My teenage daughter’s plans show the fabled gap year has changed beyond all recognition
In a week’s time, my 19-year-old daughter will set off on her gap year travels with her boyfriend. Australia for a month, then Bali, Thailand and Vietnam until the money runs out. I’ve lost count quite how many times she has packed and repacked her toiletry bag in a sustained frenzy of pre-preparation for her upcoming trip, but we are surely by now into double digits.
Nevertheless, she insists, “it’s important, Dad”, and what do I know? They have something called “hard water” where she is going, and so she requires all manner of lotions and unguents to counteract it. “And I need my conditioner, obviously,” she adds.
Since completing her A-levels last summer, she has been stacking shelves in a supermarket. I’ve been impressed by her drive. She really wants this, and I’m hoping that her boyfriend does too, though he is quieter, less excitable, and won’t himself start packing until 15 minutes before they leave.
He is particularly looking forward to Australia, because that’s where his friends are. But she is craving Asia, and this, I tell myself, is inspired by my and her mother’s own wanderlust, when we trekked through Thailand and Vietnam in our 20s and 30s (also Zimbabwe, India, Mexico and Peru) until parenthood arrived, consigning us to two weeks on Greek beaches every August.
But no, my daughter tells me, it’s not our influence at all. “I’ve been looking at Koh Phi Phi and Uluwatu on TikTok. They look amazing.”
It is because of TikTok, or more specifically the people she follows on the social media platform, that she has been endlessly repacking, and not just her toiletry bag but her brand new suitcase too, which is big enough for a Kim Kardashian honeymoon. It’s on wheels. When I tell her that even multi-directional wheels will have trouble navigating Bangkok’s chaotic Khaosan Road, she laughs. “No one uses backpacks, Dad. It’s not the 1990s anymore.”
I made her watch an episode of the BBC’s Race Around the World with me, simply to show her that each contestant carried a backpack, even Kelly Brook. Her response had an infuriating logic to it. “Yes, but we’re not in a race, are we?”
Each of us will eventually reach a point in life when we look towards the younger generations, and gawp in confusion. I have reached that point. Now that I am in my 50s, I peer at my daughter’s demographic – from a safe distance – and feel only bewilderment. We did things differently in my day.
When I was 19, I travelled the US with a friend by Greyhound bus for six weeks. I’d brought a backpack along with me, the cheapest that Millets sold, into which I’d stuffed two pairs of shorts, three T-shirts, some socks and a toothbrush.
We were on a budget of $12 a day, survived on Subway sandwiches, and slept mostly on the bus. The days were long, and my travelling companion did not place much importance on personal hygiene, showering only when the moon was full. Being on the road was exhilarating, yes, but exhausting, too.
We had planned our trip meticulously with the help of TikTok’s 1988 equivalent, a paperback copy of The Moneywise Guide to North America, leaving New York’s unsettling Port Authority bus station at midnight, heading down the coast towards New Orleans, then along the border through Texas and the Grand Canyon, and onto Las Vegas and California, before heading back east.
The West Coast would prove cruel to me: mugged in San Diego, and fined by police for travelling on a tram without a ticket; then fined again in Los Angeles for jaywalking. On Venice Beach, I got so badly sunburned it left me with an eye infection and two virulent cold sores, making me resemble a gargoyle, thus rendering the possibility of a holiday romance impossible.
Now that I am a parent of two teenagers myself (the other is 16), I boggle at how my mother ever let me go quite so far away without adult supervision. At 19, I was naive to a ridiculous degree, my blossoming taste for adventure outweighed by adolescent inanity.
I had promised to call home regularly, but could never quite amass the necessary amount of quarters that the public phones required, and although the two postcards I did manage to send were filled with information, I learned later that they took weeks to arrive. My mother was furious when eventually I got back. “I thought you were dead!” she screamed.
My own daughter will not be off-grid. We will be able to track her every move on our phones, via an app that she herself willingly installed. If this is all worryingly Orwellian, then it seems her entire social circle tracks themselves incessantly. She knows where each of her friends are at any given moment, their avatars floating around the globe on her phone. I sense that part of her excitement for travel is the FOMO she’ll prompt in those she leaves behind, still stacking shelves.
I am confident, I think, that she will be fine. She is a smart young woman, increasingly intrepid. True, she called me last week from Clapham Junction after her train was cancelled, wanting to know when the next one was, but reluctant to ask a guard. She won’t be doing that from Woolloomooloo, will she?
Her life to date has been largely suburban, and almost entirely screen-based. Now it’s about to stretch across a broader canvas. I am in no way prepared for the umbilical wrench of her departure, but, through tears, I will hold her close, then let her go. I hope she has an amazing adventure. I hope the hard water isn’t too hard.
And I hope she comes back.
Nick Duerden’s memoir ‘People Who Like Dogs Like People Who Like Dogs’ (John Murray, £14.99)
