Adventure is a broad brush. One of the most adventurous moments of my life was when, aged 18, I over-filled an inappropriately massive, shiny, new rucksack with all sorts of things I would never need and flew to Africa to spend a year living in a small village there.
It was the happiest and most important year of my life. The important thing is only the way it makes you feel and what it teaches you. And nobody forgets their first backpacking adventures. Travelling by train, for example, is a sedate, civilised way of seeing the world. Certainly there may be moments of chaos, particularly if you choose to sample the rare delights of the cheapest classes of train carriages.
I once travelled by train through Pakistan, from Islamabad to Karachi. We were virtually out of money for we were returning home at the end of a long trip. At one of the many lengthy delays at a small station, my friend headed out clutching the very last of our Pakistani money to spend it wisely on the largest amount of food he could find. We were both extremely hungry. We were hot, too, suffering and sweating in the stifling heat in a crammed budget carriage without air-conditioning or fans.
I waited eagerly and impatiently. He returned, looking delighted with his haul: a big pile of battered balls that looked filling enough to fuel us to the end of the journey.
Biting into them, though, our faces fell. It was a deeply unpleasant hour journey as our mouths burned, our bodies sweated, and our bowels gurgled! Our delight at eventually reaching the end of this train torture was tempered measurably by our bicycles no longer being in the luggage carriage we had stored them in. We slept amongst the rats and homeless people on the station platform until the next morning when, to our great surprise, our bicycles arrived on a totally different train.
