As an undergraduate I spent countless evenings hunched over Jack Kerouac’s books, telling myself that some day I too would travel the world.

I so wanted to be like Kerouac that I even began to drink his favourite drink. I still remember the first time I ordered it at the student union bar.

The barmaid, a fellow student, seemed unimpressed.

“Vermouth? What the hell is that?”

“It’s a fortified wine,” I told her. “Kerouac used to drink it.”

“I don’t know who Kerouac is, but she sounds like a pain in the arse. Why couldn’t she have a normal wine like everyone else?”

I spent the rest of the evening complaining about that barmaid to a friend.

“She’s probably never read a book in her life,” I moaned. “How can anyone not know who Kerouac is?”

“She must be studying something soulless like marketing. She probably thinks Hemingway was a girl too.”

At the time we thought we were the coolest guys in the place, but in retrospect we were utterly insufferable.

After I left university, I kept the promise I had made to myself and travelled the world; an experience which taught me some valuable lessons that I’ve carried ever since.

Lesson 1: You don’t matter as much as you think you do

In was walking the streets of Hanoi and taking in the sights. Perhaps the Vietnamese girl in front of me was doing the same — because she failed to notice the crossing up ahead and collided head-on with a car. People ran to help her, but there was nothing they could do. She was already dead.

I hung around for 20 minutes or so after the accident in case a witness was needed. In that short time, an ambulance collected her body, the debris was cleared, and soon there was no evidence that she had been there at all. People who knew nothing of the accident began to arrive — and before long, everyone began to chat and laugh again.

We each think of ourselves as the centre of the universe when, in reality, the world will continue to spin after we are gone. This sounds morbid but it really needn’t be — realising you don’t matter as much as you thought you did allows you to take risks you’d never had taken on before.

Lesson 2: Everything looks better in the photos

In Accra my friend was having a bad day. In the morning she’d fallen into an open sewer. At lunch she’d drank some dodgy pineapple juice and spent two hours vomiting. And finally she’d been bitten by what looked like a thousand mosquitos (or one very angry one).

Later that day I laid next to her on the beach. She was recounting the day’s events when, all of a sudden, she noticed the setting sun.

“Quick,” she said. “Take a photo of me walking alone on this beach. It looks like paradise.”

She heaved herself up, clutched her rumbling stomach, and limped into the distance.

“You’re too far away.” I shouted, “I can hardly see your face.”

“Good!” she yelled. “I don’t want everyone seeing the bites.”

Getting the perfect shot for social media is a huge part of modern travel, but before you descend into a jealous slump, remember these photos never tell the full story.

Lesson 3: You can’t escape yourself

People think travelling is a magical cure-all: once they’re in a foreign land they’ll be happier, more laid-back and free-spirited. But if you’re irritable at home you’ll find things to get irritated at everywhere else — because wherever you go you always take your personality with you.

Its a cliché but the only journey that really matters is the one into yourself. And the good news is you don’t have to spend money on flights, sleep in hell holes, or climb out of open sewers to take it. You can start from wherever you are now!

I doubt Kerouac would approve of the anti-travel philosophy I’m pointing to here — but I’m OK with that. Over the years I’ve realised I’m not much like him after all — and that’s not necessarily a bad thing because I never did like the taste of vermouth anyway.