Why travel? That is indeed one question that has followed me for a long time. Not because I was asking it , a but because I was answering it.
That question bothers me much. It feels personal, like someone questioning your values, or your own ideals. It also makes you feel sometimes missfit. Awkwardly positioned as opposed to the questioner 's point of view. Why do you travel, they ask me, pointing almost immediately the supposedly high costs of traveling, the useless waste of time or how our home town is so nice and unexplored that there is absolutely no need to furthermore explore the world. This limited view of the world should be very limited in the number of supporters, yet the number of times I have been asked the question is absurdly high.
Coupled with the question comes the limited view of travelling. Besides the obvious benefits that are often ignore, such as leaving you home to explore new places, cultures, people, to challenge yourself, to gain knowledge and experience, people refer the checklist benefit. For me that is no benefit, in fact if you travel to complete an imaginary checklist and take photos to post on Facebook I seriously advise you to just stop, save some money and rethink the purpose of travel. The checklist is worthless, the photos are good for memory keeping but they are no good if you do not experience. If you are in a new place, whatever the place , explore it, live it. Photos are secondary. If you really want to keep it, make a video without caring about it , without the experience becoming the video instead of the opposite.
 |
| Portugal vs Germany , in Porto Portugal |
The checklists is often followed by the informed opinion of the best places to go, which often are unfortunately not based on their experience but on the highly publicised travel destinations. Nothing wrong with those, but often the experiences that should be seeked are put aside for more worthless photo tours to monuments, with no connection at all to them. The monuments themselves should be visited, but in an exploration route, not a defined strict photo tour.
To conclude, I am confronted with their own realization of how senseless it is to travel with this purpose. It is something you could do at home with Google ! I agree ! True, this is not the way. We should travel for other reasons. One reason, a powerful one, is that we have to learn how to be wanderers. It is hard at first, and I shall talk over the time how I am learning to be one, but it is worth it. A fine pursue , although not an easy one. We are often bound to home, to conform, to our place where we feel fine. Travel helps to change that, challenging us, testing us, helping us learn about the world but most important about ourselves. And once you start learning about you, things change, and start changing faster, and your safe place on the world no longer makes sense. In fact, you discover it never existed, and it is no longer your place, so you start wandering, both in the sense of travelling as in the sense of learning.
Happy discoveries, see you next week.
Daniel
