A little more than a year ago, the Maloneys were watching the sun set and the humpback whales breaching in the clear, warm waters of the bay below, in Western Australia’s Cape Range National Park.
They liked the area – lots of young fellow backpackers to hang out with; further up the state in Kununurra they had wound up in a caravan park full of retired people, which was pretty dull. But here, from their hilltop picnic point, glasses of wine in hand, the couple could reflect on some of the highlights from the adventures they’d been blogging about for the previous few months on their travels.
Such as paragliding in Nepal, witnessing riots in Kathmandu, watching orangutans and volcano-climbing in Sumatra; an earthquake, long treks, slow boats, fast boats, crashing a motorcycle, being knocked over by a motorcycle, 15-foot waves at sea in Java, diving with sharks; swimming with manta rays, sleeping under the stars in the outback and and flying in an old DC3 into Darwin Airport. All pretty typical – if rather daring – backpacker tales.
And yet not, perhaps, such typical backpackers. The Maloneys are Alan, 68, and his 50-year-old wife of nearly 24 years, Bev, and they were on what has recently come to be known as a “grey gap year” (although they prefer their own nickname for the trip: “OAP and HRT on tour”).
Research by P&O Cruises revealed last year that there had been a 300 percent increase in the over-50s age group taking a year out to travel the world in the previous five years – with envy at the lifestyles of younger people said to be partly the inspiration. Not something the Maloneys suffered from. “I’m only glad we ran out of time before getting to New Zealand,” said Bev, at home in Buckinghamshire, England. “Alan had decided we were going bungee jumping.”
An extended globe-trot could go so many ways for a long-married couple. Many of the younger people the Maloneys met – in bars, backpacker hotels, halfway up a volcano – said “you wouldn’t catch my parents doing anything like this”. Perhaps with good reason.
The idea of travelling together had always appealed – particularly to Alan, a former army officer who was poised to step down from his second career of co-running a golf club. But in 2009, as his retirement loomed, Bev had recently started a new job that she loved as a researcher and market analyst. But then Bev noticed a mole on her husband’s neck that turned out to be cancerous. Two operations later, Alan was given the all-clear. But by then he wanted to travel,
and he wanted Bev to go with him.
“I’d only been working at the new job for five months… but… I realised that Alan comes first,” said Bev. Fortunately, her employers were happy to keep the job open for her return. And so the planning began. “I’m a bit of a control freak,” said Bev, “and I had to keep being firm, saying, ‘no, Alan – this has got to be planned’ “ – including insurance, the potential lack of which, with Alan being a pensioner recovering from cancer, threatened to cancel the whole thing until Bev found a company willing to take on the risk.
As for the trip itself, they knew they wanted to start in India, Alan being a fan of Rudyard Kipling’s books. So they scheduled in Varanasi and Agra – then “just built on that”, said Bev. “Once we were away, I fell into the not-planning bit very readily. Every evening, we’d sit with a glass of wine discussing where we might go, not mapping out too much because we wanted that freedom. Alan became the chief organiser, reading up in the guidebooks.” And they went for the full traveller experience: through India, Nepal and South-East Asia, they were firmly on the backpacker trail – alongside twentysomething gap-yearers whose company they found “refreshing”.
One of the most memorable moments was paragliding in Pokhara, Nepal. They did tandem jumps. They also had an “awesome” Christmas spent on a slow boat on the Mekong, en route to Laos, where the best bits included wry smiles at Felipo, the middle-aged Sicilian out the back smoking “funny-smelling cigarettes” with a bunch of 21-year-olds, and an unexpected stop to pick up a local man – who needed everyone’s help to haul his large cargo of agricultural machinery on board. They were constantly delighted to be in the company of young people – yet amazed at their capacity for sleep. “They’d be there, eyes closed, iPods on. We’d think: ‘where are all these party people?’ “
Meanwhile, the Maloneys’ respective families were at home eating turkey. Apparently no one was too surprised at what the grandparents were getting up to. Well, apart from the six-day trek they did in the Annapurna mountain range in Nepal (Alan had had a knee replacement a couple of years ago).
“My respect and admiration for Alan has really grown,” says Bev. “Walking still isn’t easy for him… I’m just very grateful I’ve got Alan and not some old fogey.”
And as for Alan, “he learnt not to ask me where the sunscreen is when it’s 40°C outside and I’m having a hot flush”.
They are back home now and “loving it”, but while Bev has slotted back into her “work/gym/socialise/sleep” pattern, Alan “has taken up a fitness routine, something he has not had since leaving the army 18 years ago, and is planning to take part in a half-marathon”, said Bev.
“The great thing is our dreams and ambitions are quite unfettered now… we’re talking about another trip, though perhaps not for so long this time,” she said. – The Independent