Why Do We Travel?

Like many, I’ve been dreaming of travelling again. It’s been almost two years since I boarded a plane.

I pulled a book off my bookshelf and thumbed through it. I bought it in a second-hand bookstore over a decade ago when I first fell in love with hiking in the beautiful, rugged terrain of mountains and canyons. The book sparked many dreams of more hikes, more adventure, more exploration. 

The book, Trekking by David Noland (published in 2001) lists 20 great treks. 

Over a dozen years after purchasing it, while I haven’t done a single one of those listed, I have done a fair bit of hiking, and a different version of a couple of the hikes listed:

# 9 in the book: Peru, The Inca Trail. While I didn’t hike up the Inca trail to Machu Picchu, I did climb Huayna Picchu.

#19 on the list: Spain, El Camino de Santiago. I didn’t do the most popular Camino (Francés), but I did part of the Portuguese Camino.

I’m currently writing a memoir on that decade of hiking, part travel memoir, part midlife quest. Whether the book will ever find its way into readers’ hands, I don’t know.

               

But now, I am longing to travel again. And the questions I keep asking myself are: Why do we travel? Is it for pleasure? Relaxation? Escape? Do we travel to tick an item off a bucket list? I’m not a bucket-list-making type of person. Is it to post those selfies on Instagram? Do we want to understand other cultures, explore different foods and ways of life? Immerse ourselves in art and beauty and history?

              

Do we travel to lose ourselves in something different? Or to find ourselves?

Albert Camus, French writer and philosopher, says that travel “breaks down a kind of inner structure we have...stripped of our props, deprived of our masks, we are completely on the surface of ourselves.” 

(Random aside:  we will likely never travel again ‘deprived of our masks’).

He goes on to say this that I love: "Travel, which is like a greater and graver science, brings us back to ourselves."

When the world opens up again and I board a plane to somewhere, where will that be?

Yes, I’m dreaming of travel again.