The encouragement ‘everyone should experience travel’ or similar iterations of that, are thrown around like it’s a normal thing to leave your life behind for a year and go on an extended holiday. I used to be a guilty party of spreading this same message but the more I’ve heard it recently, and it’s creeping up in the weirdest of contexts, the more that message sits uncomfortably with me.
I’m sorry to my friends for the times I was shoving this message down your throat and you didn’t want to hear it. The truth is that ‘travel’ (and I put it in quotation marks here because I’m referring to my version of travel) isn’t for everyone and looks different to each of us.Even in my two years of travelling my definition of that very thing has changed. I’m no longer backpacking through a different town every few days, catching neck-aching 14 hour night buses with 25kg worth of luggage, and hoping to turn up at my pre-booked hostel in one piece, with all my belongings and life still in tow.
These days, it all happens a little more slowly. I don’t feel the need to cram in everything I possibly can. I’m happy to spend a little extra time soaking in a place and its atmosphere, meeting local people and exploring a little deeper. I may cover less of a place but what I did see and do, I did in more depth. And that’s just what my version of ‘travel’ looks like to me at the moment. I’m sure it will morph into a different thing in time again.
The same goes for friends. Everyone I’m close with isn’t not travelling, they’re just doing it in their own way, by their own definition. My girl boss sister has an epic job that sends her all over europe, at their cost mind you. She gets to see places (and stay in the nicest hotels) she probably wouldn’t have chosen to go to if it weren’t for her job. Other friends moved abroad to work for a year and see new things, some work insanely hard at their passion and escape on beautiful relaxing holidays at their will. Everyone is travelling, they’re just doing it their way.
But actually, everyone can’t travel and this is where that statement really doesn’t sit quite right. To travel is a privilege and to travel by that definition of leaving your life behind to go on an extended holiday requires a number of things. Firstly, you have to earn enough money or come from a place where you can live your current life and save for ‘travelling’. There’s a lot of people who that simply isn’t an option for. The breadline is still a very real thing and the cost of travelling to most is an utter luxury.
It also comes down to culture. Where I’m from it’s a normalised idea to visit somewhere foreign for an extended period of time. For other young women it would be unthinkable to leave home alone and do what I did. For most of the world, including people from first world countries, travelling is merely a dream.
Travelling itself actually relies on another’s ability not to travel. Those cultures are still there because those people couldn’t leave or didn’t want to go elsewhere. If those people all got up and left to travel, then it wouldn’t be possible to experience those places and the people that make it.
Travel to me is a truly magical experience, I’m wholely grateful to be granted the fortune and privilege of it but I won’t be telling you how to do it (anymore) and that you have to drop everything and go. We’re all here making our own stories.
