The Completely Lost Tour was an elaborate form of a Way-Losing Tour that took place a few years ago but which I'm only getting round to writing up now. Rather than just spending an afternoon drifting from place to place, getting progressively more and more lost, the concept here was to spend three full days traveling blind.
It began more or less like any other way-losing tour, the only real difference being it started not in a city centre but at Bicester, a semi-rural train station in Oxfordshire. From there we heading off on foot... somewhere. We walked down country lanes and around housing estates, over fields and alongside a canal. At some point we walked into Bicester Village a shopping mall trying to pretend to be a village. It seemed popular with Chinese visitors who have an appetite for a perfect past that never actually existed.
The canal turned out to be interesting as we somehow got talking to a boat owner who invited us onboard. We slowly chugged along and heard some wild conspiracy theories, nodding eagerly all the way. You meet some curious people when you open yourself up for it on events like this.
The real challenge came when it started to get dark. The village we had stumbled into didn't have a B&B and we had a rule of not using our phone to check maps or call for services. We did find a pub that was open and started talking to people. Through one of them introducing us to another, we got ourselves invited to spend a night in someone's home. They sometimes rented rooms out to people and we ended up paying a reasonable price for a large comfortable room in a period building.
It strikes me now that when traveling in this way it becomes more important to talk to people as that is how you find food and shelter. This in turn, makes the landscape a far more populated one, rich with stories, opinions and ideas. That is how travel was conducted more, in the past, whereas we now use technology and money to make our way. It was a worthwhile experiment but if I were to repeat it I would probably try and do it somewhere warmer and dryer, perhaps in a country I know less well. I also wonder what would have been the outcome if I were very different to the people we met. I put on my best accent and presented myself as the nice gentleman and it worked. In other circumstances I would have to play it differently and I suspect some people would have a harder time working this crowd, but that's just speculation. The real proof only comes from trying it for yourself. So maybe I should set out to get completely lost in Vietnam or Bulgaria and see what happens.
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