Travelling is a trip in more senses than one.  There is an inevitable come down when it’s over.  A come down you think you are prepared for but which hits you in the face like a full speed freight train.  And when you are back in normality, basing your day around set meal times and television programmes, your recent experiences seem so far fetched that you really believe them to have been induced by some sort of hallucinogenic drug.

                Like a Class A, travelling is addictive, it leaves you penniless, when you are on it you are high and when you are off it you crave it.

Back in your familiar surroundings you kick yourself for having those “off days” during your travels, the days you waste when you are feeling a bit low because you got ripped off three times in one hour after having had no sleep on the over night bus, slowly expiring under the heat.  You retire to an internet café and allow yourself a moment of pining after the motherland by sending emails that are slightly laced with homesick sentiment.  How wonderful those “off days” seem in contrast to the grey scale of where you are sat now; right in the middle of the bleak English winter.

                As you may have guessed, I have just got back from a trip and am wallowing in self pity, desperately wanting to be back where I was.  Of course my timing could not be worse.  The last time I returned from overseas it was August.  August is o.k.  There is still Pimms, barbeques, weekends on the Cornish coast.  January is not o.k.  According to statistics, the most depressing day of the year is in January, which ironically was the day I flew back into clinical Heathrow. 

Everyone is in debt, anxious about how their gluttony over the festive season has affected their waist line and also treating you with slight resentment because you are tanned and look vaguely healthy in comparison to their translucent pallor.  January is a bucket of cold water for us Northern dwellers who have tasted the fruit of a warm, exotic winter.  You wonder why we put ourselves through the pains of this annual season affected disorder when a mere flight away exist untapped havens.

The most horrible part of the come down is the “what was I doing this time last week” thought.  It pains me to reminisce about the hammock, the sticky rice that I ate with my hands and taking my shampoo down to the river to wash my hair.  My main worry was to keep an eye on the ground so that I didn’t step on the black and yellow stripy snake that I’d heard about.  Apparently they are poisonous.  I wish my anxieties were that colourful now.

So is there any hope for those of us who are going cold turkey, craving hit after hit of exoticism and finding our own home town comparably average?  Perhaps, I think it is called adjusting, coming back down to earth and trying not to be a travelling snob and shun the things about your home that you actually love.

This afternoon, taking a break from the chapter of a guide book I am currently working on (which is a constant reminder of the beautiful country of Laos I have just left behind), I decided I needed a walk.  Armed with several layers of clothes against the bitter chill that I have not yet acclimatized to and a horrendously over priced cigarette compared with the 50p packets I was buying only days ago, I set out for the river Thames to further wallow in my post travel depression.

I wandered up to Chiswick Bridge and looked down the river.  It was about four o’clock in the afternoon and I don’t think it has ever looked so beautiful in West London.  The sun was going down which produced a pattern in the sky that rivalled many I have seen over the last few months abroad and everything seemed slightly frozen in time, as if the dropping temperature had put a spell on the scene for my benefit just so I could remember what it was about London that always makes me return.

And although that moment on the bridge only took the edge off my craving like a nicotine patch and I am still keen to be back on the move, I realised that perhaps hindsight colours the grass on the other side a little greener and that for the time being I should appreciate what I have right on my doorstep.