What is your travel dream more than all other travel dreams; the place that you dream of and hope to go to in your lifetime. Real travel is when you take to the open road, and you accept everything that comes your way be it thrilling, joyful, difficult, or depressing – this is what the original explorers did. This sense of wonder is crucial. And unfortunately, efficiency and technology are killing our sense of wonder which is the very thing that made us want to travel in the first place. Today travel is almost entirely predictable. We can look at the Prague Castle on our internet, and can see five thousand pictures of the Prague Castle so that when we finally go to Prague and see the Castle for ourselves. We are not experiencing the Prague Castle; we are comparing it to everything that technology has told us about this. This means we have lost something from the experience of travel.
Just because we can fly, that does not really mean we always have to fly. Sometimes we should take the bus, and go slowly and enjoy and embrace every discovery as it comes to us taking. Taking a bus, taking public transportation halfway around the world can teach you to trust total strangers. There are evil people who do evil things to another, but they are a minority. Thank goodness, most people are wonderful and trustworthy; travel teaches us this constantly.
The opposite of wonder is terror. And unfortunately, we live in a day and age that is defined by terror. It defines the way we travel. Right now we are being taught to be afraid of everything, in fact, we are more afraid now.
The only antidote to terror is trust, and the way that we gain trust is travel. Travel is one of the greatest human freedoms ever. Read it again, Travel is one of the greatest human freedoms ever!
All of us are living in the present, right now. We want to control this world; we want to get certain things too. But if we do that too much, not only do we delete the sense of wonder about our lives, but maybe we cancel out another possibility, another discovery that is far more invigorating and enlightening and perfect for us individually.
Don’t be a tourist in your life taking pictures as it happens; instead, we need to travel.
