TheLostGlobe

When I was younger and living on my island one of my mates and I used to go exploring, more often from out of his house than mine as he lived away from the main town. We would walk through farms, follow creeks, the coast or just blindly pushing through thick scrub to see where we ended up our imaginations always running wild, we spent a lot of time looking for a lost ammo dump that we knew was in the area but we never found it, we built hideouts all over and when military helicopters flew over on a jaunt one day we thought we had all the best places to ambush their special forces with our stick guns. We resurrected caved in tunnels that we found out were originally built by my older half brothers and their friends and we did stupid things like sliding down hills on sailboards, abseiling without proper gear or even knowing what we were really doing and setting off a particularly nasty type of sparkle bomb, it is truly a miracle we didn’t do more damage than the usual playground bumps. Our adventures are so memorable to me because although we had a huge area and heaps of great places to enjoy we were always looking for more, big hollows in the sandstone made way for better little caves on the rocky coast and we found endless beautiful little clearings along the creeks and in small valleys. We’d often just explore until we ended up somewhere we shouldn’t be, somewhere that offered some other distraction or just until we got hungry and felt like turning back.

It’s here, I think, that either I grew the sense of wonder that makes some of us want to travel or maybe it was just where I first indulged a primal or even genetic part of me that we see in today’s adventurers or the explorers of yesteryear. My wonder is in what is out there, why is it that humans have spread to almost every corner of the globe, what were they looking for? What did they find? It makes sense to roam as they did to find answers, doesn’t it? Definitely there is nothing to suggest that it is wrong to search this way. For some of us travel seems to promise answers to questions we don’t even know if we’re asking, the type of questions philosophers and prophets have been trying to answer ever since people started roaming.
It seems that travellers for the most part are very happy people, is it the travel that makes them happy? They look at those in modern cities and notice that although they have every comfort they desire they are not happy, those without the same indulgences they find are often much happier. So maybe it’s not travel itself but the nature of it that makes them happier, you must leave most everything behind, you are propelled toward living in the moment with far fewer attachments and with few material desires, they are not on the road to material accumulation of ’stuff’ we are told will make us happier but still manage to leave us wanting more.

To some wandering is about living, it is living, it’s what they were meant to do. For some of us travel doesn’t just take us to a far off place away from home but it takes to somewhere else inside ourselves were we feel like we are doing something, that feeling of having ‘made it’ pervades that most people think they will find through their careers and how much money they can earn from it, but where do you go after you’ve made it in your chosen career? Maybe a few eventually get away from it all, once they’ve found the time. But for the traveller who has ‘gotten back to it all’ getting there is just the beginning; the world can now be rediscovered in a whole new way, a personal human adventure.

[tags]Travel, Adventure, Rat Race, Discovery[/tags]

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