Jump to navigation Still on the road after all these years
It was a disconcertingly familiar scene. There were three of us leaning against a bar swapping stories about holy rivers, Himalayan passes, Iranian visa extensions and giardiasis: a classic session of travellers’ tales. It was disconcerting because, though it felt like a Friday night at the Mandela bar in the student’s union, we had all left university 15 years ago, and the bar we were propping up was in a private Soho club. Along with smoking and skateboarding, people tend to give up serious travelling when they reach their thirties: aerobics, yoga and family holidays fill their place. The rucksack goes in the attic, the tatty Lonely Planet guides are consigned to a shelf in the spare bedroom and the bespoke batik shirt from Bali goes to the charity shop.
There is, however, a small fraternity of diehard travellers who refuse to hang up their Teva sandals just because they own a suit. You have heard of Yuppies and Yummies, Dinkies and Glams, now meet the Stonky — Still Travelling On, No Kids Yet. A classic Stonky is thirtysomething, without children, probably single, employed, comfortably off and, crucially, still consumed by a passion for real travelling.
A Stonky may be too old for full moon parties but he or she is also too young (in heart, at least) to lie down and die on a Lilo in a Tuscan swimming pool. Stonkies do not do spa holidays. Stonkies think Tyler Brûlé is an egg pudding. Stonkies love being on the road.
A Stonky’s passion for travel was nurtured as a student: on long bus journeys across the Gangetic Plain, on the beaches of Thailand and Costa Rica, on the Gringo trail in Chile. But you won’t find a Stonky in a place as hackneyed as Koh Samui or Kovalam these days. Oh, no. A Stonky’s choice of destination is as discerning today as it was indiscriminate 15 years ago.
“Stonkies are always on to the next place,” Charlie Hopkinson, marketing director of Dragoman, tells me. “If we set up a new overland trip — next year, for example, we are running one from Tashkent to Kathmandu via Tibet — Stonkies are always the first to book.”
Jonny Bealby, founder of the adventure travel company Wild Frontiers, agrees: “We’ve got trips to Afghanistan, Uzbekistan, Ethiopia, Georgia, Indochina and Algeria in 2004. The weirder we make it, the more Stonkies climb aboard.”
Most Stonkies do, it seems, travel in small groups on escorted tours often arranged by niche operators, but there are still a few who choose to go it alone. “I was in Chhattisgarh last summer,” says Mary-Anne Denison-Pender, 38, managing director of Mahout, which represents hotels and provides an advisory service for people trying to start travel businesses in India. “It’s a new state which broke away from Madhya Pradesh. There’s little infrastructure, but it is beautiful and fascinating and empty. I usually make two trips alone every year.
“But I don’t just drift around.It is all very structured these days and I am beyond buses and the tops of trains. I hire a driver and a car in India, as I have to make the best use of the time away from my business. Does that make me a Stonky?” It certainly does.
Time is crucial to Stonkies. John Da Silva, 34, a solicitor from London, says: “As a student I went to Nepal, Asia Minor, Kashmir and Eastern Europe on my own. I never planned anything and time was never an issue. But when you only have 25 precious days of holiday a year, you don’t want to spend three of them at a railway station waiting for a train.”
Bealby realises this. “We try to offer the experience of the three-month trip, but condensed into two-and-a-half weeks. What we find is that these people begin the trip poorly prepared. Such is the pressure of their jobs that they haven’t even had the time to read up on where we are going, but because they have good travelling skills they have the confidence to know that they will be all right.”
Hopkinson agrees: “Stonkies are very easy to travel with. They party a little and never grumble. When a trip stops somewhere for a couple of days, they are the first to head off on their own.”
Justin Wateridge, manager of Steppes Travel, also believes that Stonkies need very little hand-holding, and he adds: “Not only can they take the rough with the smooth, but they offer constructive criticism when they get back.”
Bealby agrees: “When a trip comes unstuck, a Stonky knows how to react.” He tells me about a group he was leading over the Irkeshtam Pass on the China/Kyrgyzstan border. For inexplicable reasons the Chinese officials would not let the minibus across the border and so, after nine hours of argument, the bus was abandoned and Bealby hoisted his clients on to the back of a coal lorry.
“How could I forget it?” Louisa Thompson, 36, a film agent from London who was on that trip, enthuses. “I did Australia and the Far East for a year when I was 21. Then I got a job. Next thing, I’m in my thirties and planning to go to Italy with my mother to get wrapped in mud. Thankfully I saw a photo of the Tien Shan Mountains and I thought ‘I’m going there’. It was an ordeal at that Chinese border, but no one complained.”
Stonkies have not, then, lost the wanderlust and the desire for edgy experiences that defined their travels more than a decade ago but they will happily indulge in a little luxury these days, as John Da Silva explains. “It’s fine to lie down on a rope-bed at a tea stall in the Hindu Kush for an hour and reminisce about the trips I made as a student, but I don’t want to sleep on it all night.”
So Stonkies may not need DVD players, gold bath taps and camomile-scented teabags to bathe their eyes at dusk, but for all their experience on the road, they do require a comfortable bed and good food when they happen to reach the furthest corners of the planet. Which just goes to show, any fool can stand in a posh club in Soho and think he’s as tough as Wilfred Thesiger, but only a Stonky will be writing “pack moisturiser” on the back of t heir hand at the same time. Rob Penn, The Times, February 2004.
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Are you a stonky?
If your answer to five or more of the following questions is “b” then there is no denying it:
1 Would you be happier seen carrying a) a Louis Vuitton valise or b) a dusty old rucksack?
2 If you had a month off work would you rather a) hire a villa in the Dordogne and invite all your godchildren to stay or b) trek to Vilcabamba, the last city of the Incas?
3 Do you a) use a digital camera or b) shoot transparency film on a manual camera?
4 Would you prefer to shop at a) the January sales in Milan or b) the Sunday Bazaar in Kashgar?
5 When The Beach was published did you a) praise Alex Garland or b) sulk because you should have written it?
6 Do you believe that, above all, travel should be a) relaxing or b) formative?
7 Who do you rate as the better travel writer: a) Bill Bryson or b) Robert Byron?
8 When you are travelling and you run out of clean underpants, do you a) find a department store and get your credit card out or b) turn your old ones inside-out?
