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Dusty:Starlight:Culture



The Need to Travel
2003-09-05   5:07 p.m.

Fiji, Nepal, New Zealand, Thailand.

These are my new obsessions. Oh, and don't forget Belize, Guatemala, and more specifically Machu Picchu.

It's striking how easy it is to travel, but there has to be a willingness there. It's kind of sad to me that we're a society set up on a two-week vacation scale, and that for most people, they must work up to that scale and have it waiting for them after 3 years at the same job.

It baffled me, at first, when I'd be in other countries and would meet Australians or Canadians who "hadn't been home in two years". Some of them weren't even working in the countries they were traveling through; they simply went from place to place. How could they afford not to work? I thought. How could they afford to skip around this way?

The more I got to know different and new people, the more I realized how possible it is. It's not a matter of money or time away from work, necessarily, it's a matter of priority. I think if I saved all the money I'd ever spent on traveling, and didn't go to several countries in Europe and Africa, I would have a house fully of pretty tech-y things and a shiny fast new car.

I was out to dinner with a friend and a relative a few years ago, when I casually mentioned how much I had in my Africa fund/savings account #2. One of them nearly beer out of her nose. "What are you doing sitting on all that money like that? Why don't you put it into a mutual fund or something?"

"Because," I said, "It's for my trip to Africa". After a few seconds of blank stares, I changed the subject. I think I was dubbed a little irresponsible that night, perhaps a little foolish with my priorities.

However, I think it's foolish to spend more than $15K on a car that's just going to devalue and get dinged up anyway. I think it's foolish to gamble with my money, especially after people I know - like my landlord - lost thousands of dollars in the stock market despite the fact that he is a wise and skillful investor.

I travel to educate myself, to have new experiences, and because I like the way experience with and understanding of other cultures nurture the person I am. Traveling has made me a new person, unafraid to stand up for myself, full of enough self-confidence to avoid people I think don't deserve to be my friend. It's given me the ability to see ignorance and immaturity for what it really is, and to avoid it, looking forward instead to greater things.

I understand, now, having a job that yields a small salary, paying many bills, and struggling sometimes from month to month, how difficult it can feel. But it's also amazing to me that the small bits I put away every month turn into enough for plane tickets, food and shelter in a foreign place.

It's a good thing, I think, that we like the "darker places", the ones we're told not to go to. Those are cheaper, you know. It's fun, isn't it? Coming back perfectly fine and proving everyone wrong? Showing people that their stereotypes and assumptions are based on a biased media's distribution of information, and that they never know unless they go there themselves?

Nomads can't be held down, won't see the importance of ownership and material things. They need to move and change, it's the best way they know how to grow and breathe. Good thing I married one, eh?

All of this has taught me one other thing: to stop imposing my values on to others. I try as hard as I possibly can not to do so anymore, since that had been done to me over and over, in so many ways. Who I am is who I am, and who others are is who they are.

Travel taught me that. What has it taught you? Let me know!

T