360 Days of traveling
“You are young and should travel now that you can do it.” Before I get stuck in life? In a Job? In a house? Have responsibilities, a kid? “I wish I did it when ‘I’ was young.” It is too late now?! Apart from the beautiful stories and pictures you can post on a website or Facebook page, traveling changes you. At least that is what you can read from all those other travellers and their stories. Traveling is amazing. You can be yourself, find yourself, and then go back to your country and shave that beard, cut that big bush of rasta hair, quit smoking weed, wear shoes again for the ‘die hard’ travelers and get your job and house with kids and pets because you experienced life and know all about it now. It is like you can have a retirement after school to go to the life school and then get back to reality. Work hard, live later. Make money and then get paid by all the time you have left when you retire and can enjoy life before you actually die. The other option is of course never stop traveling and escape life? But eventually you have to get back to the ‘real world’, that is something most people agree on. For all the long term travelers I know they deal with the same universal problem. The travel bug has bitten and stop traveling is no option, maybe I get a house somewhere, next to a beach, live in the jungle, have a simple life, but I will keep traveling regularly. Trying to find the middle way. Something in between sanity ad insanity. Traveling does something. But what exactly? The traveler and the tourist To travel, the act of moving from place to place, to pass, to journey over or through.. life? the world? my world? me? To wander; to move around without a definite destination or purpose, to go by an indirect route, to turn attention from one subject to another. As the mind wanders, the body follows. I go from place to place in an attempt to understand. The tourist is a person who travels for pleasure, for leisure. The free time when one is not working or attending to other duties. Most travelers, those who call themselves that way, do not like to be called the tourist. Want to separate themselves of that other species that is moving from place to place. So the difference should be in the search for pleasure while traveling. As I started my trip, I try to become a little happy, I try to enjoy life. I am not doing anything else then those who I left behind. In fact we all try to become a little happy. The way we do it, or try since this is an on going attempt, and also the kind of happiness we search for might be different. An attempt because, I do not expect to become fully enlighten and find pure happiness. I do not need it either. Because I am content with the idea of being happy every once in a while, then become unhappy, so that I can feel happiness again. During my traveling I do not fix my destination, my time and certainly not my experiences. Most people, lets call them tourists, travel for leisure, for bliss and a travel kick. Nothing wrong with that, it is a choice though. Most of them do not see the option. Jessica asked me what I think about long term traveling and getting bored of this temple and that one, this sunset and the other, that view and the other. Her solution to this boredom is to go back home and start working so that we can go back to travel and get those trills again. That craving for these trills are the same for wanting a fancy car, a beautiful wife/ husband, that nice dress, those shoes,… Long term traveling does not get bored if you are not only looking for these trills, this bliss, but just experience life as it is at that moment. This is what you can learn from traveling. Life can surprise you if you let it surprise you. If you do not go all the way touristy where you fix your experience. You get what you pay for: you do not look for the bliss of life, but the fixed price and value this or that view, waterfall, boat trip or authentic village has. You look for the superficial, sensational experience where you can say: “oooh! Aaaah! Waaaauw!” It is the same sensation you get when watching a horror movie, in 3D and HD or not, and the blood and terror is spread on the lens of your eye. Very realistic. Or when you look at your news TV show and see a child dead on a beach drowned when put on a sinking boat in an attempt to cross to the sea. To get a better life in a more civilized developed country, free from war and horror. Once the footage looses impact, less Oooh and aaah, or too much where our civilized society is forced to react with action. These actions might be shown in the same TV show as good and civilized actions to help out, are always actions that have an underlaying agenda. Either something to do with money, or with ego, bad for this or that politician's or country's image. Wether I am in Belgium working, or go to dirty India, both of them seem exactly the same to me. They are countries where everything is about the money and a persons life is no value, money is. The difference is that India does not hide it. Better developed, more civilized in Europe is a lie to me. Those refugees and immigrants have to adapt and become integrated, but when I travel it is hard to get confronted with all that dirt and those monkey people that I feel sorry for that they have to live in those huts in a small village that I can come and