Fear Factors

Monday 5th April 2010, 9.50pm, Lava Bar - Rotorua

I suspect that it will only be when I eventually return home that I realise how travelling for this long has changed me. I know I have changed, I do not expect that you can see the things I have seen and become used to the way of life that now seems normal to me without it affecting your outlook and aspirations somewhat. But maybe it will need for me to be back on the grey and familiar streets of London to realise that I will no longer settle for greyness, knowing as I do that there are some places on Earth so overwhelmed in colour, the familiar will be made unfamiliar because I will be looking on it with a brand new pair of eyes.

There is one thing about me though that I can recognise the change in without having to go home to feel it. It has been gradually but forcibly creeping up on me, promising to take me hostage before I have any time to protest. At first I thought it was because of the Kiwis and the affect their laissez faire attitude to everything was having on me, but when I dissect the matter I realise that it has been building for much longer than that, really from the moment I arrived in Thailand, perhaps even from when I boarded that plane to Bangkok alone. From the first time I got on the back of a motorbike, drank snake wine, abseiled down a waterfall, jumped off a cliff into a lagoon, cycled through rice paddies in the dark, went snorkeling with the risk of sharks in the water, scaled slippery jungle mountain slopes, showered beneath tarantulas on the ceiling, gave blood at a Cambodian hospital, jumped out of a plane; I have been getting braver.

My friends and family will no doubt unanimously attest to the fact that although I may be many things, brave has never been one of them. I worry with the weight of the world on my shoulders, and whilst I'm busy fretting about everybody else, they use theirs and my share of courage to make adventurous leaps and bounds ahead of me. Not any more though. Living as I have been for the past 4 months has taught me that all of these things I dread happening, will probably never happen. And if they do? Well I have the strength of character and support of loved ones to see them through, setbacks will not make me crumble, I will no longer be left shaking and crying and hugging my knees to my chest in the corner of the room if things go wrong. The exhilaration and breathless sense of being truly alive that I have earned from doing things that scare me is worth every remote risk I may have had to take.

The reason that I am caused to write about this change in me this evening is because I have spent the past 2 days indulging in activities that 6 months ago I would have shied away from. Yesterday, Ella and I went caving and underground tubing, and today I have been white water rafting. The Waitomo Caves trip involved climbing into a wetsuit and helmet, throwing a rubber ring over my shoulder and following our fantastic female guides through caves and potholes 65ft beneath the earth to an underground, freezing cold river which you by turns scale on hands and knees through narrow rocky alleyways, and at other times when the water is too deep and the passage opens up, sit back in your tube and sail along in the dank, dark, watery underworld.

At one point the only way of negotiating the path of the river is to stand on a slimy rock ledge, 4 metres high, and jump backwards off of it in to a pool at the bottom of the waterfall which you can't see. You only know it's there because of the splash and the scream others make after they have propelled themselves bum-first into the darkness. Small torches are fitted in to the helmets so you are not expected to navigate in pitch blackness for the whole 2 hours, but the guides like to make it more exciting by ordering everyone to turn off their lights so that you are able to marvel at the thousands of glow worms which glitter on the stalactites above you. I additionally quite liked having the lights off because it meant I couldn't scan the water around me for eels - the caves' only other living inhabitants.

White water rafting today was similarly nerve testing. On the coach on the way to the river the guides delight in telling you that the treacherousness and speed of rapids are measured on a scale of 1 to 6, 1 being a tame little river that even Nanny Gillman might enjoy a cruise down, 6 being the kind of currents and drops that even the guys running the rafting centre very rarely dare to take a boat on. Number 5 is the highest grade of rapids that it is legal to raft commercially with paying customers, so guess what level of danger I was about to set off on in a rubber dingy? Yep, 5 of course. Again, the guides were amazing people, and all looked like the kind of men who might happily stick their head in the mouth of a crocodile just to see what would happen, or set themselves on fire for a bet, or ask to be tattooed on their tongue, whilst bungy jumping, blindfolded, from a helicopter over the Grand Canyon. You get the idea; these are the adrenalin junkies and fearless extreme sports nuts that I was so careful to hide from in Queenstown, truly charming, completely bonkers blokes. I was only slightly concerned that a few of them seemed to be missing front teeth, but elected to conclude that this was down to drunken tomfoolery and bar brawls as opposed to a direct result of the activity I was about to participate in.

They really pump you up for it, instructing the 5 of you in your boat to raise your oars and clap them together in a symbol of tribal solidarity, whilst they pray aloud to the Maori ancestors to keep you safe. Then everyone is instructed to chant the Hakka, the chorus becoming louder, faster and more impassioned as you sit in the boat gripping the vines on the banks to stop yourself catapulting downstream before everyone is ready. The air vibrates with energy and expectation and a spine-tingling, hair-raising electric fear pulses through the water, around the boats and right out the top of your helmet clad head. The atmosphere was infectious and addictive, these men have realised how to market fear - the good kind of fear - and sell it to whingeing, cowardly Poms.

This is what I could never grasp before I came away, the fact that there are two types of fear. The kind that is quietly terrifying, gut-wrenching, appetite thieving, soul destroying - the one that makes you want to wrap up those you love in your duvet and never let them walk out the front door in case Something Happens. The kind you feel when your Mum is ill, or when your friend stays in a relationship that will damage her, or when one of the vulnerable teenagers at work who you so love and cherish stops answering their phone, or when you see your sister growing up and the world and it's disappointments gaining in opportunities to hurt her; these are real fears, the justifiable kind.

But the other kind, the one I felt today as me and my crew approached the top of a 7 metre waterfall that our raft then plummeted over the top of, this fear is fleeting and assailable, momentarily shocking your heart so that it beats with the fervour and intensity required sometimes to remind us that we are living, not merely existing. Feel your heart pound in your throat, feel it reverberate through to the trembling tips of your fingertips, scare yourself, stick it to the Health and Safety bureaucrats, put yourself in measured danger to see how jubilant you feel to come through it, and then try and tell me that good fear does not exist. It's purely and simply life affirming.