Travelling abroad at 30+ is a vastly different activity from the same at 20+. That much became painfully obvious to me as I made my way from South America via the States to Europe, South Africa, and back down under a few weeks ago.

When you’re in your twenties, sleeping on a doormat in Carcassonne in the middle of winter is an adventure. Your rucksack contains an iodine water filter, a kilogram of instant Cuppa-Soups, a ton of teabags, sugar, a heating element and one change of clothing. You don’t have a cosmetics bag, but if you did, it would have contained a bar of soap and a toothbrush (you can brush teeth with soap, I’m told). Two months to enjoy Europe isn’t nearly enough. It’s perfectly all right not to wash or change your undies for 5 days, and home is wherever you happen to sit down to rest your blistered feet.

At 32, the idea of overnighting in a room without an ensuite bathroom with hot running water, is as scary as the prospect of drinking water that is not bottled and full of “minerals”. Your idea of a cheap meal has evolved from Thick Instant Tomato Broth to A Restaurant Where The Locals Eat. Your rucksack is brimming with casual clothes as well as smart clothes, you’ve remembered your pyjamas as though a T-shirt were no longer good enough, and you’re secretly beginning to wonder whether you shouldn’t upgrade to a suitcase because hotel staff looks at you funny.

Only the very basic essentials went into your cosmetic bag when you packed it: soap, toothbrush, toothpaste, face wash, face cream, eye cream, body cream, hair brush, hair clips, shampoo (2 in 1), vitamins, perfume, deodorant, razor, shaving gel, sun block, sun burn cream, antihistamine ointment. you get the picture. After 2 weeks you can’t wait to get back home and you keep visiting Internet cafes to email to your workplace about progress reports.

At 29, you stand in front of the Taj Mahal with tears in your eyes. At 32, you look up at the Empire State Building and think, “it’s tall”.

I firmly believe that when you hit your thirties, you suddenly develop a social conscience. You make sure that when you visit third-world countries, your money goes to the private citizens, not the huge international tourist corporations. The amount of litter generated by fast food restaurants sends you into a week-long depression. You don’t eat beluga caviar anymore, you don’t kill swamp spiders in New Orleans and you make a habit of carrying small change for beggars.

You also develop arrogance. At 20, it’s a point of honour to be able to greet the locals in their native tongue, to be able to order coffee with milk and sugar… at one stage, I knew how to say thank you in 11 European languages. At 30, you are surprised there are still people out there who don’t speak good English.

But one thing hasn’t changed. In my twenties, I went to Egypt during the years of terrorism attacks on tourists, to communist Russia, to unrest-torn Southeast Turkey. This year, the events of 11 September took place 60 hours before we were due to leave home.

“Don’t go,” advised my family and friends, the way they did before Egypt and Turkey and Russia.

I went.