There are times in life when a two-week holiday is not enough. In the gap between school and university, for example, or between one job and the next, lies the opportunity to step off the social and career ladders for a spell. In this week’s Travel Show podcast, The Irish Times’ Sorcha Pollak talks with presenter Fionn Davenport about her formative gap year, which she spent in the Peruvian Amazon.
Notwithstanding the mugginess of the rainforest, it was ‘a breath of fresh air’, says Sorcha. ‘I had grown up in middle class Dublin with a very small circle of friends. I was very scared that if I didn’t go away for a while that I would end up remaining in this very small bubble’.
She traveled to Iquitos, a somewhat infamous city of 500,000 people in the heart of the jungle, so remote it can only be reached by boat or plane. ‘I was wonderfully naïve. I don’t think I’d do that now. When you’re 18 you don’t think about electricity cutting every single day’ says Sorcha.
In preparation for her trip, Sorcha linked up with a Scottish NGO specializing in sending young people to work on charity projects in Latin America. She raised the money for her trip herself. ‘I was at an advantage because no-one was doing gap years in Ireland, so no-one had heard of this concept’ she explains.
The Irish Times’ Arts Editor Laurence Mackin also joins Fionn on the show to relate his own Peruvian jungle experience. Fionn wonders if there is any place in the jungle for the traditional tourist, who ‘just wants to see this and not do good’.
‘There didn’t seem to be anyone who offered that in any effective fashion’ says Laurence. ‘The only way to go in and actually experience the jungle is to with people who know what they’re at’.
In Laurence’s case, those people were scientists investigating the importance of salt-rich soil to macaws, and the activity of wildlife along jungle tracks, an investigation you could take part in for a price. ‘You’re paying for the privilege of being a very lowly research scientist’ he says.