After two months in southeast Asia I’m covered in bumps, bruises, scratches and bites. I’ve lugged my overstuffed rucksack onto buses, trains, boats and planes. I’ve met hundreds of people and stayed everywhere from flea-pits to four-star hotels. (Oh come on, what’s an emergency fund for?). So now that I’ve earned my backpacking stripes, this is what I’ve learnt so far.

Just cross the road, they won’t knock you down. It always seems as if that seething mass of tuktuks, trucks, buses, and bicycles will make mincemeat of any pedestrian foolhardy enough to step into it. But it doesn’t, for reasons neither I nor the laws of physics can explain.

Keep your mouth closed in the shower. And don’t drink the tap water. The ice is fine, though, and so are the salads, whatever the guidebooks say.

Grin and bear it. Or just eat it — it won’t kill you. When you discover the meat on a stick you bought from a man at a street stall is not “Chicken! Chicken!”, as he insisted, but kidneys, well, just chow down. (But kidneys of what? My stomach still wonders.)

When you gotta go, you gotta go. If that means balancing precariously on a slippery, fetid, squat toilet while wearing a backpack and striving to keep your trouser hems clear of the wet, filthy floor, so be it. Western-style toilets would seem weird if you weren’t used to them; the proof being the dirty footprints I saw on toilet seats in Malaysia.

Unrequited love is painful, or exceedingly itchy. Unrequited for the mosquitoes, painful and itchy for me. The blighters love me. They really do.

Backpacking is a great leveller. Backpackers are people out of context. You normally make up your mind about someone within seconds of meeting them, but that’s hard to do when every traveller you meet is tanned, slightly grubby and wearing the same uniform of flip-flops, T-shirt and baggy shorts. You can’t begin to guess how any one of them look in “real life” or what they do for a living.

I’ve made friends with two Parisians, for example. One turned out to be a hardened police detective — “When I ’ave to go in a room where zere is a dead body, I just stop for a second and zen I go in” — while the other is a stoner who used to live in a squat. Now, they’re both just backpackers.

Most people are all right, I’ve discovered. Some guidebooks and online travel forums would lead you to believe that everyone is out to rip you off, or rob, drug and mug you. They’re not. For the easily worried traveller (me), this is a marvellous realisation. Most people are just getting on with their day.

Still, you must expect the unexpected. Robert Burns was wrong to say that “the best-laid schemes o’ mice an’ men gang aft agley”. They always gang agley. Whether it’s floods in Vietnam, civil unrest in Thailand or a delayed flight leading to a missed connection and being marooned in Kuala Lumpur’s absolutely-no-frills, low-cost air terminal, things happen that you cannot control. Scrap the plan and make a new one. When that falls apart, make another one.

I’ve gone days without meeting another Irish person or seeing someone in a Guinness T-shirt, but nonetheless I keep spotting reminders of Ireland. There are O’Briens sandwich bars in Singapore, for example. After doing a double-take at the familiar green sign, I was tempted to have a wrappo or a shambo, but it seemed like a waste of an eating opportunity in the street food capital of the world.

Flicking through TV channels one day, I came upon Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova strolling around a wintry Dublin in the video for Falling Slowly. I bumped into an enormous display of Cecelia Ahern novels in a Malaysian bookshop, giggled at seeing Batt O’Keeffe quoted in the Bangkok Post, and was greeted with a cheery “Dia dhuit, conas ata tu?” by a market trader on the Khao San Road. I mightn’t always know where I’m going, but the hints of home remind me where I’m coming from.

You can’t leave yourself behind either. While planning my trip I laboured under the delusion that, after a couple of months away, I would somehow have morphed into a lean, tanned, Zen, global nomad. I didn’t realise that I would still be me, wherever I went. My suntan cycle goes from red to pink to white, just as it always did, and PMT unfailingly renders me irritable and anxious, no matter what idyllic, palm-fronded beach I’m on.

You do surprise yourself, however. I never dreamt that I, a Nervous Nellie at the best of times, would clamber across narrow, shaky, bamboo bridges with just one loose and fraying rope handrail. I certainly couldn’t have pictured those bridges being suspended high over roaring rapids in the middle of the jungle. But the bridges were there and they had to be crossed, so cross them I did.

The more you travel, the more you realise how little you’ve seen. After two months in southeast Asia I’ve barely visited any of it, really. Great chunks of the guidebook remain unthumbed. So I’ll be back. But first, a flight to Sydney on Wednesday. Time to check if Aussies really do spend Christmas Day on the beach.

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