Traveling isn’t experiencing. It’s visiting, but not experiencing. I absolutely don’t have an answer to the so modern question about “Where do you want to travel? Which places?” Maybe because in our part of EU nature is so rich, we are quite spoilt, but I have literally never dreamt in my life about traveling to a certain location. Events? Yes! Taking part in something? Yes! Travel to meet new people? Hell yeah! But to places? Not really. Maybe go to some places and do something, like rallying in the desert, climb a mountain, ride bikes, raft, camp, fly or smth exciting. But seeing and taking a pic? That’s so boring. I dream about adventures, not travel.
What makes a place magical is the people and the culture, not the architecture or landscape – those are the same as on Google Images. Actually, the architecture is an expression of the people and culture, you need to meet them first in order to understand a little bit the spirit behind the architecture. The culture, on the other hand, is formed partly on the landscape – i.e. the Scandinavians/Russians and the winter, it’s fascinating to see how nature has affected cultural norms around the world differently.
It’s so strange and boring to see so, so, so many people just supposedly doing fun things in order to get social approval. They go to places, eat some food, never meet anyone and their stories are mostly wildly boring and repetitive. Copy-paste. Why? Because they were more or less alone, or at best with a group of people from their home country, then they get tired and/or bored. Of course, the last part about being bored or tired will be omitted in terms of words when they tell you the story, but you’ll sense it easily underneath the flash of their camera.
It’d be nice if more people start traveling in order to experience, not in order to get likes on the stupid Instagram and then bore you to death while trying to impress you. Then we might start to appreciate the local cultures and become more accepting, but most importantly live with fewer prejudices. Most stories are told from the angle of “they have or do some cool things, but we’re better”. Quite an ego-driven activity, isn’t it?
End of rant :)
Motivated by a rather boring evening about the latest dose of North African/Asian trip stories where the main characters basically spent their entire time either in a hotel or a bus.
Edit: Later on I found out that Ram Dass, Eckhart Tolle, and other spiritual teachers think the same. Travelling is just escapism. You can’t live with yourself and wrongly believe that by traveling to a far away place you’ll live in harmony with thyself. It’s a distraction from your inner issues.
Ivan On Racing 