Travel Diaries

First appeared in Journal, Autumn 2022

Styling by Hannes Koegelenberg

Travelling, for those who can still remember overseas trips, is an easy digital undertaking these days, but that wasn’t always the case.

Once the travel bug bites you, it’s not easy to break free from its grip. It’s almost like a virus where
the symptoms just get worse and worse…

New destinations keep getting added to your wish list, there are places already visited that you want to, indeed need to, revisit, and then someone tells you about another small town, a fascinating museum or an atmospheric restaurant that you simply cannot miss.

Planning an overseas trip has become much easier over the past few decades (ignoring the last two
years, of course) – since the 1990s, I would say. And many of us now have a more substantial holiday
budget than we did when backpacking and youth hostels were all we could afford.

Long, long ago …

Overseas travel opportunities have been rather limited lately, which has had everyone reminiscing
about trips of long ago – as well as that last one just before the pandemic hit. And as luck would
have it, I recently came across two travel diaries dating back to 1912 in a charity shop.

Coincidence or synchronicity? Who Knows?

The first diary is in the form of a letter typed on yellowed paper, titled Derde Reis om die Wêreld – Brief Vyf (Third Trip around the World – Letter Five) and dated 24 December 1912. It was addressed to ‘Dearest Dolly’ from ‘Your very loving brother Percy’. Percy writes with colour and flair about the group of friends’ transport on a day trip in Java, Indonesia. They hired a car to visit some temples. The only problem was that the driver and his footman were passionate about using the hooter – as well as various other instruments of torture – ‘even when there was no-one within a hundred metres of
us’. The travellers had resorted to stuffing their ears with cotton wool.

On another memorable occasion, their luggage was loaded into a palanquin and they had to ride horses
2 000 feet down a mountain, ‘a three-hour journey’. According to Percy’s diary, train travel in the early 1900s was also not without its challenges.

In 1995

My own travel-diary entries from my first overseas trip in 1995 remind me of my train journeys across Europe, as well as that heavy backpack that had to be lugged from one station and youth hostel to the next.

My first hostel accommodation was in a dormitory with 14 beds, in The Flying Pig in Amsterdam. Hotels were far beyond our budget for me and my first travel companion, Vanessa.

We had to choose between the Van Gogh Museum and the Rijksmuseum, because our finances didn’t allow for two museum visits in one city. Although admittedly we did visit the Venustempel Sex Museum!

My daily expenses were carefully recorded. I spent a total of 215 guilders (R516) over three-and-a-half days in Amsterdam (including a train ticket to Antwerp) – so R147 per day. That’s a fraction of what you’d pay now for one night in an ‘affordable’ Amsterdam hotel!

In Belgium (with lodgings at a bed-and-breakfast) I could get by on R209 per day and in Paris (staying in a small hotel) on R371 per day (travel costs included in both instances).

By the book

In those days, travel guides such as Let’s Go and Lonely Planet were the fount of all knowledge and practically indispensable when it came to planning a trip. One of the greatest pleasures of
travel was – and still is – reading up about the place you’re planning on visiting, what you want to see, where to have a drink and where to eat the traditional foods of that area.

These days the online space is abuzz with websites, travel blogs and Trip-advisor reviews. Within seconds there is more information on your screen than any prospective traveller could stay relaxed hope to process.

Can you remember when everyone carried thick, heavy travel guides – books, not people – everywhere with them? Telephone numbers and street addresses were listed for every accommodation option, theatre, restaurant and landmark.

The travel guides also contained all sorts of other information, like how many steps you had to climb to get to the top of the Sagrada Família cathedral, from where you could look out over Barcelona; which little supermarkets sold delicious French cheese and baguettes that you could eat on a park bench; and where to buy a train ticket to Lake Como at the station in Milan.

A purse full of coins

Looking back, it feels unreal to think that each European country used to have its own currency before the Euro came along. There were the Belgian and French francs, Italian and Turkish lira and Greek drachma to negotiate, among others.

Stay relaxed

And as you travelled from one country to the next, you had to get your planning right and make sure you
had enough of the right currency, at the right time. This while your purse was still bulging with coins from the country you’d just left.

Then you would count out your cents (or centimes) to see what you could buy with the last few. In part because they made your purse too heavy, and in part because with them you might just be able to afford one last beer before crossing the border.

Naturally, a few coins were kept as mementoes. When I page through my photo albums now, I see coins sticky-taped to the pages alongside the faded photographs.

You also had to keep track of your finances and how much cash you had withdrawn; balances weren’t printed on the ATM slips.

And then there were traveller’s cheques! Ah yes…

Before your departure, you’d order a book of traveller’s cheques (almost like a regular cheque book) from your bank or other financial institution. They were regarded as safer than cash, because if you lost them or they were stolen, the money would be refunded if you still had your proof of purchase. So you
had to keep the receipt (with serial numbers) separately from the cheques.

