After spending the majority of my gap year working in retail, I was glad to get away for three weeks to Thailand.
I'd never been travelling alone before, and throughout the whole trip I spent my time experiencing a strange combination of excitement and fear. I distinctly remember being in the taxi from the airport in Bangkok to the hotel where I was staying for a couple of nights, and despite the fact that it was 3am, the city was still full of hustle and bustle, and everyone seemed to be eating something. The foodstalls looked delicious, piled with strange looking foodstuffs which I couldn't identify...It looked completely alien, but yummy nevertheless.
The taxi driver must've noticed my hungry staring, as he turned around, took his eyes off the road for a good ten seconds, and with wide eyes said, "the food here is delicious, very, very spicy...BUT NOT FOR YOU. IF YOU EAT THIS FOOD - POOF - YOUR STOMACH EXPLODE!"
He then turned around and carried on driving. Needless to say, I avoided buying food off the stalls for most of my trip for fear of an exploding stomach.
There was also another humorous occasion involving me being chased down an isolated road in a dark forest by a pack of wild dogs which were (literally) foaming at the mouth, causing me to cry out, "AAAAH I DIDN'T HAVE MY RABIES JAB AAAH!" and losing my flipflops before I managed to get to the internet cafe which I'd been heading to.
The big issue arose when I wanted to return back to my camp from the internet cafe...So I spoke to a little Thai lady, presumably one of the owners of the cafe, and she seemed to get the gist of what I was saying from my wild gesticulations and barking noises. She motioned for me to follow her round the corner of the outside of the building, where she had a motorbike with a broom strapped to the front of it, and beckoned me to sit on it with her.
And away we went, zooming through the pack of rabid dogs and back to camp! I got off the motorbike feeling shaken but very thankful that she'd been able to help.
All in all, it was a pretty amazing three weeks in Thailand. One of the things I learned from my travels, especially from someone who has suffered from anxiety for a while now, is that nothing can stop you doing what you want to do if you're determined enough. A few weeks before I was due to go, I literally got to the point of ringing up my travel agency to cancel the whole thing because I was panicking about going...Looking back on it now, I don't regret a single thing, and I genuinely believe that going on the trip has helped with my problems. Not to say I don't suffer from anxiety anymore, but whenever I worry about travelling or doing something out of my comfort zone, I just think, "hey, I went to Thailand for three weeks! By myself! I'M THE DOG'S BALLS" or something to that effect. (Though, of course, not the rabid dogs' balls...I wouldn't want to be those balls...)
Moral of the story: almost everything turns out better than expected.