Gap Year Experiences

Step out of the comfort zone and come to Cape Town

Tuesday 9 September 2008

What is it that makes some people fearless and others nervous of leaving the house? Is it something you're born with maybe, or is it how you grow up.

I like to think that it has a lot to do with starting small and and working your way up the list of fears. I like this theory because it implies that becoming fearless to a degree is something that anyone can become given enough willpower. Some people will however get round to starting at a much younger age, thereby laying the foundation for a life of constantly upping the ante and pushing themselves to find the next biggest rush. For others however, its a process that is never started and just gets harder and harder the longer its put off, thereby condemning themselves to a life in the dreaded comfort-zone. For some of us, pushing our boundaries and facing up to our fears is the most difficult thing we can think of, for others, its the constant rush of conquering those imaginary demons that gets us going. The one thing that we can be certain of is that it is always a mental battle. I don't believe that the battle ever gets easier, you just become tougher and develop better weapons. The first time you win that battle however and stand up to a fear is an unbelievably exhilarating experience and often one which makes you realise how unfounded your fear was in the first place. You feel like you're on top of the world and its this that will keep you coming back over and over again. Its the healthiest addiction you can have!

Travel is something that can bring about a whole range of fears (mostly irrational) and thereby reasons not to, that can be a huge beast to overcome. While I have never met a person who says that seeing new places and experiencing new things is anything but the most amazing experience you can have, a huge number of people will never step out of their comfort zone and see whats beyond. I believe that travel, and here I mean real travel, not a last minute deal to a resort in Spain with 37 of your neighbours from back home as company, should challenge you constantly.

It should make you feel alive and using this weeks quote from our website: “To awaken quite alone in a strange town is one of the pleasantest sensations in the world.”- Freya Stark, I would like to add that awakening alone in a strange town is also one of the scariest sensations in the world and along with this fear and the fact that you have overcome it by simply being there in the first place, comes incredible freedom. The type of freedom that you feel when you first get your driving license or walk out of your last A-level exam. The feeling that you are on top of the world and nothing can touch you. That is the sort of feeling that real travel should bring with it. And the reason you feel free has more than a little to do with the fact that you have overcome your fears of stepping out and doing things, of meeting people and dealing with ideas and cultures completely foreign to you. As the famous quote goes: “Whatever you think you can do or believe you can do, begin it. Action has magic, grace and power in it.”
If you have never been travelling before there is no time like the present. Get up and brush past fear like it isn't even there and let the butterflies in your stomach fly free! Plan a great trip and go. One thing I can guarantee is that you will not regret it.

Why all this talk of overcoming fear today? Well it started from reading a recent article on a few of the most amazing travel experiences you can have and in that list was visit Cape Town for the Red Bull Big Wave Africa competition, held in none other than my home neighbourhood of Hout Bay in Cape Town. Now these guys are overcoming some serious fears, but you only have to look at the stoke on their faces to realise why they do it. While there aren't many of us who can comprehend dropping down the face of a 20 foot wave, most of us can comprehend the feeling of facing up to something that scares you and overcoming it. If you have ever heard Baz Luhrmans sunscreen song, there's a line in there that says: do one thing each day that scares you. In my opinion this is one of the greatest pieces of advice anyone could take to heart. Start small and work your way up. Who knows, maybe sometime in the not too distant future you will be sitting in the freezing cold, shark infested water of Dungeons about to take off on a 20 foot wave.

The Red Bull Big Wave Africa is held in July every year in Cape Town. The event goes ahead once organisers decide that the swell is big enough. Give us a call on 0800 030 4207 if you're interested in organising a trip to see this incredible competition.

Vince