You can’t beat backpacking

10:54am Thursday 24th July 2008

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HOLIDAYS are supposed to be relaxing, aren’t they?

Unless you’re rebuilding a broken community or distributing supplies in the Third World, it’s pretty cut and dried; you hand over much hard-earned (or yet-to-be-earned, depending) and get sun, rest and rejuvenation – fact.

Well, not if you’re holidaying with me. My friends and I go out of our way to find the hardest, grubbiest and cheapest trips we can find. That’s not really our quest; we search for culture, like-minded travellers and the cheapest accommodation there is.

We’ve braved the youth hostels of Europe, a black out in America, beach huts and outdoor toilets (complete with complimentary mossies) in Thailand and freezing showers in Hong Kong and we loved it.

But last year, during a week in Morocco, it became a bit too much.

I don’t know if we were too over-worked or just plain wimps, but we put the backpacker name to shame.

We moaned, groaned, sweated and burned our way through the narrow streets of Marrakech and Essaouira.

Don’t get me wrong the enticing smells, plumes of smoke and heavy rhythm of drums reverberating through our bones in the bustling night market in Marrakech, was everything we’d imagined.

We were amazed at the vibrancy, the tooth-pullers, acrobats, snake charmers, witch doctors, animals and everything else – we just didn’t seem to be able to cope with it.

Take the food, for instance.

One night of tasty tagines and we were hooked on pizza for a week. The sight of bloody pig carcases hanging in the narrow streets may have had something to do with it – the lack of alcohol something else.

We didn’t bother to buy booze at the airport, as it was only a week of going without. By day three we were scouring the streets for beer and sucking on shisha pipes.

Arabic customs of covering up meant tan-time was limited, but in Essaouira, we sacrificed our English skin to the beach for a whole three hours. Laura, who had planned to lie there all day, stood up to examine her tan lines and fainted. Water, ice cream and a good lie-down later and she still didn’t feel any better.

She was sick before boarding an old, sweaty bus back to Marrakech and was so badly burned she couldn’t sit down in the taxi.

By now we were burned, sick, boozeless and dying to go home, which was a shame, because Morocco is amazing. It offers so much culture, heritage and vibrancy, beautiful scenery, and I’ve never met so many kind people in all my life. But there is a lot to be said for a week lazing by the beach.

You would have thought we would have learned our lesson – but no.

Tonight, we head off to Thailand, for a fortnight backpacking around the islands. The old backpack has been stitched up, stuffed with enough Imodium and plasters to last a month and we’re booked into a host of places where we can share outside loos with mossies and bedrooms with rats.

Bring it on!

* NOT much gets me riled on TV these days.

After all, reality shows like Wife Swap and Big Brother have given us warts and all access into the lives of our fellow Brits for years.

Yet a BBC documentary called Sasha: Beauty Queen at 11, really got my goat. If you missed it, it followed 11-year-old Sasha Bennington’s quest to be an American beauty queen.

This pretty, blonde girl from Lancashire racks up a monthly beauty treatment bill of £300 a month and applies more fake tan, eyelashes and nails than most of us will see in a lifetime. More shocking than that, though, was her mother, Jayne, who puts parenting to shame.

“You better be smiling when we get there Sasha, or else you’re dead,” she told her, before a modelling casting. “If you don’t get accepted on this one, that’s it, you’re grounded.”

She even pushed her daughter into the middle of a restaurant to practise her cheerleading routine and talked non-stop about her own brief modelling career. But the worst, most horrifying moment of all was when Sasha described herself as blonde, pretty and stupid.

Who on earth, regardless of their views on beauty pageants, could want their daughter to think, and believe, that?