Tasha Dhanraj is off to Asia

I’m going to Chiang Mai. You know, Chiang Mai. That city in Thailand you’ve either never heard of or might have heard of once on some cooking programme on an obscure digital channel. Yeah, that place.

My cousin returned from travelling about six months ago and kept going on about how amazing Chiang Mai was until he decided to go back there and train to become an English teacher. Since I’ve got nothing going on at the moment, I figured I would fly out and stay with him for a couple of weeks.

I’m quite nervous. I’m going to be doing an 11 and a half hour flight on my own, then changing at Bangkok and flying for another hour. I get so hideously travel sick that this is going to be a challenge for both me and my stomach. But I’m determined that I’m going to have a great time – after all, I’m on my gap yah.

Even though I don’t care too much what other people think of me, I’ve so far spent my entire year thinking that maybe I should be doing ‘the gap year thing’ and going off to build a school for some undiscovered tribe in Indonesia, or experiencing a spiritual journey through Calcutta to find myself.

“I am arrogant enough to assume I already know who and what I am”

My issue is that my middle class parents took me all around the world when I was a child. By the time I was 11, I had been on holiday to almost every continent. It kind of gave me the ‘been there done that’ approach to travelling. The kind of feeling that most people get when a friend asks them if they want to go to Pizza Express. That, and as far as ‘discovering myself’ goes, I’m so intolerably confident and self assured that I am arrogant enough to assume I already know who and what I am.

I’ve managed to get over myself though, because the world is too exciting for me to continue with my stupid attitude towards exploring it. I convinced my inner self that I should go to Chiang Mai, given that I haven’t ever been there and I literally know nothing about it. I’ve done a little bit of googling and all I’ve gathered is that there are some temples, a night market and it currently has a terrible problem with smog. It should be an adventure and if nothing else, at least I’ll come back with my fascinating story about how I got respiratory problems whilst on my gap yah in Asia.