There are two schools of thought on the subject of whether travellers want to return home at the end… Some feel that after an extended period of travelling they are ready to return home to a more ‘normal’ life, while others don’t want to return. After almost a year away, we are now battling to find a way home amid the current pandemic. The question is – do we really want to go?

The answer is a simple, unambiguous, categorical ‘no’. We aren’t ready to come ‘home’.

This isn’t to say that we aren’t looking forward to seeing our friends and family who we have missed dearly (given lockdowns and social distancing we won’t be seeing them for several months anyway), but we aren’t feeling like it is time to return to our home.

Part of this is of course due to COVID-19, we are currently in the country which has probably handled this better than anywhere else, soon to be returning to a semblance of normality, while we fly home to a country amongst the worst afflicted.

COVID has also had the effect of prematurely ending our travelling – we feel that our round the world trip is very much ‘unfinished business’. This is exemplified by the fact that since we were cut off from travelling to Canada by 6 hours, we probably won’t actually be going around the world. The government repatriation flights return via Hong Kong, so we would go back the way we came out and never cross the dateline. Technicalities aside, we were psyched for another 3 months of travelling, of new places and new experiences, and so feel like there is this gaping void between us and the idea of going home.

Even had COVID not struck the world, I doubt we would be feeling keen to go home now. We’ve met many travellers nearing the end of their time who have said that they are ready to go home, and we have friends from the UK who have travelled and felt ready to return. This isn’t us….for a variety of reasons.

Probably the simplest is the order in which we have travelled. We went ‘hard’ early, doing South East Asia and Nepal in the first half…. This was a wonderful experience, but a slightly draining one. The alien and often very basic environment made it harder work, and when it was time to travel to Bali and then Australia, we were comforted by ‘Western’ conveniences and familiarity. We went from a (usually mild) degree of discomfort and challenge into relative comfort and familiarity, so we felt refreshed and enthused. This was a deliberate choice and worked out well. The original plan had been to finish in New York where we could blow our remaining budget in the home of modernity, leaving the most expensive place to last.

Many of the others we have spoken to did things the other way around. We met a wonderful British couple in Vietnam… we were a couple of weeks into our trip and they were a couple of weeks from the end….and they were very much ready to return home. They were sunburned, hot, sticky, recovering from stomach bugs, and I think a bit tired of each other (we will cover this elsewhere!). At the end of our year we feel energised would love to throw ourselves back into a developing country.

We also feel that we have thrived in the traveling environment. The first month or so was hard, a sharp adjustment of lifestyle, but we soon found our groove. The constant new experiences, new people, new challenges, and seemingly endless beautiful places to take in…..we aren’t ready for this to end.

We have taken a great pleasure in the simplicity of this life.

We each have a little under 20kg of possessions, which we can carry on our backs. We have lived from this for a year, and learned that it is all we really need. Of course when we go back into a house we will need things to cook with, things to clean a house with, and things to entertain ourselves when we aren’t travelling the world. We will enjoy the novelty of having more than 3 sets of clothes each, yet that feels like a very empty pleasure. Not that we were flashy types anyway, but the experience of life being about ‘doing’ rather than ‘having’ has been an enlightening one.

Simplicity extends as well to a lack of real responsibilities. This is a bit of an anomoly, we set ourselves up so that we could travel without needing to work or deal with responsibilities for anything other than our own safety and environmental impact….it isn’t a sustainable life as our pot of money runs out….but we have seen how the need to work a conventional job, the pile of letters and bills on the doormat, and all of life’s other obligations really do weigh things down a little. We are under no illusions – this is a slightly immature state and we will be returning to responsibility, but it has been a pleasure.

For the last year, I’ve spent almost every moment with my best friend, and it has been probably the best aspect of this year. Going back to the responsibilities of home means going back to not spending all of our time together, and that is a very sad thought.

Finally, the nature of this experience has caused us to really doubt the meaning of ‘home’. In the literal sense, we own a house which we will move back into when our tennant finishes there, yet we no longer feel that Farnborough is our home. We deeply love our friends and family, who are generally located in the South of England, yet the geography doesn’t pull us. Prior to the lockdown we haven’t spent more than 10 days in any one place, and from this we have learned that we don’t need a fixed location to feel at home – countless wonderful people and places around the world have made us feel at home, wherever we might be. This is probably the most clichéd thing I’ve ever written, but ‘home’ isn’t a place, it’s a feeling, and we have felt it in many different places.

We aren’t feeling like we want to ditch our home lives; circumstances require that we do return home, but our experiences will lead us to a deep reassessment of how we live our lives in the future.