On How to Travel

Someone once asked me, "So, you're going to be studying abroad, eh? Sounds like outside of class it'll be a five month vacation."

At the time, I responded with a line like, "No, I'll be traveling in my free time." Point being, I simply couldn't hold travel and vacation in my head at the same time.

That's not so hard to conceive of, but consider another way of saying it. I can't see travel and leisure time colluding to produce a good time. Or travel and relaxation. Travel for me has always been about treks of self-discovery, covering a ridiculous amount of ground, and absorbing tomes of information.

This time around, I think I've finally started to appreciate that there's more to traveling than that, significantly more. I was reading a New York Times article on the plane in which a writer talked about visiting Greece 20 times in the last 20 years. Moreover, he's visited one island 5 times. He hasn't even been to Crete in all those years. My immediate reaction was to dismiss the guy: he's been blowing his travel cash for two decades. He could have easily hit up twenty different countries and be....well, he could be...

And that's when I realized. He wouldn't be anything. He wouldn't necessarily have profited any more from that experience. In fact, he might have missed out on developing the intimate knowledge of many of the Greek islands that he's had the chance to acquire.

Combining that thought with incorporating a relaxed attitude toward getting about has changed my outlook on traveling enormously. But perhaps the biggest change happened a while ago.

I've never been a fan of traveling for the sake of traveling. Sure, there's an appeal for just seeing the exotic and waking every day to a radically novel environment to immerse yourself in. But I've never understood how that could be sustained for a year or 18 months, as New Zealanders and Australians often do, or even for three months as many Americans do. Traveling for the sake of seeing something purely novel can be enormously valuable, but it's about as logical as going to see a movie simply because the movie has been made and you haven't seen it yet and someone says it's a pretty, shiny thing.

This time around, I'll only be traveling in places that hold significance for me. For instance, Malta: packed with history; Neolithich tombs, Jewish and Christian catacombs, a Crusader heritage, prominent role in WWII. That's all context I can appreciate. It's not about just seeing Malta. It's about putting place to the idea of the Knights of Malta.

Similarly with Tunisia. One part of me just wants to putz about in the Grand Erg Oriental, taking pictures and risking capture by Bedouins and Algerian terrorists. But the country has perhaps the largest number of surviving Roman ruins, and was once home to Rome's major Mediterranean counterpart, Carthage. As a classics major, it's a chance to get a grasp on a mostly imaginative study. What I see will not only rock my mind (since I've never been to an Arab nation), but it will also be familiar and inform my body of knowledge.

Alright, well this post has turned into some serious snobbish baloney, so I'm going to call it quits. I'll attribute my "profundity" to exhaustion and beg everyone's forgiveness later. Hope you enjoy the photos.