Why Travel?

Why eat? Because it’s essential to your body! So why travel, because it’s essential to living, to growing, to your mind. It can give you insights to the world, to other people as well as yourself that sitting in a cubicle or reading a book won’t give you.

If life is all about experiences then travel is the ultimate experience rich medium. Exotic locations, different people, continuously changing situations and challenges face you.

You learn, or is it, relearn to appreciate things. Simple things start giving you pleasure again; like eating a new fruit, seeing a waterfall, walking through a forest, hearing a foreign language and getting up for sunrise.

In truth you can have many of these pleasures at home but the business of life and time has the effect of closing ourselves and our senses to these things. When you travel many of these senses reawake. You feel alive, you start to be creative, you deal with problems and you get along with people, most of them anyway.

There are some experiences that you can’t have at home or are just simple better when you go traveling. These include exploring other cultures, learning a foreign language, studying meditation with an Indian guru (maybe in New York or London) and this is just the tip of one gigantic iceberg.

Some experiences I had so far whilst traveling.

• 17 day trek in Nepal – changed my view of trekking and reconnected me with my inner child that fantasized about climbing icy peaks and walking across the Antarctic.
• Disastrous climb of Adam’s peak – taught me many valuable lessons about getting prepared for trekking and big challenges.
• 2 day white water rafting in Nepal
• Teaching English in a Jungle Refugee camp in Thailand – an amazing experience that taught me how resilient people can be.
• Climbing Santa Maria, Guatemala, to witness a mini explosion of her side cone, which sent a plume of smoke about a kilometer into the air – simply awesome!
• Gate crashing a Halloween Party at an Intercontinental in Columbia, when we weren’t even suppose to be in the country
• Being freaked out in Burma (Myanmar) by the terrible political situation there.
• Two weeks of hedonistic indulgence in Goa

This is why I want to break free from work and go traveling again. This time with a view of making money to sustain it and to experiment with different styles of traveling.