(First published on Huffington Post Blogs: 10 Reasons Why Travellers Make Terrible Friends)

Yep. You know us. We are the ones who post photos and updates from exotic places on Facebook. We are the ones whose fashion collection make up of cultural rags from all the countries we have been.

We are your friends. Your terrible, terrible friends who travel.

Why do we make such bad friends?

1. We are never there

You know the bonding time friends are supposed to have? Going to the pub for a pint, a night in with the girls for a Pride and Prejudice series marathon? When you get your heart broken and you need someone to rant to?

Well, don’t count on us. We are travellers, and we’ll probably never be there for you.

2. But we are everywhere else

At the same time, we make you feel insignificant because while we are not there for you, we are everywhere else, exploring new places and making new friends!

How dare us.

3. We are snobs about travel

We don’t ‘holiday’. The H word is a dirty word. How dare you compare our epic trips to Afghanistan, there’s also Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan to your beach resort break.

It’s what you do, not what we do. We are travellers, we don’t holiday. It’s not travelling unless it takes more than three forms of public transport and small hints of danger.

Package tours? We are not talking to you!

4. We make your travel plans feel lame

After hearing our plan to trek with Alpacas in Peru and live with tribal families in Namibia, you’ll not want to tell anyone your travel plans.

Who wants to hear about the all-inclusive deal you just booked at Club Med when our stories are so much better?

5. We are always critical of your travels

We are critical of your travel plans. We will always have an opinion about where you are going and are all too willing to tell you why your choice of holiday is beneath us.

No, it doesn’t matter how excited you are about your travel plans. It’ll never be good enough for us.

6. We make you jealous, and we don’t even know it

While you are juggling with a baby with one arm and trying to clean up the mess she/he just made on the sofa, you find out on Facebook that we have just successfully conquered Kilimanjaro and are on our way to meet the Masais. We post things like “Wish you were here!” knowing very well that your hands are tied.

Yet, we don’t even know we’ve just made you hate your children.

7. We miss every important event

Birthdays, weddings, baptisms and bar mitzbahs. You’ll invite us, but we won’t make it, because we are too busy travelling the world.

What do you mean it’s your daughter’s first day at school? I didn’t even know you had a daughter!

Oh wait…

8. We are never dressed for the occasion

On the odd occasion we do turn up for a special event, you can be sure that we’ll look like we don’t belong.

Frankly, we just stepped off a plane from the jungles of Colombia, and cannot understand why a scruffy t-shirt and faded khakis doesn’t blend in at your lavish wedding.

9. We cheat on your friendship

While you are trying cling onto the friendship we had in school, continue to write emails and invite us to your parties that we’ll never make, we are out there making new friends forgetting that you even exist!

And then we dare to tell you all about our new friends when we do see you, forgetting to ask how your life has been!

10. Travellers secretly hate each other

We aren’t just bad friends to you. We are bad friends to everyone.

We are an extremely competitive bunch, so just because we look like we get along and enjoy each other’s stories, we secretly hate each other guts for the reason that we had just found out the other had found something about Costa Rica that we didn’t get to discover ourselves.

Are you a bad friend too? :)