visit and feel sorry for. And that Western scum that does not feel respect for locals and goes to fuck children and Thai women and party hard and ruin this beautiful country where I spend my leisure time taking pictures of those monkey people with the same respect as I have for a zoo animal. How dare they? I am the better tourist and support the locals in a better way so that they can preserve their culture and I can come and take a picture again. And now some places lost their authenticity and locals treat me bad and want money from me and thus rip me off. As the destination is not fixed, so the path is not fixed, but maybe the direction is the same as for those who do fix the path and the destination or stay fixed in their homeland and choose simply the path set for them by society, but we all try to go for the direction towards happiness even if some walk the opposite direction. We have no control wether we reach such thing, but we do our best. We are humans trying to become happy. Is that being selfish? Based on moral rules we can say wether we do it right or wrong, what is good and bad. Drunken tourists partying and using drugs to forget about the ‘real’ life, those people make tourism ugly. Shows the less pretty side of tourism, or life. An attempt to feel only happiness, although on drugs and intoxicants. To just find leisure, pleasure while on the road to pure happiness, 88% pure alcohol percentage. As you do not miss out on life when you stay at home and did not do that ultimate travel retirement experience, you did not miss out on anything. No regrets. If you did not done that, took the picture, posted it on Facebook, you still live your life. Wether you are a tourist abroad or in your own country, enjoying your leisure time, you can choose to stop living the sensational life, real or just on your Facebook page, and just become a traveler. Change from one place to another, one you and another, and to become aware of your world. To observe it and enjoy it moment to moment. Wether you are happy or unhappy at that moment. This view or that one, once you realize it is not about the price tag, the value some travel bible projected on it, wether you lived all your life next to this beautiful view or just witness it on your travels, you should just become aware of it being their with or without clouds, rain or sunshine. I missed this particular sight because I travel low budget and did not want to spend the money, while enjoying sleeping on the ground in a temple hearing some monks chant, seeing some small boys smoke and getting a friendship request of one of these monks who are supposed to figure out everything about leisure, the tourist and happiness. Did I actually miss out on something, a place I only new about because I read it in the travel bible? I am a devote of life trying to do it as less blind as possible and as much as a traveler of life, not fixed on a perfect peaceful world. Not scared of me not being all good and still figuring things out. Traveling gives you the opportunity to realize how difficult it is to just enjoy life, that time off or leisure time. Because just seeking for trills or working to get on your holiday where you have to enjoy and get out off as much out as possible, because just doing nothing is a waste of time. You have to enjoy that little bit of time you have, fully and crave for it the moment you free time is over or what is our quest in life? What else is traveling about? I get annoyed by society in Belgium AND abroad. I recognize why and see that I as well regularly act the same way as anybody else, I am also human and also raised in the West and brainwashed here and there. I try as much as I can to just smile about it, in the end it is nothing to be angry about, but rather funny that this is reality. We are peculiar creatures living in an odd funny way. Life is unfair anyway. It is nothing personal. For me traveling gives me the opportunity to realize this even more and live on the edge of my society and that of another. It makes it very clear how things work and what actually happens on the other side of the world, not through a news camera lens, but my own lens of my own eye. But then still with my view on things, my perception, after my conditioning. It is interesting because you meet life on the way. But it is definitely not all sunshine and beauty as you can see on most travel blogs that have the tendency to tell you all about traveling from a money perspective, this or that price tag related experience. Or these spiritual quotes that not even make sense. This trill after the other. Sensational! Images say more then words. Trying to describe traveling is hard, just as love is and hate, but trying to capture such complex thing in one picture frame is even harder. Because it is a way of living, in between countries, societies, or one party or another, or even one trill and the other. It does something with a person, mental and physical, just as growing up does. Most long term travelers loose weight, just as I did. A physical impact. And you become more and more mentally and physically de-conditioned if you become aware of your surroundings and its differences. Some travelers are de-conditioned so much that they can barely relate to their original society and customs. An eye opener.
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