When Travel Isn’t Perfect

You’ve all seen the ideal images of stunning landscapes, perfect beaches, maybe a few laughing locals.

While it is possible, and even likely, depending on your own personal flexibility and expectations, to have excellent trips, it is probably 100% likely that you will make mistakes, and things won’t go the way you’ve planned. The trick to ‘perfect travel’ is to be ok with that, and to enjoy whatever unexpected surprises comes along as a result of that imperfection.

Recently, I had one of those travel days. I’m a ridiculously careful pre-trip-planner. I’m open to spontaneous changes, but there are just connections that you can’t miss, and to be there for them…well, let’s just say I like to have a schedule.

I was on my way to Lake Baikal from Irkutsk. There was a beautiful train journey I’d heard about and it wasn’t possible to book tickets online, or because it was run by a private company, anywhere else in Russia. It could only be booked at this tiny town on the southern end of lake Baikal, about a 2.5 hour train trip from Irkutsk. It was a bit of a short connection, but I was reasonably sure the train went that day (there were some conflicting opinions online…), and pretty sure that, if the train did, in fact, go that day, that I would be able to magically buy a ticket a few hours in advance. Surely no one else had heard about this spectacular side trip, right?

Upon arrival into the town, I made my way over and asked in my lovely (read: embarrassingly bad) Russian for a ticket on the train. The ticket seller rattled off a few sentences and one horrible, disappointing word stuck out ‘zaftrak’. Unfortunately, I knew this word. The train was sold out for today, and then next one went some 26 hours later, on which there were three remaining seats. (Nothing like a little pressure to make last minute decisions, right?)

Because of my hotel booking at the end of the rail-line, my only option to make it there by the evening was to take the exact same train back to Irkutsk, and then navigate with only an hour to spare, to the bus station and find a bus to Listvyanka.

Upon further discussions with the less-than-helpful train ticket seller, the only ticket she was willing to sell me was for a train departing much later in the day, and which would force me to take a cab out the 60-some kilometres to the town.

I bought the ticket (a budget breaking 1$…;)), only to overhear some other tourists in the station speaking French! I was able to ask them their olans, hoping that they had also been planning the journey. It turned out they were traveling with a Russian speaker who was getting them on the train I’d initially wanted, and she was willing to include me in their group!

A few short hours later I was heading back the way I’d come – nothing irks me quite like unexpected backtracking, but at least I figured I was headed in the right direction. Even if it was backwards.

Eventually I was back in Irkutsk, and had decided to pay the grand total of 15$ US to have a taxi take me right to the hotel in Listvyanka – about a 90 minute drive. We pulled into town only about 2 hours later than we would have had I taken the train I originally wanted to. What a day!

So this story, and countless others of stressful missed connections, delayed flights, sold-out tickets or expensive reservations. Language and culture barriers. Uncomfortable beds in questionably clean hostels. Why on earth do we still continue to travel?!

(Side note: In my other life, I teach music. At the beginning of every school year, I sent home a letter to the students parents, mostly about my beliefs about the benefits of teaching music and why it’s a valuable and important class in today ever-tightening school budgets. But I believe it has many overlaps with why we travel. In fact, I see so many comparisons that I wrote a whole post about it here.)

While everyone has different reasons why they travel, but for me, it’s reasons like these:

You get to meet people like this:

A) I met Katya in Madrid, Spain. We remained in touch and we’ve met up three times since in our travels.

B) I met Michelle in Stockholm, Sweden. We met up again in Helsinki, and then the follow year in our travels.

C) I met Andy on a train in Siberia. We were both headed to Ulaan Baator and we were the only English speakers on the train, and we were in the same car. We spent the majority of the trip playing board games, drinking tea, sharing travel stories and enjoying Siberian scenery pass by.

You get to see amazing sights like these:

A) Sunset over Lake Baikal, Siberia, Russia.

B) Field of Sheep in Lancashire, England

C) Outdoor Sculpture Gallery in Kiev, Ukraine

D) A Perfect Beach, all to yourself on Crissi Island, Greece

And you make human connections like these: The Time I Was…

A) …exhausted, very lost, and very frustrated on my first trip to Budapest. A local waiter saw me on my third trip around his restaurant. He took pity on me and walked me to the door of my hostel. Be Happy in Hungary, Please!

B) …aching for some English conversation and had time to kill in the Hong Kong airport. I struck up a conversation with an elderly man, and it ended up being an emotional 2-hour discussion on his wife’s passing, the trip he took in her honour, and how he felt a connection to her, through me.

C) …the time my schengen ‘visa’ almost ran out while I was crossing the border between Russia and Finland. The guard pulled me aside and warned me, but told me that he liked Canadians, and as long as I promised to leave the schengen zone as soon as I could, he would allow me to continue into Finland.

D) … I wandered into the church where J.S. Bach played the organ. I climbed a narrow passageway because I heard the organ being played. The organist insisted I sit and play because he knew the love of music I had in my eyes. Together, we played Bach’s prelude number 1. He concluded the meeting by telling me I had great talent, that he wished I lived in the city so he could be my teacher, and then thanked me for being Canadian, because of my countries help to his own in the World Wars.

And to me, this is why I keep traveling, keep working hard to save (and then spend) every penny on a new experience, a new city, a new country, roll with the delays, the sometimes-strange food, travel-related illnesses, occasional discomfort and constant goodbyes to new friends. Because for a few wonderful occasions, you get to experience, within the chaos, a perfect moment, a perfect experience, a perfect connection. And if you are rally lucky, maybe all the perfect minutes will come together, and create (almost) perfect travel memories.

Or at least a story you can laugh about later.