E4’s got a new backpacking comedy coming out called Gap Year, about two friends travelling through China. But if you weren’t lucky enough to spend a year in the hostels of the Himalayas, don’t worry: here’s every adage you need to know about “gappers”.
They will never meet any locals
Gappers travel halfway across the world to experience a culture completely different to their own. But when they unpack in the hostel they meet a Swiss hippy called Cosmo who is leading a tai chi class in the morning. They go to the communal area and meet two French guys, both called Cosmo, who are playing a drinking game with the local schnapps. They head to the kitchen and meet an Israeli girl, called Cosmo, sprinkling weed into the pasta sauce. They spend the next three months hanging with these four people. The only thing they utter to a local is “eight grams of Cutters Choice and liquorice Rizla please”.
Hemp harem pants will be a must-have
They arrive wearing their normal clothes: Miss Sixty jeans, sheer tops from Forever 21. But their hostel mates just seem to wear the same pair of purple harem pants and linen kaftan every single day. Newbie gappers have to fit in, so they start going into shops called things like Rainbow Rhythms, where they pay wildly inflated prices for a pair of yoga trousers covered in paisley elephants. This is just the start of the transformation. Soon, they stop washing their hair, instead spraying it daily with Batiste (it’s more rustic). Then comes the stick-on bindi, the Sanskrit tattoo (which they think means “impulse” but actually means “deodorant”) and the 29 ear piercings. At airport security, you can always tell when people are returning from their gap year because they are bleeding profusely from their earlobes as they attempt to remove all the dodgy earrings they picked up.
There will be earnest do-gooding
After a few months of destroying their former possessions and having bunk sex with everyone in their hostel, a gapper starts to experience a new emotion. It is a combination of guilt and boredom that they have decided to call a “holistic awakening”. They realise they can’t just get drunk all day, they need to help the people of this poor impoverished nation, whichever one it is. Somehow, this help, from a British teenager who doesn’t know how to put up a shelf, always comes in the form of building a school. They sign up to a local programme where they’re put to work with five other home counties do-gooders. “Fabulous!” says the programme leader as they mesh together bricks and concrete. “This will change lives.” The gappers leave feeling good about themselves. That night a bulldozer crew come and knock it down, ready for the next group of suckers.
They will get jaded with the hostel scene
After a while they’re no longer the hot new gapper in town. Now they have to lie on the bottom bunk while they hear some new arrival bonking a Cosmo on the bed above. They start to loathe their fellow travellers and see what a fraud the whole gap year industry is. In the final months they move away from the hostel scene and start to travel alone. They run out of money, get their parents to transfer some more dosh, then come home.
They will come home ‘changed’
Back in the UK, a gapper will relentlessly mock other “posh white people” for their “gap yahs”, seemingly unaware that they are talking about themselves. At the same time, they refuse to eat at any ethnic restaurant – “Eugh, it’s so inauthentic” – instead insisting on making this amazing dal they learned to cook in Marrakech. Oh, and they no longer use cutlery – all food must now be served in other food: rice in coconut bowls, cocktails in hollowed-out pineapples, fruit salad in a watermelon bowl. Honestly darling, that’s how they do it in Vietnam. Shame it’s been ruined by all those trustafarian gap year kids.
Gap Year is on E4, 9pm, Thursday 23 February
View all comments >