The travel story I got wrong. Really wrong

I was reading a travel column the other day that I vehemently disagreed with – which would be fine, except the author of that column was me.

This is the thing: if you write opinion pieces for long enough, you will end up disagreeing with yourself. Opinions change over time, as your worldview changes, as life teaches you a few humbling lessons. Anyone whose opinions don’t change at all over 20 or 30 years is either lying, or hasn’t been paying attention.

Still, how could I have got it so wrong?

Reflecting on revisiting Cambodian landmark Angkor Wat. Credit: Getty Images

A few weeks back, the editors of Traveller passed on a link to “the Wayback Machine”, the digital archive of Traveller content from days long past. This link was to the columns I used to write under the name “The Backpacker”, when I could properly claim to be such a thing back in the mid-2000s.

One particularly interesting/fraught column topic jumped out at me: “The places I’ll never go back to”, published in November 2007, almost 17 years ago.

Interesting, I thought. I wonder if I have actually returned to any of those destinations since. I wonder if I enjoyed them. I wonder if I was wrong to say I would never go back.

Reader: I’ve been back to almost every single one of them. And I was wrong – about every single one of them.

Let’s start from the top. Siem Reap, Cambodia. “This comes under the ‘done’ umbrella,” I wrote back in 2007. “I can’t imagine there are any ruins that would impress me as much as they did the first time.”

And in a way that’s true, you can never repeat that initial awe. But does that mean you shouldn’t return? I went back to Siem Reap about 10 years later, and couldn’t believe the changes to the city itself.

The temples of Angkor, however, were perhaps even more impressive without the FOMO-driven need to see everything and do everything all at once. When you’ve already been there you can just relax, enjoy, go back to the places you loved, check out a few you didn’t get the time to visit on the first occasion.

Copenhagen would become the epicentre of a global food movement, thanks to places like Noma.Credit: Dresling Jens

Next up: Copenhagen. “Another that kind of falls under the ‘done’ banner,” I wrote. “What I saw there didn’t intrigue me that much.”

What the hell? Who writes this stuff? Of course, I wasn’t to know that: a) I would go on to develop a deep passion for food; and that, b) Copenhagen would very soon become the epicentre of a global food movement.

This is why you should never say never. Places change. People change. There could be a very good reason to go back.

We move now though to the north of Scotland, where I lived as a teenaged gap-year kid. “To return would just be living in the past,” I wrote.

Absolutely untrue. I’ve since been back and it’s still one of my favourite places in the world, where the ghosts of the past just serve as a pleasant reminder that in some way I belong there and always will.

Okavango Delta … second time’s a charm.Credit: Getty Images

Next, the Okavango Delta: “The Okavango is the dud of African game parks.”

What. The. Hell. A mere eight or nine years later I would return to the Okavango on a road-trip safari with my partner Jess, and have probably the greatest game park experience of my entire life.

We camped out there at a site called Third Bridge, watched as elephants walked straight past our campfire in the dying evening light, heard lions roar and hyenas cackle in the night time, and just loved every single second of one of the world’s great adventures.

How about Lauterbrunnen, the tiny mountain village in Switzerland that I used to visit regularly when I worked onboard tour buses with TopDeck? “I’ve well and truly done [Lauterbrunnen],” I wrote, “and had such a great time doing it that I couldn’t possibly recreate it.”

Here’s one of the things I’ve learned in the intervening 17 years: you don’t have to recreate anything when you return to a place you know well. You can just start afresh. You can revel in all the things it has to enjoy, you can reminisce, you can revisit, and you can make new memories.

The tiny mountain town of Lauterbrunnen … still achingly beautiful.

You can do all of this effortlessly, which is why I ended up loving my return to Lauterbrunnen a decade later, when it was still so achingly beautiful, and I could still go and get a rosti and a beer on the main street, and I could enjoy the company of new people to share it all.

I was wrong about every destination on my list, but there’s more than that: I was wrong about the very notion that there are places you shouldn’t return to, or at least declare you will never revisit.

These destinations will change – but just as assuredly, you will change. So why deprive yourself the pleasure of returning to somewhere you know and love, or deprive yourself the opportunity to see how a place has changed for the better, the way you and this destination have now met in the middle?

Familiarity can be a thrilling, beautiful thing. Rediscovery can be a joy. And there’s even pleasure in admitting you were wrong.