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It was now 7pm. I was exhausted following the ten-hour hitch and getting a bit desperate as car after car passed me, despite the placard I held which read 'FRANCE: £10?' Just as the streetlights began to buzz a van screeched to a halt a couple of hundred metres down the road, I grabbed my impossibly heavy rucksack and lurched after them. "Ten Quid?" he asked, before opening the door of their small van. I was to share the back with several crates of beer that they'd just bought in the duty free...

European Tales: Switzerland 1996, a lengthy tale

Joseph Tame
2006-06-30 17:53:26

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www.tamegoeswild.com

In April 1997, at the age of 19, I returned from Switzerland having spent the preceeding eight months over 2000 metres up in the Alps. At that time my head was all a little muddled, and so in order to try to make sense of what had gone before I commited my experiences to paper. Here is the result of that exercise.

Despite having disliked geography of any sort throughout my formal education, two of my closest friends and I had in 1991 decided to take a trip around the world in the year following our departure from sixth form college. When the three of us were reunited (having been at separate schools for a few years) we began to plan our travels.

Not knowing anything about the travel industry, or around-the-world tickets, we started off by getting an old atlas out of the local library, and writing down a list of all the countries that appealed to us. This ended up being somewhat longer than we had anticipated, and when presented to a local travel agent we discovered that a ticket tailor-made to our needs would break all of our banks. The next plan was to pick up a cheap year return for Australia, stopping off in several capital cities for a few months on the way. After further consideration these ideas changed once more, until it was decided that we would simply spend a year in Australia as many young people do these days.

Throughout this time of great dreams and pie-in-the-sky planning, a number of things affecting my personal life were triggered off when I was diagnosed as having a mild form of Epilepsy. The Epilepsy I could cope with, but I reacted badly to the medication that I was prescribed to control it. I quickly became irritable, tired, and generally had a feeling that I couldn't cope with life. Unfortunately for my education this coincided with my first year 'A' Level exams, which I started to fail fantastically. I was thirty minutes into a ...