Spirited away

Where she once set off on holiday with an ironclad itinerary that optimised every minute of her trip, AVANTIKA SHANKAR has learned that the beauty of travel is in journeying within

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IT'S ONLY THE second night of my 10-day trip to Thailand, and I'm miserable. I'm sitting at a bar in Pai, a mountain town in the north that I had chosen based on someone's recommendation of it being a "quiet place no one had heard of". I had just quit my job with no plan for the future, and had come to this small bohemian getaway with a specific agenda: to leave behind the cacophony of Mumbai so I could be alone with my thoughts in the wilderness. An alarm had clearly been sounded somewhere because by the time I arrived, sleepy Pai had devolved into a version of a Portuguese nightclub on a Saturday night.

I don't believe I'm alone in feeling this sort of dismay on holiday. Social media has set up a fantasy that's impossible to live up to, with thousands of "top ten" and "must-visit" recommendations that all feel as unmissable and life changing as the next. Hustle-culture millennials like myself have been hard-wired by our capitalist conditioning to cram as many of these experiences into a trip as possible. As a compulsive itinerary maker, I've had my share of "stood in line for four hours to look at something not worth the time" experiences, but that was just the bucket-list template of holidaying most of us were handed down by parents who looked at the exchange rate like it was a monument in itself. Now, things are different.