Your signature had to appear on each cheque to ensure that no-one else could exchange it. You also had to request cheques in smaller and larger denominations, which required careful planning – that meant working out your expected daily expenses, give or take, for meals, transport, entry fees, sightseeing tours and souvenirs.

Clouds of smoke

And remember when you were allowed to smoke on aeroplanes?! Although you could book a non-smoking seat.

In the 1980s, countries around the world starting introducing legislation to prohibit smoking on planes. British Airways only banned smoking on their aircraft in 1998; SAA followed suit soon afterwards.

Arrivals and departures

After all that careful planning, when you finally landed on foreign shores you first had to find your way from the airport into the city centre. Taxis were – and still are – horribly expensive, no matter how you look at it. If you were lucky, at airports like Schiphol in Amsterdam there was a train directly into the heart of the city, or, in many other places, like Istanbul, a subsidised bus.

To this day, I avoid using taxis; I prefer to spend the money that I save on a bottle of local wine or comfort food.

Then the search for your accommodation began. Up the street, down the street, ask around, look around, open the travel guide, study the map. There were no Google Maps or other direction finders that you could check on your phone – what phone?

Outings each day involved searches for museums, sights worth seeing and affordable places to eat. And huge disappointment when you found the right address but the place was either closed for the day or simply no longer existed.

But when the time came for you to fly home again, it was a lot easier then to get away with overweight suitcases and extra hand luggage. Things weren’t nearly as strict or closely checked as they are these days.

If you visited me at home now, I could show you which décor items I lugged home with me – drag-carried because they were so heavy or bulky.

Missing you

If you wanted to phone home while on your travels, you had to find a phone box (also called a tickey box back in the day, remember them?) – usually with a local phone directory in it. Coins were fed into a slot, so you had to make sure you had enough of the correct type, or perhaps you could use a phone card (which was later glued into your photo album as a memento). You could also make a collect call, which meant the person you were phoning would have to pay for it.

Fortunately we didn’t phone home very often – only if there was a crisis (Mom, I’ve run out of money!) or if you were very homesick. Long-distance calls were expensive.

When visiting Jordan in the early 2000s I was surprised to realise that I hadn’t seen any public payphones,
until I read that this Middle Eastern country was the first in the world to remove all its phone boxes.

And yet, when I was in Mongolia just a few years ago, I needed to make my way to the main post office in
Ulaanbaatar so I could phone home. There I had to stand in a queue until a telephonist had a line available for a long-distance call. She dialled the number and then we both had to wait until it was put through. And it wasn’t as if that happened very fast either!

Instead of a quick WhatsApp to the group of friends who are following your travel adventures, in those days there was the ritual of choosing postcards in every place you visited. When your feet got tired, you would sit down at a street café or cosy pub with a cup of coffee, a cold beer or glass of wine and jot down your news.

Oh, the thrill of selecting an Amsterdam postcard with a picture of a dagga leaf on it from the rack and
deciding who to send it to… Often your postcards would arrive long after you had already returned
home!

Look at the photos

With the ease and abundance of digital photos that we have become used to these days, it’s almost inconceivable that until recently we had to be strategic about how many rolls of film we packed for a holiday. And not to mention how we rationed the number of photos we took!

Rolls of film and film development were an expensive part of your holiday budget. You had to focus carefully; you hardly dared take more than one picture per landmark. And heaven forbid your image coming out blurry.

If a specific roll in your camera was black-and-white, then that batch of photos would all be monochrome.

Dear diary …

Until fairly recently, I was diligent about keeping a diary when I travelled. This detailed ‘bookkeeping’ of
my experiences was time consuming, but wonderfully nostalgic. Needless to say, I never managed
to complete the last day’s entry; the time always caught up with me.

These days, though, it is so much easier to ‘keep a diary’ on Facebook or Instagram.

Visas ad infinitum

The more things change, the more (some things) stay the same.

According to the Henley Passport Index, our South African passport is ranked a miserable 51st on the list for visa-free travel. Japan and Singapore are joint first and Afghanistan is last (henleyglobal.com/passport-index/ranking).

There are 71 countries – out of 199 – where South African passport holders don’t need a visa; these include Angola, Zimbabwe, Namibia, Mozambique, Argentina, Hong Kong and Russia. One positive point is that the Schengen visa now covers 26 countries; for out trip in 1995 we needed a separate visa for each of the six countries we visited.

In 2000, Eastern Europe was still to a large extent ‘undiscovered’, and therefore much cheaper to visit than
Western Europe. But I had to obtain visas – with much difficulty and red tape, I might add – for all six countries that I visited (Estonia, Russia, Poland, Czech Republic, Hungary and Croatia) plus two countries I travelled through by train.

To follow my route on that same train journey now… you’d need only a Schengen visa!