“HE travels the fastest who travels alone,” Kipling wrote. Certainly the hardiest explorers and voyagers regard solitude as the natural condition of travel. Most of us, however, like to travel in pairs. The benefits of this are obvious: it is safer, and you can divide the load of books, sun cream and lavatory paper evenly between two rucksacks.
Arguably, who you travel with is the most important decision that you have to make before a trip. Where and when to go are matters that fall naturally into place once you have decided who your partner is. But what makes a perfect travelling partner?
In practice, many of us fail to consider the question. We simply head off with a good friend, often with disastrous results — the rigours of travel can turn a mild-mannered mate at home into a grizzly gorgon on the road.
Ideally, you want to travel with a kindred spirit. Xanthe Woodhead, 18, from Oxfordshire, who is now on her gap year in South America, believes that this is vital: “You must have an interest in the same things. If one of you wants to spend a week nosing around temples and the other is an adventure-seeker who insists on going jet-boating, then you have a problem.”
Equally, travelling partners should share the same degree of sociability. As Sam Ware, a 33-year-old chef who has driven around Australia three times with three different partners, says: “Trappist monks travel in pairs just as well as It girls. But put a Trappist monk and an It girl together in the back of a Jeep on the Karakoram Highway and you’ll have fireworks. Everyone has their ups and downs, but in general you do need to share the same enthusiasm for meeting people, which is one of the greatest goals of travel.”
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On the practical side, it is helpful if travelling companions also share similar tastes in hotels, food, music and books. Xanthe Woodhead adds: “It is crucial to be on the same budget. The easiest way to fall out is if you want to stay in different places and can’t afford the same things.”
While it is important that there is commonality in several key areas, ideal travelling companions should have a host of minor personal attributes that complement each other: you are, after all, a team. In a perfect world, you would cover between you all the qualities highly prized by inveterate travellers — curiosity, optimism, empathy, toughness, skill with languages and, of course, a sense of humour (which no one should ever leave home without).
For Jonny Bealby, 41, who spent four months riding horses across Central Asia with a blind date to make a television programme, choosing a fellow traveller boils down to a simple formula: “You need to decide if you are a leader or you like to be led, then find a partner who is the opposite. Two Indians and you are going nowhere; two chiefs and you will kill each other. Riding across the Steppes, we were two chiefs. It went wrong from the start.”
One serious consideration when choosing a partner is — should you travel with a loved one? I set off around the world on a bicycle nine years ago with a girlfriend. Three months in she realised she disliked bicycles and loathed me.
“It is the ultimate test of a relationship,” said Tamsin Bruce-Gardyne, 39, a political lobbyist from London. “I went to Thailand with a boyfriend for six weeks. We split up after three but carried on travelling together and sharing a room. It was hell. But last year I spent three fantastic months in Chile and Brazil with a new boyfriend. When you are travelling you spend so much time together, often in a confined space, that you quickly find out how compatible you are. We’re now married.”
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What makes a good travelling partner changes with age — in your teens, you want a buddy with a good nose for a party and a way of dealing with thieving tuk-tuk drivers, while in your seventies, you hope for an accomplice with spare reading glasses and a sense of direction.
Serious travel writers, like hardened boozers, tend to work alone, and when a companion does make it into a travelogue, it is usually as a goofish foil to the author. There are exceptions: James Boswell and Samuel Johnson, who made their celebrated tour to the Hebrides in 1773, excelled in each others’ company, while in On the Road, Jack Kerouac’s semi-autobiographical account of a journey across America, it was the freewheeling Dean Moriarty who enriched the author’s travels.
But perhaps the adventurer and writer Robert Louis Stevenson knew best: for his trip through the Cevennes, he found reliable and unstinting company in one Modestine: a donkey.
Rob Penn is the author of The Sky Is Falling On Our Heads — a journey to the bottom of the Celtic Fringe (Sceptre, £8.99).