From the archives

For many students, the best thing about going to university is the gap year. Traditionally, this glorious year of freedom and self-discovery known as G.A.P. (Gigantic All-Year Party) takes place the year before students start their university course but quite a few people are now choosing to take it in the middle of, or immediately after, their studies. Isn’t it better just to jump into an eight-month half-naked trek across the more salubrious slums of the Third World’s tourist resorts than to give up your dream of responsibility-free bohemian bliss forever? If that’s what you’re thinking, read this…

AUSTRALIA
If you travel here on your gap year, you have to be prepared for long slogs in the outback otherwise you risk getting caught up in the tedious holidaymaker parts of the country. Sure, they have big tasty prawns to eat, but culturally it’s akin to spending your holiday in an Outback bar in Islington only without it raining outside. All the best bits about Oz, like Nimbin (a valley about two hours from Byron Bay where they grow literally 1,000 acres of weed) and the Blue Mountains, are off the beaten track so you have to do your homework and be prepared for some serious travelling. Note: Whatever you do, please don’t end up on one of those Oz Experience bus ride testosterone fiestas. Seriously, those things are like 50 rugby-playing guys slapping each other round the face with their dicks and going “yah” a lot. Horrible.

BEACH
The chances are you will end up spending a few nights here with some local down and outs and fellow travellers. Where else is there to go when you run out of money? If you are going to sleep “al fresco” like a dirty old tramp be sure to wake up early and keep your valuables next to parts of your body that can’t be easily pickpocketed. By the way, regularly lying outside exposed to the early morning sun for five hours will leave you with skin like a sunbedloving granny from Essex. You might also get cancer, which is almost as bad.

CAMBODIA
This is a pretty insane place. Did you know that in certain parts you can pay to fire assault rifles and bazookas at cows and other farm animals? Here’s something else weird: our friend Rahul just came back from there and he told us he’d bought a Cambodian police officer’s uniform right off his back. The cop just wandered off in his pants. No lie. He even tried to sell him his gun! Be careful though, some people we know from Brighton went away with a friend who had a little too much of a taste for Cambodia and after getting his student loan on his return to England decided to fuck off back there again. This was three years ago. His parents were recently in the national press offering a £10,000 reward for information on his whereabouts.

DELHI BELLY
Don’t go to India. You will be ejaculating acidic streams of diarrhoea out of your anus as soon as you touch down. It happens to everyone. Also, you will have to face the fact that at one point during your travels you are going to feel really ill and shit your pants. Deal with it.

EUROPE
Sure, South America and South East Asia are cool but there is a whole continent on your doorstep. You know that crap movie Hostel? Well, the former Eastern Bloc countries aren’t quite like that, but they are cheap and full of beautiful girls. An InterRail ticket is next to nothing compared to an around the world flight. Or you could just buy a van, call it Doris and break down all over Stalin’s back garden.

FINDING YOURSELF
This is what it’s all about, man. But while you’re doing that, don’t forget that you are in a strange environment and stand out like a big red greasy carbuncle. Make sure you take any advice the friendlier locals give you. Our intern, James Knight, was about to get a bus over the Laos border into Cambodia when a little old lady came up to him and told him not to get on. James is an open-minded guy so he listened to her advice and instead waited hours for another mode of transport. Later in the day, the bus was hijacked and six tourists were shot. He had a lucky escape.

GAP CHALLENGE
This is one of the many organisations offering pre-college students the chance to work in developing countries like Peru, where you will get to spend all day hanging out with poverty-stricken kids. It may not be as selfishly fun as writhing around a beach on Goa on ketamine with thousands of other British pieces of trash, but it’s more likely to make give you a sense of self-worth and some stories that are better than: “I met this girl from Nottingham and we had sex in the sea, then I got dysentery and now we talk on MySpace occasionally.” Go to www.world-challenge.co.uk to find out more.

HELPING THE NEEDY
Seriously, though, who really wants to go all the way over to the other side of the world just so they can build some stupid school or teach blind orphans to tap-dance? If you are going travelling you need to make sure you look after number one. Ride an elephant, see a few temples, maybe take a piss in a massive waterfall, then spend the rest of your cash on booze, drugs and crappy souvenirs like a wine bottle opener in the shape of a man with a turban having his ten foot whanger sucked by a dog.

ICELAND
Don’t go here unless you’re a single mum of three and you want to buy 78,000 sausage rolls for 99p. Oh, the country? It sucks as well. Yeah, so it’s beautiful and everything is open 24 hours, but a beer costs, like, £50. Unless you are an Earl or have won the lottery or something it’s just not feasible. But if you were an Earl you’d probably be in Monaco or St. Tropez or somewhere else, so never mind.

JOB
You will need one of these to be able to afford to go away. So quit whining and get your hands dirty, you useless layabout. Get to temping agencies, bar work, labouring, do whatever it takes. Chances are you still live with mum and dad so any cash you bring in is 100 per cent profit. Enjoy it. Like we keep saying in these Student Guides, you’re going to walk out of university with a minimum of £10,000 debt.

KUALA LUMPUR
Fuck this place as well. Idiots namedrop Kuala Lumpur as a dream gap year destination because it sounds like a place out of Star Wars: Episode 9 where Boba Fett trained to be an assassin for the Empire, but in reality it’s boooring. Look, why go to a builtup urban area when all around it is the wilds of the jungle with lions and tigers and soft-breasted tribeswomen eager to milk some Western sperm onto their faces.

LANGUAGE
Don’t worry, you won’t need to learn any new languages on your travels. If the locals can’t understand some primitive grunts, then they’re not worth speaking to. But on a serious note, it’s probably worth taking some type of phrase book. We recommend one with pictures so you just point at the things you need and shake your fist. When you do this, make sure you’re really drunk, wearing a hat made out of a knotted handkerchief and your face resembles the colour of a freshly boiled lobster dipped in red paint. The locals will respect you for it, we promise.

