I recently wrote a post about the people you meet whilst travelling , citing this as one of the many reasons I love to travel. Another reason has to be meeting up with friends and fellow travellers in different parts of the world. It really brings home to you what a small world we live in and it enriches the shared history of your friendships.
In the past, we have said goodbye to friends in the sweltering heat of Vietnam and met up with them again a couple of years later in an Indian restaurant in cold, wet Cleethorpes! (We have also seen the same friends in northern Spain, the south of France, and a pub near RAF Scampton!)
A few weeks ago, we were fortunate enough to spend the day with someone we travelled with on our month-long trip through Ethiopia this time last year. We have kept in touch via social media. We tried to meet in London last autumn, but the dates didn’t quite coincide. Then, we realised that we would have just arrived in Cochin at the same time as she would get there at the halfway point of her overlanding trip through southern India! The planets had aligned and we spent a wonderful few hours together catching up and talking about past, present and future travel plans.
Similarly, the day before we flew here to India, we met up with another of our Ethiopian travel group – this time in the slightly more mundane surroundings of a Guildford coffee shop. The encounter was no less pleasurable, though, with so much to talk about in the little time we had available to spend together.
Since we’ve been in India, another two travellers from our Ethiopia trip (which was only ten-strong), one from the UK and one from Ireland, have met up in Myanmar and shared their encounter with the rest of us via WhatsApp.
These were all organised meetings and, in the days of Facebook and Twitter, not really so hard to arrange. I remember a reunion of fellow travellers many years ago. We were all 18, hailing from all corners of the UK, and had travelled together to Israel during our gap year between school and university. The company we had booked through insisted on a commitment of at least a three month stay on the kibbutz we were being sent to, but, after that, our time was our own. So, while some of our number left after 3 months to pursue other travel plans, others stayed on for longer. This was before mobile phones and the internet had been invented so, as each person left, we reaffirmed our agreement to meet by Nelson’s Column in Trafalgar Square, London at 12 noon on 22nd September. The idea was that we would all need to be back in the UK by then to start our respective degree courses. On the day before we were due to meet, I travelled from my home just outside Paris (that’s another story!), and then made my way to the rendezvous point the next morning. I had absolutely no confidence that anyone else would be there – after all, the first of our group had left the kibbutz almost a year earlier. But they were!! Fourteen of the sixteen members of our group met up that day and had a great time reminiscing. At the end of the day, we went our separate ways and most of us never met again. I suppose, had Facebook been around, we would have still been in touch now!
I also love the ‘accidental’ reunions you have when you travel a lot. A few years ago, we were in Kenya when we met a Canadian couple. He made his living as a professional ice-hockey player. We had very little in common and, yet, we got on like a house on fire. We spent much of our holiday together. Again, this was before social media, so, when we parted, we didn’t exchange details and made no plans to keep in touch. Imagine our surprise, then, when, a year later, we bumped into them at Heathrow airport! They were flying back to Canada, having spent a season playing for a British ice hockey club, and we were going to Sri Lanka.
Such memories reinforce my love of travel – may we have many more of them!
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