KEY POINTS:
They say the joy is in the journey, not the destination. I say bollocks. Give me a direct flight and a taxi to my pre-booked hotel and I'll give you joy.
Oh, I've done it the hard way. There was the time I decided to see Scandinavia and smugly booked an ultra-cheap flight from London to Friedrichshafen in Denmark.
"Oh look honey," I hear the more geographically supercilious among you say, "Typo in the Herald. They've put Friedrichshafen in Denmark." Idiots! Everyone knows its in Germany.
Yes, Frederikshavn (read it carefully and compare with above) is in Denmark. Friedrichshafen is about as far south as Germany gets and about 1400km from Scandinavia. Cue hilarious scenes at Friedrichshafen airport when I say, "Excuse me, which way to Copenhagen?" That's like turning up in Auckland and asking for directions to Ayers Rock.
But a worse error of geographical judgment was letting my new boyfriend plan a Christmas holiday in Morocco. Rather than fly from London into Marrakesh, like everyone else does, he decided we'd take a budget flight (you see a pattern here?) to Madrid, a train to the south of Spain, a ferry to Ceuta in Spanish Morocco and a taxi and bus across the border into the real Morocco. Ah, so much room for error!
It took four days of our nine-day holiday to get to Morocco, at which point we had to pretty much turn around and head home. We must be the first tourists in Moroccan history to have missed Fes, Marrakesh, Casablanca and the Atlas Mountains. We spent our two nights in Morocco in a village in the Rif Mountains called Chefchaouen, where nothing much happens but the Muslim call to prayer.
And it was heaven. We lost ourselves in its alleyways, drank fresh orange juice, scoffed tagine and watched kids play football in the dust and women wash clothes in a waterfall-fed river. It was what you so rarely get in a week's travel: a slice of the unaffected everyday life of a foreign village.
Would I make the same mistake again? No, these days I'm far more careful. And what a lost opportunity that is.
Bronwyn Sell is a freelance journalist with a zest for travel.
