and harmonious trip with friends…
“Make it a point to respect each other’s wishes, and don't expect your friends to read your mind.”
1. Verbalise your expectations
Do you have some non-negotiables that you absolutely can’t miss? Do you have some activities you’re not that fond of? At some point during your travels, make it clear to your travel companion your musts and mehs, and make it a point to respect each other’s wishes. Don’t expect your friends to read your mind.
Example: I am a curmudgeon who hates the beach 90% of the time because I hate being crowded, getting sunburned and getting salt water in my mouth. The 10% of the time that I do like the beach is when I’m in a place that’s just so amazing that even my curmudgeonly ass can’t find something to complain about. My friend is a normal human being who enjoys the beach. When in Málaga, she went for a few beach days while I wandered around the city taking photos and eating tapas. Everyone wins.
2. Compare your budgets
Compare your expectations. What do you think is a reasonable cost of accommodation? A reasonable dinner? What are you willing to splurge on and where would you rather cut corners?
While I don’t recommend planning every little detail, it’s helpful to get these parameters in place early. Find out where you agree and where you diverge. Consider whether or not you can meet your friend halfway or whether it’s a dealbreaker.
For example, if they are insistent on a diving tour, and it’s out of your budget, are they okay with you skipping it and them going it alone? Or if you really want to do one blow-out, sky’s-the-limit dinner, and they’re on a tighter budget, are you okay with tempering your expectations? Be willing to compromise where needed and go it alone if necessary.
3. Schedule time alone
When you spend so much time together – especially if you’re sharing hotel rooms and beds – you often find yourself wanting ‘me’ time. And travel, while amazing, can be so mentally exhausting that you need time to process all that you’ve seen and experienced. After all, you want time to reflect on your memories, maybe write about it, or edit some pictures. Doing that and juggling conversations can be difficult.
If you’re travelling short term (like a week or two), plan little parts of the day that are apart and reconvene for dinner. If you’re travelling long-term (two weeks or more), taking breaks becomes even more crucial. If you’re staying in a place where it’s possible to get cheap single rooms, schedule a little break from each other for two or three days every few weeks. If you’re on a strict budget, try staying at different hostels (see my next point for more on this). Or, if you definitely want to bunk together, at least set out on different adventures some days and meet up at dinner to talk about it and share your experiences.
4. Break up (nicely) to meet new people
Travelling with a friend is wonderful because you always have someone to talk to, mull things over with, make plans with, travel with, get lost with and so on. But sometimes, you’ve been travelling together for weeks and it’s like, ‘Good God, what the hell else do we have to talk about?’
Enter the travel friend. Meet someone new – either pony up the guts to talk to people at a local bar, stay at a hostel and chat your way into some new friends, or do some sort of activity or meet-up aimed at travellers. Invite that person to join you and your friend – or accept their invitation when they invite you. The group dynamic will change, and everything will improve as a result.
5. Check in with each other periodically
Aim for informal catch-ups with one another. It can be as simple as, ‘Do you think this plan is okay?’ or ‘Do you still want to do this?’ As a frequent solo traveller, I can sometimes steamroll my travel companion with ideas. Don’t fall into this trap! Make sure you and your friend are both contributing ideas roughly equally. It sucks both to be the one planning everything and the one being planned for. So don’t let your friendship dynamic fall into that and ensure you get feedback from one another regularly.
6. Vent your niggles before you blow
Similarly, if there’s something your friend is doing that’s bothering you, for goodness sake don’t hold it in and wait until you’re ready to explode. I know you think you don’t want to ruin your vacation with talking about your feelings and risking a fight, but trust me, travel brings out stress and those feelings will come out at some point. It’s just a matter of whether you allow those feelings to come out in a civil fashion or via a meltdown when you’re overwhelmed and getting into a nasty, hurtful spat.
Verbalise your feelings early and calmly, so you have a chance to amend behaviours and improve the rest of the trip. Acknowledge your shortcomings too, and be willing to apologise.
In the event that you do get into an argument while travelling, try not to be defensive. There’s nothing worse than denying what another person feels – those feelings are valid. Acknowledge that this person is (most likely) not crazy, and they have a legitimate reason to be upset. Talk it out. Be willing to look within yourself, inspect where you can improve, articulate this and make steps towards doing it. Oh, and enjoy your trip!
5 apps to help you chill when you travel
Always know where you’re going, and how to relax when you get there, with these handy apps.
Headspace
This monthly subscription meditation app walks you through daily 10-minute guided mindfulness sessions as well as targeted meditations for things like fear of flying, falling asleep and commuting.
www.headspace.com
Google Translate
Reading a road sign, buying a train ticket or ordering food can be stressful when you don’t speak the language. Google’s free app can translate speech, text, handwriting and photos between over a hundred languages, helping to avoid those ‘lost in translation’ moments.
From iTunes and GooglePlay stores
Yoga With Adriene
I swear by Adriene’s free YouTube yoga videos. She’s so calming and exudes so much compassion that by the end of each class it’s like you’ve had a hug from a close friend.
www.youtube.com/user/yogawithadriene
Yoga Studio
This yoga app is great because you can download ‘classes’ to use offline, so that even when you have poor access to WiFi you can still do a full guided yoga practice. You can also create your own classes using ‘Pose Blocks’ so you can customise a routine based on your strengths, wants and needs.
www.yogastudioapp.com
Maps.Me
This free app allows you to download detailed maps to use offline when you don’t have WiFi or a local SIM card. There are many things you can’t control when you travel, but getting lost won’t be one of them.
http://maps.me
“You’ll get far more out of taking a moment to luxuriate in a coffee and watch the world go by than lining up for yet another tourist attraction.”
