It probably feels a bit premature to be thinking about coming back home already, but this information may affect your planning, so best that it’s addressed now. Let’s assume you’ve circumnavigated the planet. You’ve fended off wild animals in Africa, hitchhiked across Asia and blowgun-hunted with indigenous forest-dwellers in the Amazon. You’ve learned to eat rice with chopsticks and dhal with your fingers and meditated with monks. You have new friends on every landmass, a new global outlook and even a few new parasites. All you have left is to return home.
But here’s where things can get problematic. With a comfortable bed and fresh set of clothes in sight, it’s tempting to lower your guard. Instead, you’re going to need to brace yourself for a potentially rough re-entry.
Many people coming home from a long trip experience a bigger shock on their return than when they first set foot abroad, and at a time when they’re least prepared for it. The good news is there are a few simple things you can do to turn the experience into a smooth landing, and the most important of these is just knowing what to expect. The stages of re-entry mirror those of culture shock: honeymoon, crisis, recovery and readjustment.
The honeymoon is the initial exhilaration of returning home, and precisely what most are expecting: a warm welcome, familiar bed, inquisitive friends who are dying to hear your stories.
The surprise left-hook (or “crisis”) is the reverse culture shock, which lasts until you acclimatize to your home surroundings and eventually return to your old self (with a bit more wisdom and experience).
The degree of the reverse culture shock you experience largely depends on how integrated you became into foreign cultures during your journey, and how different they are from your own. On returning, you may miss the regular and close social interaction you had with your foreign community and other travellers. You may find yourself revolted by the aggressive marketing campaigns you had previously learned to ignore. More likely, you may feel a distance has come between you and your friends and family because they can no longer relate to your “new” well-travelled persona – one that has grown and been shaped by your range of different experiences. Instead, they’re treating you the same way and don’t have the patience to hear the thirty hours of stories required to bring them up to speed. And if you’re returning to a job, you may notice reduced responsibilities and little acknowledgement for your overseas accomplishments.
This is compounded by The Questions. If you’ve ever broken your leg and had to explain what happened to everyone you met for a month, you already have a good understanding of what it’s like to be a human recording. But when you’re trying to sum up a few months or a few years of life-changing experiences in one or two cute lines, it’s even more frustrating. The Questions tend to be the same worldwide. They’ll start with “How was the trip?”, go on to “What was your favourite?”, and quickly get to, “So what are you going to do now?”
Eventually you’ll recover and adjust as you ease back into routines, accept your difference and apply your newfound approaches to various situations.
Scuba diving and cultural immersion are similar in at least this one respect: a little decompression is a good idea. Before you return home, try to build in a little stop for mental refuelling. It needn’t be a month of silence at a monastery: a beach will do fine. You just need a place with minimal stimuli. It can take a while to process the lifetime of experiences that you’ve just crammed into a ridiculously short period. And more important still, you need to begin to engage with the concept of returning home. You’re going to have enough to worry about when you get back, so try to work out a game plan in advance: where you’re going to stay, who you plan to visit and so on. So, if you do plan to stay at a beach, make sure it’s a beach with a good internet connection.
The best single thing you can do in this respect is keep your friends and family up to speed during your trip with regular dispatches from the road… tweets, Facebook updates, email, travel blog. Your friends and family will have far more patience to read about your experiences in bite-sized chunks as you go than to listen to them all in one sitting when you get home.
When you’re just about to head home, take some time to sum up your trip in your last dispatch. Answer the questions they’re likely to ask. List your favourite places, favourite experiences, craziest misadventure… things you expect you can spare yourself from having to answer one hundred times in person. Tell them what your plans are. Those around you will want to get that extra dose of info when they see you in person. Help them out. Give them something they can ask about. You might say, “I’ll be carrying around a very small selection of photos I wasn’t prepared to put online. For a beer, I’ll be happy to show them to you.”
Stay in touch with the friends you made on your trip. It improves the chance you’ll see them again, have a free place to stay (and a cultural guide) when you head abroad next time and gives you a free support network. Facebook makes this ridiculously easy.
Join an organization that supports a place or cause you found on the road. Study that language you were dying to speak at the time but couldn’t. Read fiction or non-fiction books on the subject. If you do eventually head back to any of these places, you’ll be able to appreciate them on another level.
There’s probably a hostel in your area filled with Europeans (and Aussies and Kiwis and Americans and Canadians, if that’s who you miss). Spending time with travellers, visiting students or an immigrant crowd can be just enough of a dose to remind you that you’re sane after all.
It’s common to feel superior to those around you who haven’t had such international experiences. Suddenly, their views may seem pedestrian and insular and you feel the continued need to “set them straight”. Just remember: your own views may not be that popular, either. Time outside your own country tends to highlight its faults, and you may come off sounding like a born-again critic. Take heart. You may well have enlightened perspectives, but don’t expect others to come around easily.
If you have the possibility to arrange your work/study schedule before returning, keep this in mind: a little down-time at home is wonderful, but too much can be self-defeating. Finding that right balance is up to you, but in general the less the better. One or two weeks is usually sufficient.
If you need a quick fix, you might try escaping back into your travels for a brief tour. This is where a good scrapbook/pinterest board and well-kept journal come in handy. Using your notes and images, it can often be helpful to write about your experiences more fully. Who knows? This may be the chance to release that budding travel writer within.
Chances are you never fully embraced your town like those you visited during your travels. Hit those museums you never bothered to visit, try some new pubs, even stay in traveller accommodation for a night. Apply your spirit of exploration to your home turf and chances are you’ll see it in a new light.
If all else fails (except your finances), hit the road again. It doesn’t have to be a long trip, or even an international one. Just taking some trains and buses, packing up your rucksack, sleeping in a few ratty hotels and meeting some other travellers can be enough.