Notwithstanding the COVID19 pandemic shutting down travel in 2020, in this century travel has become more accessible than it has ever been before. Unsurprisingly, the fastest-spreading, fastest-growing types of travel were, of course, mass tourism and spontaneous weekend trips. The former, because it’s the cheapest; the latter, because it fits into the only leisure time full-time working people had.

This significantly changed the meaning of the word ‘travel’. Today, people understand it as being synonymous with tourism, i.e. the thing you have to do, to get to the tourism. But, in the entirety of literature before this, it meant something different, and the distinction is not just the snobbery of a travel writer.

What travel used to mean

When it was rarer and more difficult to come by, most people were not able to have the experience. Those who did undertake such journeys, understood that it meant risk and uncertainty, and losing the ability to rely on your home community. Indeed, you wouldn’t be able to contact them at all.

A different psychology is experienced with travel in this sense, than travel-as-tourism. This kind of travel is invariably profound and meaningful, because of its unfamiliarity and because you savour it more. You’re more likely to find yourself ignorant, and therefore humbled. You pay attention, because this may be the last time you could come. (In older centuries, you pay attention, because maybe you can never return home.)

That’s the kind of experience that grows people. That’s the kind of travel that gave the genre its fame. You must face uncertainty and risk, to come to terms with your humanity and your inner resources.
You must go deep, to recover insight.

My travel stories are different from my travel guides

While I do write travel guides on this blog, most articles I write are stories. This is in part because I think that once you have the basic travel skills, over-planning can prevent you from being open to everything the trip can give you. And I say this, as a former over-planner – I’m really, really good at planning.

The thing is, the most valuable life experiences you get from travel, lie in the space of uncertainty. It is the making of new relationships with new people and new places. And just like any relationship, you need to vacate space for the world to connect to you. Yet having everything planned out removes all the contact points. There are no miracles when you are not open.

So I write the travel stories that show how different your experience of  place can be when you have this mindset. When you bring yourself instead of your plan, every trip – no matter where you go – becomes unique. You will simply see different things, and understand that what you find in a place depends on what you bring in yourself. And in the mirror of these different places, you see the hidden parts of yourself that increase your awareness of who you are.

Some of these stories come from a series of trips or a long trip that came out thematic, and you can follow me on them through my Odyssey collections. Others are more standalone.