I did a Contiki tour 27 years ago. It was a lifetime travel highlight

Ten countries in 25 days. That’s some feat. You could visit 10 countries in 25 years and that would be entirely reasonable.

But that’s what we did on that Contiki tour of Europe, my first proper journey as a semi-adult, as a wide-eyed and shallow-pocketed 17-year-old, a gullible moron who had somehow already graduated from high school and been allowed out into the world.

Visiting 10 countries in 25 days isn’t unusual on a Contiki tour.Credit: Alamy

I can’t tell you a lot about what happened in those 25 days on the Continent, through France and Switzerland and Italy and I suppose seven more countries. It’s like that old saying about the ’60s: if you remember your Contiki tour, you probably weren’t there.

I have snippets, though: shopping for Swiss Army Knives in Lauterbrunnen; walking the streets of Florence; helping to cook at the campsite in Amsterdam; and wearing a garbage bag as a poncho when it started raining at Oktoberfest.

That journey will always be a lifetime travel highlight, a formative and, above all, fun experience, though it’s one I will never repeat. You can’t recreate a trip like that, and you shouldn’t attempt to. Everything has changed.

My approach to journeys began to morph as I got older. The next time I set out for a proper adventure I was 25, a little smarter, a lot more confident and on my own this time, without the fallback of a tour guide and a bus.

I still moved quickly, though: Vietnam in a fortnight, Cambodia in a week, India in three weeks, and almost all of East Africa in the space of three months. I travelled by train, bus and tuk-tuk – but I also travelled a lot by plane, flitting from country to country at 40,000 feet with the benefit of a round-the-world ticket.

I travelled by train, bus and tuk-tuk.Credit: Getty Images

Then I was in my 30s, still with itchy feet. I travelled overland from St Petersburg to Beijing in a fortnight, pausing only in a few cities, the bulk of my time spent in a rattling train carriage watching Europe become Asia, watching the world turn.

There’s an assumption, I think, that travellers will slow down as they get older, particularly when your first journey took in most of a continent in the space of a month. And I have certainly become a fan of the slow-travel movement, to the point where a lot of the holidays I now take are to a single destination that I prefer to get to know intimately rather than move around.

When I’m going on a journey, however, I still move fast. I appreciate the feeling of movement, the nature of travel itself. This to me is the way to embrace the journey, to get up each morning and just keep going, to have a goal for the day and achieve it.

I’m in my 40s now and the most memorable journeys of my recent past have all been rapid-fire. My partner, Jess, and I drove a ute around southern Africa for a month, through South Africa, Namibia and Botswana, never stopping for more than a few nights. We spent a week riding a scooter around the Mekong Delta in Vietnam, always on the road because the road was the adventure, the road was the goal.

So I haven’t slowed down in the way even I thought I would. If anything, I’ve learnt to embrace the nature of the journey, to love the movement, the essence of travel.

The main difference now is that I don’t like to fly much. And I don’t need a tour bus. And I’ve bought a proper raincoat.