\u2018Is there ever a holiday so heavenly that one is not counting down the days?\u2019 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\u2019d 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 \u2013 and I wasn\u2019t even there in the characterless Airbnb flat among the skyscrapers and crack addicts.<\/p>\n
\u2018I\u2019m longing to see that tray of food in the plane,\u2019 she texted. \u2018The plastic tray I\u2019d usually despise takes on a glow of light.\u2019 With its refrigerated bread roll and rock-hard butter-pat, that tray symbolised the homeward journey.<\/p>\n
For those of us of a home-loving persuasion, I don\u2019t think there are any foreign holidays when we\u2019re not secretly counting down. However beautiful the castles, delicious the breakfast pastries and cloudless the sky, by day four we\u2019re secretly working out how many days there are still to go and being grateful that we\u2019re 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
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 \u2013 working, running a household, walking the dog, gardening, throwing away the junk mail and so on \u2013 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\u2019ve \u2018done\u2019 the main museum, cathedral and famous view by the end of the first day, and sampled the local caf\u00e9, taverna, trattoria or street-food.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s a two-hour flight across Europe, nine days if it\u2019s an eight-hour flight across the Atlantic, three weeks if it\u2019s a ten-hour flight to Asia and six weeks if it\u2019s a 30-hour flight to the Antipodes.<\/p>\n
This \u2018holiday length in proportion to flight length\u2019 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\u2019t say: \u2018I\u2019m only doing the five-hour return journey to Stratford-upon-Avon if the Shakespeare play is five days long.\u2019 It\u2019s quality not quantity that we should travel for.<\/p>\n
Second fallacy: that if a journey is expensive, we\u2019ll 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: \u2018Will the pleasure I get from the whole holiday be worth the total amount I spend on it?\u2019 And you\u2019ll be spending quite a lot more over those extra days tacked on at the end, during which you\u2019ll continue to haemorrhage money on hotels, restaurants, tips, drinks and entry fees.<\/p>\n
Third fallacy: that you\u2019ll need \u2018well over a week\u2019 to \u2018recover from the journey\u2019 and \u2018immerse yourself\u2019 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\u2019ll recover from the journey in a couple of hours, and you\u2019re not going to understand a foreign country unless you live there for at least a year and speak the language fluently.<\/p>\n
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 \u2018young\u2019 or an \u2018old\u2019 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?<\/p>\n
You\u2019ll have a good sense of the answer to these fundamental questions within a very short time, and they probably won\u2019t deepen or change much over the next five or seven days. (It\u2019s a similar syndrome to interviewing for a job, or dating: within minutes you get most of what you need to know.)<\/p>\n
However beautiful the castles and cloudless the sky, we\u2019re working out how many days there are still to go<\/p>\n
Opinions vary, when it comes to the new craze among Gen Z for \u2018extreme day trips\u2019, 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.<\/p>\n
Some oldies may see this trend as typical of young people\u2019s short attention spans, but I see why they\u2019re 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\u2019t time. As an extreme traveller, you can just wander around for a few hours, \u2018get the vibe\u2019, watch the world go by, have a few beers in the square, maybe take a metro to a random suburb to have a look, \u2018get some food\u2019 (it\u2019s never \u2018have supper\u2019), and then it\u2019s nearly time to go back to the airport.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u2018Is there ever a holiday so heavenly that one is not counting down the days?\u2019 a friend texted…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":759783,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[40680,64,63,31401,44,3792],"class_list":["post-759782","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-australia","tag-airbnb","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-holidays","tag-news","tag-travel"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/759782","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=759782"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/759782\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/759783"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=759782"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=759782"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=759782"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}