Stanfords Blog

Once you have fought off the doom-mongers who maintain that flitting off to a distant corner of the world on a gap year is irresponsible in these recessionary times, turn your attention to deciding where to go, what to do and who to go with (if anyone). The range of choices can be overwhelming – studying lemurs in Madagascar, backpacking around Indonesia, teaching English to Ecuadorian children, picking fruit in New Zealand to fund some adventure travel, working a season in a French ski resort, learning Spanish in Argentina, and so on.

The best advice is to do lots of research – starting, dare I say, with my book Your Gap Year. Let the ideas swill around in your imagination and see what floats up.

The next step is to do some hard-headed planning. The first question is always: how can I afford a gap year? Most gappers spend at least half the year working and saving hard, knowing that their reward will be a full moon party, a watersport instructor’s course on the Mediterranean, a bungee-jump in New Zealand or any of a thousand adventures.

Remember that you have only to take a firm decision for a crazy idea to become a reality. Once you have announced your travel plans to parents and friends and there is no going back, don’t worry about the odd moments of blind panic at the prospect of leaving ‘it’ all behind. These are guaranteed to evaporate within 48 hours of disembarking at your destination.

Whatever you decide, here are some handy practical tips to help your gap year go smoothly:

• Look at the advice concerning personal safety given by the Foreign Office (www.fco.gov.uk). On arrival in countries where embassy officials may need to track you down in the event of an emergency, register your details and itinerary on the FCO’s LOCATE service (www.fco.gov.uk/en/travel-and-living-abroad/staying-safe/Locate).

• Shop around for travel insurance and make sure you are covered for everything you intend to do e.g. working and sports. Expect to pay roughly £25 per month for basic cover and £30-£40 for more extensive cover for a policy that covers the whole world.

• Keep a record of travel document details, like passport number, insurance policy, driving licence, travellers’ cheque serial numbers, tickets, emergency number for cancelling credit cards, etc. Scan and email this information to yourself so that you can access it at any stage from an internet café.

• Have several ways of accessing money rather than relying on one bank card that can be lost, stolen or damaged.

• Carry valuable items (like passport, essential medicines and, of course, money) on your person rather than relegating them to a piece of luggage which might be lost or stolen.

• Only pack items you are prepared to lose. Flashy clothes and electronic equipment may attract the attention of pickpockets.

• Learn a few key words and phrases in the local language, so as not to seem arrogant in assuming everyone communicates in English.

• Be aware of the laws, customs and dress code for the country. Guidebooks should provide all this information.

• Online banking is a great way to manage your finances while you are away. But many internet cafés are slow and access may not always be easy so don’t leave important transactions until the last minute.

• If you are volunteering through an organisation, ask for the contact details of some recent volunteers on your project. They should be able to give you advice about the project.

• If you are staying in one country for several weeks, consider getting a cheap local mobile phone or a local SIM card for your UK mobile. Local texts and calls will be cheaper and incoming calls from abroad are free, which avoids the massive charges when using your UK mobile.

• Most importantly, have a ball! Pay attention to your instincts and aim to achieve that perfect balance between travelling safely and enjoying yourself. If you are over-cautious you might miss out on something amazing, but at the same time you want to avoid unnecessary risks.

Browse all books by Susan Griffith. Author: Susan Griffith Date: 06/04/2010

Wherever your gap year travels take you and however enthralling the trip, there will be moments when a good book to read is just what you need. Whether it is to fill time whilst waiting for a departure, to relax in a quiet moment away from all the excitement or just to close the chapter on your day’s activity, finding room in your rucksack for that work of fiction is something you won’t regret.

Some people opt for a mighty tome to last, such as Tolstoi’s impressively humongous War and Peace or A Suitable Boy by Vikram Seth, using the time away to embark on reading something that they haven’t found the opportunity to get through before. Others choose a slimmer volume, for example the cult classic Jack Kerouac’s On the Road or Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, then look to trade it en route with fellow gappers when finished. Either way, something location specific can enhance a trip and inspire you with ideas and enthusiasms for your own travels. 

Shantaram by Gregory David Roberts is a current chunky favourite and is a modern-day saga based on a specific period of the author’s life. Encompassing everything from philosophy and ethics to underworld crime and war, and set in India and Afghanistan, it is something to keep your mind engaged and give you ideas to grapple with.

Other titles that I would add to the list of books designed to last you a significant chunk (if not all) of the way round wherever you are would be Cervantes’s tale of the noble knight, the errant Don Quixote, Olivia Manning’s The Balkan Trilogy – an epic evocation of a marriage and a breaking 20th-century world, James Clavell’s Shogun, set in Samurai Japan, and The Count of Monte Cristo – a classic tale of a miscarriage of justice, providence, retribution and fate by the 19th-century French great, Alexandre Dumas.

Alex Garland’s The Beach (set in Thailand) and Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code have been the choice of those wanting an easier, escapist read in recent years, with the more literary reading options often being something such as the Mann Booker winners Life of Pi and The White Tiger, Ian McEwan’s film-adapted Atonement or Rose Tremain’s Orange Prize-winner The Road Home which centres on Lev, a Polish migrant worker who journeys to London, both to seek and escape, on a path that leads him home to where his heart is.

A perennial favourite for the more surreal backpack is Mikhail Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita, a title harder than most to condense into a summary…suffice to say that the devil, in the guise of a magician, lands himself and his entourage (which includes a human-sized upright walking, talking, chess-playing cat) in 1930s Stalinist Moscow, with the general and targeted aim of prodding a few consciences and scoring a point or two for the artist’s right to self expression and freedom from state control.

Esther Freud’s Hideous Kinky has accompanied people to Morocco. Haruki Murakami has been the choice of those heading to the Far East with titles such as Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman and The Wind-up Bird Chronicle. With Rohinton Mistry’s novels A Fine Balance and Tales from Firozsha Baag and Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children and Satanic Verses likely to accompany a trip to India. There is even the wide-reaching Edward Rutherfurd, whose epic tomes encompass the entire histories of Russia (Russka), Ireland (Ireland Awakening), London, and New York.

The chances are that there is a novel set either where you will be going, where you have been or where you might want to go in the future…so save a little space in your back pack and see whether fiction really is stranger than the reality that’s out there!

See also: Gap year gear – Top 10  Author: Sam Golding