Sue Perkins: How I overcame a debilitating lifelong fear of travelling
I am deep within the forest, the raw heat of the day softened by the canopy above. The man in front of me is swaying, a gobbet of raw pig’s liver hanging from his ear. Another man, to his left, has what looks like a piece of lung adorning his fringe. As I draw nearer, someone flicks a bit of kidney in my direction, which hits the white of my eye. Nearer still and the tribesmen rush to adorn my shoulders with offal, a ventricle here, a pancreas there. I think I can make out a spleen on my shirt collar, but am not sure. I was never any good at biology.
I am the only sober person in the forest.
Further offerings are made to the spirits, to the ancestors they believe inhabit this ancient land. A bubbling handful of intestines is respectfully arranged on a makeshift shrine. Men, and it is only men here, bob and bow – though I’m not exactly sure whether this is down to reverence or simple intoxication.
Tom Yam, the village elder, is sitting next to a giant bottle, the glass stained with green fur. Inside is a strange liquid which smells like a holy trinity of petrol, semen and Pimm’s. For all I know, it may well contain all three. One by one, the celebrants are invited to suck on the thick pipe that snakes from the murk. Some cough into the bottle as they drink. Some spit. Finally, the chief stares in my direction, his eyes glazed with grog. He beckons me.
It is my turn.
Historically, the Perkins tribe were neither explorers, nor adventurers. In fact, Dad, in a moment of genealogical fervour, traced his family tree back 200 years and discovered that all the men had been labourers or soldiers, and all the women charladies. None of my ancestors, not one, had the opportunity to leave the UK, not unless, of course, it was to offer up the odd limb or two at Gallipoli. Dad broke the mould, venturing as far afield as Kingston, Jamaica while on National Service – but he was so terrified by the flora and fauna that he vowed never to leave the shores of Britannia again.
“The crabs, Susan! The crabs! They were the size of landmines!” he’d recall, hysterically – as if the crustaceans would prove the more dangerous factor in that equation.
Mum was a little more intrepid. She had ventured forth to Ibiza in her mid-20s, but pronounced it “not Spanish enough” and returned a week later, disappointed.
Because our parents didn’t do “foreign”, and hated sleeping in “strange beds”, we tended to holiday in places where you could arrive and return on the same day. These trips were planned with military precision and felt more like tactical strikes than mini-breaks.
Occasionally, we visited my grandparents in their 117th-floor flat in Torremolinos. It must have been just “Spanish enough” for my mum because we went twice. We’d get sunburnt, drink Fanta, ride on a poor, beleaguered donkey in Mijas and fly home again.
When I was 18, I went to the East Coast of America, got mugged and came straight home. At 21 I went on a week’s trip to Madeira and drank vodka in an underwhelming villa with sea views so distant they stretched the very bounds of trade description.
See, I told you – not adventurous.
I’d never been one for leaving the comforts of home. That person wasn’t me, I didn’t spend my formative years youth-hostelling round Rwanda, or climbing Everest in a tie-dye playsuit to raise awareness of something or other. After all, why visit the Bora Bora crater when you can stay where you are and enjoy Netflix and salt-and-vinegar crisps?
As an adult, the obsessive dynamics of self-employment meant it was impossible for me to take a break. What would happen if I disappeared for a week or two? I would be forgotten. Forever. A once-in-a-lifetime opportunity would, doubtless, present itself – and I would miss the chance to seize it. No. Best stay here, alert and primed at home in London, and wait.
And then something wonderful happened – work itself afforded me the chance to go away. Finally I got to leave my desk with a clear conscience. In 2013, I was asked to make a documentary about the Mekong river, which flows for more than 2,485 miles, from the snowy peaks of Tibet to the vast Mekong Delta near Ho Chi Minh City in Vietnam. It had been a dark, difficult year. Poor Dad had been sick with throat cancer, and our days were spent bombing up and down the A30 taking him to and from his daily radiotherapy sessions. He was now in remission, but the treatment seemed not only to have shrunk his tumour, but his horizons. Now, he rarely left the house; content only to explore the already-explored, the safe, the pre-experienced – the familiar poles of armchair, bed and dining table. Occasionally his swollen legs would carry him as far as the biscuit tin and back. That would be a good day.
