New Best Friends

I guess it was at about the three-month point on my travels when the majority of my emailing / facebooking switched to being to "new" friends: to people I'd met since I'd been away.

I guess this is hardly surprising. At the moment I have more in common with people that I spent two weeks in a Cambodian orphanage with, than I do with people I've not seen since Christmas. Maybe my "proper" friends think that their news (doing an extra three hours over time, say) doesn't compare with sky-diving, life-threatening moto rides through the streets of Saigon or even the more mundane things which generally don't make my blog (seeing a pig wandering through a petrol station, for example, or buying lygons at a floating market). Maybe they're too bogged down by work to chat (this time last year I would've been). Maybe that by writing a blog I'm missing out on personalising messages. Maybe that we only really have a memory of about three-months and anything before that is essentially irrelevant (several of my closest friends have left Britain for periods of a year or more, I doubt I emailed any of them more than a handful of times after the first couple of months). Whatever the reason, most of the people I communicate with are people that I didn't know a year ago.

I was chatting to Nou the other day; she asked if Dan was my best friend. She seemed surprised that I'd only known him a few months - "you know each other very well". Truth be told, at the time Dan probably was my best friend. We'd travelled together for about three months, been through a heap of stuff together - it's not with everyone that I've cycled death road, or shared a bag of insects, or walked the Inca trail, or been jumped by a gang of ladyboys - we were going to know each other pretty well.

It seems that when you're travelling whoever you're with is probably going to be your best friend, albeit in a completely disposable manner. Within 48 hours of leaving Dan I had met Anna, who was my best friend for a week. Then she left and Emma and Christen got promoted... You get the idea.

Shared situations (eg. being unable to cross a border because of a strike) mean that you form instant bonds with strangers which result in actions which in normal circumstances would seem ridiculous (eg. sitting in a gutter playing cards with people that don't speak your language or lending someone you've known for less than a week $100).

When I get back to the real world I have no doubt that I'll be able to reintegrate with my "proper" friends, even those I've had next to no contact with over the last year. What will be far more interesting is what will happen to the new 2009-vintage friendships.

______________

Two blog posts in one day. You can tell the storms haven't eased off... I walked down to the river just now, I didn't go too close as I couldn't tell where the road ended, I guess the boats were a bit of a clue.