Travelling with anxiety
Anxiety can run the gamut from being a minor inconvenience to an all-consuming battle against the self. Over the last 10 years, I’ve circumnavigated the globe, all while navigating my own mental health issues. I’ve touched down on six continents and dozens of countries to date, and my anxiety has never been more in check.
It wasn’t always this easy, however. At 18, on my first solo trip abroad (an ill-conceived summer in Ecuador with a poorly organised voluntourism company), I had a complete breakdown. I had anxiety attacks where I locked myself crying in the bathroom of the school where I was volunteering – not exactly the life-altering impact the company sold me.
My anxiety was so severe that I constantly felt like I was at the precipice. My lungs felt compressed, as if in high altitude at the top of a mountain, looking down, afraid to fall. A single moment’s falter caused tears to brim and panic to rise in my throat like bile. In short, I was constantly suffering.
This is what people who don’t have anxiety forget: the utter physicality of it. Sure, there are the racing thoughts, self-defeating tendencies and self-shaming that we often associate with the word ‘anxiety’. But there’s also a whole host of physical symptoms that are paranoia and worry’s bedfellows.
But if you think that after that horrible trip I’d give up on travel, you’re more sensible than I am. A little over one year later, I found myself sitting on a plane with my heart catching in my throat and a Czech student visa in my passport. Though I fully expected to burn out and fall, like Icarus nearing the sun, something strange happened. On the contrary, the longer I spent abroad, the more I found my wings growing stronger.
Through repeated exposure to stressful and confusing situations, I suddenly found myself improvising and adapting in ways I never thought possible. By learning from my mistakes, rather than chastising myself for them, travelling grew easier and easier by the day. Now, I can hop on a plane to virtually any country with excitement, not fear. These five tips should help you do the same…
1. Accept that you will make mistakes
I used to burn with embarrassment at each perceived faux pas I committed. The ironic thing about anxiety is that while you often have low self-esteem, you simultaneously have a massively overinflated idea of the importance of your actions in the grand scheme of things. As a result, your mistakes seem impossible to recover from.
When you’re travelling, acknowledge that you’re existing in a foreign culture with social norms you’re unfamiliar with. It’s simply inevitable that you’ll stumble your way through even the most routine of interactions and fumble with coins through the simplest transactions. Learn to accept the redness that rises to your cheeks with each mistake: it means you’re learning.
You’ll never exhaust a city or see it all. Rather than viewing it as a defeat, view it as an inspiration and an invitation to return.
2. You can never do it all (and that’s a good thing)
Bucket lists, Instagram, Pinterest… The things that theoretically make it easier for us to travel also make it easier for us to judge ourselves for not doing it often or well enough. You’ll never exhaust a city or see it all. Rather than viewing it as a defeat, view it as an inspiration and an invitation to return. You’ll get far more out of taking a moment to luxuriate in a cup of coffee and watch the world go by than standing in line for yet another faceless and overpriced tourist attraction.
Let yourself sleep in from time to time, enjoying the feeling of unfamiliar sheets on your bare legs. Give yourself permission to rest when you need it. You come first; the world, after all, will still be here, with or without you.
3. Don’t neglect self-care
As lucky as you are to get to travel this beautiful world, it doesn’t mean that you can’t experience moments of stress or malaise. There’s nothing wrong with that: having privilege is not exclusive of experiencing hardships.
Practising self-care means acknowledging your struggles and taking active steps to make your mind and body a more pleasant place to occupy. Whether this means making time to find a yoga class, sleeping in late, treating yourself to a massage, or taking an afternoon off sightseeing to rest, at the end of the day you are the only person responsible for your life, so live it with compassion.
4. Don’t be too proud to ask for help
Using Google Maps in the cities of Morocco seems to be a social experiment to see how many dead ends a person can run into before losing their mind. Ever stubborn, I nearly broke down in tears every time I tried and failed to make my way home alone amid the advances of everyone from orange juice vendors to 12-year-old boys.
Ultimately, I had two choices: to spend my life circling the medina in the hope of finding my riad, or ask someone for help. After flirting with the former for nearly an hour, I finally realised there were worse things than paying someone to accompany me back to my hotel.
5. Problems have a way of working out
When travelling from Albania to Kosovo, my newly minted travel companions and I hit a bit of a roadblock when we found ourselves standing on the side of an unpromising road, waiting for a bus that didn’t seem to be coming.
With rain clouds gathering, we formulated a plan to get ourselves over the border. Finding a piece of cardboard by a skip, we wrote our destination on it: Prizren, a city about two hours away.
Within five minutes, two young men on their way to Kukës, a town on the border, pulled over and offered us a lift. Our driver then navigated masterfully through swirling mountain mists, stopping at a garage where he insisted on buying us all drinks and sharing his lunch with us. As we reached Kukës, he told us in halting English that they’d drive to Prizren, an hour out of their way.
Stunned at our luck, we offered a flurry of thank yous in the form of coffees, beers, lunch. Obviously it’s not always safe to hitch a lift, but the only thing they wanted was to see us safe at our destination, enjoying their country – and a quick, strong handshake.
Travel is amazing. It opens doors to cultures you never knew existed. It inspires creativity and passion in avenues you’d never imagine. And, as we’ve seen above, it can also be incredibly difficult. Language barriers can frustrate. Hungry stomachs can make moody travellers of the best of us. This is doubly so when you’re travelling with a friend, as your moods often play off one another. Even if you’re not feeling hungry or anxious or lost, your friend might be, and suddenly conflict can arise.
Read on for my top tips on how to how to have a harmonious holiday when travelling with friends…