MUM
You will miss her. She will miss you. You will miss each other. When you run out of money she will send it to you. When you go missing she will go on the news to make an appeal for your return. OK, this probably won’t happen, but remember: the most useful thing you can have on you when you’re gallivanting on the other side of the world is mummy’s telephone number.

NEW FRIENDS
One thing is certain: you will NEVER see the people you meet abroad on your gap year EVER again. In the unlikely event that you do, you’ll soon wish you hadn’t as you sit there staring at your feet waiting for them to get the train back, following the 10 minutes of forced chuckling as they reminisce about the time they slipped on a piece of shit on a rock in a stream and got water in their brand new plimsolls.

OPIUM
AKA guilt-free heroin, AKA the “get out of jail free card”, this drug is one of the best you can get. You have amazing dreams, an amazingly calm, positive outlook on the world and virtually none of the downsides of heroin like itching, projectile vomiting and being imprisoned for eight months for compulsively shoplifting minced beef from Sainsbury’s. North Thailand is the best place to find this stuff, but remember, if you get caught, you may end up in prison for years and years and years, especially if you try and bring some back on the plane with you. Opium’s pungent stuff and the drug dogs will easily sniff it out.

PREACHING
This is what you’ll be doing for the next two years after you come back. You’ll be sat at the uni bar regaling people with stories like the time you met some crazy religious holy man on the beach who sold you some mushrooms and made you “the most wicked potato curry you ever tasted” inside an old wigwam that smelled like twoweek- old cat litter and beer. Just remember that no one gives a shit about your “wacky” travelling exploits apart from yourself, so show some restraint and save yourself some friends.

QUEBEC
We met a girl there who knew stuff like Ian MacKaye was in a band called Teen Idles before Minor Threat. She also knew you can still get the Evergreen seven inch on Gravity but the LP is impossible to find. Basically it’s an OK place if you’re an emo nerd.

RELIGION
Remember, this is important to a lot of people, so don’t go offending anyone by trying to make jokes about suicide bombers or dozens of beautiful virgins or, worse, pretending you know what you’re talking about while drunk in a bar shaped like a pineapple in the middle of Bangkok. It’s interesting that no one ever really goes on gap years to Muslim countries. Why not try somewhere like Pakistan? This supposedly “wartorn” country has whole galaxies of unexplored amazingness that 99 per cent of other kids won’t see. The British Consulate gives out up-to-date, free advice on demand, you know. With a bit of effort you could be in Madagascar or Saudi Arabia next week.

SEX TRADE
Any of you desperate to jump on the AIDS bandwagon, look no further than the people who work in the sex trade in places like the East or Africa. Yessirreeeebob, for less than £10 you can contract this deadly disease by splitting your condom inside the anus of a postop transsexual you thought was a real girl after downing a bottle of whiskey with a scorpion at the bottom. It might be fun at the time, but the next 30 years (if you’re lucky) are going to be a total disaster.

THAILAND
If you’re planning on taking a gap year, this will be top of the list, no doubt. Why are people so keen to go here? We don’t really see the big fuss. You get to go scuba-diving and buy lots of cheap counterfeit clothes and hang out with peasants and loads of other students. Is that really worth spending a year of your life working towards and doing?

UNIVERSITY
Remember during your “horizonexpanding” experience that you are heading back here at the end of it all for three more years of loafing about. There’s no need to go totally crazy every night. Go to a museum or climb a mountain. Visit a temple or try eating a live snake’s heart or something. People who get drunk every day spend most of their time being hungover and lying down in smelly hostels half-asleep while mosquitoes buzz around them, ready to pass on diseases that doctors haven’t even thought up names for yet. Oh yeah, that’s the reason you should NEVER go anywhere vaguely foreign without getting ALL of your innoculations beforehand.

VAN
If you do end up choosing to go to a really, really big place like the US then you should rent a van or a car. They are really fun and you can pretend you are Dean Moriarty from On The Road. They also double as accommodation when you spend your last few dollars on some weed that turns out to be tree bark. Petrol is cheap as dirt in America (that’s why there’s a war) so there are absolutely no excuses.

WORLD
At the end of all this you may realise that Planet Earth is a pretty cool place. If you hang out in darkened rooms for the next three years playing Super Monkey Ball with the sound off while listening to The Dark Side Of The Moon and eating microwave pizzas, it has been wasted on you.

XANAX
We’ve talked about a lot of different drugs, but this is the one you are most likely to end up depending on when you get back. Your year of fun is over and it’s probably all down hill from here. This will be your lifesaver. People get addicted to Valium while travelling which is really great for long plane journeys but not so good when you’re doing seven a day and falling asleep in lectures having totally forgotten the night before when you told your best friend that it was “all over between us.”

YOUTH
People cling on to this until they’re in their mid-30s, but every time they wake up from partying their bodies get weaker by the day. This is why it’s important to pack as much fun and experience into the period between the ages of 18 to 25 as you possibly can. If you waste any of those years by being boring or moaning about how many problems you have, without doing anything about them, you’re going to turn out to be a very angry and sad old person indeed. This is why your gap year HAS to be pushed to the limits.

ZERO
Unless you are in the 0.001 per cent of the population that is a spendthrift, this is the amount of money you will have in the bank at the end of your trip. If you plan it right, it’s also the number of times you will have wished you were back home and the number of cares in the world you will have. Despite the SARS scares, stomach upsets and near-death experiences, your gap year should bring you some of the best times you are ever likely to have!

VICE STAFF

Tagged: gap year, the vice guide
October 28th, 2009 @ 07:23