This was published 7 years ago
Over exaggerated travel experiences: Louise Linton and the night I almost died, really, truly
Actress Louise Linton copped a backlash over inaccuracies in her travel memoir.Credit: Getty Images
The town was in Peru, somewhere – it was so long ago that I can't remember exactly where. Near Nazca, maybe? Or perhaps even closer to Lima?
Anyway, the location doesn't matter. It's what took place there that's important.
I'd been travelling in South America for about three weeks on a budget bus tour with a few friends. We were making our way from La Paz in Bolivia to Lima on the Peruvian coast. Everything was going well until we arrived in this little town and I started to feel cold. Only, it wasn't cold there.
Could this be the small town in Peru where I stayed? Credit: iStock
Pretty soon I had chills that soon morphed into a full-blown fever, a sickness that forced me to withdraw from a planned overnight sandboarding trip with my friends to instead lay low in a small hotel and attempt to fight off the bugs.
It would turn out to be one of the most horrendous nights of my life, alone in a cheap, filthy hotel room, sweating and writhing on this creaking old single bed, fighting off some sort of superbug the likes of which I doubt modern medicine could identify. You know that scene in the original Trainspotting, when Renton, the main character, is going through withdrawal from heroin, locked in a bedroom at his parents' house, screaming and hallucinating? It was like that.
When my friends got back the next day I was a shadow of my former self, sunken-eyed and gaunt. It took me weeks to properly get over that bug – whatever it was. Wherever I was. I don't know if I've been the same since.
At least, that's the story I now tell. That's the one that gets repeated. This, despite my failure to even identify where exactly this took place, meaning certain other details that could also have been improvised over time. Did I really have such a bad fever that I was hallucinating? Was I screaming in that tiny, dirty hotel room like a desperate Scottish junkie?
There's a fair chance that I probably wasn't. It was a bad fever, no doubt. And it did take me a while to recover. But I'm fairly sure, if I look back honestly and truly, that it wasn't quite as dramatic as the story has now become.
But hey – you never let the truth get in the way of a good travel yarn, right? Travellers are as bad as fishermen. It was thiiiiiiis big. We're all prone to exaggeration, to allowing the passage of time to vastly improve our mediocre tales.
Anyone who says they don't do this is either lying, once again, or they're deluded. Memories, after all, are a fluid phenomena, prone to being slightly reshaped every time they're accessed. There's scientific evidence of this: a memory is like a crumpled piece of paper in a drawer, which is occasionally pulled out and looked at and never replaced in exactly the same way.
So it stands to reason that your travel memories will change over time – it's just coincidence, I'm sure, that that usually makes your stories more dramatic, more hilarious, or more exciting than they originally were. Pull the memory out of a drawer, retell it with a slight exaggeration, put it back in the drawer, and repeat. All of a sudden it has spiralled out of control.
This is how you end up with people like Louise Linton, the Scottish actress who last year infamously penned a cringe-worthy and blatantly untrue account of her gap year in Zambia 10 years previously, recalling tribal warfare that never happened, and brushes with deadly animals that don't exist in that country, and her saviour of small children who I'm sure would have no idea who she is. Partly, this was wild self-aggrandisement – but I'm certain a good part of her would have come to truly believe over time that these things happened.
I know the feeling: I was once caught up in tribal warfare in the Democratic Republic of Congo. I managed to get out of there just before the bullets began to fly. At least, I think that's what happened. How close I actually came to being caught in the crossfire is up for debate. Probably not very, I'd say. But still.
Generally – Linton's case aside – these yarns are harmless exaggerations, standard embellishments that are used subconsciously by travellers as tools for entertainment. As with the fisherman who almost caught a marlin as long as his boat, you just have to take them for what they are.
I probably didn't get that sick in Peru, the same as I probably didn't get shot at in the DRC. But hey, that's how I remember it.
Have you ever over exaggerated a story to a friend? What was it? Leave a comment below.
Email: b.groundwater@fairfaxmedia.com.au
Instagram: instagram.com/bengroundwater
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