I’ve dragged my wife on some terrible trips overseas. It’s how I know she’s the one

June 22, 2026 — 5:00am

Imagine that you’ve just cycled up the 500-metre elevation of a mountain pass somewhere in the backwaters of Taiwan. Your face red, your lungs burning, and then your husband runs over and starts art-directing you for one of his photos. The next thing you know, a picture of you drowning in sweat ends up on a major news website and it’s all because you made the mistake of marrying a travel writer.

This has become a painful reality for my long-suffering wife. In an attempt to support my fledgling career she has posed for awful photos, forced down terrible meals and subjected herself to the worst modes of transportation known to humanity, all in search of a good story.

I’m sure it’s not how she’d like to spend her holidays. She’d much rather be lounging on a deckchair somewhere, sipping on something tropical with a tiny umbrella in it. The problem is, it’s hard to write a good story about tiny umbrellas, no matter how many of them you accumulate. This has left us in a difficult position: our holidays are the kind of holidays that you need to take a holiday from when they’re finished.

But if there is one good thing about all the dodgy transport, lost luggage and bouts of gastro that I’ve inflicted upon our relationship, it’s that nothing has made our marriage better than our bad travels.

In sickness and in health, in boredom and in mild states of panic, travel has a way of bringing out the best and worst in all of us, and it’s in these moments that we learn how strong our relationships are.

Let’s say you’re in Cuba, watching as a tropical storm rolls towards you on what might be the world’s worst internet. Then, when it hits, you get trapped in your casa particular with nothing but each other and the strange old man who lives upstairs for company. The windows are leaking, the walls melting and the streets flooding as a communist country unravels around you.

If you still don’t want to murder each other after four days of eating nothing but local perennial ropa vieja (translation: old clothes) in a room with its very own microclimate, then congratulations, you survived, and your relationship will be all the better for it.

Much like our relationships, travel also exposes our guts to an assortment of diabolical things. It’s a travel writer’s duty to consume as many of these as possible, as the best way to open our hearts to a country is to first open our mouths and our stomachs.

This becomes problematic when you’re in Laos and someone (me) orders a roadside larb. I’m not sure what animal died for our lunch but whatever it was, it had its revenge, sending us crawling back to our hotel room, where we proceeded to do what the Germans colourfully call Brechdurchfall.

It’s a slightly more digestible way of saying “shooting from both ends” and, while most travellers have experienced Brechdurchfall, doing it with your partner only centimetres away from you is a whole different beast.

Any physical attraction you might have had will be gone, and you’d better hope there is still something left in that withered shell of a human to love. If not, then your relationship is only skin-deep, unable to see past the last roll of toilet paper.

But if you look at your partner as they’re splayed out in bed, a green tinge to their face and a haunted look in their eyes that screams, “is this covered by travel insurance?” and you still find yourself hopelessly, madly in love with them, then you’ve seen your partner at their absolute worst, and you both deserve the very best.

I know my wife deserves the best after everything she’s put up with. And while the deckchairs, tropical drinks and tiny umbrellas sound good on paper, they wouldn’t have been nearly as much fun as the travels we’ve had. By chasing these stories we’ve written our own, and even though it’s my name on the articles, these belong to her just as much as they belong to me.