I don't remember much from my first visit to Amsterdam – which, in the experience of most young travellers in that city, is a sign that I enjoyed my first visit to Amsterdam.
I do remember seriously considering getting a tattoo. I also remember being talked out of that idea by a Kiwi girl named Vanessa to whom I owe a lifelong debt of gratitude. (It was going to be an ode to my then-favourite heavy metal band, writ large and immovable on my shoulder blade. The things you almost do.)
I remember indulging in all the touristy things that you do in Amsterdam when you're 18 and travelling on a bus tour: I went to a "coffee shop" and sampled the produce, did a booze cruise along the canals, sat through a sex show, and wandered around the red light district gawking at the sex workers and the bucks party groups and the fact that I was actually there seeing all this when just a few months earlier I had been in a central Queensland high school wondering if I was going to pass maths.
I must have been in Amsterdam for two days on that trip, the standard bus tour interlude, which included a trip to Edam to try some cheese, and a few journeys in and out of the city from our campsite, which was in a forest a good half-hour out of town. That is not much time to give a destination, but I still felt like I'd hit the highlights, I'd done the Dutch thing. And I loved it.
Skip forward about 15 years. I've since been to Amsterdam maybe seven or eight times, getting to know the city a little better each time, spreading my arc of exploration just that bit further. I've travelled with friends, I've travelled by myself. This time, however, I'm with my girlfriend, Jess, who called the city home for a few years in the late 2000s.
The city, to us, is now a different place to the one I visited when I was 18. Jess and I aren't hitting the sex shows, or doing a booze cruise, or wandering the red light district, or bothering going to Edam just to try some cheese.
Instead, we're going to the Albert Cuyp Market to eat pickled herring and fresh caramel waffles. We're skipping the queues at the Anne Frank House and relaxing at the Noordermarkt, eating apple pie. We're steering clear of the touristy Leidseplein and hanging out in the old-man pubs in the Pijp. We're giving the coffee shops a miss and going to… Oh, no wait, we're still going to the coffee shops.
Anyway, the point is that this is a different version of Amsterdam. It might as well be another city. It's still a major tourist hub, but it's quite easy to avoid those tourist hordes and find things that genuinely appeal to us, rather than the things the guidebook and the tour manager would tell us to see.
And this goes for all destinations: they change as you get older. The cities themselves remain the same, but the way you visit them is completely altered. Amsterdam is no longer a place of sex shows and booze cruises, but a city of farmers markets and art museums. To an 18-year-old that sounds hellish. To a 35-year-old it sounds great.
So many places around the world have changed for me in a similar way. The first time I went to Portugal was with a bunch of mates when I was 17 – we spent two weeks getting drunk by the beach in the Algarve region and sleeping until midday. I'm about to return and go wine tasting in the Alentejo region.
My first trip to Laos mostly involved floating down a river on a rubber tube drinking $1 cans of Beerlao and then fighting off the related infections. The next trip I took a slow boat down the Mekong. First time I went to the US I worked in a ski resort as a destitute liftie. Last time I got to stay in a five-star hotel in Beaver Creek.
All of these experiences have been amazing. None is necessarily better than the other. It's just that as you change as a person, so the way you see the world is altered.
That is why you can keep returning to the same destination throughout your life and find something new and interesting and exciting. You have new experiences, create new memories.
About the only thing that remains the same is that you will always think to yourself: man, I'm glad I didn't get that tattoo.
b.groundwater@fairfaxmedia.com.au
See also: Australia, the nanny state: Have we become a nation of idiots?
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Australia vs the world: Rules and cultural misunderstandings
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