Down and out at Tutankhamun’s tomb after some Egyptian wine

Those less-than-perfect travel experiences are so memorable — like that Christmas time in Egypt.

Egypt's Valley of the Kings.

Was it Christmas Day or Boxing Day when I found myself flat on my back outside Tutankhamun’s tomb trying hard not to chuck? It was a long time ago, and while the precise date is a little foggy, the memory of the previous night’s local wine and the morning in the Valley of the Kings outside Luxor is sharp.

We were on a Nile cruise and the Egyptian experience had been brilliant. It felt so grown up to be away from home in such exotic climes at Christmas. Not that Egypt in 1984 was big on Christmas. (Note to self, next time schedule London or one of the great European capitals.)

The cruise operators had tried to ginger things up the previous evening with the aforementioned local wine and an especially large buffet, but the proceedings had lacked pep. We’d retired early, only to awake in a somewhat fragile state, blaming the rough white rather than the food.

Christmas spirit evaporated rapidly as we took a desultory look at Tut’s tomb then tried to bluff our way through the rest of the morning. Waves of nausea cancelled out the waves of history as we pretended to look like citizens of the world rather than Aussie tourists dreaming of a cool sea breeze and a beach. Still, it’s a Christmas I won’t forget.

That’s the thing about less-than-perfect travel experiences — they are so memorable.

Not that difficult travel is so onerous: even a tiring day in Vienna is preferable to a day in the office, after all. Years ago, travelling in India, standing in endless queues at railway stations, I always found it restful. It was as if time was suspended away from your regular routine. Patience, so hard to practise at home, was easy in a country where queues and bureaucracy are the order of the day and where it is pointless to rail against either.

Of course, Zen is harder to do if you are the sort of traveller who relishes a packed schedule. I can think of nothing worse and have come to accept I am a lazy tourist; one highlight a day is enough for me. My aversion to too much structure — and too much pre-reading — has made for relaxing breaks but has meant that at times I have missed out on some of those landmarks. The worst was bypassing the Alhambra in Granada, a miss I took years to admit to. Not so much a bad travel experience as a non-travel experience. It’s still on my bucket list (I think).

Other less-than-perfect highlights? Forty years ago, I almost ran out of money in Italy but had a couple of weeks to kill before catching the plane in Rome to return home after months away. I calculated I might just make it if I hung out in Naples and the Amalfi coast where it would be warmer. But food became something of an optional extra and I ate a great deal of bread in the cheapest bedrooms in the country. The low point was tucking into raw sardines on the beach at Positano and hoping no one would notice. When people rave about the beauty of that city, I nod sagely and agree that it is indeed super-memorable.

Back to Christmas and those hopes of a perfect celebration in an exotic setting. In Rajasthan one year, we were told the place (I can’t recall which city) went off on New Year’s Eve, so we prepared to be very excited. We had a good dinner then parked ourselves on our hotel balcony to witness the spectacle. But as in Egypt, we were disappointed. A couple of Catherine wheels do not a festival make, especially not for Sydneysiders spoiled by multimillion-dollar displays.

Sometimes, of course, the planets align and deliver an almost perfect experience. New Year in Berlin recently was fabulous. The Germans do fireworks well, although the danger level is high as the locals nonchalantly set them off in the streets with little effort to protect passers-by. It’s a spectacle that, combined with mulled wine and snowy weather, is as memorable as the holiday season spent flat on my back at Tut’s tomb.