I agreed to the trip. Perhaps, deep down, I felt that I would be doing my travelling for him. And for Mum too – who has an adventurer’s heart but a carer’s role, glued to her partner through times, of late, more thin than thick, and certainly more in sickness than in health.
There was another reason too. I have a voice inside. A voice that I am forever trying to silence. A voice that calls me in when I want to be out, playing. A voice that is always sad. That is always terrified. That always wants to sit in the darkened room, away from noise and movement and colour – away from any experience that could prove to be challenging. To travel is to quieten that voice, to know that it cannot and will not control me.
So I said yes.
I landed at Ho Chi Minh City, wheeling a suitcase so large it looked like I was using it to perform a magic trick. “Ladies and gentlemen, as you can see, my assistant is now locked inside the Samsonite, and if you walk around you will see there is no way for her to get in or out. Now let’s see whether she can survive the baggage-handling.” I was the furthest east I’d ever been, if you exclude the time I took mushrooms and thought I was one of Kubla Khan’s handmaidens.
I was the furthest in any direction I’d ever been.
A gaggle of can-do Vietnamese lads was there to meet me outside the airport terminal, but even they struggled to load my outsized luggage on to the van. I am willing to admit that I had somewhat over-packed, and that the industrial waders, oxygen tent and satellite tracking system may have been a bridge too far.
I got into the back of their jeep and we drove around for what felt like hours. ten miles or so into the journey, it struck me that I had no idea where I was going, who these people were and whether, indeed, I’d even got into the right car.
Still, I wasn’t fazed, thanks to the diazepam I’d necked some 39,000ft above Ukraine. I am terrified of flying, you see – but I do it nonetheless (screw you, scared, sad voice within).
Two months later, and my suitcase is gone; in its place, a small rucksack containing a bottle of water and a picture of my dog, Pickle. I have learned how to travel light. I am now in rural Cambodia, in a forest with a bunch of drunken animists from the Bunong tribe. They have just sacrificed a pig, and are busy placing lumps of raw flesh on their nearest and dearest, by way of a blessing.
A young man approaches me, swaying, holding out something that looks like a sliver of heart. “I wouldn’t have said that was hygienic!” I mutter anxiously, as he grabs me in a headlock and starts grinding it into my quiff.
CLAIRE: “Sue!”
Claire is the director. She is loitering behind the camera, safely out of range.
CLAIRE: “Look! Go over there! There! They’re calling you over!”
She points to the tribal leader, Tom Yam, and a gaggle of elders hunched over a vat with a clear hosepipe sticking out of the top – the sort of pipe you’d use to siphon petrol out of a car. Those who had already had a drink were red in the face and clutching their foreheads, like they’d just done a ton of poppers.
Tom Yam sucks on the hosepipe. He swallows, then coughs violently into the bottle. He beckons me over. It becomes clear that I have no choice. I need to step up. I need to embrace the Bunong’s unique hospitality, even if it kills me. And it might.
I look over to the crew. They are some distance apart, shooting on a long lens. It is the look of a woman who is about to cross every health and safety threshold she once held dear; a woman about to be exposed to every single gastrointestinal disease vector known to man, and a few hitherto yet unidentified by medical science. It is a look that simply says “Help me.”
I know that a choice is presenting itself. I can play the squeamish Westerner, protect the delicate flora of my intestinal tract and offend a bunch of festive animists. Or I can be another person, a different Susan – a fearless explorer, embracing with open hands and open heart a strange new world.
I know the sort of the person I am. So I try to be the opposite.
And I drink.
The essentials
Sue Perkins’ book East of Croydon (Michael Joseph ￡20) is published on Oct 18.
Tickets to see Perkins on her live tour (Oct 28-31) are available from sueperkinslive.com.
