Personal Travel Websites That Will Make You Quit Your Day Job
Written on March 11, 2008 by Tezza
Ian from Brave New Traveler wrote a great post listing 12 Personal Travel Websites That Will Make You Quit Your Day Job. While a few have already been mentioned on this blog the list is an exciting collection of travelers who have in their own way went in search of adventure and meaning in their lives.
Having been on the road for the past month I’ve had the pleasure of meeting travelers from all walks of life and from all age ranges. They travel for different reasons but a kindred spirit connects us all. Some are searching for something, others are running away from something and yet others don’t fall into either group.
Ian rightly says that “there are many reasons we keep ourselves from heading out into the world. Not enough money. Not enough time. I have to work on my career. I’ll get to it when I’m older.” Yet so many people have taken the leap of faith and followed their dreams and it has all panned out just fine.
If you too dream of one day traveling to far away lands, seeing cultures in person rather than from a book or experiencing new things in the common hour then all is within reach if you make a decision to follow where your heart takes you.
“Ask yourself this question, “If you could do anything — anything in the world — what would you do?” You can guess my answer. I feel that life is a gift and that I have only one chance to live. In the words of Henry David Thoreau, “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.”
And, to be honest, I had more than my fair share of angst and riding around the world was the only option I could see to overcome my malaise and become (or is that prove) to the world who I thought I should be.” - http://www.theargonauts.com
Like Mike from Vegabonding I also view travel as “life’s great educator. There’s no better way to learn about people and nature and your place in the world.” There is no greater way to bring people closer and to give each other a greater understanding of the other person’s culture then to walk a day in their shoes. Travel unlike any other endeavour gives you the most comprehensive eduction there is.
You learn to survive in foreign lands whose language you have no grasp of, you learn to appreciate how other people live without comparing it to your own ways, travel teaches you to accept what is rather than what it should be. And like Julia from The Travel Junkie says, “I may be a McGill University graduate but travel has been the ultimate education. My trip has given me a deeper understanding of what’s going on in the world and where I fit within it.”
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only one thing you forgot to mention, which is that often our travel education comes at the expense of the cultures that we go to see. don’t get me wrong, I am a devoted traveller myself and at the age of 23 have spent two and a half out of the ast five years on the road, but through that have come to change my mind about the nature that travel should take. it’s so easy to say we want to go and “learn about” and “appreciate” other ways of life, but the end result more often that not is that we turn countries into zoos and unique cultures into freak shows that we line up to get our two-bob worth of. And you only need visit somewhere like thailand to see what THAT does to a country. It becomes a tourist-driven theme park. and so we go in search of the “undiscovered places”… give it ten years and they will all be thailands. (and in my oppinion that is not a good thing!! In the middle of thailand I wanted to cry for the destruction of what I could still see had once been a beautiful magical place).
travel is beautiful. travel is my life!! but if we don’t make a serious effort to get ethical about it then we are no better than those imperialists who put “savages” on display at world fairs for the benefit of the curious public. So far my attempt at this is to make an effort when I travel to give back to the cultures by spending a significant amount of time there (three to four months is my standard at the moment but hopefully thast time will be ablew to increase) working and living the life with the people amoung whom I live. hopefully in a volunteer capacity ion a role that helps disadvantaged elements of that community. I feel that by doing this i am at least not belittling their life, but truly embracing it. i hope in the future i can do this in a truly big way.
Rom, thank you for your wonderful response. You make some great points and I too think that travel can be destructive to the places we frequent. But it is my hope that by traveling we can all benefit and grow from the exchange. While thailand is one extreme, many other places have greatly benefited from the influx of tourists both financially and cross culturally. To be able to stay in one place long enough to truly emerse yourself in the community is the ideal way and certainly helps to forge a closer experience. At the end of the day, travel is such a personal endeavour that people have their own ideas about it and many more Thailands are going to eventuate.