Sunday, March 18, 2007
Travel
Is it the only way to get some color into your live? Are you sick of your everyday life and trying to escape it? Or you just wanna see everything worth seeing in this life, but who's that one who said it's worth it? Maybe you simply got too much money and other means of spending it are not funny anymore? Is that the only way to get excited because all the other things are already boring? Or you've had enough from the past life and think that traveling is some kind of earned prize for all what you've done? Is it a new challenge for you?
I think, such list of simple and otherwise complicated psychological reasons to travel can be continued for kilobytes of text. But every traveler has a little bit of many of them as a compound part of his own reason, motivation to drive, fly, walk, run, swim, sail...
Each one has it's own style of traveling and there are also people, who don't stand changes in their everyday life and are never traveling. Even holidays take place at home and without leaving the hometown. But I've already seen such people, who never traveled, changing their mind. And I am glad to say that there are several people of such a kind whom I've shown some beautiful locations around the place they live in. And they became real fans of those formerly far away and impossible to reach places. Moreover, they have become this virus, this desire to see more and more. If you get infected, you would never get healed, that is for sure. Only the cruel reality can stop the progression of this great "sickness" but your mind will never change and will strive to continue your search with wide-open eyes and always willingness to see more and more.
I am not sure when I was "infected" and when I realized that there is a huge list of places that I MUST visit, no matter when and what it takes. I think that came from a variety of reasons such like frequent flights in the childhood, because all the relatives of my family were spread across the whole Soviet Union. Or maybe from constant change of the place and country of living, that supposes a total change in the living environment and tolerance to changes in life.
Another thing that you get along with traveling is surely lots of contacts in each country you visit. Of course, it depends on your ability and willingness to communicate and the duration of stay. But if you get at least one acquaintance in a country or place you travel to – just imagine how wonderful is it to have friends in various locations of this planet.
There is one sad thing about traveling I've had to find out. It is time. This is the only factor that won't let you to visit all the places in this world. There are many books like "100 most beautiful cities of the world". Imagine you would want to visit all of them. But don't forget that 100 of cities – is only a 100 and there are hundreds of cities worth visiting. And these are only cities, but a place to visit can be also a waterfall, a mountain, a lake, seashore and many others. So, you decide from now to spend for example 5 days for every city, what is actually insufficient to see all the interesting places in it. These are 100 cities each 5 days, what makes 500 days! But you cannot travel 500 days without having a rest, a break in a place you live in. So let's say 5 cities per travel what makes 25 days and 25 days at home. So you need additional 500 days to relax and to settle up your impressions to get ready for new ones. This makes good 3 years that should be spent on cities only. And for that you should have a good amount of money for airline tickets, hotels and whatever. And you should have all the time yours, but not spending it working for someone to earn money.
So, this planet is small and huge at the same time and the time goes by. And if you are "infected" with the "travel-virus", you should probably set up your priorities, make up a list of places that you surely would visit according to your living situation... and visit them...
Have a nice trip.