Why do people travel so much? Do we really need to travel around? Is it some urge that we feel from the inside or are we just being conformists, seeing that most people around us travel everywhere? Either way, almost all of us like traveling. It is proven that the most effective way for a person to relax is to change the daily background and to go somewhere else. From a psychological angle, traveling is related to the change of mood, communicating with others and experimenting.
Traveling to your home town or going to the province to meet with relatives is somehow a change of scenery. That includes familiar people and places.
It is a whole different story when you travel to a place where you go for relaxing – going to a picnic with friends, spa procedures, massages, or going to the beach for a day or two. That kind of traveling is fun and entertaining.
What is missing in these last two types of traveling? It is the adventurous spirit. When we know exactly what the goals of the journey are, it is not likely to be caught by the fascination of the unexpected.
The excitement to leave footprints on an unfamiliar for you ground, to meet with the people who live there, to taste their way of living – now that’s intriguing. Finding the DIFFRENT and specific in the atmosphere of a new place is just like becoming a cheery and unselfish explorer with interest for everything curious, weird and new. This is when you go out of your comfort zone and start getting to know everything unfamiliar, you go away from the well-planned weekend or you stop thinking of the vacation that you have always dreamed of, and perhaps – the dream vacation that will never happen. Going for the unknown makes you a real explorer; that is when you can truly relate with your real inner self. Diving into a new exciting journey gives you the opportunity to let yourself observe, relax and revive.
Sadly, not all people fit into the description of “explorer”, because they feel like grown-ups. I have heard people say when coming back from places like Egypt, Malta or Mexico that they haven’t seen anything special and just comment of how expensive or cold/warm it was. They don;t seem to have that flame inside of them – that flame which burns in every explorer of new lands, who will see beauty in everything and won’t find themselves bored in a new place.
As Andre Gide says: “Man cannot discover new oceans unless he has the courage to lose sight of the shore”.
So we we need to stop being afraid and to try to enjoy the journey, we should be able to find the beauty in every new culture and place. We will see new things, things we have never even had dreams of. The Earth is big and interesting things are around each corner. The consumption in our world and the industry industry are becoming bigger and bigger, even now a simple walk on the beach can be a pain, because of the salesmen around, but that”s not really what traveling is about. It is about exploring.
We travel because the hunger for new things is in our veins. It is the adventurous spirit that leads us to finding new “shores”.