Answering the call of the wild

Gap years are often a wrench for parents, says Hilary Wilce. Her son David Dickson describes how 'it made me grow up"

Every year since they started school we have taken a photograph of our three children setting off for the first day of the September term. But in September 2000 only two were in uniform. The third had a rucksack on his back and was leaving to teach in the jungles of Borneo.

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Every year since they started school we have taken a photograph of our three children setting off for the first day of the September term. But in September 2000 only two were in uniform. The third had a rucksack on his back and was leaving to teach in the jungles of Borneo.

I dropped the two younger children at school and we drove to Heathrow. David was travelling alone to Kuala Lumpur, and looked very young and not a little apprehensive as he waved at passport control and was gone. I don't think I cried, but felt I could have wept buckets as I stared at the gap where he had vanished. This was the end of family life as we had known it.

A few days later there was cheerful email – thank God for email! – saying he'd met up with his fellow gappers and was safely in Borneo. Then there was another, saying he'd got a dreadful stomach bug. Then came email silence as he headed away from civilisation and our contact was reduced to occasional long letters about the village he was living in, the family he was staying with and the jungle all around. His world was inconceivable to us. He was dining in stilted long houses and hunting porcupines in the night-time rain forest, but we could tell he was well and happy and we settled down to life without him – although in a household where there were now only girls, the dynamic felt quite different. We not only missed our son, but also the thumping bass of the car radios which had always heralded his friends' arrivals.

By the time he set out on the road, in December, we felt he had found his feet in Asia. We also knew he was travelling with one of his fellow gappers, and his emails made clear that there was a travellers' world which he felt at home in, so our anxiety about him was only muted and subconscious, something like an electricity generator humming quietly away in the background of our lives.

Vicariously, we enjoyed his travels through Malaysia and Thailand, India, Nepal and Cambodia. He told us a lot about where he had been and what he had seen, but presumably nothing at all about anything he didn't want us to know about.

The low point, from our point of view, was one of the few times he sent us an email from Borneo, in which he recounted the wonderful time he and a friend had had, jumping into a rock-strewn river from a high jungle footbridge. "It's brilliant," he wrote. "But the locals think we are mad." "Don't EVER," we wrote back in a panic, "do anything the locals think is mad!!!!"

But we knew he had already disappeared back into the jungle and would not get our warning for weeks. At that point, the awful tragedies that haunt all gap year parents loomed in our minds, and we found ourselves jumping out of our skins if the phone ever rang at an odd time of the day or night.

The high points were the vividness of his letters and messages; the pleasure we got from his enjoyment of exploring the world; and the long (and expensive) phone calls we occasionally enjoyed. On Christmas Day we all talked for over an hour – far more than we would have done corralled around a turkey.

Then, quite suddenly it seemed, we were driving to Heathrow again, but this time with light hearts, not heavy ones. When he arrived back through the arrivals gate, he looked surprisingly the same, apart from the tan and the traveller's gear of a hand-woven shoulder bag and thonged leather sandals. We were thrilled to see him, and he seemed gratifyingly pleased to see us, too.

Not that that was the end of it. For a time he enjoyed the pleasures of hot water, free meals, and catching up with his friends. But it was a struggle for him to settle into the tedium of a summer job, and we all found ourselves having to make another adjustment – to having a child in the house who has grown too big for it, and is itching to be gone again. Gap year parents have a hard row to hoe. They have to let their children go, adjust to their absence, then re-adjust to the return of someone who might look much the same, but is actually very different.

The huge reward, if all goes well, is finding that although your old kind of family life is now history, you see the beginnings of a new one, with an interesting and engaged young adult who in many ways now knows more about himself, and the world, than you do.

'You can't go into different cultures and not be changed'

I was excited but nervous at the thought of being away from home for eight months, going half-way round the world, and being with people I'd never met before who perhaps wouldn't have much English. I was also apprehensive about teaching, which I hadn't wanted to do. I'd originally got a place to work in an orang-utan sanctuary, but that fell through and Gap Challenge had given me a teaching placement instead.

But I felt fine after arriving in Miri. I'd met the other three people who were going to Borneo at Kuala Lumpur and knew we were going to get on. We then met Sampson, our local rep, who was great.

In our village there were two of us. Nicky and I both lived with the deputy head of the school, Sang, and Julia, his wife, and their children in a modern house Sang had designed himself.

The best things about living there were hunting and swimming in the jungle, fishing and living with a local family. Town was eight hours away, on a good day, although when it rained you couldn't get there at all. But the village had everything you needed. We ate papaya, pineapples, oranges, tangerines, bananas, fish, chicken and rice.

I taught English to 12-year-olds and played football with them. The worst thing was not being able to communicate very easily, and also having a lot of free time, so sometimes the days dragged. I was probably ready to leave after three months, but I've often wished I was back there since! When I started travelling, I was really glad I'd done it. Otherwise you go from place to place, and never get under the skin of a country.

After we finished, four of us travelled around seeing the rest of Borneo, then two of us went up through Malaysia, and I went on alone to northern Thailand. I really liked being on my own, being forced to meet new people, and going where I wanted, when I wanted. But with the internet you still feel hugely connected with home.

I felt I'd experienced an awful lot in a short time, and although I don't want to sound too New Age and say I found myself, I don't think you can go into different cultures and not be changed. And it makes you grow up. You have to look out for yourself, sort out your food, your accommodation. I think I felt more independent when I came back, and – at first at least – much more relaxed about things like time. I also noticed when I went to university that there was a huge difference between people who'd had a gap year, and those who hadn't.

I'd say to anyone, take a year out, but only if it's really what you want to do. Unfortunately you meet lots of people when you're travelling who are moving from place to place just so they can say they've been there.